Mutant Campaign Idea

[Mutant for Hire]

Once upon a time, having grown disgusted with the Marvel Universe, I started plotting out a fanfic of the direction that I thought the X-Titles should have gone in, based on my own conception of mutants and mutant society. It occured to me that there were some good ideas in there that could be used in other mutant campaigns, though I don't think they could be adapted all that well to the standard Champions Universe.

So I figure I'd toss out the overall plot of the fanfic and let people make of it what they will. Without further ado, here's the background and plot of the War of the Mutants:

[Mutant for Hire]

First let's take a step back and go over the basics of mutants. To my mind, the bulk of the mutants in the Marvel Universe should have been low powered mutants. Telekinetics who can levitate bricks at full power, telepaths who can pick up flashes of thoughts, mutants who just have minor talents. Cerebro was only set to pick up more powerful mutants than that. If you're recruiting for a superhero team, you go for the cream of the crop.

Now beyond powers, mutants can be subdivided into two categories, inobvious and obvious mutants. Inobvious mutants are mutants with no obvious physical abnormalities and can pass for non-mutants without any difficulty. Obvious mutants are folks like Nightcrawler who can't. Obviously there are cases like Mystique who blur the boundaries, but for the most part mutants fall cleanly into one of the two categories.

Now in general, most people, including Xavier himself thought that obvious mutants were rare compared to inobvious mutants, based on observational data. Of course the problem with that is that there may be factors which bias the observational data, such as the fact that obvious mutants out in plain sight tend to get lynched.

The average inobvious mutant, once their power manifests, tends to keep in the closet. In some cases they have to move out of any area where they've used their power, but in most cases all they just have to do is go to some new place that's never heard of them and start over and live in the closet.

Obvious mutants can't do that. Puberty hits and they start changing colors, growing strange body parts (e.g. wings) and so on. They can't just move. Most of them end up running for their lives, bundle themselves up, and end up among the homeless. In fact in some cases they can't even do that. They have to hide from sight during the day and come out to scavenge.

The best places for them to hide are in big cities and preferably underground. Of course there are only so many good hiding spots in cities, and obvious mutants from all directions start gathering in these spots and forming communities. There are even some inobvious mutants that can't or won't fit into normal life, can't stand living in the closet who end up drifting into these places as well.

It's fairly obvious that the Morlocks just gathered together. A few moments of thought would make it clear that the Morlocks aren't the only such gathering, they just happen to be the favorite gathering point in the tri-state area. All over the globe there have to be other Morlock tribes gathering all over the globe in the bellies of cities and other recessed places that obvious mutants might be inclined to drift to.

And the first point I stuck in to make it clear that though even there were hundreds if not thousands of mutants out there, the bulk of them were low power mutants barely stronger than non-mutants. Civilian mutants too weak to be a serious threat, though mutant enough to suffer all the downsides of being a mutant, especially an obvious one.

A powderkeg that goes off just by being exposed to public knowledge. How would the city of New York react to a bunch of ugly mutant squatters living in the tunnels beneath the city? Kelly or any other anti-mutant activist would have a field day with the Morlocks, holding them up as a prime example of the mutant threat.

Trying to evict the Morlocks would lead to some very nasty battles, which of course would fuel public fear of mutants. And where would the Morlocks go? Normal prisons would not be well suited for holding Morlocks. Most likely special camps would be set up to hold them. And in time the other Morlock tribes would be flushed out. And once they finished flushing out the obvious mutants, they'd go after the inobvious mutants. What sort of world does this sound like?

To say that Nightmares of Future's Past was the result of Robert Kelly's assassination is like saying that the First World War was due to the assassination of the Archduke. On some level that's true but even if the Archduke wasn't assassinated, something else would have triggered it. Europe was a powderkeg and something was going to set them off. Likewise, the Morlock tribes were the powderkeg that triggered off that timeline.

Now the unpleasant part was that the Morlock tribes were growing every year. Sooner or later one of these tribes was going to be uncovered. All that Kelly's death did was set off a progrom to go flushing out hidden mutants that ended up flushing out the Morlocks rather unexpectedly. Even without Kelly's death, sooner or later the Morlock tribes would have exploded in a set of race riots that would have made the sixties look trivial.

Xavier always looked at the mutants as a single unified biological species and he vastly underestimated the number of obvious mutants out there. Plus he came from an age when all gatherings of mutants were formed by strong leaders, and he tended to filter all other groups of mutants through that perspective. He never really paid much attention to the global mutant situation, espeically developments in the civilian mutant population, instead focusing on that small segment that tends to cause trouble.

