Setting:Halo
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Halo is a videogame series exclusively released for the Xbox, Xbox 360, and PC. The series was developed by Bungie and eventually sold to Microsoft's 343 Industries, an offshoot of Bungie to continue the series. The Halo universe is incredibly large, spanning over video games, comic books, graphic novels, action figures, tons of books, an anime, and even a movie. The first Halo game is famous for saving the FPS genre from slowly rotting itself from the inside by introducing newer graphics, gameplay types, and immense stories. Halo is especially know for its large universal story that includes an Empire of overtly religious alien species, a strange secret of Humanity, and an assortment of memorable characters.
Setting
The Halo universe takes place in the 26th century. Mankind, led by the United Nations Space Command (UNSC), has developed its own crude faster-than-light drive (the Shaw-Fujiwara Drive) and finally colonized other worlds. At its height, human civilization occupies nearly 800 planets, forming a ring of outer colonies and rings of inner colonies with Earth as its capital. This is not what they're talking about when they say Halo, mind you.
Sometime in the year 2525 (believed to be roughly half past three), an agricultural world in the outer colonies, creatively named Harvest, is attacked by an unknown force. In the succeeding months, all attempts to make contact, or even defend against the alien forces are met with swift destruction. It is not long before more colonies are wiped out.
The unknown menace finally identifies itself as the Covenant, a coalition of several alien races bent on destroying humanity. At first they seem to be doing this because that's just what aliens do, but later on, it is discovered that the story is somewhat deeper. Apparently humans are the descendants of an ancient super-advanced alien race called the Forerunners.
This made the Covenant kinda jealous, because it was them who first discovered the Forerunner technology, adapted it to their own, and finally started worshipping the Forerunners. Apparently, knowing that your gods had a favorite, finding out that it isn't you, and finding out that it's instead the species that invented truck balls upset them just a little. So, back to glassing. It's not long before the UNSC military, and humanity itself, finds out that it is being pwned. Clearly the only solution to this would be a ridiculously tiny unit of infantry in clever armour with a name in allcaps. This leads to the Spartan-II program, humanity's last hope.
The Spartan-II program
You have been called upon to serve, you will be trained... and you will become the best we can make of you. You will be the protectors of Earth and all her colonies.
— Dr. Catherine Halsey, founder of the program, to the young Spartan-II recruits
The Spartan-II program was originally a super soldier project intended to fight increasing terrorist and rebel threats throughout UNSC space. It was masterminded by genius geneticist Dr. Catherine Halsey, who is the founder and former director of the the project. She and her team visited practically all 800 planets in human space, trying to find children who matched the exact psychological and genetic profile of Big Boss that would accept her newly-developed super soldier treatments. In the end, over 300 children were selected for the program but only 150 were actually abducted due to budget constraints. Those that were abducted were replaced with clones so the families would never know they went missing, since apparently making stable clones is impossible in the future. It is unclear why nobody pointed out this pointlessly angsty backstory would probably result in all of them turning evil like in every other game where this sort of thing is tried, or asked how a fighting force of 150 would be useful to an alliance with five times that number of planets.
The child-recruits were brought to a secret, heavily fortified military world called Reach. They were trained, given numbers instead of names, beaten, retrained, mindfucked, trained some more, and in general subjected to the kind of treatment someone who's half-watched parts of Full Metal Jacket thinks of as military training. Finally, the children, now in their late teens, were cleared for biological enhancement. Using the latest experimental treatments, the 150 were pumped full of drugs that induced their muscles to grow, enriched their blood, and increase their brain processing to the point some of them even knew how to set up a TiVo. They were surgically modified to give them superior eye sight, hearing, and ceramic skeletons. The procedures were so dangerous that over half of the remaining recruits were lost in the surgeries. Only about 33 of the original 150 survived the experimental augmentation procedure program that would've utterly crippled all those without the proper genetics (which makes you wonder how this process was developed to begin with). The result, however, were the Spartan-IIs, who had a laundry list of biologically unlikely abilities. On the other hand, severe psychological issues result in them thinking all objects are exactly the same size for inventory purposes, from a rocket launcher to a pistol. This makes day-to-day life difficult, as they stand confused in front of their dresser trying to figure out whether to drop their car keys or wallet in order to put on their clothes.
Later, the super soldiers were finally given their signature green armor, a prototype powered suit called MJOLNIR (the second choice, as ALLCAPS was already taken). The suit added mechanically unlikely abilities to their biologically unlikely abilities, and canonically weighed a metric ton. Despite that it doesn't make people sink into the ground or fall through every staircase in the universe, thus showing Halo's fluff writers have no fucking clue what they're talking about.
Over the course of the fluff, the Spartans are sent into several missions that even the UNSC elite forces (the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers or ODST) can't go in. Basically, the Spartans Get Shit Done. By the time the Covenant starts to attack human worlds, the Spartan-IIs have been in service for nearly a decade and they are quickly redeployed with the new MJOLNIR Mark-V armor, each complete with a reverse-engineered personal shield stolen from the Covenant. Almost all of them then die since in Crunch (and even in some fluff) their armour provides slightly less protection than lingerie and the shield goes down if a space lizard sneezes on them. The rest of the fluff was apparently played on a secret super-easy difficulty where you defeat every enemy in the game with your penis in the first ten minutes.
