Cluttered Universes

[Vestnik]

OK, so I ws thinking about the Marvel Universe. Now that is one cluttered place -- I mean, virtually everything seems to exist in the Marvel Universe, regardless of whether they contradict each other in terms of tone, logic, or whatever. In one (1) universe, we have:

 

A heck of a lot of mutants everybody hates

Asgard

Olympus

The Savage Land

Atlantis

The Micronauts

Godzilla

Psycho vigillantes (The Punisher)

Dracula

Super-Powered Cosmic Beings

Super-High-Tech Powered Armor

Super Mages

Rom, SpaceKnight

Conan the Barbarian

And so forth. This list could be continued a long time.

 

This is the kind of universe I would never believe in if it was given to me in one big lump, rather than developed bit-by-bit over thousands of issues of different comics. No way would my sense of logic permit it. It's just whacky. (Obviously this is the result of trying to tie together a ginzillion different titles and plotlines developed largely independently of each other by different people for different reasons into a single coherent whole.)

 

So, my question is, in your games, what degree of "clutteredness" do you go for? Is it an "anything goes" kind of environment, or do you like to set up some kind of structure, limitations on what kind of characters can appear and so forth.

[pinecone]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

OK, so I ws thinking about the Marvel Universe. Now that is one cluttered place -- I mean, virtually everything seems to exist in the Marvel Universe, regardless of whether they contradict each other in terms of tone, logic, or whatever. In one (1) universe, we have:

 

A heck of a lot of mutants everybody hates

Asgard

Olympus

The Savage Land

Atlantis

The Micronauts

Godzilla

Psycho vigillantes (The Punisher)

Dracula

Super-Powered Cosmic Beings

Super-High-Tech Powered Armor

Super Mages

Rom, SpaceKnight

Conan the Barbarian

And so forth. This list could be continued a long time.

 

This is the kind of universe I would never believe in if it was given to me in one big lump, rather than developed bit-by-bit over thousands of issues of different comics. No way would my sense of logic permit it. It's just whacky. (Obviously this is the result of trying to tie together a ginzillion different titles and plotlines developed largely independently of each other by different people for different reasons into a single coherent whole.)

 

So, my question is, in your games, what degree of "clutteredness" do you go for? Is it an "anything goes" kind of environment, or do you like to set up some kind of structure, limitations on what kind of characters can appear and so forth.

 

I avoid trim,ordered universes because they just don't feel "organic" otherwise.

Big messy things get that way over time. otherwise it feels "artificial" to me...

[Corven_Ren]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

So' date=' my question is, in your games, what degree of "clutteredness" do you go for? Is it an "anything goes" kind of environment, or do you like to set up some kind of structure, limitations on what kind of characters can appear and so forth.[/quote']

 

Well as far as my own personal Champs Universe. It is a unique blend consisting of a little bit of Marvel, a minute amount of DC, a healthy dose of Champions Universe and a whole lot of custom heroes & villains. I do not use or allow god races, such as the above mentioned Asguardians & Olympians (Mainly due to my Christian beliefs and will eventually like to one day run a Left Behind campaign with supers). I would allow an Atlantean or an alien character (I am currently working on my own version of the GLC). I would allow almost anything else with a well written origin.

[Doug McCrae]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

I really enjoyed the sheer insanity of the Marvel Universe's size, emphasised in some of the recent works by Kurt Busiek. There's a great line in an early issue of his Avengers run where Cap berates the Squadron Supreme for getting mind controlled so many times.

 

I tried to recreate this in a superhero universe of my own devising but the sheer scale of the project was too much for me.

[assault]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

My ideal Marvel style universe would consist of the (equivalents of the)Fantastic Four and the people they ran into in their first year. And then I would build out from there.

 

Nice and simple, but quickly building into weird and wonky.

 

Of course, both of my actual settings fail this test, since they aren't built around the PCs like this... That's mostly because I don't actually have any PCs, because I'm too lazy and disorganised to actually be able to run a game at the moment.

[Sketchpad]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

Cluttered as can be My idea campaign would be a DC/Marvel shared universe campaign In fact, my home setting has many homages to the characters within it

[Evil Steve]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

mine get cluttered during character creation. I let the players create their character and its background, while encouraging or discouraging aspects that clearly cause conflicts, ones I just can't work with, or ideas that I could never utilize properly.

 

Norse Gods, Lovecraftian horror, alien conspiracy and immortal warriors are all there, alongside techno-fetish megalomaniacs, transdimensional magical beings and lost world residents.

