Livin' on Marvel Time

Gary Gygax said: “You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept.”

I wonder if that applies to superhero games, too? If so, its a bit difficult to find that strict time-keeping in the source material--at least at Marvel and DC. Both companies long ago adopted de facto “sliding timelines,” and have since enshrined them in company policy, more or less.

For the uninitiated, in the Marvel Universe, this means that the current “heroic era" never gets more than about 10-15 (depending on who you ask) years-old. The Fantastic Four originally got their powers in the sixties. In the Lost Generation limited series in 2000, that event seems to have occurred in the late eighties-early nineties; now, it probably happened around 2000.

Now, the number of events between the beginning of the current age and the ever-advancing now keeps increasing, though the distance between those two points remains constant. Eventually, there'll be a major crossover everyday of Peter Parker’s life since he was 16.

It was not always thus. As George Olshevsky’s Marvel indices show, early Marvel, seemed to follow “real time”, more or less. The reason comics abandon it, like most serial media, was presumably to have evergreen brands.

A superhero rpg campaign doesn’t need brands. There’s no reason why heroes in a Marvel-inspired rpg campaign couldn’t grow old, have children, and retire and make way for the next generation. DC has toyed with this in comics themselves (safely placed on Earth-2, for the most part), but this would be fairly new territory for Marvel.

I’ve run a Mutants & Masterminds campaign based on that premise in the past, constructing a timeline from Olshevsky’s work, and my own collection of date references from comics. I could have saved myself some work, had I discovered the The Wastebasket blog and Tony’s chronology work on what he calls The Original Marvel Universe. Though my conclusions sometimes differ from Tony’s, the detail and analysis he puts into the OMU is great.

I suspect if I ever run that campaign or a similar one again, I’ll find the OMU indisplensible.

Truth, Justice, and all That Other (Gaming) Stuff

This weekend I picked up Green Ronin’s DC Adventures: Hero’s Handbook, which is the main book of their new DC Comics rpg. It utilizes the the latest iteration of Mutants & Masterminds' take on the d20 system--the version that’s going to be in Mutants & Masterminds 3e, which is suppose to be coming this fall.

My history with role-playing in the DC universe goes back to 1985 and Mayfair’s DC Heroes. That was the third superhero rpg we played--after Villains and Vigilantes, and the first edition of Marvel Super-Heroes. Mayfair’s system (later to be dubbed the Mayfair Exponential Game System and be acronymized as MEGS), was a little unusual and abstract, but it did allow a world to exist that went pretty seamlessly from street level to cosmic, and it used kind of cool, balanced “parallel mechanic” for physical, mental, and spiritual activities.

My group played a lot of DC Heroes in its second edition incarnation from 1989. Unlike, interestingly, our long-term Marvel game, we didn’t use “real” DC characters, but made up our own instead. In fact, I don’t know that those characters actually inhabited the DCU because I can’t recall if we ever interacted with any of the “big names.” I think we found it had a better character generation system that Marvel which, even in the advanced game, always seemed like it was an afterthought to the designers.

Anyway, back in the present day, I haven’t given DC Adventures a thorough reading, but right off the bat I notice a few changes. The ability scores have expanded beyond the D&D standards. There’s “stamina,” which is probable renamed “constitution,” but there’s also an agility in addition to “dexterity,” and “charisma” is missing, but “presence” appears. They don’t run the usual 3-18, but instead the score now seems to be the old bonus/penalty that was related to the score. This caused a moment of confusion when I paged through the book and saw Batman with a Dexterity of “7”--which is actually pretty high once I figured out what they were doing.

Some other changes seem inspired by other superhero rpgs. Powers seem a little more “effects based” than previously a la Champions, but I may be overstating this, because there doesn’t seem to be a huge change, here--maybe just in how they present it. “Fighting” is now an ability score--shades of Marvel Super-Heroes. In another MSHRPG call-back that made me smile, the determining of the damage condition from an attack is now decided by referencing a table which has color-coded columns of green, yellow, and red (and also blue) like the much-beloved Universal Table.

I haven’t reviewed the book enough to start the inevitable quibbling about the stats of famous characters, but overall it looks pretty good if you like Mutants & Masterminds, and makes me interested in seeing the third edition/

An Evening With the Nocturnals

Nocturnals is a series of comic book limiteds and one-shots written and drawn by Dan Brereton. Its main characters are a vigilante team of--well, monsters--who tangle with gangsters, supernatural menaces, and an evil corporation that serves as a front for Lovecraftian invaders. If it sounds like role-playing game fodder, Green Ronin beat you to it with a 2004 sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds. I also count the Nocturnals among the inspirations for my Strange New World of the City setting.

It all started with an eponymous limited series published by Malibu Comics’ Bravura imprint in 1995. It’s since been collected under the subtitle, Black Planet. It introduces the mythical Northern California town of Pacific City, and its resident extra-legal heroes, Doc Horror (a two-fisted scientist from an alternate dimension with a dark secret), and his gang. The group includes: Polychrome, a ghost; Firelion, an artificial, pyrokinetic samurai; babe from the Black Lagoon, Starfish; reptilian genetic chimera, Komodo; and undead gunslinger, Gunwitch. Also tagging along is Doc’s daughter, Evening, who likes to be called Halloween Girl, and carries creepy toys inhabited by spirits.

Their foes are the forces of the corporation Narn K and their mob allies. Narn K manufactures artificial humans and human-animal hybrids in its Monster Shop, but, more sinisterly, is a front for an invasion force. The alien Crim overran Doc Horror’s homeworld, the Black Planet, and only the Nocturnals stand in the way of them doing the same to Earth.

The adventures continue in another limited, The Dark Forever, in 2002. Halloween Girl gets her own stories in Witching Hour (1998), and the Troll Bridge one-shot in 2000. Gunwitch takes center stage in Outskirts of Doom, also in 2002. After a hiatus, the gang was back in Carnival of Beasts in 2008. Green Ronin’s Nocturnals: A Midnight Companion, isn’t just a gaming supplement, but a “bible” to the series’ characters and their world with material written by Brereton, himself.

Anyone who’s a fan of psychotronica, or just good comics, should probably spend an evening or two with getting to know the Nocturnals and the mean (and weird) streets of Pacific City.