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Infinity Background Questions

Hello all

I've been on the fence with infinity for a while now I'm going to take the plunge with the starter set and if that goes well I'll invest in the rule books for the big time fluff.

In the meantime could you answer some of the fluff questions I have.

What's happened to the UK Specifically Wales? What faction would my country be associated with?

Is there still a UK and other countries or is everything just the factions?

How far in the future is the game set?

How advanced is the technology?
Is the FTC travel?
Is there teleporting technology?
Do guns fire bullets or "lasers"?

The aleph and combined are controlled by a super Ai(right?) what other robots etc are there? And how advanced is their ai?

Obviously the combined are alien invaders (bad)and pan o are blue (good) but where do the factions stand from karma wise?

P.S. Yea I could probably google most of the but where is the fun in that

There is no real "good" or "bad" guys. Everyone is kind of a jerk.

Start here http://infinitythegame.wikispot.org/Chronology and read away.

No teleportation. Guns shoot bullets, or plasma. Wales may be in the Pan-O faction.

Achilles is a jerk.

Guns fire bullets, though modern rifles (combi-rifles) are more sophisticated, along with Multi-weapons that have selectable specialist ammo (like armour piercing rounds or explosive rounds). I think Combined Army has some energy weapons though.

Anyway, for more insight into one of the factions (Yu Jing), this thread was quite interesting, especially Durandal's post: http://infinitythegame.com/forum/index.php?/topic/13374-fluff-question-yu-jing-internal-security/ - it's quite an interesting read about how the society is built and compared with PanO.

The Aradnia faction contains a bunch of lower tech space colonists from various European nations that got isolated from Earth proper when their wormhole sealed up for a while. They would probably be the "spiritual successors" to Wales/UK style of people. They have S.A.S. officers and Highlander infantry. Otherwise the actual country itself is folded into Pan Oceana by now. To the best of my knowledge there really aren't that many countries left on Earth anymore, or at least they've gone "European Union plus" levels of integration into the main faction blocks.

I think the timeline is a couple hundred years in the future although that chronology link will be much better for backstory than I am. There are wormholes but I don't know of any ship mounted FTL drives. No teleportation. Guns by and large shoot bullets. There are a few non-standard weapons. The Combined Army have the most and are the only faction that have plasma guns, but even then most of their stuff are mass drivers of some kind. The other stuff are either energy pulses designed for frying electronics, or else are "weird ammo" slug throwers that fire stuff like virus injectors or nanobot swarms (there's actually a "Nanobot flamethrower" which has to take my award for coolest weapon thematically speaking).

Also there are some advances in AI and brain uploading tech. Other than Maya (The ALEPH AI) and whatever the CA brain is called there's also an AI that the Nomads were working on. Maya outlawed this AI though (some say because it/she was afraid it would make her obsolete). Other AIs are more like "smart personal assistant" level programs though.

Also most people in the non-Aradnia factions have a "cube" which is a memory storage device that you can pull out of somebody's body and re-socket after they die. That is probably the most "out there" piece of tech in the setting. Plus the Combined Army has a weapon that can over-write your cube and make you work for their side...if you can't tell CA is the faction where you get to play with all the cool toys.

Honestly, this game does a good job of not having any obviously evil or good factions. It's not as grimdark as 40k, in as much as pretty much anywhere would be a place people would want to live, but nobody has a "spires and togas" utopia either. Even the "designated bad guys" Combined Army aren't actually 100% evil when you learn their backstory. An ancient race built an AI to figure out how to do the whole "transcend this dimension" Chozo Ruins/sufficiently advanced alien thing. It did, and ascended without telling its creators how to do it. So they built another AI that thinks more like they did. That AI started contacting different species to see if getting different perspectives and thought processes would help it find the answer. By this point it's kind of turned into an interplanetary thinking machine that's trying to figure out the secret of immortality, and happens to want your help to get it done. The humans in the setting just don't want to be a part of the empire so they're fighting back. You could call them guilty of obstructing spiritual/scientific progress if you really wanted to.

On reading it, I always thought there was an element of Arthur C Clarke's 'Childhood's end' about the Combined Army and what the EI is trying to achieve.

Although, obviously the Human Sphere is much better placed to defend itself than the earth in that story. Still, the impression is given that unless they can do something drastic to stop the CA, the days of the Human Sphere are numbered.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the storyline develops going forward, and specifically with the next campaign book. I have a funny feeling that the Tohaa might turn out to be the true 'villains' of the piece...

The Tohaa, as a race, would not be the villains.

The Triad, a faction within the Tohaa, are a different story entirely.

I have a question about the backgroud if it's okay to put it here? It's been bugging me for a while now.

Nomads hate Aleph, and yet a lot of nomad models in game have cubes. Aren't cubes an Aleph invention? So why do Nomads have them?

