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Yu Jing Fluff - Perception, Reality, Desire

Discussion in 'Yu Jing' started by Devrailis, Mar 28, 2018.

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  1. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    I'm not upset with the Secession itself. Japan was never a good fit into a Greater China (and all the rest of the Asian Nations) in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace, there's an immense amount of bad blood left over from 1900-1945 between everyone east of India and Japan.

    I'm very upset that the organs of the StateEmpire that are supposed to be Counter-Insurgency experts are fucking it up so severely that they are actively making the insurgency worse.

    Yu Jing has always been honest about the things that are needed to protect the StateEmpire from harm. But if you think PanO, Haqq, Nomads, or even the USA today doesn't do those things (and just sweeps them under the rug), you're not paying attention.


    Man, I don't even play PanO and I'd be pissed if the secession of the Church was handled like the Japanese Secession.


    Yes, and that's all OLD fluff, not the new stuff.

    We are objecting to the ... lessening of that older fluff with "We're too fucking stupid to know that showing civilians a bunch of mass graves and telling them that more of the same is coming for rebelling will only make more active combatants in the insurgency." Look at how evil we are.


    Yes. That's pretty close to what the ISS should be.


    There's a bigger difference between the conservative and reformer (or whatever they call them) sides of the Chinese Communist Party than there are between the Democrat and Republican parties in the US. The reason you don't see the debates on the floor of the Congress of People's Deputies is because the debates are not held there, the debates about who to elect or what laws to enact are held in private. The vote is the public statement of "this is what we have agreed to do."

    One thing to accidentally kill a few civilians. A whole different thing to actively drive noncombatant civilians into being active combatants by threatening them and their entire family with death for being 'in rebellion' (for being Japanese).


    It's why I think Aleph was complicit in the Secession, for some reason not yet explained.



    I really would like for this to be the case, but I'm terrified that YJ is going to be the bigger bad guy than the entire Invading Aliens.


    I think that the Imperial Service should stay, after some massive house-cleaning. I don't want there to be a YJ Codex, though. Part of the advantage of the Warmahordes/Malifaux/Infinity style 'all-armies-expand-at-the-same-time' model is that nobody goes a decade without any new models.

    Yes. I liked the Imperial Service, when they were competent at stomping organized threats to the Peace, Prosperity, and Stability of the Yu Jing StateEmpire.

    They have not been very competent at stopping an insurgency.


    It is good that at least one Agent has been arrested for going too far. I'm not sure it's enough, but I will reserve judgment until I can read the book (still irked that my copy isn't en route to me yet).

    PS, my problem is that the Imperial Service is acting incompetently. Incompetent to the point that they look like a badly-written child's cartoon villain.


    The Party in charge still started life as the Chinese Communist Party.

    The way to win a popular insurgency was written by Mao, in the Little Red Book. That book is still required reading for all Party members. It is also strongly recommended reading for all members of the US Military getting assigned to The Sandbox.

    The Chinese military uses the US military's counter-insurgency manual, which was written specifically to combat a Maoist popular insurgency.

    So could someone please explain to me how the organization of the StateEmpire dedicated to the prevention of insurgencies is not reading both of those books and at least attempting to apply them?
     
  2. Borlois

    Borlois Yu Jing Imperial Service Agent

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    The only possible answer is because "Uprising" is a book only for JSA players, leaving Yu Jing as a incompetent villain. The others NA2 factions... a poorly description? I'm waiting for a good podcast analisis so we can have a better perception about all.
    Unfortunately like is saying psichoticstorm we must wait to see how it will crash to You Jing players.
     
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  3. Death

    Death Well-Known Member

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    If they did and the ISS was able to effectively quell any secessionist movements in the japanese population then there would be no JSA split. There has to be some failure on the ISS part for the split to happen.

    And we really don't know if the ISS hasn't attempted to apply them. The secessionist movement among the Yu Jing Japanese population has seemingly been around since Yu Jing formed. Thats a long time that Yu Jing may well have been using more effective counter-insurgency plans. After all its taken so long for the JSA to split away, Yu Jing must have been doing something right for a long time.

    Outrage does seem focused on the Japanese perspective so its hardly an unbais account of the rebellion.
     
  4. Death

    Death Well-Known Member

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    That doesn't change the fact that the PRC is an Authoritarian Regime, "favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom".

    Yu Jing is a Confucian authoritarian regime. Under Confucianism there is no right for a citizen to rebel under any circumstance. All citizen have a duty to obey their lord, in Yu Jing thats the party and by extension the Emperor. Failure to do so can be seen as a crime. So no doubt the ISS believed their actions were in accordance with Confucianism. That doesn't mean they didn't mess up big time. However, it does explain why they were not following the old PRC handbook on counter-insurgency in this instance. We don't know if the ISS hasn't been using it in the past. Considering that Yu Jing has had problems with Japanese secessionist for a long time and yet still manage to keep most of Japanese society under control, its quite possible they've had been.
     
