WWYCD: Culture Shock

[Zed-F]

At the end of one story arc, the GM announces he's planning a change of pace for the next story arc, which should last 3-4 sessions or so and then get back to your usual fare.

 

The next session, your characters find themselves (for whatever reason) taking an unexpected interdimensional trip to MarvelMutantParanoiaLand. Here, the public and law enforcement is hostile to any meta, regardless of SFX, heroic or not. Your characters have reason to believe they will be rescued / transported back eventually, but it will take some indeterminate amount of time on the order of weeks or months before it happens -- enough time that they have to get used to living there, but not so much time that they can really effect sweeping global changes. Oh, and it turns out (through no fault of their own) that a significantly powerful interdimensional baddie got transported to MarvelMutantParanoiaLand with them, and is not very happy about it...

 

WWYCD? Hole up and wait it out? Try to save the world from the interdimensional baddie? Even though the very people they might try to help will likely try to get them captured or killed? Even considering that they've been hunting down metas for years, and thus they stand a reasonable chance to succeed? How will the scenario play out?

[OddHat]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Any of my characters: Try to protect the innocent. Avoid the badly written and clearly villainous police. Try to leave a few seeds of change behind if they can.

[Metaphysician]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Microman II: This would be rather painful for him and the New Sentinels. Most of us are very upbeat and upright. The idea that an entire planet full of people could be so psychotically ungrateful would be jarring. Thankfully, we have mobility resources that should keep us free and active, barring direct intervention by Reed Richards or the Sentry. So, the dimensional critter still gets fought. Horus-Re and Starguard will probably try and give some inspiring speeches, but this is Marvel. It won't work.

 

Hermes: While Hermes isn't as tied into the silver age tone as Microman, this would be almost as bad. He believes that humans, while not fundamentally good, have the potential for goodness, and the willingness to embrace an inspiring example. Whereas, this is Marvel, where this is not the case.

 

Again, mobility and stealth is covered, so they probably aren't going to track us down, once we get acclimated, and we've been exposed to hostile future worlds before. Depending on who came through with us, though, there may not be anything we could do about it, if the locals are unwilling or unable to help. . .

[Zed-F]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

The idea that an entire planet full of people could be so psychotically ungrateful would be jarring.

You can assume that there is an excuse of some sort, such as unacceptable amounts of collateral damage from superbattles in the past. Nevertheless, the question of whether unilateral suppression of any potentially dangerous meta is a reasonable response to such remains for you to decide.

 

Depending on who came through with us, though, there may not be anything we could do about it, if the locals are unwilling or unable to help.

You can assume that the locals will try to stop the interdimensional baddie once they find out about it. It's unclear that they have the wherewithal to be able to do so, however. And it seems unlikely that they will appreciate help unless it becomes painfully clear that the PCs' help is desperately needed... and even then, once the threat is vanquished, it seems likely they'll soon revert to their previous mistrustful ways.

[Zed-F]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Try to protect the innocent.

The definition of innocent gets a little bit blurry when it could be argued that most of the populace of the world is complicit in something akin to ethnic cleansing.

[Vondy]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I'd get awefully busy on gaming day for the next few weeks.

 

I find marvel mutant paranioa land tedious, cumbersome, and fundamentally without merit. Its tired, cliched and overdone at this point; there is nothing left of the horse's corpse to beat; and I gave up on marvel a long time ago. And the main reason I gave up on marvel was mutant paranoia, mutant angst, mutant title spam, and dystopic dark futures. Marvel has characters I like. The problem is, they don't have editors I like, and haven't for about a decade.

 

I would use the Power Absent until the "something different" was over and done with.

[OddHat]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

The definition of innocent gets a little bit blurry when it could be argued that most of the populace of the world is complicit in something akin to ethnic cleansing.

 

Of course. It's similar dropping the heroes in Nazi Germany without the traditional excuse that only the leaders were evil. The players still have no choice but to save lives and protect the innocent; that's what being a Hero is all about.

 

I'd get awefully busy on gaming day for the next few weeks.

 

I find marvel mutant paranioa land tedious, cumbersome, and fundamentally without merit. Its tired, cliched and overdone at this point; there is nothing left of the horse's corpse to beat; and I gave up on marvel a long time ago. And the main reason I gave up on marvel was mutant paranoia, mutant angst, mutant title spam, and dystopic dark futures. Marvel has characters I like. The problem is, they don't have editors I like, and haven't for about a decade.