Xavier's whole operating style for the X-Men was reactionary. He waited until there was trouble and then sent the X-Men in. As long as something was quiet, he tended to ignore it. The problem is that a bomb is very quiet until it goes off, and in this case, once the bomb went off, it was too late for even the X-Men to stop the resulting disaster.

[Mutant for Hire]

All of that was more or less backstory for the fanfic that I set up. My own personal inclination was to have Cypher do his own analysis of the mutant situation. Cypher was always the brightest of the New Mutants and his mutant power gave him a knack for sorting through data and seeing patterns. He realized the Morlocks weren't unique and there were tribes of them all over, and seeking to follow in Xavier's footsteps went on his own global tour of the Morlock situation.

Along the way, Cypher starts talking to the various Morlock tribes and talks to them about cooperating with each other, helping each other, putting their heads together to deal with their situation. He runs into resistance and attempts to have him driven out or even killed. The more he travels around and pushes cooperation, the more trouble he runs into. He learns he's not the first to talk about that, but everyone who has has run into a bad end.

Cypher gets suspicious as he travels along and starts to suspect that there's a conspiracy buried in the Morlock tribes to keep them weak and disunited. This doesn't make any sense to him, but he nonetheless is coming to the conclusion about that. He finds out he's not the first to claim that but everyone who did came to a bad end, which tends to make him more paranoid.

As he comes up with increasingly solid plans for saving the Morlock tribes from disaster, answering potential objections, the more frentic the attempts on his life. Finally he manages with some help to take one of his assassins alive and finds out that they're Japanese, and all of a sudden everything clicks into obvious place.

A country with half the population of the United States all bundled up on a land mass the size of California, most of it too mountainous to be inhabited and having two atomic bombs dropped on civilian population centers is going to have a lot of mutants. Now in Japan there is a saying, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down". For the most part inobvious Japanese mutants are the most closeted population on Earth. The Silver Samurai is a very rare exception.

The problem is that the obvious Japanese mutants can't do that. Like obvious mutants elsewhere, the ones that didn't commit suicide went underground. In the case of Japan, there was one city which was the obvious draw for the obvious mutants was Tokyo, which was sort of a population sink for the rest of the country as well. Tokyo pretty much collected the vast bulk of the obvious Japanese mutant population.

The Japanese are a very orderly people and the obvious Japanese mutants were no different. They pretty much started using their powers in an organized fashion to uncover and secure obvious mutants before they killed themselves or got into trouble with their peers and brought them to Tokyo. That's part of the problem.

You see, as Japan is such a conformist society which has a religion that believes in purity, the obvious Japanese mutants looking like monsters felt more shame and revulsion than normal about their appearances and felt very impure and unclean. There was a much higher degree of self-loathing. Normally they would end their lives but in this case, there were those who decided that before they ended their lives, they should seek vengence on those who made them that way.

Yes, you see unlike obvious mutants elsewhere, the obvious Japanese mutants could lay the blame on someone. The United States was to blame for their conditions, many of them (not unreasonably) decided. Some of these obvious Japanese mutants, who named themselves the Bakemono ("monster"), decided they would live for vengence and once they had it, they would then end their own lives honorably.

The Bakemono started way back and they just grew more nuts as time went on. In time they decided that it was not fair that Japan was the only country to know nuclear horror and decided to work towards plunging the rest of the world into nuclear hell and make them suffer the way that Japan had. Of course the United States deserved it more than anyone but every other nation deserved it as well. And so they quietly started working on plans for nuclear horror. That's why no one, including the X-Men heard of the Bakemono. They were very carefully not attracting attention to themselves.

Now the Bakemono knew that they had the world's largest collection of mutants. Admittedly only a fraction them were hard core commited Bakemono, but the hard core ruled over the rest of the Japanese Morlocks with an iron fist. The one power that they felt could be a danger to them was the other Morlock tribes uniting. And so the Japanese Morlocks planted agents in the other Morlock tribes to make sure that they remained weak and divided.

Of course there was a faction of the Japanese Morlocks that did not follow the beliefs of the Bakemono. The one reason that Cypher managed to survive the Bakemono attacks was that a faction of the Japanese Morlocks were quietly working to frustrate the will of the Bakemonom, keeping Cypher alive long enough to understand the situation and to bring word to those who could do something about the Bakemono.

[Mutant for Hire]

Cypher was the pebble that moved Charles Xavier and more to the point, Magneto. Once Magneto saw the Morlock situation and for that matter the Bakemono, he was horrified and appalled at the situation. Magneto, for all his terrorist ways, believed in the survival of the mutant race and ultimately embraced life. The Bakemono lived only for vengence and the death of everyone and everything. In the end, Magneto was one of the most fervent enemies of the Bakemono as anyone.

