Game Planning 2023 – Captain’s Log Supplemental #2

It looks as though I will have an opportunity to sneak in a little Infinity 2d20 for a few slots before the year is out. This wasn’t part of the plan, but we are looking to mix it up a bit with alternating fortnightly play, and I thought a nice contrast to Pathfinder 2e would be some space operatic factional cyberpunk. There might be some space in the game for ‘new’ players to mix in with the Thursday nighters.

Infinity is at the very crunchiest end of the 2d20 spectrum, an early incarnation of the system before they lightened it up with newer entrants such as Homeworld (another I’d like to get to the table). The game has had seven years of continuous books, squeezing the setting juices for a deep and conflict laden future that has an Altered Carbon edge to its pervasive AR, alien infiltrating, fragmented core. There’s a lot to take in! 

In fact its depths and the jagged edges of the crunchy system have always slightly unnerved me. The game might be a tingler, but I’m going to say a wary one. I have only ever run it at North Star convention for one shot play. Why do I do this to myself? Get a crunchy system and inflict it on innocent convention friends in the tightest of session formats? Honestly… And yet, to a sufficient extent, I have bossed the system into compliance and delivered some fun games with it. 

Online PC generator. Click image to explore…

Sometimes it is worth just going for it, and not worrying too much about the details. I have at least three printed camopaigns of material already, so diving in with some of that is the way to go. It further helps that Infinity has a lot of online support. The online character builder takes a lot of the complexity away whilst providing a guided journey through the lovely lifepath system A character is probably ab out 20 minutes away, with an exported PDF character sheet as a usable momento.

The beginnings of the Infinity 2d20 Setup on Role VTT

The lack of an integrated system on Role lightens the prep time. PCs and NPCs are mostly recorded off Role itself, with dice rolls and consumable resources initiated and recorded on the character sheet. More Role developments are incoming soon for the dice roller, which I’m hoping will include custom dice, useful for 2d20 games. Modiphius are already partnering with Role as a supported VTT where their content can be purchased and played. Dune, Fallout, Homeworld and Star Trek have received offical support, though I’m not expecting Infinity to get anything at this late stage in its published life cycle. I don’t really need anything anyway, though having someone else create maps, images and tokens would be sweet!  

Role also makes it super easy to publish a streamed game, with OBS doing the heavy lifting. Your OBS scene pretty much just has to have a Window Capture’ of the Role session browser tab, with some sound configured. Anything else is trimmings. I’m not a stream watcher (Glass Cannon Network are an exception and are awesome), or a stream content producer. I had a bit of a go, and was technically proved, but overall didn’t really work out. I’d like to showcase both Role and Infinity, so maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a group who would be happy to give that a go.