    #924 Death, Apr 14, 2018
    Last edited: Apr 14, 2018
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  5. Red Harvest

    Red Harvest Day in, Day out. Day in, Day out. Day in, DAY OUT

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    Well, I lost track of this thread about 30 pages ago. Much forgiveness if I repeat something.

    Pardon me for breaking the 4th wall. Perhaps Gutier Lusquiños Rodriguez has not read them, or quite possibly, does not know that they even exist?

    He is the sole source for the Infinity storyline -- we are told thus.

    Let's be honest, FM 3-24, the COIN manual I think you refer to, it is a very dull thing to read.
     
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  6. Triumph

    Triumph Well-Known Member

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    It's like one of those was written by an international award winning author with a long history of working with some of the biggest companies in the industry, and one of them was written by Gutier. To go back to my original point Gutier's not actually particularly good as a writer and it seems like people were expecting too much of him. I get that people were invested in the fluff but this kind of degeneration was inevitable.
     
  7. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    Not quite. When the Emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, rebellion is expected, if not actually required. To restore the Mandate of Heaven.

    So, given that rebellion should not be successful unless the Emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, it means that the sitting Emperor needs to go (for having lost the Mandate of Heaven).

    I've read the Classics, and Sun's Art of War, as well as Musashi's 5 Rings. Not to mention Guy Gavriel Kay's historical fictions, which are more accessible.


    No argument here, damn thing makes almost as good a cure for insomnia as the US tax code!

    It's why I've been harping more on Mao's Little Red Book. It's much more accessible.
     
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  8. the huanglong

    the huanglong Well-Known Member

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    I keep saying, keep the word building up, forget the plot advancement. Invest more effort in making it believable rather shaking things up unbelievably. Pay some more attention to the guns, give them working anatomies instead of moving bits around and redesigning them every five seconds. I want to know a combi rifles ROF, magazine capacity, effective range, terminal ballistics, shit like that. Give me a clear explanation of what shock and double action are meant to be. There's so much to add to the world that's built, so lets ease up on the cataclysms for a while.

    TL:DR instead of thinking how to move things forward, research and read and work out how the things we love work.
     
  9. chromedog

    chromedog Less than significant minion

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    To quote a small green sage with pointy ears:

    "Read them have you? Page turners they are not."
     
  10. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    While I mostly agree, I still want the setting to advance. I just want the way the changes happen to be logical and internally consistent.

    If I was going to play in a static setting, I'd play 40k/Sigmar. And even both of those have had some major developments recently.
     
  11. Hjiryon

    Hjiryon Well-Known Member

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    I assume you mean Uprising with the last sentence? Otherwise, should probably read Outrage sometime, if it was foreshadowed there.

    As for the split needing the ISS to fail for it to happen, that depends heavily on what you mean.
    Maoist revolutionary practices (which have been used repeatedly in the 20th century in one permutation or another) might very well make it untenable for Yu Jing to keep hold of the Japanese population and lead to open rebellion from a large number among the Japanese minority against the emperor. It's at least somewhat credible.
    By the time the actual revolt rolled around, of course, that would mean that Yu Jing as a whole had failed miserably at information control in regards to the Japanese, or there simply wouldn't be public support in the minority to justify it. All of that makes some modicum of sense at first glance, having not read the book.

    What do not make sense is that the troops trained specifically in counter-insurgency tactics would completely fail to understand how insurgency works.

    Again, this leaves the impression that the Uprising book is written heavily from a Japanese propagandist viewpoint. And, given how much of it is apparently conveyed by a Haqqislamite teacher, that begs the question "How does an authoritarian regime, heavily focused on controlling its population and information flow, completely fail to do so, and then also lose in terms of setting the narrative to the outside world, against a minor fragment if its own population?"

    Off the top of my head, I have three takes on this:
    1: Information control in the Infinity setting is growing increasingly impossible due to media developments (but only for Yu Jing this time around). Or, I guess, due to Aleph. The problem with this scenario is the one-sidedness in how it is executed in the storytelling.
    2: The contents of the Uprising book are written on purpose to be propagandist pro-JSA; from what we're told by the folks who've read the book, this simply doesn't seem to be the case.
    3: The Yu Jing StateEmpire is incompetent to the point of complete ideological collapse (and this goes far, far beyond the ISS).

    In reality, some combination of all of the above may be required.

    --- --- ---

    What you see from people like Section9, if I read things correctly, isn't only annoyance with what seems like inexplicable incompetence, but also a worry that this will be glossed over and simply never explained further - because Uprising seems like Ad Hoc writing. "How can we justify JSA leaving YJ?"
    Now that it's accomplished (forced), who knows if anyone cares to go back and make sense of the narrative at all?
     
  12. ijw

    ijw Ian Wood aka the Wargaming Trader. Rules & Wiki
    Infinity Rules Staff Warcor

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    For the (counts) third time, there's a Haqq instructor commenting on the chronology, and a Haqq article on the Celestial Guard FUBAR. The info presented in the book is not conveyed from a Haqq point of view.
     
  13. Hjiryon

    Hjiryon Well-Known Member

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    I understand that the book is not writte from a haqq-exclusive point of view. I should have been clearer about that, I suppose.