Cypher ended up kicking off the War of the Mutants, also known as the Morlock War. Charles Xavier and Magneto ended up pooling their resources and pulling their forces and the Morlock tribes together. It began with the Battle of New York and then spread to the other Morlock tribes.

You see the Bakemono saw the Morlock tribes were weak when divided, and the Bakemono knew that Magneto was likely to regroup the Morlock tribes together, or at least the most significant warriors of the Morlock tribes. So they started sending out their forces to crush or at least damage individual Morlock tribes.

The War of the Mutants started with the X-Men, New Mutants, retired X-Men, Freedom Force and former Brotherhood of Evil Mutants people, plus Xavier and Magneto standing between the Morlock tribes and Bakemono forces while they evacuated the Morlock tribes to the Savage Land to set up a fortification there where they could gather and ready their forces.

Magneto ends up general and leader of the Morlock tribes in the process. This is one of those subtle manuvers of the Japanese Morlocks in opposition to the Bakemono. They knew that ironcially the Bakemono would cause the Morlock tribes to unite and form a new mutant nation in the Savage Land, out in the sun, under the rule of an honorable and good man (Magneto) who would rescue the Japanese Morlocks from the Bakemono and lead them to a better life in a new land.

The War of the Mutants ends with the Battle of Tokyo, when Magneto and Xavier lead a combined force of mutants, pretty much every mutant the pair of them can scrape up, into the Bakemono warrens under Tokyo. This is the moment that the Japanese Morlocks in opposition to the Bakemono rise up and join with the invading forces.

The Bakemono nuclear arsenal is recovered from the Bakemono and destroyed and the Bakemono themselves are forced to flee. In the end, it's a victory for the Morlocks. The Japanese Morlocks leave their warrens for the Savage Land where a new mutant nation under Magneto's rule is forming. Magneto and Xavier part ways, their temporary alliance ended. They are not quite enemies. Magneto has now given up his terrorist ways to be the head of state of the new mutant nation, which Xavier has no problems with. However they have slightly different ideas on mutant-human relations and may yet end up butting heads.

Xavier and Cypher look at the situation and realize that they need to make some radical moves as well. Magneto's next move will be to reveal his mutant nation to the world when he's ready. The reason for that is to bring in the inobvious mutants. As Cypher points out, Magneto doesn't have to find all the inobvious mutants in the closet, all he has to do is let the inobvious mutants find him.

Now the problem is that while Magneto wants to encourage all these mutants to move to the Savage Land, the Savage Land doesn't have an infinite capacity to hold mutants. In time, Magneto would be forced to go on a war of expansion to create more mutant-only territory for his people. Short term, the meltdown that the exposure of the Morlock tribes was averted, but long term, war was coming.

Xavier agrees that they have to find a way to prevent that. Cypher points out the simplest way to do that is to give the inobvious mutants living in the closet an alternative to emigrate to.

Cypher points out what the bulk of inobvious mutants really want is a place they can live out of the closet, go to work, send their kids to school and so on, and above all be safe. Magneto can offer that with his nation. Right now Xavier can't. So the obvious solution is for Xavier to set things up to make the same offer.

Xavier moves the X-Men off the estate and into one of the poorer parts of New York City, along with the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. They come out of the closet and set up an open mutant community, offering the protection of the X-Men to any who want to live openly as mutants. With the help of Warren Worthington and the Inner Circle, small business loans are offered to any mutants or any non-mutants who want to set up mutant-employing and mutant-friendly businesses. And the school is made public to any young mutants out there.

Of course the mutant community becomes a lightning rod for anti-mutant types. The X-Men no longer have to fly out in the Blackbird to find trouble, trouble is now heading straight for their doorstep. And yet they have to make this mutant community successful in order to inspire other mutants elsewhere to set up more mutant communities, to show that mutants can live among non-mutants.

[Mutant for Hire]

Once upon a time there was the Age of Ignorance, the Zeroth Age of Mutants. Then Xavier came along and identified mutants as a subspecies and mutants knew what they were. Xavier set off the First Age of Mutants, the Age of Hiding. The bulk of civilian mutants were either inobvious mutants living in the closet or obvious mutants living in hiding. Even the more militant mutants lived in secret, even the X-Men.

Cypher saw that the Age of Hiding was doomed. There were forces that were stirring to flush mutants out of hiding, one way or another. In another timeline, it was the enemies of mutants who forced them out of hiding and created the camps to keep them. In this timeline, the mutants came out of hiding on their own, creating places for their own kind in the open, creating a better Second Age of Mutants, the Age of Communities instead of the Age of Persecution.

So to my mind this was the natural evolution of the mutant part of the Marvel Universe. The Morlock Massacre never happens. The Battle of New York is pretty close to that and probably just as bloody, but the Battle of Tokyo is far worse. And the X-Men stop hiding and come out of the closet as mutants. The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants more or less reforms as the Morlock Guard of the new nation, but the Bakemono are a new group of mutant terrorists who make the old Brotherhood look like a pack of girl scouts.

