Endsong (unmarked SPOILERS)

I don't have Endsong, but just going by the blurb at the start of the ITS15 document, it seems like a massive improvement to the lore. After years of tedious "total war" nonsense, they've finally incorporated CA into the social fabric so that we can have our black ops cyberpunk setting back. I am quite optimistic about it.

Yes please! That could be a great story.

 

The EI essentially had a choice, it could arrange a ceasefire and help O-12 stabilise the Digester and the quantum zones, or it could let the Digester explode, taking Concilium with it (along with a good chunk of it's forces and fleet). The Digester is 90%+ of the reason the EI cares about the Human Sphere and letting it explode would essentially be a near total mission failure.

I also like the big with the EI getting pissed that the Exrah damaged and destroyed several Circulars, it shows they see some value in humanity as a client race and would like to capture major infrastructure like the Circulars intact, sending Norks to "reprimand" the captain responsible was a nice touch.

Good to see a callback to Campaign: Paradiso with McMurrough, finally we know why the Old Man of the Mountain had him permanently forced into Doggo form and gave him Berenice.

I like the Exrah being independent rather than completely dominated by the EI. They're awful ultra-capitalists most of whom won't live long enough to do anything other than die young and pretty. Those that are actually capable of reaching old age (or even middle age) are more than willing to send their ephemeral kin into battle. The EI opening a line of credit then hiring the Commissariat to brute force open the wormhole with wave after wave of their own troops and ships was a neat fluff piece. Having Samsa as one of the last members of the Concordat kicking about is a nice callback too.

 

With the discovery of Styx, Tartarus and Abraxas wormholes, the Human Sphere also have a lot of potential to expand or find new threats (or both).

 

Or potentially start launching raids into deep EI/Tohaa space.

 

I like the return to cold war too.

Lots of interesting plot hooks, plenty of room for fun narrative campaigns.

The Exrah could be a good villain faction if they get their own sectorial. And a Korean uprising would be fun if only for hearing the wailing and gnashing of teeth from Yu Jing :D. They almost have enough profiles now.

With all the spaceship action described, it seems a pity that there aren't more boarding action missions in ITS15. But of course most missions can be made "in space" if the terrain is right.

 

Wasn't ITS 14 was the space themed one? With the decompression zones and Achilles' boyfriend dying.

 

I like how it resets the universe back to Code Infinity, a cold war and clandestine skirmishes instead of a major war.

It gives believable narration and motives for all involved and opens the setting for many interesting future developments.

Pneumarch and his line of logic is the star of the show though.

 

I may don’t like what happened with model lines and “new good materials”, but I like, where the story is going.
I hoped for more peaceful non-war interactions with EI. Still interesting to see.

I would not be surprised to find another problem from where is Digester came from.
After all Tohaa are just care about this things. Not making them.

I hope, I would get the book. At least I would try)

 

The Observance covering up the Shasvastii infiltration of Bakunin and blaming it on Aleph to solidify themselves as the main power aboard the ship was really well done I thought. The Illuminatrix is also really leaning into the dark, evil side of cult behaviour.

 

Code Infinity, that's a name I haven't heard in quite some time

 

It's an older code ... but it checks out ...

 

Really cool to see the longest Infinity character and plot story arcs getting tied together in this book.

Also the plot presents a very elegant way to bring the background's scale and focus back to small-team skirmishes.

The book brings the CA side of things into greater depth: realizing that the cold hunger of the EI is extremely goal-oriented, and that conflict can coexist with cooperation. Also I think the EI has underestimated exaclty how dumb humans can be about their own survival, which will probably be their edge when they get access to all those lovely, explodable things back in the CA home systems.

Thoroughly agreed.

One thing that's really good to see is the "battle/unit description" style of writing is starting to tip towards to more character-driven stuff that you can follow for more than a page or two.

The Pneumarch-focused pieces are some of the best Infinity writing I've read. Love Gutier's style overall but the battle-focused/historical material can be a bit dense for casual reading (feels like an Osprey historical battle description at times). Where character-driven writing happened before it was somewhat attenuated by the frequent changes in perspective: it jumped around a lot, making it hard to really get to know and follow a character.

But Endsong feels like it is growing past that: the Pneumarch's perspective here really ties the entire book together IMO. You can follow the thread of his interesting perspective closely, despite the alien nature of the character. And it pulls the plot together with it.

Same for the Spiral stuff, to a lesser extent and with changes between characters: but seeing the perspective handoff from one character to another who was in their scene just before is great.

Spoiler: Thoughts on where the story goes from here...

