Universe-wide Crossover Events are a thing that happens in comic books. The modern format seems to be a main limited series with all the big actions scenes and major plot points, a few more limited series that focus on an integral-to-the-event character or team, and then tie-ins in all the ongoing books. Some books end and others begin.
In actual practice, it’s often terrible, because the centerpiece is an eight issue hero-vs-hero slugfest, and those are usually the least entertaining sorts of superhero comics. But if played as a genre trope, you can get some wonderful results. There was the great episode of Justice League Unlimited that followed Booster Gold as every superhero except him was battling a cosmic evil.
Is this a trope you’ve integrated into your games? My own answers in the comments.
Game the first was run at a weekly college gaming club. So my solution to the two-week break was that a massive crossover event would be happening during the break. The session before the event was the group’s tie-in issue/event prequel: They escorted the villain from the previous session to the super-prison, but while they were there it was attacked by one of the Kirby-esque space gods that were the villains of the event. When that session was done, I told the players that during the break, each of their characters would have a guest role in another comic book, and then gave them a list of 25 comic titles and one-sentence descriptions.
When they came back from break, each one had a love letter based on the title they had chosen, describing the situations they’d found themselves in as guest stars, and asking them about the choices they’d made.
These worked very well, for the most part. The Beacon became the new protege of the silver age science hero whose book he starred in, the bull made out with a space-god and a teen wolf, and the delinquent got hospitalized in his one-panel cameo in the main-event book.
Game the second had long hinted that an alien invasion was coming–a previous invasion was written into the backstory of multiple PCs, and I’d started throwing references to enemies and allies of Vanquish. For the penultimate arc, The invasion finally hit–Vanquish and his empire having teamed up with the syndicate that was after our team’s Bull.
The invasion hit, when a mothership appeared suddenly over Freedom Park, along with several other ships including a field-projecting ship that trapped the Exemplars in their downtown HQ. I used a map of the city along with tokens of the ships and some boardgame-ish custom moves to help sell the scale of the invasion, and threw in several NPC heroes, villains, and civilians that had been previously referenced or cameoed. The team managed to find a cure for the alien nanotech that had been previously tested on the Janus and was now being used to power the alien soldiers, and then split up–one half going to paris where they could use the alien fleet’s communication hub to broadcast the cure worldwide, and the other half assaulting the shield ship to free the trapped Exemplars–but it was the exemplars who took down Vanquish and the alien mothership, offscreen.
I think the boardgame-ish custom moves didn’t really work as intended (the board game/city map did convey scale, but the actual moves i wrote didn’t do a good job of creating and supporting the fiction). Other than that, I was very happy with the results.
I have plans for it for my podcast, but haven’t yet! Subscribing to read ideas!
I’m trying to pull off the penultimate villain of my game in something like this: they’ve had a hand in everything the baddies have done in each arc so far but it’s for their own ends. Closer to the spirit of the trope I’m thinking the next arc is going to center around a villain called The Rat King hosting a tournament to elect the next Rat King, pitting the players against some of the other heroes they’ve met and introducing some they’ve heard of but not met in person yet.