    Would you say that, having read the book, those two instances in mind, it's a reasonable assessment that the story as a whole is written from an in-world pro-JSA perspective and intended to be one-sided propaganda, with the Yu Jing side of the story (or just a neutral perspective period) left out on purpose?

    I don't have the book (yet), I can't make qualified comments here. I have to go by what the people who have read it tell me.
    But so far, the impression I've gotten was that those accounts were intended to be somewhat neutral, including the CG FUBAR.
     
  14. psychoticstorm

    psychoticstorm Aleph's rogue child
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    Ultimately the book is limited by its page numbers to explain a really complex situation and it is written as open to interpretation one must pay attention to details that would better be explained if the book had double the size, it is written in the sidelines that Keimpetai kill ISS agents and Yuriko goes way out of her way and mission in red veil to kill one agent (maybe they kill agents investigating clues that would lead to the upcoming rebellion?) they did the same in Kurage and the opening acts of uprising was the mass killing of ISS agents and precincts not sabotaging military installations.

    Personally I think the book is logical and internally consistent, maybe it is too compressed for easy reading? the details are in there though.
     
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  15. tyrannosaurus69

    tyrannosaurus69 Flatlined console cowboy

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    I was responding to your [incorrect] comment that "There’s never been any evidence that the JSA as a whole has [wanted to split from Yu jing]". Separatist leaning is wanting to split from Yu Jing. Play semantics if you want but it's right there in black and white.
     
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  16. xagroth

    xagroth Mournful Echo

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    Eh... no. It's "what the ruling party considered good to use as a control philosophy for the YJ subjects", and I'm not talking about 100% confucianism, but whatever parts they decided were good to keep the population stable and focused.
    Without knowing the changes applied, it is not possible to say with any kind of certainty that YJ is confucianist in the same sense that "the Diamond's Age" China is portrayed as.

    Not really. Making the situation untenable until YJ decides that it's better to send all Japanese together to somewhere remote where they don't need to endure their not-punishable but yes-inconvenient attitudes would have suffice. Send them as a "colony", and colonies tend to become independent... specially since that would be a reason for take JSA out of YJ's section in the Army, and you get a "soft" separation that, eventually, can become a total one. For example, that is.

    But separation without rebellion IS possible, which is the point there.
     
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  17. tyrannosaurus69

    tyrannosaurus69 Flatlined console cowboy

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    Highly unlikely, and not the point I was responding too. The desire to split from Yu Jing has been there from the get-go.
     
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  18. Death

    Death Well-Known Member

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    Why the heck would there be a separation without rebellion? This is a table top wargame, coming up with conflicts for players to engage in is the goal with events like uprising.

    And the average citizen isn't going to be able to make the claim the Emperor lost the mandate of heaven. But good to know, thank you for the clarification.

    I suppose that means if they wanted to the leaders of Japanese society could have demanded the Emperor resign over this incident and stay within Yu Jing. Instead they used it as an excuse to seceded from Yu Jing.
     
    #938 Death, Apr 14, 2018
    Last edited: Apr 14, 2018
  19. Red Harvest

    Red Harvest Day in, Day out. Day in, Day out. Day in, DAY OUT

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    There would be separation without rebellion to avoid the transformation of Yu Jing into a collection of incompetent mustache-twirlers. Also, it would leave open the possibility of working together against a common enemy, like say the kleptocracy corporacracy that is Pan-Oceania. Y'know, taking the long view and acting accordingly.

    For those of you thinking about reading Mao's Little Red Book, spare yourselves. The relevant section is called On Guerilla Warfare. I recall reading it decades ago. I found the foreward/Introduction by the translator more interesting, IIRC. And here it is. http://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/FMFRP 12-18 Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare.pdf

    Maybe read with a good cup or five of coffee?

    The current US COIN manual is much more recent. It seems like I read it about 9-10 years ago.

    Despite the impression created by the media these days,or the 'conventional wisdom', most insurgencies fail. Mao's succeeded because he had help from the Soviets, and because Gen. George Marshall was an idiot.
     
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  20. xagroth

    xagroth Mournful Echo

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    Seriously? We play in a setting where everybody faces everybody, and misinformation, manipulation, crude coin or sepsitors can be used to justify ANY kind of faction A vs Faction B... or even Faction A allied with Faction B faces Faction C allied with Faction D...

    And, well, you have said it yourself... "player to engage in". As in "participate". I see little participation in this Uprising business, or little advancement of the canon (2 years of advance after 12 years of the product, and we see... a small part of a single, minor faction).

    Incidentally, someone claimed through Whatsapp that "history is written by the winners". I'd disagree with that affirmation, since I doubt that no matter how victorious the JSA is, I doubt they will write any kind of history books aside from the ones they will self-consume.

    To be truthfull, JSA has not succeeded by itself at anything but survive a beating until the real big boys came, not to defend the underdog, but to use it as an excuse to hit the big guy. And it seems like the ISS did behave like idiots (if we are kind).

    Never discussed against, and quite agreed upon by almost 100% of the people that wrote here. The point of contention is limited to "how" was this split presentend to the players.
     
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