Monday, October 21, 2024

Operation Edgelord

Overview

Welcome to the Bromad Academy persistent Infinity campaign, Operation Edgelord! It’s intended to be a low-commitment campaign that you can hop in and out of as your life and interest level allows. Want to get involved?

Here’s how it works:

  1. Every month, we release new match-up dependent missions and lore and secret objectives for each faction based on the games submitted and player generated lore from the previous months.
  2. As interest/time allows, you play 1 game a month, selecting the mission based on your faction and your opponent’s faction, with NA-2 taking mercenary contracts for the major factions.
  3. Submit your game results and optional battle report, including whether or not your achieved your secret objectives, and then wait for the next month’s missions and lore drop!

You get one game a month, as tracked by your ITS username. Please be reasonable and don’t ruin it for everyone by registering for multiple accounts. We won’t release results till the end of the month to discourage metagaming. If you want to make sure you make a big impact, encourage your friends to play!

Also, watch out for the special narrative bonus points available each month. In Edgelord, “fluff” is part of the game and narrative postings contain clues to scenarios featured in the advancing story. If you correctly guess the featured mission for a month and can play it against either of the factions featured in the narrative, you AND your opponent will score a bonus for your faction. If it doesn’t work out for you this month, don’t worry, you’ll get more chances later in the campaign.

Finally, note that there are secret faction objectives, which behave much like classified objectives. They’re always a way to get an additional Objective Point, but they can’t take you past 10. Please make sure to let us know if you scored your Secret Objective when you submit the Google Form! If you want to get involved with your faction, join your faction discord!

If you’d like to write a battle report, we certainly aren’t going to stop you. Please use the following Google Docs template and submit the link to your battle report to the Google Form above! Please remember to set it so that anyone with the link can view your report.

The lore behind this campaign and our mission selection will be focused on non-area control mechanics. Infinity is about skirmish combat between black ops teams, not about taking and holding ground in a large scale ground war. We will also release special “secret” objectives (as secret as anything can be on the internet) that are faction-specific. These objectives will replace any Classified Objectives in missions, and we may introduce other scoring mechanics as well, all of which will be tracked by the Google Form above.

Missions and lore may lag in their response to game results by a month or so. This is simply so we have time to respond to events, do data mining, write lore, select missions, and so on. This isn’t our day job–it’s a labor of love!

Remember, the lore is as much in your hands as it is ours. The relationship model here is of a tabletop RPG Game Master and their players. You are the players, and it’s your story that’s being told. The Game Masters (that’s us) simply enforce mechanics of the campaign, keep the storyline consistent, and make sure things generally don’t go too crazy. One direct way you can influence the lore is by collaborating with the other members of your chosen faction to write a new secret objective each month (and please tell us so we can post it!).

In fact, if you’ve got long form lore you want to clue us into, please use this Google form to drop a link to a Google doc, blog post, etc. We’ll do our best to monitor the discords, but if you want to guarantee the lore gets in front of our eyeballs, this is the way to do it.

If you’d like to hear the long form discussion and description, you can check out this Late Night Wargames episode! By the time you watch, the video might be a bit out of date (it was recorded 2024-07-02), but the general gist will be there.

Common Questions

Can I play different factions or sectorials month to month?Yes! Play whatever you like. Please play the appropriate missions, and don’t go spreading the secret objectives around if you’re in multiple faction discords.
My playgroup has an odd number of people, can one of of play 2 games a month to make sure everyone can participate?Yes. We’re not going to gatekeep people who want to play in good faith. Don’t spam games and you’re good.
Can I play <X> type of Infinity game?We’ll accept any type of game. Learning, in-person/TTS, whatever. All we ask is that you try to stick to 300 points and the appropriate mission, just to make sure the data we’re getting is consistent.
Where do I find the secret faction objectives?Below, hidden by spoilers! Don’t go poking around other factions’ objectives, we’re on the honor system here.
Can NA2 work for <X>?With some restrictions. See NA2 Employment Permits.

The Story So Far…

  • October 2024 Briefing

    October 2024 Missions

    In contrast to previous months, we’ve decided to remove the mission matrix mechanic. It was causing confusion, creating a lot of work for the GMs (myself and YueFei), and most importantly, limiting player choice impacting fun.

    Instead, we’re just going to release a short list of recommended missions along with their intended narrative role in the campaign.