Or am I completely wrong and they're nothing to do with Aleph...

Cubes are just a storage system for a personality/brain functions.

ALEPH is not the only way to maintain such a storage system.

Ah okay. So Nomads use Arachne to maintain theirs?

Probably. I do not think we ever really got one single explanation.

Okay thank you. I always thought cubes were an Aleph thing, dunno why.

ImAGeek wrote:
Okay thank you. I always thought cubes were an Aleph thing, dunno why.

Aleph does have the cube 2.0, which as far as I can tell is basically a cube with wi-fi so you don't have to recover it and you can "hot swap" bodies. Combined Army can do something similar, but it's a much more Mass Effect "assuming direct control" style Evolved intelligence "possession" of the unit in question.

 JoeRugby wrote:

What's happened to the UK Specifically Wales? What faction would my country be associated with?

Is there still a UK and other countries or is everything just the factions?

For the most part, nations are dead. Folks will still self-identify as being from a given region on Earth or having ancestry linked back to [insert nation] since they aren't in the far distant past. But few countries operate independantly outside of the big boys. Basically anything that isn't under direct or indirect control of PanO is under the control of Yu Jing (with maybe small bits being under Haqqislam control).

Given what little we know about the various bits of earth, the remnants of the large western powers probably went in with PanO. So the UK is probably in with PanO.

How far in the future is the game set?

~185 years or so.

How advanced is the technology?

Fairly advanced but in mostly down-to-earth ways extrapolated from what we see today. The biggest leaps are mostly in medical tech allowing things like cubes (memory storage) and Lhost (artificially grown bodies) to be produced. Mechanical engineering and material science has gone a ways off and things like orbital elevators are possible. And we have neat bits of military tech like holoprojectors and thermoptic camo. Weapon tech has mostly just improved along the current lines. It has become a bit smarter (most advanced combat rifles are highly flexible affairs called combi-rifles that combine the best features of an assault rifle and a carbine for both open combat and CQB fighting) but is still about putting a chunk of metal in the other guy. There are a few highly advanced system like the rapid-fire railgun found on some TAGs, but it is rare. And of course things have advanced enough that power armour and larger armoured suits (the aforementioned TAG) are common sights on the battlefield.

Is the FTC travel?

Yup, via fixed wormholes that lead to a set destination. So no free-floating FTL, this means that blockading is a definite possibility if one can camp the egress of a wormhole.

Is there teleporting technology?

Not as such, no. The closest you can get is some advanced cubes (mostly found in Aleph and the Combined) can beam a consciousness to a new body. But no physical teleportation (okay, well I guess the FTL system kind of counts).

Do guns fire bullets or "lasers"?

Human factions at least fire bullets. The combined are a bit more advanced and may actually wield direct energy weapons (and at the very least the plasma rifle is definitely a direct energy weapon).

The aleph and combined are controlled by a super Ai(right?) what other robots etc are there? And how advanced is their ai?

Aleph is the actual AI that is the (probably) beneficent overseer of humanity. It forms a large and ever-present network for all of humanity and basically is a mediator for the various factions. Its true power is unknown, but there are hints that it could be something that is either speeding toward or already passed the singularity. Think of it like Battletech's ComStar, but a sentient being instead of a bunch of AT&T religious fanatics.

The EI is a post-singularity machine god of frightening scale and power. The only reason humanity has lasted this long is because we are too insignificant to really register and so it has only sent a small expeditionary force to check us out. Few races have ever successfully opposed it (the Tohaa being an example).

As for mechanical units, they are scattered fairly liberally amongst all factions. In the Combine almost every remote unit is basically a shard-aspect of the EI itself. Something similar happens in Aleph, though it does have independent personalities within it. The rest of the factions have various weak/dumb-AI systems in place (with Yu Jing apparently being fairly good at it since it has a totally autonomous android unit that doesn't even require a hacker on the field to function). Convnetional remote units in human factions require a hacker or TAG (most likely to route through a local tactical network since their actual processing power is likely not found in the machine itself).

Obviously the combined are alien invaders (bad)and pan o are blue (good) but where do the factions stand from karma wise?

Nah, doesn't really work that way. The Combined are pretty much cackling villain types (basically something right out of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) but humanity and the Tohaa don't really get a free walk simply because they aren't subjugating whole arms of the galaxy. PanO have a lovely history of expansion, have subjugated an alien species on Varuna (yay colonialism!), and have a system of government that gives you more power the richer you are. Yu Jing is an Orwellian nanny state that basically engineered royalty for the government to provide entertainment to the populace. Though they talk a big game of one-ness, they still let age-old nationalistic fervour colour their treatment of the Japanese. Haqqislam are probably amongst the nicest of the bunch, but even they have their skeletons and in some ways represent the fears of big pharma writ large, using their exclusivity to keep the secret of immortality in the hands of the rich and powerful. Nomads are a mixed bag. You have good folks looking to earn some cash for hard work rubbing shoulders with the worst scum in the sphere (and I need not go in to the kinds of horrible that humanity can do to itself in a transhumanist setting *shudder*). Aleph seems to be constantly pushing its boundries and seeing what it can get away with, and one day it will either reveal itself as the saviour of humanity, or it will simply reveal itself to be just as much a tyrant as the EI itself. Ariadna gets seen as the underdog, but their treatment of each other, let alone the inhabitants of Dawn has definitely not been stellar. They are what you would expect from a civilization born from folks just trying to survive on a hostile planet, and it ain't always pretty.