[OddHat]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

My Universe is "cluttered", but it all makes internal logical sense to me. I know my first causes, and mostly how they led to the universe as it is today. It was good fun working backwards from a world that appeared to contain multiple impossibilities to something almost plausible.

 

Universe X actually does a fairly decent job of un-cluttering the MU, even if it is yet another light Iron Age dystopia book. Not a bad take on the whole mess.

[Doug McCrae]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

1990 and beyond

 

This is the start of an attempt to do a detailed write up for a cluttered universe. It took me three days to do a third of the events for 1990 so I gave up at that point.

[TheRealVector]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

I agree the Marvel Universe is very cluttered (as is DC). I run a game that is set in a heavily modified version of the MU. I have essentially taken the things I like best from the classic runs of my favorite books and characters and mixed them in with the things I like from the Ultimate Marvel books. In the process I cleared a lot of the clutter out.

 

In my game there is Spiderman, the Ultimates, the Fantasitc Four, the X-Men (with more classic/limited roster instead of a membership consisting of every damn mutant on the planet) and the player own super group, Vanguard, based in Chicago.

 

This way I can introduce "new" villians and plots into the game and not be burdened down by forty years of continuity. For example the only aliens known of in my game are the Skrulls and Galactus. We got to meet them for the first time and create our own continuity. I thing by the end of the sixties there were already scores of aliens in the Marvel Universe. It seemed alien invasion was a very popular storyline.

 

If I don't want any Olympus, Micronauts ,Godzilla, Dracula, Rom, SpaceKnight,

Conan the Barbarian I don't have to have them. Keep your Universes, like your plots, lean and mean.

[Vestnik]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

 

If I don't want any Olympus, Micronauts ,Godzilla, Dracula, Rom, SpaceKnight,

Conan the Barbarian I don't have to have them. Keep your Universes, like your plots, lean and mean.

 

Well, see, you're driven by something else than the profit motive. Seems like for a while there if something was trendy and Marvel could get a contract, lo and behold it would appear in a Marvel comic. The Transformers, Godzilla, Rom, ninjas galore, GI Joe, Micronauts etc. etc. etc. I never read much DC, but it doesn't seem to be that they did/do this as much.

[OddHat]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

Well' date=' see, you're driven by something else than the profit motive. Seems like for a while there if something was trendy and Marvel could get a contract, lo and behold it would appear in a Marvel comic. The Transformers, Godzilla, Rom, ninjas galore, GI Joe, Micronauts etc. etc. etc. I never read much DC, but it doesn't seem to be that they did/do this as much.[/quote']

 

Well, DC also includes about as much pop culture flotsam, but they did make some choices that kept it a bit neater than Marvel sometimes gets. Most of the pagan gods appear as opponents or supporting characters rather than lead characters, and DC has been historically more likely than Marvel to treat stories as happening in their own continuities and on their own separate Earths. Still pretty darn messy though, with Arion theoretically sharing the same world as all the classical pantheons and historical reality as we know it.

[Kali Magdalene]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

I like clutter, to a point. I like having lost worlds, hidden cities, Atlantis, magical enclaves, alien races, galaxy-spanning empires, multiple mystic dimensions, parallel worlds, space gods, giant monsters, mythic pantheons, government conspiracies, and world-spanning criminal organizations.

 

I don't really see these as limiting, though. They're opportunities.

 

I'd be hesitant to map everything out at the start of a game, though. Like, "No, you can't have a winged seer from a secret Tibetan temple, because I already have Nanda Parbat!" wouldn't be a desirable response to a player's character concept.

 

I do think that an organic setting played over a long period of time will get cluttered also, and I think that's a good thing, much as the Marvel and DC settings being cluttered is generally a good thing.

 

I'm not defending the stories and writing that they come up with, necessarily. That's a somewhat separate issue.

[Weldun]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

The universe is cluttered. In a setting that can allow an individual unleash energies potent enough to rip a supercarrier in half, I say anything goes. Any restriction on what can exist (as opposed to what a PC can play) feels artificial.

[Chimpira]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

I have all that and more, but I never have seen it as cluttered. The universe is a vast place and when you add various Dimensions to the mix you have an infinite amount of room to populate.

 

I think it is a matter of taste and scope. I can not shoehorn everything that is out in a vast universe into my campaign but that does not make me think of it as cluttered, I simply acknowledge that it is there and if want to use it I have to put it in the queue. Then we have the players whom want things like lost Russian Science Cities, Fire Dimensions populated by Denizens of all shapes and sizes and etc.. I need to make room for them as well.