USNC Marines
These are your everyday cannon-fodder from the UNSC who in fluff meet fates similar of the mobile infantry in the first Starship Troopers movie or your typical Imperial Guardsman. In crunch, they vary from scripted death-by-anything to being able to laugh off multiple Fuel Rod Gun hits.
The Covenant
The Covenant are a coalition of religious alien civilizations. They venerate and worship the Forerunners and are known to utilize some Forerunner technology for their own means, giving them a colossal fleet of ships that outmatches the UNSC Navy. They are composed of the following:
- Grunts: Ewoks wearing giant seashells with technicolour blood. Typically shout "he's unstoppable!" in their helium voice and then die.
- Jackals: Irritating bastard-creatures with space shields who like to
throw grenades at youshoot your stupid ass, sometimes with particle rifles.
- Elites: De-tailed lizardmen IIIIIINNNN SPAAAAAACE! They have the same shields as a Spartan, and are a bit tougher than the lower-ranked enemies. Some are Arbiters, equipped with laser swords with which they Arbitrarily kill you. Eventually join the humans due to the plot.
- Hunters: Some odd combination of worm/alien/giant thingy. They stand nearly 10 feet tall, but are actually a hive collection of worm-like aliens fusing together to form 1 giant thing, and usually come in pairs. A single hunter is armored from head to toe in overlapping tank-class plate armor, vulnerable only to fire from heavy weapons and handguns. They are armed with powerful Fuel Rod Guns that can take out anything up to light armored vehicles in fluff and can deal anything up to minor damage to NPC Marines in the game. Basically terminators that don't get shit done.
- Brutes: Slightly intelligent Yeti/Cave Troll/Gorilla-like creatures......IIIIIINNN SPAAAAACE! Reputedly, they are the only race in the Covenant that had developed super advanced technology through constant warfare - namely, nukes - then became a space-faring race, then nuked their own civilization back to the stone age, only to claw their way back up to space-faring again...and learned nothing from the experience. They later replace the Elites as the go-to force of the Covenant, and bodyguards of the Prophets, forcing the Elites into exile. This makes sense somehow.
- The Prophets: They form the leadership cadre of the Covenant, claiming that they alone know the true purpose the Forerunners had for them, leading the Covenant in a spiritual-militaristic philosophy called "The Great Journey." It was the Prophets whom discovered that Humanity was the genetic descendants of the Forerunners, and declared humans as a threat to The Great Journey.
The Covenant actually think that tinkering with the advanced technology they dug up from the olden days is HERESY, meaning most of their stuff kinda sucks and they don't know much more about how it works than humans do.
Battles with the Covenant by the humans have often resulted in catastrophic losses on the human side. On the ground, UNSC Marines, armored divisions, and Spartans can hold their own against their foe, but it is a different story in space. Naval engagements almost always results in the obliteration of all human ships. The weapons of the Covenant ships are able to melt right through the meter-thick battle-plating of human warships. The only chance the human Navy has are nukes and massive slow-firing coilguns called MACs (Magnetic Accelerator Cannons) that fling 600-ton rounds, able to break Covenant ships in half.
The Flood
The other antagonists are "The Flood". A race of silly bouncing potatoes that exist only to infest other lifeforms and OMNOMNOMNOM them. They are more or less a viral form of the Star Trek Borg, and make you sprout gross stuff and serve their hive mind if they touch you. They were the ancient enemy of the Forerunners and why the Forerunners built the Halo devices. Battles with The Flood destroyed the Forerunner civilization, as The Flood could infest their own people and technology to use against them.
Previous to the Flood - Forerunner war, an advanced AI named Mendicant Bias was interrogating a creatively named being, The Captive. This captive later turned out to be a Gravemind and convinced Mendicant Bias to join The Flood. Originally designed to operate Forerunner defenses, and in emergencies their fleet, Mendicant Bias assaulted the Forerunner homeworld using said fleet. In response to this the Forerunners created a second AI, Offensive Bias, to lead the remnants of their fleets against The Flood, seeing as an AI fleet-master worked so well the first time.
Finally, with all their massive fleets defeated and all their soldiers massacred, the Forerunners committed mass suicide on a galactic scale to prevent more of their people and other fledgling civilizations from falling prey to The Flood, depriving The Flood of its essential hosts and food sources. The Flood finally died off due to starvation and were defeated...sorta. Small pockets of them hid themselves in the Halo devices waiting for the day the new civilizations would rise so that they might feed again, in the meantime surviving on copious supplies of yoghurt or something.
This shows the Forerunners were completely incompetent and if The Flood hadn't come along they'd probably have been eaten by a swarm of space rats or fallen down some space stairs eventually anyway.
The Halos
The actual Halos are artificial "ringworlds" stolen from a book by Larry Niven, which are covered in illogical geography, annoying copy-paste buildings because the level designers were feeling lazy, and together form a superweapon that kills all complex life in the universe. This was created by the Forerunners to defeat The Flood, the ancient super-race apparently not really understanding that if you destroy all sentient life to defeat a race that will destroy all sentient life it still counts as losing.
Battletech and Halo
Taking full advantage of the resurgence of mech combat in video games and the currently crippled state of Battletech's videogame franchise, Halo 4 now includes a Shadowcat lookalike. Fear the coming "Halo did that mech first" cries from thirteen-year-olds everywhere.