 Ronin_eX wrote:

 JoeRugby wrote:

What's happened to the UK Specifically Wales? What faction would my country be associated with?

Is there still a UK and other countries or is everything just the factions?

For the most part, nations are dead. Folks will still self-identify as being from a given region on Earth or having ancestry linked back to [insert nation] since they aren't in the far distant past. But few countries operate independantly outside of the big boys. Basically anything that isn't under direct or indirect control of PanO is under the control of Yu Jing (with maybe small bits being under Haqqislam control).

Given what little we know about the various bits of earth, the remnants of the large western powers probably went in with PanO. So the UK is probably in with PanO.

How far in the future is the game set?

~185 years or so.

How advanced is the technology?

Fairly advanced but in mostly down-to-earth ways extrapolated from what we see today. The biggest leaps are mostly in medical tech allowing things like cubes (memory storage) and Lhost (artificially grown bodies) to be produced. Mechanical engineering and material science has gone a ways off and things like orbital elevators are possible. And we have neat bits of military tech like holoprojectors and thermoptic camo. Weapon tech has mostly just improved along the current lines. It has become a bit smarter (most advanced combat rifles are highly flexible affairs called combi-rifles that combine the best features of an assault rifle and a carbine for both open combat and CQB fighting) but is still about putting a chunk of metal in the other guy. There are a few highly advanced system like the rapid-fire railgun found on some TAGs, but it is rare. And of course things have advanced enough that power armour and larger armoured suits (the aforementioned TAG) are common sights on the battlefield.

Is the FTC travel?

Yup, via fixed wormholes that lead to a set destination. So no free-floating FTL, this means that blockading is a definite possibility if one can camp the egress of a wormhole.

Is there teleporting technology?

Not as such, no. The closest you can get is some advanced cubes (mostly found in Aleph and the Combined) can beam a consciousness to a new body. But no physical teleportation (okay, well I guess the FTL system kind of counts).

Do guns fire bullets or "lasers"?

Human factions at least fire bullets. The combined are a bit more advanced and may actually wield direct energy weapons (and at the very least the plasma rifle is definitely a direct energy weapon).

The aleph and combined are controlled by a super Ai(right?) what other robots etc are there? And how advanced is their ai?

Aleph is the actual AI that is the (probably) beneficent overseer of humanity. It forms a large and ever-present network for all of humanity and basically is a mediator for the various factions. Its true power is unknown, but there are hints that it could be something that is either speeding toward or already passed the singularity. Think of it like Battletech's ComStar, but a sentient being instead of a bunch of AT&T religious fanatics.

The EI is a post-singularity machine god of frightening scale and power. The only reason humanity has lasted this long is because we are too insignificant to really register and so it has only sent a small expeditionary force to check us out. Few races have ever successfully opposed it (the Tohaa being an example).

As for mechanical units, they are scattered fairly liberally amongst all factions. In the Combine almost every remote unit is basically a shard-aspect of the EI itself. Something similar happens in Aleph, though it does have independent personalities within it. The rest of the factions have various weak/dumb-AI systems in place (with Yu Jing apparently being fairly good at it since it has a totally autonomous android unit that doesn't even require a hacker on the field to function). Convnetional remote units in human factions require a hacker or TAG (most likely to route through a local tactical network since their actual processing power is likely not found in the machine itself).

Obviously the combined are alien invaders (bad)and pan o are blue (good) but where do the factions stand from karma wise?

Nah, doesn't really work that way. The Combined are pretty much cackling villain types (basically something right out of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) but humanity and the Tohaa don't really get a free walk simply because they aren't subjugating whole arms of the galaxy. PanO have a lovely history of expansion, have subjugated an alien species on Varuna (yay colonialism!), and have a system of government that gives you more power the richer you are. Yu Jing is an Orwellian nanny state that basically engineered royalty for the government to provide entertainment to the populace. Though they talk a big game of one-ness, they still let age-old nationalistic fervour colour their treatment of the Japanese. Haqqislam are probably amongst the nicest of the bunch, but even they have their skeletons and in some ways represent the fears of big pharma writ large, using their exclusivity to keep the secret of immortality in the hands of the rich and powerful. Nomads are a mixed bag. You have good folks looking to earn some cash for hard work rubbing shoulders with the worst scum in the sphere (and I need not go in to the kinds of horrible that humanity can do to itself in a transhumanist setting *shudder*). Aleph seems to be constantly pushing its boundries and seeing what it can get away with, and one day it will either reveal itself as the saviour of humanity, or it will simply reveal itself to be just as much a tyrant as the EI itself. Ariadna gets seen as the underdog, but their treatment of each other, let alone the inhabitants of Dawn has definitely not been stellar. They are what you would expect from a civilization born from folks just trying to survive on a hostile planet, and it ain't always pretty.

