Choose the authority
Understand the mandate, customer, jurisdiction, desired decision, and disclosure limits.
First operation guide
Read the requirement.
Know your role.
A successful first session begins by understanding who needs the intelligence, what decision it supports, what your role can access, and how the cell will recognize enough evidence to act or withdraw.
Direct answer
Is this page a live game tutorial?
No. This is a proposed player loop, not a live game tutorial. It explains the intended IARPG experience: how a cell receives tasking, divides roles, prepares access, collects and validates evidence, delivers an assessment, extracts, and debriefs. To understand the website itself—its examples, tools, standards, and research—use the Start Here guide.
- Use this page for
- The proposed player experience and first-operation habits
- Use Start Here for
- What the current website contains and how its sections fit together
- Current product state
- Reference publication and local tools, not a live persistent MMO
How to use this page
Learn the player loop, then inspect a concrete mission.
The guide is conceptual. Use it to understand decisions and role habits, then open a mission example to see the same concepts expressed as structured content.
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01
Read the five pre-deployment decisionsAuthority, role, requirement, access, and abort conditions establish the operating frame.
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02
Follow the operation cycleTask, plan, access, collect, validate, deliver, and debrief without forcing a preferred story.
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03
Open a complete exampleCompare the conceptual guide with an actual mission brief, evidence threshold, and extraction plan.
Before deployment
Five decisions before
the cell moves.
The reference operation does not require memorizing a fictional bureaucracy. The briefing exposes the minimum professional context each player needs.
Choose the role
Select field access, case management, analysis, technical collection, or support and liaison.
Read the requirement
Know the primary question, deadline, confidence threshold, constraints, and what is currently unknown.
Prepare access
Choose cover, source, credential, liaison, technical position, route, communications, and contingency.
Agree on abort conditions
Decide when exposure, source risk, weak evidence, or changing tasking requires withdrawal.
Before accepting the narrative
Read the relationship,
not just the faction label.
An operation may involve allies, partners, intermediaries, rivals, neutral services, and internally divided institutions at once. The briefing should show what each relationship covers, what evidence supports it, and what the mission could change.
In which domain do they cooperate?
Security, intelligence, trade, technology, relief, logistics, governance, or a single issue—not an undefined universal friendship.
Who can actually commit the faction?
A public spokesperson, local officer, internal bloc, contractor, supporter, and governing council do not carry the same mandate.
What is known, inferred, or disputed?
Shared rhetoric, a common adversary, or post-event praise does not by itself prove contact, support, tasking, direction, or control.
What can the operation change?
Trust, access, releasability, burden, public legitimacy, internal cohesion, neutral protection, and exit cost can move independently.
During the operation
Follow the cycle.
Do not force the story.
Task
Receive the authority, intelligence requirement, desired effect, mandate, constraints, and reporting deadline.
Plan
Select collection disciplines, covers, routes, sources, cut-outs, communications, contingencies, and abort conditions.
Access
Establish a legitimate reason to be present and create the relationships, credentials, or technical position required to collect.
Collect
Acquire observations, documents, signals, imagery, testimony, network evidence, or physical material without collapsing the operation.
Validate
Check provenance, source reliability, contradictions, alternate explanations, and whether the apparent answer was planted.
Deliver
Move intelligence through the required channel, classification boundary, handler, liaison, or customer without losing context.
Debrief
Record what happened, what remains uncertain, what access survived, what was burned, and what the next operation must know.
Operational habits
Good intelligence play
is disciplined uncertainty.
These habits make the role-play legible to the rest of the cell and keep the game focused on intelligence work rather than guessing the designer’s answer.
Describe before interpreting
Report what you saw, heard, recovered, or received before explaining what you think it means.
Name the source and access
Explain who or what produced the report and whether that source could actually know.
Keep alternatives alive
Ask what evidence would support or weaken each plausible explanation.
Use confidence and gaps
Tell the cell how certain you are, why, and what remains unknown.
Preserve source and cover
Avoid spending valuable access on low-value collection or avoidable exposure.
Record what changed
Capture new relationships, contradictions, burned channels, surviving access, and follow-on requirements.
Interfaces and access
The headset is primary.
The cell is multi-interface.
Field Operative
Embodied access, observation, meetings, object handling, movement, collection, and extraction.
Case, analysis, and technical roles
Tasking, source context, mapping, multi-source review, communications, and technical collection.
Support and liaison
Short-session coordination, document review, logistics, notifications, and continuity between longer sessions.
Before trusting the brief
Read the relationship
before reading the room.
An operation can change an alliance, expose an informal dependency, reveal a faction split, or correct a false attribution. The player’s job is to distinguish evidence from assumption.
Ask where cooperation applies
Trade, intelligence, security, technology, relief, diplomacy, infrastructure, and governance may have different partners.
Separate promise from obligation
A public statement, treaty clause, private expectation, and actual response are not interchangeable.
Separate support from direction
Shared goals, material help, praise, tasking, command, and false attribution require different evidence.
Watch the stress test
Burden disputes, leaks, leadership changes, rights impacts, and local opposition can alter what a faction will do.
Do not treat a faction as one mind
Members, ministries, communities, leaders, and operational units can disagree.
Report what remains unknown
Record the evidence, alternate explanations, confidence, and what would change the assessment.
Deep research links
Research behind the proposed player loop.
These reports connect tasking, processing, analysis, dissemination, counterintelligence, and source reliability to game mechanics. They support the design without turning the site into real-world operational instruction.
FULL REPORT
Intelligence Cycle Game Mechanics
The full cycle as playable decisions, handoffs, uncertainty, and review.
→
FULL REPORT
Intelligence Tasking Game Design
Customer, requirement, authority, constraints, priorities, and feedback.
→
FULL REPORT
Intelligence Processing Game Mechanics
Converting collected material into structured, traceable evidence.
→
FULL REPORT
Intelligence Analysis Game Mechanics
Alternatives, confidence, contradiction, and decision support.
→
FULL REPORT
Intelligence Dissemination Game Mechanics
Audience, releasability, urgency, format, and feedback after delivery.
→
Current release language
Reference operation now.
Persistent MMO ambition later.
The public package demonstrates a marketing and reference-operation framework. Native-headset delivery, certification, production AI services, and worldwide persistence remain deployment milestones rather than current launch claims.
Review the reference gateway
