Timelines: Alien Invasions

[KawangaKid]

I've just received my copies of the Champions Universe and CKC books, and I was perusing the timeline. I'm currently cobbling together my own version of the timeline that incorporates Marvel & DC stuff, but with most of the 'major heroes' retiring by the late 1990s.

 

I was checking out DC's 12-year timeline (supposedly 10-year, but that's a discussion for another time) and realized that the Earth is invaded a LOT!

 

Man, there were the Appelaxians, the Hyperclan (White Martians), the first Invasion Alliance, the second Invasion Alliance...

 

How often do Aliens invade in your timeline, and what are the consequences?

 

One of the things I liked about DC's INVASION cross-over event was that there were alien refugees and captives, as well as looting of alien technology for a respectable period after the event took place.

[Kid Chaos]

Are you speaking of strictly extra terrestrial aliens or do extra dimensional ones count as well?

 

If just the former, almost never as only one of my campaigns includes aliens of that type.

 

The latter, about once a month depending on the campaign, or permenantly for one as that's where all the supers come from.

[dbcowboy]

Only done an alien invasion of Earth once when I ran a short campaign based on the Oblivion War storyline from the old Elementals comic.

[Kid Chaos]

Originally posted by dbcowboy

Only done an alien invasion of Earth once when I ran a short campaign based on the Oblivion War storyline from the old Elementals comic.

 

Oddly enough I don't include much Elementals material in my games. For some reason I just like Kid Chaos...maybe it was the costume.

[KawangaKid]

Extra-Dimensional Aliens?

 

Originally posted by Kid Chaos

Are you speaking of strictly extra terrestrial aliens or do extra dimensional ones count as well?

Actually, I was referring to extra-terrestrial aliens. However, I guess extra-dimensional invasions count as well.

 

In my current campaign, a big helping of the players draw their origins from that extra-dimensional arena. The rest are metahumans of the reg'lar variety.

[zakueins]

Re: Timelines: Alien Invasions

 

I've decided that if an alien invasion in my game runs more than six sessions, the overall tech level of the game (and points value for agents!) goes up. This represents the fact that a lot of new stuff is being invented, in a short period of time, to compensate for the invaders.

 

One invasion that I ran, the multi-racial group had one race that was either shock troopers (male) or assassins (female). All the female assassins had the psych lim "one target, one assassin" (they sent one assassin after Dr. Destroyer-don't ask what her point totals were...), and they also had another psych lim- "Must kill the Emperor if He/She/It is incapable of ruling."

 

One of the players had been honorably inducted into the assassin order, and she managed to kill the Emperor.

 

Since she was also the team leader, she was crowned by "the Grace of God, and The Empire, Her Imperial Empress, Lillith I".

 

Needless to say, she became an NPC...and I gave the player 10 extra XP points for RPing the dropped jaw when she was, ahem, "volunteered" to the throne.

 

Originally posted by KawangaKid

I've just received my copies of the Champions Universe and CKC books, and I was perusing the timeline. I'm currently cobbling together my own version of the timeline that incorporates Marvel & DC stuff, but with most of the 'major heroes' retiring by the late 1990s.

 

I was checking out DC's 12-year timeline (supposedly 10-year, but that's a discussion for another time) and realized that the Earth is invaded a LOT!

 

Man, there were the Appelaxians, the Hyperclan (White Martians), the first Invasion Alliance, the second Invasion Alliance...

 

How often do Aliens invade in your timeline, and what are the consequences?

 

One of the things I liked about DC's INVASION cross-over event was that there were alien refugees and captives, as well as looting of alien technology for a respectable period after the event took place.

[Redmenace]

Re: Timelines: Alien Invasions

 

Originally posted by KawangaKid

 

How often do Aliens invade in your timeline, and what are the consequences?

 

One of the things I liked about DC's INVASION cross-over event was that there were alien refugees and captives, as well as looting of alien technology for a respectable period after the event took place.

 

From my own campaigns, we've had three. Each of them was designed to be a stand out event and they were seperated by significant amounts of in game time, at least a year or two.

 

1,) A alien civilization's civil war spills over on to earth resulting in great destruction and some very difficult alliances between Alien freedom fighters/Terrorists and earthly super villains.

