1: Do we know which of the Dynasties currently holds the Jade Throne? 2: Do your guys have a particular preference between the two? Qing or Ming?
I haven't read anything that says which dynasty is in charge, that info may be in the RPG books, though. My preference is for whichever one was NOT in charge during the Uprising.
Correction, they didn't commit war crimes yet..... and to think I use to be the voice of optimism, assuming the reaction to uprising was overblown. Well, CB definitely proved me wrong. At least Invincible Army is less overtly evil like ISS.
More importantly, the War Crimes are a way that they can force the old dynasty out of power, remove a bunch of damnfool mid-level agents, and set things up for their own agents.
Did you miss everything about the Kuge and the ninja clans? Everyone did terrible things. To be fair, Yu Jing were absolutely the bad guys. For the life of me, I cannot understand why this upsets people. The empire in Star Wars is awesome, they're clearly the bad guys. People play nazis and soviets in historical games, also pretty despicable. Embrace the fact that Bao troops are stormtroopers. Not the comically inept, white plastic wearing buffoons of Star Wars. I’m talking, the guys who break into someone’s home and murder the entire family because they are suspected of speaking against the party. This is who the stare empire is. It’s okay.
Hilariously Lunah left Haqq for YJ because during her time as a Husam Operative, She decided go to Aristeia! with the sole purpose of using her fame and following, in order to broadcast Haqq as the morally reprehensible empire.
The problem is that the Imperial Service were incompetently evil. Telling some WarCor to broadcast a threat of death to every ethnic-Japanese is NOT how you make the non-combatants hate the insurgents more than they hate you.
Did you miss the inverted commas? JSA are the protagonist faction in Uprising. YJ are portrayed as genocidal maniacs to justify the Nipponese following the Kuge and the diplomatic and military cover provided to JSA by the other HS powers. ONCE AGAIN FOR THE HARD OF THINKING: This was a recasting of scarily efficient, harsh (brutal even), judicial enforcers and combat oriented military police as incompetent, ineffective murderers. It was backed up by the creation of an actual einsatzgruppen as the CBL. That’s why people who’ve played the faction since November 2006 are disappointed in the fluff of Uprising.
Sooooo, back to my original questions, I'll ask another: Just how involved is ALEPH in your personal IS fluff and crunch? ALEPH in general seems more aligned with the Imperial side of things in the StateEmpire than the party. Case in point: Sun Tze is not available to the the 'Party' Sectorial (Invincible Army) but IS to the Imperial one.
I got the impression that the kuge were planning the operation for quite some time. Hence the need to get the support of the hyperpower, leave most of the civilian population behind, and the loss of several important contingents of the JSA. That makes sense. I could see why that would be a hard pill to swallow. I didn’t take it that way though. It seemed to me like a power that had gotten complacent, which does seem likely.
Well, even if so, Kuge's followers withdrawing ASAP from StateEmpire-controlled territories is hardly a justification for IS an co. to lash out at Japanese non-combatants because... they couldn't get their hands on someone else or something? Comparing Uprising's YJ to Nazis and Soviet means people are comparing them to common modern caricatures of the latter two, which is hardly a quality depiction unless you only want them as faceless and de-humanized antagonists for heroes to shoot at.
@yoink101 While i don't have any problem playing villains, one of the main selling point of the infinity setting is that there is no such things as good and bad guys, all factions are morally grey. For all intent and purposes Yu-jing is a functional authoritarian state (an alien concept for westerners i know), it's not supposed to be your stereotypical evil empire. As for the OP questions: - On the emperor, it's not said which dynasty is in power at the moment, and honestly it doesn't matter. I'm not a scholar on the matter of chinese dynasties, but i have a preference for the Ming, they really did a lot of good stuff. - Aleph being part of the ISS but not the state army is a show of force from the Party. While panoceania gladly accept Aleph presence in their society and their military , Yu-jing wants to show it doesn't need it and is strong enough on its own. However the imperial service is the dark side of yu-jing, the hidden one. The imperial agents are feared by the citizens because being feared makes their job easier, but said job is usually done in the darkness and most of it is covered by the party, which means it's entirely possible that Aleph working with the ISS has never been witnessed by a citizen.
I was disappointed because I thought of the ISS as cops that fought corruption, whether that be ethnic Chinese or Japanese, and had good ideals. There were parts I definitely didn’t like, the Kuang Shi for example. Kind of why I’ve was trying to proxy them with robotic figures like Karakuri. I guess I really just don’t want to play the “bad guys”. I’ve never understood anyone that thought of the Empire in SW as cool or good. Which is a bit weird because I now play Ikari which I think of them as nearly Pirates! I guess because they are small evil and not big evil. I'm weird like that.
You mean the Infinity fluff. Publishing biased viewpoint "perception is reality" background material is just a chore to read and seems like the writer is just trying to get over how clever they think they are.