 

I would use the Power Absent until the "something different" was over and done with.

 

Agreed with every word.

[wcw43921]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

SOP for any sojurn to an alternate dimension--voluntary or otherwise--is to hit the libraries and the local version of the Internet, should it exist. Identify the historical and cultural differences between this version of Earth and the one you call home.

 

Pump the locals (inconspicously, of course) for information to fill in whatever gaps exist in the public records. Find out who you can and cannot trust. Avoid revealing your "otherworldly" origins to the locals, as such contact could endanger yourself and/or those you entrust.

 

Try, if possible, to locate your counterparts on this Earth. Do not attempt contact unless you feel you can trust your counterpart, or is otherwise absolutely necessary, as such contact could endanger yourself and/or your counterpart.

 

Most of this information is well known to "seasoned" alternate universe travelers--this is re-stated mostly to have it all in one place. Feel free to add to this list--I'm sure it's not at all complete.

[OddHat]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

5) If your alternate self is of the opposite sex, do not have sex with him/her. You have no way of knowing which of you will get pregnant, but it's inevitable that one of you will.

 

5a) If you're from a state or province where Brother-Husband, Sister-Wife, and similar relations are both socially acceptable and legally recognized, what the heck, go for it.

[Sundog]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Terminus would go after the interdimensional baddie. A) It's his job, and Interdimensional Baddies have a nasty tendency to show up again. Best to nip it in the bud.

 

Silverghost, on the other hand, would probably go on a crime-spree. If these guys hate her anyway, why try to reform? PAR-TAY!

[Kirby]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I'd get awefully busy on gaming day for the next few weeks.

 

I find marvel mutant paranioa land tedious, cumbersome, and fundamentally without merit. Its tired, cliched and overdone at this point; there is nothing left of the horse's corpse to beat; and I gave up on marvel a long time ago. And the main reason I gave up on marvel was mutant paranoia, mutant angst, mutant title spam, and dystopic dark futures. Marvel has characters I like. The problem is, they don't have editors I like, and haven't for about a decade.

 

I would use the Power Absent until the "something different" was over and done with.

Repped!

[Alverant]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I'd get awefully busy on gaming day for the next few weeks.

 

I find marvel mutant paranioa land tedious, cumbersome, and fundamentally without merit. Its tired, cliched and overdone at this point; there is nothing left of the horse's corpse to beat; and I gave up on marvel a long time ago. And the main reason I gave up on marvel was mutant paranoia, mutant angst, mutant title spam, and dystopic dark futures. Marvel has characters I like. The problem is, they don't have editors I like, and haven't for about a decade.

 

I would use the Power Absent until the "something different" was over and done with.

 

Agreed. I didn't buy the mutant spam books, I focused on heroes/heroines who I felt earned their powers in some way. Naturally many of these books got canceled. Marvel is close to loosing me thanks to Civil War.

 

On the bright side if things keep going bad in Civil War, Marvel may have to do a reboot like what happened in the DC universe several times. Just start from scratch, and none of that Ultimate stuff.

[Hermit]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I think most of my characters would try to go after the Extradimensional baddie, take him down, and see if he has some tech or something that would speed up the return home.

[McCoy]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I'd get awefully busy on gaming day for the next few weeks.

 

I find marvel mutant paranioa land tedious, cumbersome, and fundamentally without merit. Its tired, cliched and overdone at this point; there is nothing left of the horse's corpse to beat; and I gave up on marvel a long time ago. And the main reason I gave up on marvel was mutant paranoia, mutant angst, mutant title spam, and dystopic dark futures. Marvel has characters I like. The problem is, they don't have editors I like, and haven't for about a decade.

 

I would use the Power Absent until the "something different" was over and done with.

I'm suprised to hear you say that. Mutant paranioa is a metaphore for all persecution and bigotry, and as long as there is persecution and bigotry in The Real World those storylines will be relevant. Cliche? Perhaps. But three generations after WWII Nazis and the Holocost still resonate. Cliches become cliches because they reflect a very basic truth.

[McCoy]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Back to the question.

 

All characters Track down interdimensional baddie. All characters except dolphin will try to take him out. Dolphin will point out that if he is unconcious or imprisoned he may miss the D-portal when it next opens, how about a truce and everybody lay low until then?