 

The universe tends to get crowded in one's mind, then I remember what the word infinite really means and I just push things back just a little bit more.

[Alverant]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

Well' date=' DC also includes about as much pop culture flotsam, but they did make some choices that kept it a bit neater than Marvel sometimes gets. Most of the pagan gods appear as opponents or supporting characters rather than lead characters, and DC has been historically more likely than Marvel to treat stories as happening in their own continuities and on their own separate Earths. Still pretty darn messy though, with Arion theoretically sharing the same world as all the classical pantheons and historical reality as we know it.[/quote']

 

Well doesn't DC hit the reset button more often than Marvel? Has Marvel ever totally abandoned their current timeline and start fresh (Ultimate series don't count because the original titles are still going)? Civil War and Annihilation may force them too if they don't go well.

 

I think Marvel/DC is like Windows/Mac. Mac reinvents it's OS each time. Windows builds upon itself. In theory you can take a program in Windows 3.1 and run it on Vista. You can't do that with Mac.

[Enforcer84]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

Cluttered? Gods yes, but still cleaner than my apartment.

[Robyn]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

In theory you can take a program in Windows 3.1 and run it on Vista.

 

In theory you can take a Play4Sure media file and run it on Windows Vista

[assault]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

As a result of this thread, I'm currently fiddling with a cut down version of the Marvel Universe, round about 1961-1963. Basically, it's the MU as seen by the FF.

 

Cap, Namor etc were around in WWII and into the 50s. (I'm ignoring the "there were four Caps" stuff, at least for the moment).

 

More recently, there have been a bunch of monster attacks which have been narrowly survived. (A homage to the monster books, of course).

 

The FF are the first actual superheroes of the present period, although Hank Pym is probably around somewhere. The only other ones that would show up in the intial period would be the Hulk (as an opponent!) and Spider-Man (as a snotty nosed punk).

 

Villains would be the FF's opponents from their first 12 issues, plus the Hulk and Spidey's opponents from the same period. That's only 6 issues for the Hulk, and about 3 for Spidey.

 

That's manageably simple, but contains the roots of the whole subsequent MU.

 

The late 50s/early 60s is an interesting time for a setting, incidentally. WWII was still fairly recent, and you have all the nifty "space race" stuff going on. Unfortunately, like all period pieces, it's a little tricky to get the ambience right. Still, that shouldn't really matter - it's really just fairy tale time anyway.

 

Anyway, I think that you can get a reasonable degree of complexity simply from character generation, if you allow characters to have any background they feel like, and fill in the gaps from there. If you want more, just add a simple backstory, like say, "there were earlier heroes, like Cap et al, but they haven't been seen for a while. Oh yeah, and there have been monsters".

 

You don't really need a huge background. Even if the PCs are just a few of a massive number of superheroes, most of these NPC heroes will simply never appear. All you really need are a few names. If you ever actually need character sheets for any of them, reuse your villains' sheets...

[McCoy]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

I prefer the clutter. Seems organic.

 

If I ever get my Universe in order, it will inclued the Leage of Extrordinary Gentlemen; The Justice Society of America (with the Red Tornado, Abigail Mathilda Hunkel, restored to her rightful place as a founding menber and the first Superheroine); the Justice Leage of America and other silver age heroes (with Supergirl in the JLA while Superman remained with the JSA); Fantastic Four; old X-Men, new X-Men; an amalgam of Bewitched, Sabrina, the Worst Witch, and Harry Potter; Sky High, Up, Up and Away and the Incredables; War of the Worlds and A Princess of Mars; Gilligan's Island and Greatest American Hero, Doc Savage, the Lone Ranger, and the Green Hornet. Now I'm working on getting the timeline right for beings from the Lovecraft mythos to have created Earth, Mars, and Orphius (and possibly Venus) With the walls between realities deliberately weak (explains why Earth gets so much alternate dimension traffic, and how the Mars of John Carter, J'onn J'onzz, Xzydgeous 12½; and H G Wells can all exist in the same space).

 

Will the player characters ever need to know that both Dr. Strange and Sabrina Spellman are directly descended from the Royal family of Atlantis? Probably not. Will they need to know that while Robins have come and gone, a pre WWII recording of Batman's voice produces a voiceprint that matches the one from a terse "no comment" Batman gave a reporter last week? To the limits of the quality of the recordings anyway. They might.

[nexus]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

My primary setting is fairly cluttered. The Redwood/Raptors Teen mutant angst settings are somewhat cluttered but most of the clutter is behind the the scences and there are definite limits on what can exist. Seeds of Change is pretty straight forward and uncluttered. Superhumans only started recently appearing publically.

