Ichar IV. Armageddon. The 13th Black Crusade. In the ’90s and ’00s Games Workshop experimented with the ‘global narrative campaign’ concept for Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, a massive scale participation event where players from across the world could submit the results of their games to swing the outcome of the war, and with it the course of the story. It was a fan favorite campaign format, but one that GW has left largely untouched for decades. Now sci-fi skirmish wargame Infinity has picked up the baton and is running with it, in ‘The Monday Signal’ campaign.
If you’re old enough to remember those old-school participation campaigns – first of all, how’s your back? Second, you’ll probably recall that players could submit their results on behalf of whichever Warhammer 40k faction they were playing, and wins and losses would contribute to a different warzone depending on where they were based geographically. Warzones swung back and forth and the GW designers frantically scrambled for lore explanations of the results – one possible reason why GW seems less willing to put this kind of thing in the hands of the players.
Infinity isn’t a game about wars, it’s a game about deniable spec-ops missions, and the scope of the campaign story is accordingly a lot tighter. Ruby Monday was a grifter and troublemaker until an unexpected encounter with xenotechnology left her body threaded through with strange alien hypertech. Now she’s disappeared, but she’s left a trail of clues hinting at a big score, and every team of spooks, hackers, counter-terrorists, and wet-work operatives in the Human Sphere is trying to track her down.
“Players will shape the direction of the story as operatives race to uncover what Ruby left behind before it disappears forever”, Corvus Belli’s community manager Gabriel Miller says in the announcement post for the campaign. The studio has teamed up with different content creators in the Infinity community to create custom scenarios, with one dropping each week.
The first, ‘Raid the Kazureibu’, was created by YouTube channel Loss of Lieutenant, and sees players’ hunting down data packets in an illegal hyper-rave, while “smoke, lasers, and lots of glitter” spin around the battlefield creating eclipse zones that block line of sight (including for fancy thermal goggles).
If you play this or any of the upcoming scenarios and submit your results to Corvus Belli, you’ll be in with a chance of winning one of four bundles containing the upcoming Operation Mazebreaker starter set.
Are you playing in this campaign, or do you have fond memories of participation campaigns past? Come and share your escapades in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