 

Cheeta can "pass" by not taking his drugs, but probably won't.

 

Millennium would feel the need to rescue people as publically as possible, seting an example.

 

Again, all characters, make contact with the meta underground, plant the seeds.

[OddHat]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Mutant paranioa is a metaphore for all persecution and bigotry' date=' and as long as there is persecution and bigotry in The Real World those storylines will be relevant. Cliche? Perhaps. But three generations after WWII Nazis and the Holocost still resonate. Cliches become cliches because they reflect a very basic truth.[/quote']

 

The Mutant Paranoia cliche usually reflects that truth poorly, mixing over simplification with basic misunderstandings of how and why persecution occurs. Very occasionally it's done well; usually it's pedantic paranoid pablum. Repeating a pet peeve, for a story to work on multiple levels it has to actually work on each of those levels; most mutant paranoia stories simply don't.

 

My KKK is the KKK, my Nazis are Nazis; I see no reason to thinly disguises them and do a search and replace, trading the words "Jew", "Black" or "Gay" for "Mutant".

[Zed-F]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

It might be a metaphor for persecution and bigotry, but it could be better set up IMHO. While ethnic cleansing (for instance) exists and still occurs today, usually the society doing the ethnic cleansing doesn't depend on some portion of the group being cleansed for safety against outside threats. Still, however personally unbelievable I find this scenario, somebody out there must like these kinds of stories. I'd like to hear from someone who does about how their characters would react.

[OddHat]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Still' date=' however personally unbelievable I find this scenario, somebody out there must like these kinds of stories.[/quote']

 

Sure, and the stories tap into teen angst perfectly. Your body is changing, you try to do good, but everyone blames you for things you didn't even do and always thinks the worst of you, you can do and perceive all sorts of things that no one else can but no one appreciates it, they just pick on you more, etc, etc. Add in the red-haired social outcast girl with a great body and X-Men and early Spiderman are fantastic for the teen male demographic. There's nothing wrong with those kinds of stories, done well.

 

They're just not the stories I liked as a kid, or the stories I want to tell right now.

 

As to how my characters would react, I mentioned it earlier. A Hero continues to follow the moral code that leads him to perform heroic acts, regardless of time or setting. He may have to compromise to survive, but that does make him less heroic. I try to play Heroes; My characters would help as much as they could and protect those they could, while looking for a way back hom.

[Alverant]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I'm suprised to hear you say that. Mutant paranioa is a metaphore for all persecution and bigotry' date=' and as long as there is persecution and bigotry in The Real World those storylines will be relevant. Cliche? Perhaps. But three generations after WWII Nazis and the Holocost still resonate. Cliches become cliches because they reflect a very basic truth.[/quote']

 

I have to disagree for part of that. Persecution and bigotry are frequently cause by an ungrounded fear/hatered. "This group is inferior." "That group rapes children." "Those people want to topple the government." Often without concrete proof or heavily uses stereotypes. Mutants are a bit different. Fear of a group of people who stretches across all ethnic and religious lines and have huge battles doing millions in property damage is much more reasonable than fearing one group of people for something their ancestors might have done centuries ago. What's more, your own child can be one! The closet analog in the real world is homosexuality and last time I checked, more violence was done over them than by them. (Check out what happened in Jerusalem recently.)

[TheRavenIs]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I have a C that is going thru this right now, her team is beginning a series of trans-dimensional hops. Each one will require the team to get info on the local's, the history, etc..

 

I look forward to it, we haven't really done one in a few years. The GM is creative enough to pull it off.

[Trebuchet]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I'm surprised to hear you say that. Mutant paranoia is a metaphor for all persecution and bigotry' date=' and as long as there is persecution and bigotry in The Real World those storylines will be relevant. Cliche? Perhaps. But three generations after WWII Nazis and the Holocaust still resonate. Cliches become cliches because they reflect a very basic truth.[/quote']Metaphors can also be badly overdone; as I think they have been in the whole Marvel "mutant scare" thing. After all, we don't see the same level of mistrust towards the myriad other superpowered beings which inhabit the Marvel universe. I could see a certain level of distrust towards any being with inexplicable powers, but why focus exclusively on mutants? What makes Cyclops inherently more scary than Reed Richards or Thor? Magneto is a frightening villain, to be sure, but certainly no scarier than Dr. Doom.

