I just read a question, one of many, regarding TAGs, asking for a collection of all TAG stats in one place. There is a TAG source book upcoming some time, so we will get this in an official product anyway.
But what puzzled me exceedingly was the high number of posts (on Discord and elsewhere) about TAGs or about character concepts of very strict military nature. And that is the reason for my question here: What are your Infinity RPG campaigns about?
Do you actually use lots of TAGS, heavy weapons, heavy armor, etc. in your Infinity RPG games?
I regularly run Infinity for quite a while not, had several campaigns started and concluded, but we NEVER had anything remotely similar to the massive war-like conflicts the tabletop miniatures game is about.
Not one TAG, some vehicular combat scenes, one space combat scene with little weapon use, and everything else was mainly espionage, infiltration, secret agent stuff, no military operations at all.
So I wonder regarding the not that rare posts about “combat monster” character builds and military-only equipment, what kind of roleplaying campaigns you are actually playing where you need all this stuff?
The default setup is for the PCs to be O12 Bureau Noir operatives. That is as “James Bond”-like, as it gets in Infinity. So I never missed the strictly military equipment and, although you certainly can build very combat effective character concepts, they usually suck at doing all the investigation, undercover, infiltration stuff O12 Bureau Noir sends the PCs on.
So I’m really curious about what kind of campaigns you actually run?
so all my players are new to the infinity universe and i am new to the 2D20 system, so rather than do one campaign, i decided to do a series of mini campaigns that slowly introduce rules for us as well as take a tour of the different factions and locations of the human sphere. to date, no tags. it’s on the menu for later, but in general i have not leaned into vehicle rules yet. but here’s what we’ve done so far, with some of the rule sets used:
haqq corsairs at the start of the third offensive in ghezirah. modified/simplified space combat on an escort mission from the sheyk gate to paradiso, followed by an search and rescue exfiltration of an intelligence asset in part of the city overtaken by the combined army. meant to roughly correspond to the guardians of the gate mission set for qapu khalqi. focused mainly on gunfighting, skill checks for stealth, observation, tech, with some light hacking and psywar.
military orders confrere sect raiding a black hand research facility. more light space battled, but it was a special operator search and destroy mission with some introduction to acquisition rules, more work on one metanoia tests, gunfighting, hacking, and meaningful decision making in plan development and execution (e.g. to be seen in public as knights versus trying to infiltrate end of the line station as civilians).
a short horror campaign on an o-12 exploration vessel that ends up with a maat’zani (primitive umbra) stalking and killing the crew. also features crazy AI and a sygmaa agent. players were all non-combat builds so really it was focused on improvisation and survival mechanics, with tests to keep the ship afloat and to endure the big bad while they worked out how to dispose of it. good into to player death.
now it’s a wu ming campaign against jsa and pano in svalarheima. this is the most spy/infiltrator one, with some psywar, getting resources, finding solutions to problems/situations presented by the gm. can’t talk too much about it because it’s ongoing, but looking for a mission impossible vibe followed by a big ole a-team type battle at the end.
on deck is an ariadna campaign on dawn, followed by an aleph one shot, followed by nomads, with a druze mercs/submondo minicampaign somewhere in the middle. there are tag opportunities but not trying to force it yet. don’t want players to be in a situations where i keep having to level up the baddies to present interesting challenges and we’re in a position where everything is an army of avatars and charontids to keep them feeling like the stakes are real.
Cop stories, lots and lots of cop stories, ranging from murder investigations, to anti mafia operations, to strange, Scifi oriented or political cases. Lately is full section 9 anti terrorism unit. It allows me to release powerful and specialized gear when needed and for specific missions, because it’s all government or 012 property after all. I love this kind of stories because it’s easy for my players to really explore the different aspect of the 26th century with this style.
My only campaign revolved arround my players following the trail of some unknown yet L-host type capable of some degree of genetic adaptability to their users, although degrading their minds slowly. One of those users was wreaking havock in Neoterra, and the players were dispatched to track and capture or kill the
That in turn led to a crashed shuttle in an asteroid field near the Edge of Humanity wormhole where they discovered a hidden JSA facility, where a scientist was toying with stolen CA technology and trying to create some sort of super soldier L-host, called Project Suzaku. There they found out that the scientist got discovered by Yu Jing, but she released her test subjects so she could escape, and made her way to Paradiso to a city that, at the time, was still not controlled by the CA.
The last game revolved arround the players either leading a frontal assault against the CA battle line to create a diversion for the other team to infiltrate the city and track the researcher down, and later confronting her as she transplanted her cube to the prototype Suzaku Warrior. I used that last session to test heavy weaponry and TAGs, and as you could imagine, give the player enough firepower and mayhem will ensue
Other than that, I’ve only run oneshots of this game, and those were usualy Section 9 style with the players working as covert ops, so no heavy weapons nor TAGS.
Recently I have gmastered an adaptation of Douglas Preston’s book “Impact” (german Der Krater). My story was based mostly around the view of the main character Ford. So first my group had to find the source of some gemstones with “unexplainable” physical properties, beginning their search on a submondo auction in Bangkok filled with the most evil people mankind had ever produced, as well as representatives of every known intelligence service the infinity universe had to offer. Then they had to find the source and shut it down, while evading the other guests of the auction, finally discovering the secret behind all, and then save nothing less then earth itself.
Meanwhile it is history, the secret has became a national secret, maybe “the” secret for the moment. And the character slowly discover that a lot of people, they had met in the adventure simply die or disappear otherwise …
My first shot on a longer campaign, where located in Nigeria (or better the “Federal Rep. of Guinea”), where the characters took the roles of O12 Personal securing the nothern borders to the sahara wastelands and keep an eye on the growing Yu Jing influence. The entire campaign was based on a set of stories about assisting the local population and technical personal around there. However the hidden mainplot was to reveal an aggressive Yu Jing plot around their new transafrican highspeed railways and their building places. Yu Ying used this, to try to kick out PanOceania influence in the region, by discrediting them. At the end, everything blow up, and for a moment the chars where the most wanted, stranded on hostile ground, in an beginning civil war. However they were lucky. They had allready collected all necessary evidence - delievering was the problem, esp. when your boss outed itself as an huge a**, reacting extremly to political presure.