    Players may choose any of the following missions to play this month:

    Black SpotWith all of the chaos in system, accidents can happen. Everyone should be careful out there…
    Dead or AliveThe Tohaa have been suspiciously quiet… are we sure there are no Tohaa agents in our midst?
    Photo FinishRattled by her encounter with Lisette Beckmann, FZX CEO Samantha Moneylady Harboil is putting out bounties for footage of unsanctioned Triphammer duels. The bloodier the better!
    Xenoform ContainmentSamantha Moneylady Harboil is quite ambitious, if nothing else. Knowing that the Triphammer duels will only give her a temporary bump in ratings, she’s hard at work setting up more fights to keep her ratings up and FZX in the black. Hopefully the shipments are without incident.

    If you have a mission that fits your narrative better, feel free to play it instead (I included an “Other”) option in the submission form.

    Bonus Mission Points

    If you’d like to try and guess what the bonus point mission is, have a look at John’s story and if you like what you see, buy his book!

    Reminders

    It’s worth pointing out that these missions have some mechanics that are perhaps unfamiliar to you especially if you’ve been playing predominantly ITS missions only. Here’s a few things to keep a look out for to make sure you’re playing the mission as intended:

    • End of Turn Scoring – Instead of scoring at the end the game round, i.e. after both players have had a turn, we score at the end of every player turn. This gives us the ability to help balance first/second player turn advantages/disadvantages. This mechanic has been explored by many mission designers, and we use it here!
    • Entire Order (Long Skill) Objective Interactions – Instead of short skill + WIP, many objective interactions have been changed to require base contact (as before) but now are a long skill without a WIP roll. This prevents the non-interaction where a specialist just dies on the objective to make an unopposed WIP roll and also addresses the “well I would have won that game but my WIP 15 specialist rolled 17, 18, 18, 19, 17 on the objective over five orders” problem. This mechanic comes from BlessedBe and the IGL team. Huge thank you to them!
    • Specialist Bonus is now Short Skill + WIP – In the missions where the objective interaction is a long skill, typically we’ve changed the specialist bonus from +3 WIP and +1 Burst to being able to do the objective interaction skill as a short skill, with the return of the WIP check. For example, this would represent a Hacker being able to “cut corners” when hacking an objective but maybe failing under pressure. In contrast, an Engineer will follow the full procedure and have a guaranteed success, but it will inherently take longer. Thanks to TheDiceAbide for this idea.
    • Dominate and Subjugate – Dominate is more points in a zone, Subjugate is be the only one with models (not markers) in a zone. Subjugate is a Corvus Belli invention and comes from Resilience Ops, we just borrowed the mechanic.

    Remember, the above mechanics are just reminders that some of the missions have these mechanics. They are not overriding rules for missions. Whatever the missions say takes precedence.

    October 2024 Faction Lore and Objectives

    The global “secret” objective this month comes courtesy of Uncle Pentium and the ALEPH players. All factions have this objective for the month:

    Celebrity Deathmatch
    Have a character from your army put a character from the opponent’s army into a null state before the end of the game. If the opponent has no characters, use characters in your army to put 3 troopers in null state instead.

    With respect to the faction specific lore summaries, just keeping ahead of everything going on for the monthly summary is becoming too much. I’m going to focus on the summary, as that highlights player submissions, which is is the point of this thing. To drive the monthly narrative, I’ve included some lore backgrounds for the missions instead (see above).

    NA-2 Employment Permits

    If you’re playing a Non-Aligned Army (NA-2), you can play a game as any of the major factions above, assuming you have an authorized permit (green check mark). Some NA-2 factions simply won’t work for particular major factions or major factions won’t hire particular mercenary companies, so it’s not a free-for-all of playing whatever you like for whatever faction you like. There have to be some rules.

    The Japanese Secessionist Army (JSA) is a little different in that it’s technically not a mercenary faction, but it’s still subject to influence and coercion by some major factions to align military goals. We model this as “working with/for” those factions here.

    There are also mercenary contracts available at the Ducktail Pub to give you the opportunity to earn some BitCred, so if you’re interested in that, have a look here!

Faction Discords

Here’s a list of the faction discords:

To ease the moderation duties of the volunteer discord admins, please don’t join all the discords, just the ones for factions you intend to play.

Get Merch

If you want to support the effort and fund any future patch production, you can buy merch!

Threadless

T-Shirts, Stickers, Magnets, Mugs

Patches

We’ll be making patches for the campaign, but there isn’t a concrete schedule in place yet. While you wait, you can grab a Universal Warcor Union patch while supplies last!

Universal Warcor Union Patch