From bottom to top in rank.

Knights - The front line soliders of the Crusade

Wizards - Technicans of the Crusade who employ the various time travelling technologies to support the Knights.

Bard - Entertainers who look after front line troops after their return from combat.

Priests - Responsible for morale and communicating the message of the Crusade.

Grand Knight/Wizard/Bard Bishop - Visible Leaders of the above.

Grand Master - the Visible leader of the Crusade - currently a vacant post after a successful Jihad assassination.

Blue Skies Thinking Dept (Blue Sky) - The Crusade’s tactical think tank.

Board of Faith and Redemption (BoFaR)- Religious advisory board.

Committee for Effective and Orderly Living (CEOL) - Disciplinary panel.

The Head - the mysterious and invisible leaders of the Crusade.

Just finished reading the the first of the Jerry Cornelius ‘Quadology’ The Final Programme.

If the ‘Big Time’ is the core of the game, JC is very much the front line. The fast, funny, punchy and down right sexy action of the battle field littered liberall with new ageisms, mad science and pop culture references.

The Final Programme, amongst other things, features the world heading towards Entropy (in the sense of disorder) and Jerry Cornelius and Mrs Brunner working towards a evolution in humankind that can deal with this.  In terms of the Infinite War, both JC and Brunner are by turns agents of the Entropy Jihad, bringing on the meltdown of the time line, and the Crusade, trying to stop/hinder Entropy’s onset.

I orginally read the book when I was 15 and it made bugger all sense to me then so especially chuffed that this time round I understand what was going on!

So I’ve finished reading ‘The Big Time’ by Fritz Leiber,  a cracking little book and one of the best reads in a while.

Its a short punchy book, no more than 100pages more a novella than a novel, which takes place in a pocket of reality known as ‘The Place’ which exists outside the normal space-time continuum, known as ‘The Little Time’, which two factions the Snakes and the Spiders are fighting over in what is known as the ‘Change War’. The story unfolds like a stage play, with the main protagonists trapped in the Place, which is a recuperation Zone for Spider Soliders,  with an atomic bomb. The resulting tension brings out the truth behind the Change War. Its a very sharply written book that I’ld recommend any Sci-fi fan to read.

As far as roleplaying material is concerned this has it all. Diverse characters who can can come from any imaginable period of time (including pre-history and far flung future), strange technology (such as the Inverter which is used in front line surgery, and the Maintainers, devices which prevent the void crushing The Place) and some big themes and sources of conflict , such as the Change War and the characters struggle to come to terms with an ever changing universe and their place in it. It even has its own termology (Demons, Ghosts, Zombies etc). My only caveat is that for an rpg game you would want to move away from the tight claustrophobic setting of The Place and into history itself.

Other sources will add bits and branches to add flesh but this book is the spine of what Infinite War is all about.

The idea behind Shift City is that its a neutral outside of time place, that changes as the balance of power between the Crusade and the Entropy Jihad inside Time shifts. Its where the players go to find out what’s truely going on, its packed with intrigue, factional politics and mystery,

At this point my references for Shift City are purely visual at this point.

Brazil - the administration/Government sector.

Dark City - for the dingy parts of the city, that are perhaps sliding into the clutches of the Entropy Jihad.

Repo Man - Edge City from this film is definitely the suburbs of Shift City.

Red Route - Route from Shift City to warzone in Time.

White Corridor - Route to Shift City’s healing rooms from Time.

Possibility n - A definition of a distinct time frame/period eg Possibility 23 where the Psychedelic revolution of the late 60s lasted for another fifty five years, before humankind transcended en mass leaving a vacant Earth behind.

I’ve been struggling for a while to come up with an idea for an example setting for Graham Spearing’s upcoming Wordplay RPG, a narrative/storytelling game using stacks of D6 and descriptive traits.

Then the other day while browsing my local Blackwells, I came across Fritz Leiber’s ‘The Big Time’, a sci-fi novel based around the idea of two sides Spiders/Snakes fighting a ‘Change War’ over Human History. Suddenly it clicked, pressed several of my buttons and the idea for ‘Infinite War’ popped into my head.

I’m going to use this blog as a development area, as I gradually extract the idea kicking and screaming into reality.

Read the About page for more detail at this stage.