 

The heroes travelled to the alien homeworld and helped end the violence and mediate a lasting peace. I brought the story back a year later when the alien world opened up realtions with earth. The catch was that their culture felt most comfortable with that of the Middle East. They begin opening embassies in Iraq, kuwait, Saudi Arabia etc and seek resources for technology accords.

 

Our heroes hadn't, in true comic book fashion, mentioned their part in the ending of the civil war to anyone back on earth. (Before I go any further i'd like to state that this was played after the first Iraq war and before 9/11 and the second war) The implications just kept rippling out and the plot really wrote a lot of its self.

 

Security clearances for several characters were revoked, public oppinion really turned on them after alien tech found its way into the hands of political extremists and the carnage that resulted. As it should, I think, it really altered the world. Some religions took it very well and others, particularly Judaism, didn't.

 

 

2.) An earlier invasian involved an adjacent dimention. A D&D sort of parallel to Earth had been conquered by a vastly powerful wizard. Having conquered his own world he set his sights on the next one, ours.

 

The invasian begins with portals opening across the earth at various "magical sites" like stonehenge, Nazca etc. Orcs, Goblins, dragons and wizards pour out and begin raiding. Unfortunately for them differences in our universe's physics left them at a distinct disadvantage. The players have a ball mopping up the puny invaders, (this was done to instill a major case of overconfidence in the players), later they are asked by the Government to lead a punitive expidition over to the offending universe's earth.

 

The physics of the situation are reversed with the supers going in at a much diminished power level. Lasting effects were a kind of magical cold war with the invader's world, a magical villain fifth coloumn trying to aid a second invasian and the players being forced to meet and make friends with earth's supernatural community.

 

3.) the last was'nt really an Invasian upon us so much as intervention against the magic world of example two from skipping Earth and hitting the next easy-target parallel. It was done as a kind of Secret Wars cross over event. (I know, forgive me)

 

The third world had some magic but nothing like the the Invaders. By cooperative casting, their wizards summoned a force powerful enough to turn the badguys. Instead of summoning a legion of monsters they got a legion of superhumans. (Like a huge ed teleport usable against others)

 

As a lasting effect there is a certain comraderie amongst supers who fought in the event kind of like the feeling soldiers aquire after facing combat together. Some characters didn't make it or lost their powers, foci etc., some villains turned to the side of order for the duration and when they returned to earth dealing with their criminal acts felt very different.

 

The biggest change of lasting effect was the creation of a Sanctuary like Neutral Ground. It wasn't used very much but If I brought it into the game the players knew from experience that something big had hit the fan.

[TheEmerged]

I purposely try to minimize what I see as one of the genre's worst cliche -- it is a genre convention, but like Secret Identities it's one that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

 

From PS238 Issue 2

HERSCHEL: Anyway, back to the invasion thing. Why does everyone assume that aliens would come here to take over? I mean, all the natural resources they could ever want are floatin' around in space where you don't have to overcome a planet's gravity to get 'em. Invadin' a planet makes no sense unless there's something unique there available nowhere else.

 

ISADORE: Maybe he's here to sieze Earth's supply of marshmellow peeps. I can't imagine those being available at every space station.

[Lord Liaden]

I've actually only participated in one comic-book style invasion: as a player, my character was part of an ad-hoc collection of some of the world's mightiest heroes, assembled to counter a combined extra-dimensional demon/alien invasion. We were contacted by the Star Knights (the campaign's equivalent to the Green Lantern Corps) who had been founded to fight Lovecraftian "Old Ones" from devouring and supplanting all other life in the galaxy. The Great Old Ones had been banished from this dimension, but some of their spawn lingered on other worlds. Some of these horrors had learned that Earth was passing through a stellar nexus which could open a portal and free the Great Old Ones, and launched an invasion of Earth to bring that about.

 

It was a fun opportunity to throw around some serious power for major stakes, but it was only a short term campaign without lingering consequences; the impact on the game world would have been profound, but that campaign setting pretty well closed down afterwards.

 

BTW if anyone is interested in running a comic style invasion, I'd recommend checking out the 4E Champs supplement Invasions: Target Earth by Cyrus G. Harris. It discusses in considerable detail the major conventions of this style of focussed campaign, invader motivations, the chronology of principle events, styles of different invaders, different types of troops, leaders and cadres, and the long term consequences of an invasion. It also includes a fully detailed sample invasion campaign, and writeups for several other types of invaders.