So, right off the bat, I want to explain that it’s taken me four months just to figure out how 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.

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.

So, yaknow what?

Screw it. I won’t even bother.

Behold the monster that devoured Spud’s summer:

If anyone’s unsure about whether to click that link, here’s a quick FAQ to explain what it is.

I’m about to start up an intro league for Infinity at my store, and I wanted to provide the new players some sort of cheat sheet to help them keep track of various items they’ll be running into frequently during their first few games. Several rules references have been put together by various individuals, but all of them seem to be aimed at experienced players and as such have a lot of information that I don’t want to burden people with right out of the gate.

As is my way, when I found that something I wanted didn’t exist, I shrugged and made it myself. My reference sheet explains how to read unit profiles and weapon profiles, how to spend orders, and has a list of fairly common skills that might come up during a demo game.

It’s definitely aimed at completely new players– existing players will find it all a bit redundant and obvious. ?

• Infinity Quick Reference (Pages 1 & 2) [PDF, 3mb]

I’ve added the sheet to my Infinity Tools page in the top menu. Feel free to download and print some copies If it looks like the information might be useful for you. 🙂

March 23rd Update:

I just realized that I never posted the second reference sheet (pages 3 and 4) that I made to support weeks 2 and 3 of my boot camp, covering common weapons, camouflage, and specialists. So, here’s that part:

• Infinity Quick Reference (Pages 3 & 4) [PDF, 3mb]

-Spud

I ran an Infinity league at my local store this past summer. An ongoing narrative ran through the five weeks of missions, and that narrative frequently called for battles to take place in fairly specific locations that are difficult to represent with the terrain my store had on-hand. I didn’t want the players to have to play these missions with ill-fitting boards, so in the month leading up to the league, I spent some time creating new terrain pieces to match the environments I was planning to send them into. You’ve already seen one result of this effort in the form of the sewer board. A second one– a modular system of space station walls– was built enough to be played on during the league, but I never finished sprucing it up because I didn’t like how tedious it was to assemble each time we used it. (I may revisit that bucket of components at some point in the future, though).

The third board I built took the most work, but ended up being my absolute favourite. The inciting incident for the entire campaign was an alien attack on a Yu Jing cargo transport over Paradiso, and I wanted an actual ship for the players to play on. I traditionally build my Infinity terrain out of hand-cut foamcore construction with hand-cut craft foam detailing; this technique yields great-looking terrain that is extremely durable, but it takes quite a long time to build due to all of the precise manual cutting. I only had two weeks and change to build my spacecraft, though, so I had to figure out some shortcuts that would let me do more construction than normal in the time I had available.

This conversation happens about once a month, generally at work or at family gatherings:

• Person: Do anything interesting this weekend?
• Spud: Not really. Mostly just sat at home and sculpted.
• Person: Oh, you sculpt? Neat!
• Spud: Oh, right. Yeah, I sculpt little dudes about an inch tall.
• Person: That’s so cool! Do you have any that I can see?
• Spud: Uh, no.
• Person: No?
• Spud: Yeah, I kind of end up giving away every single model I sculpt. I can’t think of a single one that I still have in my possession.
• Person: Oh. Hmm.
• Spud: Yeah. It kinda sucks. I have some pictures on my blog, though.
• Person: Ehh, I guess…

And then I show them my pictures, but I can tell that they’re disappointed, because that isn’t quite the same as being able to hold the model in your hand.

After a decade of having this conversation, I decided to finally do something about it. That’s right, kids: I am sculpting some models just to keep for myself. And what’s more, they aren’t going to be models for any particular game– I just want to draw a cool picture, then sculpt the character I drew, and then never paint the model, and have all of that be okay.

I ran an Infinity league this past summer at my store, and as I was prepping one of the weeks, I realized that the story I was writing really demanded that a mission or two take place in a sewer.

This was a problem, seeing how my store does not have sewer terrain. However, this was not a large problem, because… come on. It’s freaking sewers, people.

Three short blasts of the Terrain Party Horn summoned my army to my side, and we proceeded to churn out our smelly battlefield in the span of an afternoon.

Prelude

Spud: So did you hear the leaks for the Hordes colossals?

Dan: Yeah, they sound okay. The Skorne one was a bit disappointing, though. It’s weird that they also just have, like… bigger titans.

Spud: What would you do instead?

Dan: I dunno, but there are tons of options. Skorne capture all kinds of different creatures, so why couldn’t they find some totally different type of horrible monster out in the desert? Like a giant Starship Troopers beetle that shoots acid goo, or another type of their dinosaur beasts? It could literally be anything. So it seems weird that in the faction known for huge beast diversity, they’d opt for “same, but bigger.”

Spud: Fair enough.

Dan: Or they could do something totally bonkers and make it, like, a giant Ancestral Guardian statue. Just a huge ****ing statue walking across the battlefield stomping on people.

Spud: Hmm… that would actually be awesome, but I don’t feel like that would be a warbeast.

Dan: Why not? Isn’t the Circle one just a huge Wold? And they made that a warbeast.

Spud: Sure, but Wolds are beasts to begin with, even the smaller ones. Ancestral Guardians are solos, so whatever’s going on with them, they don’t seem to “interact” with a Warlock in the same way a Wold does. So while I could totally see a badass giant Ancestral Guardian, my guess is that it would be a battle engine, not a colossal.

Dan: I guess that makes sense.

I have related this story back to Dan after the fact, and he does not remember the conversation. It did happen, though. So whether he remembers or not, all of this is squarely his fault.