{"id":3659,"date":"2016-02-02T15:00:41","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T20:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/?p=3659"},"modified":"2017-06-02T16:30:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-02T20:30:56","slug":"war-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/?p=3659","title":{"rendered":"War Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, right off the bat, I want to explain that it’s taken me four months just to figure out how<\/em> to present what I’m about to share with you. It’s a sprawling project that incorporates narrative fiction, detailed mission writeups, character art, terrain work, web design, and a ton of homebrew rules. I’ve tried to assemble written, audio, and video commentaries to present what I built, but in each case, I found that giving my usual detailed blow-by-blow of the work just ended up being really long and tedious. I keep going back to the drawing board to find a new way to encapsulate everything for you, and I keep coming up with bad solutions.<\/p>\n

I’ve been at this for five months, and I don’t think I’m going to have any more success in the next five than I did in the last five. So rather than continue this fruitless struggle, I’m going to concede that I will probably never figure out a way to present the project with all of the context that I would have wanted. It was just too big.<\/p>\n

So, yaknow what?<\/p>\n

Screw it. I won’t even bother.<\/p>\n

Behold the monster that devoured Spud’s summer:<\/p>\n

\"screenshot\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If anyone’s unsure about whether to click that link, here’s a quick FAQ to explain what it is.<\/p>\n

Q1: So, what the hell is it?!<\/h2>\n

I ran an Infinity story league at my store last summer. We had ten participants (though two eventually had to drop out)<\/em>, assigned to two teams: the Human Coalition, and the Combined Army. Each round, I wrote 4-5 missions, and the two teams each distributed their players to each site according to player preference. The missions were designed around an ongoing storyline that I wrote, as told by a cast of characters I drew and crafted personalities around.<\/p>\n

It was super fun, but it was an absolutely life-shattering amount of work, and as such I will likely never do anything like it ever again.<\/p>\n

Q2: How do I navigate around your web thingie?<\/h2>\n

Use the Week arrows at the top to move from one week of missions to the next. Click a Site button to read the mission that was played at that site. Each mission is preceded by a briefing– by default you will see the writeups for both the Humans and the Combined Army, but you can use the “HS\/CA\/Both” buttons at the top left to switch into and out of the single-faction views that were originally presented to the players.<\/p>\n

At the end of each Week is a “Results” page that tracks how my players did in their run-through of the campaign, and reproduces their “mission debriefing” writeups if you’d like to read those. They insisted that I included those somewhere, so I did. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n

If you want to try one of the missions out, there’s a Print button underneath the briefing for each mission that cuts out some of the extraneous content and turns the whole page black and white.<\/p>\n

Oh, and there are a couple of spots where extra pages are inserted– the campaign ruleset at the very start, and a short fiction piece before Week 3. The “Next week” button will take you past those to the next block of missions.<\/p>\n

I think that’s about it. Let me know if anything doesn’t work. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Q3: Awesome! So, I can run this campaign with my group?<\/h2>\n

I really doubt it! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The campaign is very story-centric, and the story for each week was tailored to the outcomes of the previous week’s games. So you can try<\/em> to run it at your story, but unless your players achieve identical results to my players, the story will quickly stop making sense.<\/p>\n

Also complicating things is the fact that the campaign is fairly terrain-specific. I created my space ship<\/a> and sewer board<\/a> explicitly for this campaign, so if you don’t have comparable terrain, you’re going to have difficulty playing those missions.<\/p>\n

Q4: So what’s the point, then? Why publish it?<\/h2>\n

A few reasons.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Mostly because I think it was cool, and I figure someone else might enjoy reading it.<\/li>\n
  2. Despite the full campaign not really being reusable by other people, you might be able to make use of the individual missions just as a change of pace from standard ITS games. They’re fun and close enough to balanced not to cause you any major issues.<\/li>\n
  3. And in theory, if there are any other folks out in the world looking to run a story campaign at their own store, they might be able to draw some inspiration from what I did. In particular, I think the mission reward system was a huge success, and the Black Ops format employed in a few of the missions has turned out to be a pretty awesome variant gameplay mode.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Q5: Are the missions balanced?<\/h2>\n

    Ehh, they’re not too bad. I used ITS missions as my model, but diverged quite a bit in terms of complexity, and also created quite a few “asymmetrical” missions where the two sides have different advantages and objectives. All of the missions received one live playthrough, and some<\/em> got a single playtest in advance. So there could absolutely be problems that I didn’t catch.<\/p>\n

    My focus was on making the missions fun; if any balance or wording issues came up, I was there to resolve them in person for my players. So if you do decide to play any of them, try to approach them from a cooperative mindset– if something seems blatantly wrong or if you discover a really obviously broken loophole, figure out a way to quickly resolve it with your opponent before carrying on. If you get really rules-lawyery with these missions, you WILL find errors, and they WILL ruin your game.<\/p>\n

    So just, like… don’t do that. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n

    Q6: How canonical is the fluff?<\/h2>\n