Geography/Terrain on PanO worlds + Human Sphere Politics

I can't really answer question 1, but my mind's eye paints it as a post-industrial cityplanet, skyscrapers as far as the eye can see, traditional cyberpunk. Hyper-urban for the most part, aside from obvious oceans. I always imagine it as the Citadel from Mass Effect, except, you know, a planet and not a 5-armed rotating cylinder in space.

If I recall correctly, the US went into a major recession and ceased to be an economic or military superpower post-wormhole-collapse. As far as I can tell, they are not really represented in the Infinity universe outside of the USARF on Dawn.

It really depends based on what your narrative is. Everything in Wotan and Kurage, for example, is a local skirmish in a larger conflict (over the Wotan Gate Blockade, or Novvy Cimmeria) while the one-off missions you play at the LGS are probably random skirmishes. If your group wants to do a campaign that tells a story, it's definitely the former.

 

For questions 1 and 2 I would refer you to the Infinity RPG book, it goes into quite a bit of detail when it comes to background, and several other books are coming with individualized descriptions of planets, so keep an eye out!

As for 3, most of the engagements within the human sphere are decidedly black ops skirmishes, with possible exceptions being Paradiso, Svalhreima and Dawn, where there are large to medium scale conflicts going on, or possibly anything involving the Combined Army, as their presence is a sign of war

Paradiso is under full scale attack by the Onyx Contact Force, with the forces of O12 barely holding on. At the same time, the different human sphere factions are constantly infighting, though they are more sneaky about it (see: Flamia and Wotan campaigns)

Svalhreima has a tepid war going on between PanO and Yu Jing. While it is not officially recognized, everyone knows the ice and snow aren't the deadliest things you can encounter in the border regions (probably the next campaign scenario)

Dawn and it's rightful owners, the Ariadnan people, are constantly assailed by both the savage antipodes and the galactic powers looking to carve territory for themselves (bit propagandistic but basically true, see: Kurage campaign)

 

Small correction - Political correctness brought to you by your friendly neighbour PanO administration. Join the Mayafeed all day every day 24/7!

@CoffeeBadger the most important thing to remember is that we are talking entire planets.
Climate is diverse, even Svalarheima has nice areas.
Neoterra's topology probably is roughly equivalent to earth. Frozen wasteland to tropic jungle. But it is very, very heavily developed and there are a lot of urban/industrial areas.

 

How's giving Varuna back to the Helots going then?

 

I'm not contesting that it is rightfully theirs. We just kinda took it because we wanted and could. Most of them can see the advantage in that nowadays. The occasional bombing just happens. Wheather a human or alien was the culprit let's not discriminate an entire race for the actions of individuals. Collect the cubes and eh.
How are those Antipode wars coming along? Could offer to send you some Cube tech in exchange for another Teseum mining colony...
Don't worry about "Ariadna not being supposed to get that kind a tech", we'll bribe it through legislation for you.

 

We're good pal, rather not become Sepsitor bait

ITS tournaments and narrative campaigns are not directly related, but it is possible for an ITS organizer to create an event tailored to let players get campaign games in.

Generally campaigns are just an assortment of game reports uploaded by the players to a specific site. These games are played on locations and use missions specified by the campaign organizers.

 

NeoTerra is very earth-like with a full range of geography, flaura and fauna (both native an introduced).

The gravity is slightly higher than Earth, and the ambient temperatures slightly lower ('though it's still vastly colder at the poles and warmer at the equator).

Both of the largest continents, Lux and Pax, have ancient arboreal forests on rolling hills dominating the inland part of the continent. There are also deserts and huge cities.

So you could use any camo scheme for Earth and be justified, but either an "urban" or a "forest" scheme is the most "NeoTerran" in nature.

 

The interesting thing about Neoterra is that the ecology is very fragile.

This means that to preserve it the cities are built up, instead of out, and are therefore very densely populated with vast tracts of wilderness and low impact farms between.

Most factions (especially PanO and Yu Jing) use smart fabrics and armour coatings that can change colour to match the environment, so the dress blues of a Fusilier can become green/orange for a forest, tan for a desert, or white for snow/Varuna beach.

 

I always thought of it more like Atlantis from SGA

I feel strongly that this is first. Especially considering some troops that are being used it's hard to keep that black-ops vibe in my mind. But how i perceive the game mayby different than what lore states.

 

Another interesting tidbit from the RPG book. It also states that Neoterra has hundreds of massive orbiting shipyards, that produce most of the Human Sphere's civilian spacecraft. So you could do a Neoterrain space force theme as well.

The one picture they have in the book for Neoterra shows the typical Sci-fi futuristic city with clusters of impossibly tall and complicated skyscrapers.

 

I think that one has been pretty well answered.

The US suffered a massive war and a gray goo scenario, it's basically gone to 3rd World/Failed State status. Canada, being contiguous and having most of the population relatively close to the US, then (logically) caught a large piece of that. I believe that Russia was on the other side of that war.

That's also on top of a massive economic collapse due to the loss of the Ariadna colony. Dump trillions of dollars/euros/rubles into space development (in the form of bonds that will be repaid by the profits of the colony!) and then have it just vanish will take down a country (or "three", in this case: US, Russia, and the EU!) really quick.

Africa is home to one of the orbital elevators. Pretty sure the Elevator is in Somalia. Right on the coast, right on the equator, because you don't want anything under the Elevator if it breaks (due to Earth's rotation, an Elevator will fall to the east).

Nigeria is apparently one of the major powerhouses on Earth, though most of the population of Earth has 'hollowed out' and left for the stars.

Since I usually play against other human factions, I assume that they're black ops in the cold war. Tom Clancy's technothrillers with even better toys, basically.

When I do play against the Combined, that's on Paradiso and is part of the larger War. If someone in the local group played Tohaa, those would be cold war missions, almost certainly on Paradiso.

Officially, they can be either. There's an older (previous rules edition) campaign book out, Campaign Paradiso, that is explicitly an early part of the Paradiso War. It's still the only place you can get the Special Ops rules and the basic Infinity Campaign System rules, but the Paradiso Campaign missions themselves are really painful (even worse back in 2012 when several sectorials basically only had one possible build for the mission requirements). But the events of the Uprising are definitely Cold War. At least if they weren't caused by a damn Shasvasti...

Between the N3 and Human Sphere N3 books, you should have almost all the written fluff from CB. There may be some older unit blurbs out there, I think those are hosted on the fan wikia, human-sphere.com.

If you really want to dive into the fluff, the Roleplaying Game books are canon (they are all approved by @Interruptor which is why they're slow to come out). I only have a preview of the core book, but I think the PanO faction book is out now.

 

Well, at least part of Canada is in PanOceania.

We know, because the Hassassin society assassinated the head of one of the universities there.

The PanOceania RPG supplement isn't out yet, but it should be soon.

 

Is earth under PanO control? and I was thinking earth would be a great place to have the next campaign just add in a moon base and bam! you got the next campaign, the back story could be that Tohaa has set up a top secret lab on the dark side of the moon, the lab has been there since 1809, and nobody on earth knew about it, It could happen.

 

No, Earth (entire Sol system, actually) is 'balkanized', multiple different countries there. I mean, the founding nations of both PanO and Yu Jing are still on Earth, and now the Japanese Islands are a separate country again.

Part of Mars was under YJ control, and is now (at least partially) JSA instead.

The original wormhole to Ariadna was out around Saturn (it was detected by changes to Saturn's rings), and there's been a lot of traffic since.


That lab would have to have been deep cover and minimal (if any) contacts for the last 250 years, though.