 

Had they limited the mutant fear factor to just X-Men titles that would have been bad enough, but tolerable. But it seems to have infected the whole Marvel universe.

 

As for the thread topic itself, Zl'f would try to find and fight the bad guy. Being a hero isn't about being popular or legal; it's about doing what's right. And as she's low-powered plus highly personable and attractive, maybe she could help bridge the gap between normals and supers in this strange distopia.

[Vondy]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

I'm suprised to hear you say that. Mutant paranioa is a metaphore for all persecution and bigotry' date=' and as long as there is persecution and bigotry in The Real World those storylines will be relevant. Cliche? Perhaps. But three generations after WWII Nazis and the Holocost still resonate. Cliches become cliches because they reflect a very basic truth.[/quote']

 

Metaphors can be thoughtlessly applied and abused. If you do either it loses its power and serves to inure those exposed to it to the real problem due to the fact that it is not only cognitively dissonant, but annoying as well. In Marvel's case the metaphor is more of a caricature of real world problems than a useful, thought-provoking analog. I understand what they want to say with the mutant paranoia theme, but they've said it so many times without meaningful variation, and have used it in such a ham fisted manner (in terms of application) for so long (thirty years running!), that its become a trite crutch for creative and meaningful storytelling. They need to do something new; something meaningful; something creative - something that makes more sense.

[Zed-F]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Agreed that there are ways to make the metaphor work better. To start with:

1) Remove society's dependence on metahumans to combat external threats & crime.

2) Remove the loaded word 'superhero' from the equation. Make the motivations of both metahumans and their persecutors stem from political bases rather than altruistic/heroic ones.

 

Of course now the story starts looking more like a near-future sci-fi thriller rather than a traditional comic book.

[Kevin Schultz]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

Jake the Troll - stares blandly at the Sentinals as their shots fruitlessly bounces off his chest. "Um, can you stop that? I like this shirt." He'd walk down main street, freaking out the norms for a bit, until he realized that their (bigoted) panic was doing more harm than any sort of good. Then he'd sigh, try to take out the baddie, and step back into the spirit world to find a way home. He'd find the whole thing fairly emotionally stressful, as it would be the first time people would CONSISTANTLY hate and fear him. I mean, yeah, he's read X-Men and Spiderman, but that's a far cry from ever actually wanting to live that life...

 

Icon - lots of culture shock. Is also aware of the DC and Marvel universes from a comic-book perspective, but is more of a DC/Superman fangirl. Once she realized that she would be treated functionally like a mutant, she'd be on the first trip out of there. Yeah, she'd probably try to take out the interdimensional baddie while she's there, but she would certianly not be showing her face much otherwise.

 

 

Shinji Miromoto - he's already a (petty) criminal in his home dimension, so there's nothing really different here. Try to fight the baddie, keep his head down, try to find a way home.

[Zed-F]

Re: WWYCD: Culture Shock

 

To answer for my own characters:

 

Soulbarb is already a vigilante-styled hero who tries to keep a low profile. In this environment, she'd feel the need to keep an even lower profile than normal, especially once she found out that most people actively dislike metas and don't want them to interfere in their lives, even to save them. So she'd probably hang back at first, allowing the locals to see what if anything they could do about the interdimensional baddie, while studying it to determine its weaknesses. Once it became apparent that the locals could not solve this particular problem without metahuman help, she'd find whichever member of the meta underground had powers suitable for exploiting the dimensional baddie's weaknesses, leak the info on those weaknesses to that local meta, and let the local meta take care of the baddie (with some covert help from her.) Hopefully, pointing out the fact that this sort of thing could happen again and that the normals need the metas as insurance against that eventuality will act as a seed planted to catalyze some measure of social reform.

 

Sylph just wouldn't get it, would use her powers at first opportunity to prevent some sort of crime or injustice, and get the cops called down on her head as a result. As she's very respectful of authority, she'd get taken away and the cops would try to suppress a confused Sylph's powers. This would lead to her maenad side coming out and going on a rampage, more-or-less confirming the cops' worst fears. After Sylph wakes up in a strange place, with no memory of the altercation with the police, the whole thing would probably happen all over again... only this time when the cops get called in, they try to kill her rather than capture her. Sylph runs, stumbles across the interdimensional baddie, gets caught in a 3-way firefight between it, herself, and the cops, and survives by sheer luck, getting transdimensionally ported out at the last second rather than executed by the cops.