The X-Men, at least in the beginning function more as a police force, patrolling their mutant community. As time goes on, Xavier establishes a force composed of retired X-Men and lower power mutants to patrol the community and the X-Men go back to a team flying around the globe dealing with high power attacks on various other mutant communities around the globe that their local forces aren't equipped to deal with.

And as I stated before, the bulk of the mutants in this community are low power mutants, barely more than non-mutants. Not that this doesn't mean that they are inferior to non-mutants and many of them train up and become formidable unofficial police of their community, but they're not on the level of the X-Men.

The New Mutants suddenly find themselves in a school with dozens if not hundreds of mutants. The bulk of them are low power mutants but there are some higher power mutants around. The New Mutants are just one clique at this school. The Hellions are another clique at this school as well. There are probably others. There is plenty of stories about mutants clashing that can happen without them having to leave the school grounds.

Emma Frost is one of the financial backers of the New York mutant community and sits on pretty much all the boards in the mutant community that Xavier is on, much to his irritation. Emma Frost is also a financial backer of Magneto's nation and assisted personally in the Morlock War to earn respect, status and the power that goes along with it in mutant society. The Inner Circle is sticking their fingers into pies all over.

As for the federal government, Xavier managed to spike Kelly's faction pretty effectively. He simply told the government if they weren't allowed to form their community in the United States, he'd simply head over to Europe and form it, or perhaps another country that was open to the idea of hundreds of individuals gifted with special powers coming in and becoming citizens of a nation and using their powers out of gratitude.

The more pragmatic faction of the government didn't like the idea of a mass mutant emmigration to another nation. Of course taking a pro-mutant stance was suicide, but they didn't dare take an anti-mutant stance. So much to the relief of Xavier and the disgust of Kelly, the official government position is to pretned the problem doesn't exist. Both Xavier and Kelly aren't too pleased with the cowardice of the government but Xavier is willing to settle for non-interference.

Eventually Magneto's mutant nation comes out of secrecy and then life gets interesting for everyone. The Bakemono try to stir up war between Magneto's nation and America and its up to the X-Men to try to stop their plans.

I'm just tossing this out as fodder for anyone interested in playing with the concepts for a mutant campaign of sorts. To my mind, obvious Japanese mutants would be a very scary group of people with reasons to hate the United States.

[assault]

Another relevant Japanese mutant: Sunfire.

[Supreme Serpent]

Another revelant Japanese mutant: Sunfire.

Indeed, he originally encountered the X-men in an attempt to avenge Japan's loss in the War.

[zornwil]

Good stuff, MfH, wanted to bump it and will rep later when I have some again.

[Dholcrist]

Very interesting concepts MfH. I really enjoyed the ideas you had concerning the probable enormous amount of mutants in Japan. Great stuff. Question though: when did you stop reading the Marvel U? Because interestingly enough, most of this has occurred, either in the 616 U, or the Ultimate line. In the Ultimate X-Men series, Magneto formed a mutant nation alongside Xavier in the Savage Land, a veritible mutant utopia. There were indeed mutant camps in the US.

And in the 616, a lot of similar events did occur. Magneto eventually became ruler of his own nation of mutants, but instead of the Savage Land, it was Genosha. Mutants from all over the world migrated to this island nation, where Magneto ruled as a kind and just ruler, content with finally attaining mutant freedom. Until Genosha was destroyed, that is. After this, mutants all over the world were forced to form their own communities (at this time, the mutant population increased exponentially in the past few years, rising to the millions pre-Genosha), including a burrough in New York nicknamed "Mutant Town" where mutants could live relatively at peace. The X-Men didn't move to this locale, but instead Xavier did indeed go public, setting up corporate outlets around the world called "X-Corps" where any mutants who were outcast or in need of help could go and get what they needed (using almost all of the Worthington/Xavier capital, in addition to many other rich backers). The Estate was expanded, and doors thrown open to any mutant child, and now is home to dozens of mutants, of which the New Mutants are only one class (all the students were split into a sort of mini-team/advisory class, the New Mutants, Hellions, Corsairs, etc.). And Emma Frost is more than just a financial backer currently, she's the Co-Headmaster of the School, alongside Cyclops (Xavier left for Genosha, in hopes of rebuilding it in secret, though his current whereabouts are unknown after the infamous 'House of M' debacle).

Anyways, just noticed that there were a great deal of similarities with your timeline and what Marvel's done in the past few years. Great ideas overall though, keep up the good work.

[Cold Steel]

Keep up the good work MfH. repped.