Mild tangent: This book gives me some thoughts about where the arc and scale go from here. My guess is that it remains at squad/black ops for another few years while CB work on less-expensive plastic-ish minis materials and explore other ways to play squad skirmish level stuff. Then at some point if they perfect resin-plastics, they may decide to publish a full 40-60-mini wargame a la 40K. if they go there, the plot rachets back up to full-scale interstellar war again and the humans start pumping out combatants a bit like the Clone or Droid Armies so that they can match the scale of CA forces.

Plot options during the skirmish phase though are that something on the other side of those new wormholes makes the CA/Humans want to collaborate... and/or the EI has an actual change of heart and is convinced by something like the Haqq Search for Knowledge that it can only develop to Ascension if it furthers peace more than destruction, and that there are no shortcuts to the work required to improve itself.

But those are just long-term guesses :D

 

I don't see them going to larger scale battles at the current scale, N4 made the maximum game size smaller, and Warcrow is aiming for roughly similar numbers of miniatures. What might be more likely is a 10/15mm game in the future (though certainly not while Warcrow is under active development) as that's one of the few Gen Con post-it notes that hasn't come to fruition.

 

I hope they don't go to larger scale games. The skirmish / spec-ops nature of the battles are a huge part of the charm of the game.

 

After thinking about it, you guys are right and I agree about Infinity itself (even if the temptation to field -all one’s minis at once- is very strong!!).

But -another- game set in the same universe? With either smaller scale minis and focus on vehicles/TAGs etc. like Dropzone Commander like what @colbrook mentions… or as an alternate ruleset while normal Infinity also still exists? Heck yeah.

 

Many years ago at Gen Con they showed a bunch of Post-it notes with ideas they wanted to do in the future, including things like Beyond Boxes, Dungeon Crawler, Aristeia!, Fantasy skirmish, etc. The only thing they haven't done from that list is a 10/15mm larger battles game.

 

Welcome to the rotation of CB. Since CA got a lot of protagonism in Third Offensive, it's not its turn. At least it's not like other books in which half of them were copy-paste from previous editions' fluff.

This is like WW2's Normandy. You lose A LOT of troops in the initial landing, but once the beachhead is stablished and a base readied, the casualties go down enormously. Here, the CA has to build a "jump receiving station" akin to the Daedalus' portal that used to connect the Human Space with the Tohaa one, allowing for much safer passage.

Unless the fluff has been changed, that is.

In truth, they had access before thanks to shasvastii infiltrators. I imagine the CA needs a critical amount of processing power in the Human Sphere to start contesting Aleph's primacy.
As for the resurrection of Aleph's Troops (not just SSS, all subsections), the rule was in campaigns that Aleph would succeed all Cubevac rolls against all enemies but CA, which was an auto fail (Cubevac was the second roll, after the PH one to see if the character was merely wounded or had suffered "true death", the second roll was to check if the Cube allowed or not the Resurrection). The fluff was that any and all Aleph's units that lost connection to Aleph while in zones suspected of CA's presence, due to the Sepsitor's existence, had to self-terminate (and indeed had a gland for precisely that) and would not be instanced again from Aleph's main databanks; I always assumed that was because Aleph decided the risk of having two instances of the same operative, one working for the CA and the other with accesses to the Human Sphere's secrets and the like was too great a security risk (since the systems would not be able to know which one was the "good" one).

Yes, the CA knows about Aleph since Paradiso, the Evolved Intelligence considers races capable of developing AI's like Aleph great candidates for integration in its Empire, because the EI's reason of existence is to Ascend to a higher plane of existence with the UR consciousnesses that were integrated in it milennia ago (think Posthumans so integrated they no longer separate in the physical world, there are just "aspects" of the EI), and observing other AI's doing so helps it a great deal (and the Tzechi compilators may even have the recipe for such evolution).
On the other hand, an AI created by the EI may end in civil war... again, thus the importance of using other races' AIs.
Regarding the ones external to Aleph, those are of no consequence to the EI, since those are like comparing a drop of water with all the oceans of Earth (including all organisms within).

Zealots tend to go for tunnel vision, having spent so long fighting the "evil overlord" that is Aleph, they aer unable to look at any other threat. In the latest Dire Foes (Bakunin Vs Military Orders, with Robin Hook), the Observancy wants to capture a Sepsitor weapon to use it themselves in order to "convert" others to the True Faith...
And in this same thread, Shasvastii infiltration has been mentioned...

Thus the reason to merely borrow the books instead of buying them... Of the latest books, I have read Uprising, and bought Third Offensive and Daedalus' Fall... and frankly, all three are a waste of space and time, with less than 20 pages worth of reading on each, save Daedalus that may have about 50.

 

Agreed, I thought that was a nice touch. And I plan on digging out my old Void Operator model as a stand-in.