Awesome write up

 Kanluwen wrote:
The Tohaa, as a race, would not be the villains.

The Triad, a faction within the Tohaa, are a different story entirely.

By the end of the Paradiso event (second to last mission for fluff) the Tohaa race (not the Triad) have decide after the CA mankind MUST be wiped out.


Edit: Ronin the Plasma ammo in a slug that converts to a plasma right before impact, kind of like how Shotguns shell work in Infinity.

Thanks for all the replies.

So wales is likely part of the pan o but maybe a remnant with ariadna. (Mechs or werewolves hmm)

I've had a look at some of the Stats and I'm confused that the SAS has a shoot stat lower than your average pan o trooper, is 11 a poor shoot stat? Are they any good?

It seems like the setting is mostly at a cold war point apart from the fight against the combined? What is a usual confrontation between forces?
Is it just raids if so how do factions get away without it going to all out war?
Or are there hot zones/ contested areas?

Camouflage and infiltration. Aha, they're amazing at the moment. BS 11 is average for the line infantry and skirmishers.

The background states it's very much cloak and dagger. Governments denying responsibility, exception of open fronts such as Paradiso or some other conflict. Plus I imagine, if you get caught you can always nag at O-12 meeting (UN but with harder sanctions and its own active army), get some penalty and refund from the other faction. Wars are costly and it's in no ones interest for a full scale conflict, not, if a little bribe and intimidation gets you what you want.

There are few contested areas, Svalarheima for instance where Yu-Jing and PanO fight each other for the valuable ore.

Yeah, 11 is a trained soldier but camouflage means their opponent is on -3 to hit all the time.

Dawn (the planet of the Ariadnans) was openly contested for some time, with all the big corporations moving in and trying to take control of the various natural resources.

Before the Combined Army turned up there were also several periods of war between the major factions, mostly between Yu Jing and PanOceania.

Go watch Ghost in the Shell. It's like that. The battles aren't huge open wars, but small elite teams sneaking around doing things to their allies that they don't want public. Yes, A and B might be allies for the moment, but A is sending a team to steal a piece of information from a division in B's government while B sends a team to kidnap a C dignitary.

According to Gutierr, the man writing the fluff, "You guys, just like us are all part of Pan-O".

I asked him about Poland and that's the answer I got.

 Alkasyn wrote:
According to Gutierr, the man writing the fluff, "You guys, just like us are all part of Pan-O".

I asked him about Poland and that's the answer I got.

Yup, Poland and Spain are both PanO.

The real question is did you get him to sign your Infinity books?

I did.

Noir wrote:

 Alkasyn wrote:
According to Gutierr, the man writing the fluff, "You guys, just like us are all part of Pan-O".

I asked him about Poland and that's the answer I got.

Yup, Poland and Spain are both PanO.

The real question is did you get him to sign your Infinity books?

 IJW wrote:
I did.

I did too. I only brought my Artbook, since I was flying from pretty far away, but next year I'm hoping to bring N3 or Acheron Falls (here's hoping )

I hope to be in the same area as these guys someday so I can finally get that custom Jotum sketch!

 Alpharius wrote:
I hope to be in the same area as these guys someday so I can finally get that custom Jotum sketch!

They'll never sketch a Jotum with Alpha Legion logos on it. Sorry alph.

 motyak wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
I hope to be in the same area as these guys someday so I can finally get that custom Jotum sketch!

They'll never sketch a Jotum with Alpha Legion logos on it. Sorry alph.

Hah, they probably would

They treated us "extranjeros" like total VIPs back in Vigo at the Interplanetary.

Who else wants some Infinity Novels? I think it would be cool to see the universe from the different soldiers perspectives. I can imagine a story with a nosy war cors putting his or her nose too deeply into Alephs business. Or a cool one would be a disgruntled Azra'il tossing out witty quips as he fights some of the trade wars along the silk road.

Or even better there could be a manga/comic book series.

I think plenty of fans would buy it!

There's some great events in the Infinity universe that would make cool novels. I'd love a novel covering the Silk Revolts, or some of the events on Paradiso.

You occasionally hear hints that there is a desire from Corvus to publish a graphic novel, they're just not quite certain with whom, how and when to do it.