[Shaft]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

As a result of this thread' date=' I'm currently fiddling with a cut down version of the Marvel Universe, round about 1961-1963. Basically, it's the MU as seen by the FF...[/quote']

 

This is slightly off topic, but I wnated to post this thought:

 

Advantages about running a game in the 60s when you know what the next 40 years are like. Time travel adventures can be more fun, since the players might know the outcome of histroy, but the characters should not. It's also interesting to show where things changed because of the supers and other "clutter", so even the players can't count on their knowledge.

 

A major change: It's not unreasonable to assume that the technology we take for granted in 2007 is available in the 60s. Just Reed Richards, Tony Stark and Hank Pym alone could have invented everything ranging from cell phones and PDAs to weather satelites and the personal computer. If they market their discoveries, the changes of the information age that occured in "real life" from the late 80s to the late 90s could have occured in the early 60s.

 

Imagine the Vietnam war, with journalists able to give live coverage over satelite. What would a newly awakened Cap's stance on that war be? Could the X-Men have saved Kennedy? Perhaps the Falcon spent a great deal of time with Martin Luther King during the civil rights movemtns and he could have prevented King's assassination? Could Dazzler have sung at Woodstock? Would Iron Man have been asked to help "resolve" the Cuban missle crisis?

 

There are a lot of possibilities.

 

One interesting way to include Marvel and DC heroes is to create some interesting backstory. I'd do something like make most of the DC heroes (who were created back in the 1930s/40s) the "golden age", with the Invaders thrown in as well. As they aged, they were gradually replaced by the classic Marvel heroes, most of whom were created in the 60s/70s. Of course the heroes who age slowly could still be around, but this way, you have a history of heroes who are well known, and who's names are instantly recognised by the players the same way other historical figures have a certain amount of recognition. At the same time in the "modern day", the heroes aren't wondering where the Justice League or Avengers are when a world-affecting catastrophe is looming. They could even be the JLA or Avengers, with a truly impressive legacy to live up to.

[input.jack]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

Im co-reffing a campaign with one of my roomates. (I prefer to co-ref; the world seems larger and more complex with two PC groups or more in it). I was taking a look at the roster for The Sentinels (the premiere American super-team), and realized that only TWO members were fully Human...and they are both Metas (which is a lot like being a Mutant). We have a strange visitor from another planet whose homeworld was destroyed when he was an infant. We have the King of Alat'landis (incorrectly pronounced as "Atlantis" by silly air-breathers). We have the last of a race of alien shapeshifters. We have an unaging Dark Knight who is secretly undead. We have an Amazon princess from another realm. We have an ambassador from the colony of metahumans who live on the moon. And then we have a Meta who can manipulate magnetism, and a Meta who can teleport.

 

Freaky.

 

Our campaign includes alternate realms (dinosaurs on one world, Nazis on another. Who can resist that kind of fun?), Metas, aliens of seven or eight known varieties, artificial people, cyborgs, robots, scientifically-altered people whether by accident or design, Living Avatars of ancient Gods, the ancient Gods themselves (in rare guest appearances), Judeo-Christian Angels, Demons, Devils, Fallen Angels (all different things), Gargoyles, Seelie and Unseelie Fey, Dragons, Shadow-beings, and more.

 

Ive been very happy with the campaign thus-far. As far as the religious aspects go, it has been generally acknowledged that while the Ancient Gods were real, and beings of great Power deserving of being called "Gods", they are powerful on a planetary and dimensional scale. The One God is evidently MUCH more powerful, broad of scope, and inexplicable. The One God is the God of the multiverses; the Creator of All, which comprises far, far more than our one little planet, our one galaxy, or even our one universe. Judeo-Christian Angels have been seen working side-by-side with the Avatar of Anubis, and neither seemed to begrudge the others' existence.

 

Good aids Good in the fight against Evil.

 

Besides, its fun watching some of the players' expressions as they try to reconcile the co-existence and co-operation of beings from ethos they thought were in opposition, when all the while they are working toward a common goal.

 

The world, the galaxy, the universe, and the dimensions are FAR more complex than a mere mortal can ever hope to comprehend. Even if he IS the Ref. Ive stopped trying to figure out everything in the universe, and started concentrating on telling stories my Players will get a hoot out of

 

(PS: I guess this is a vote for "cluttered")

[assault]

Re: Cluttered Universes

 

Could Dazzler have sung at Woodstock?

 

I am now officially traumatised.

 

Roller Disco at Woodstock? Eww...

 

I owe you rep. Edit: Repped!