parent nodes: MarvelWiki | Recommended Reading | Scrapped Ideas and Design Document
This is a page dedicated to all scrapped ideas, as well as some of the design philosphy of everything.
I will not be including anything that I might rework and incorporate into the campaign at a later date.
The start
So I don't quite remember the lead up to it, but I think it had been discussed for one reason or another. I had drawn up plans for what the campaign might be such as Kurtis Rowan is the big bad villain, as well as the ImportantPeopleNYC document. A lot of the earliest ideas were generally scrapped for one reason or another, and originated from a point in time where I might not have been the GM of whatever Marvel thing we did. For whatever reason though, I ended up being the GM, I think in part so it would largely serve as an alternative for when anyone couldn't make it to the usual DnD session. As time drew closer, I took a lot more inspiration from the comics, wanting public identities to be secret, and basing more things off the comics, while relying on the movies as touchpoints for the players. Some good examples of this are Tony Stark saying that Iron Man is his bodyguard, as well as the Fantastic Four being celebrity sensations.
Something interesting about the ImportantPeopleNYC document is that I wrote most of it in a study hall, struggling for names. At least two I took inspiration from the sharks on Shark Tank.
I also wanted things to be relatively early on in the universe, which is why the Avengers weren't formed at the start. I don't think I quite had the timeline down as it can be seen now for the years 2010-2014, although I think it at one point was just on a sheet of note paper(todo:find the old timeline).
I think 2010 was picked just because it was enough for the universe to be in motion, but not long enough for things to be too terribly deep. It'd relatively be as though you hopped on to Marvel comics in the mid to late 1970s, just the Avengers weren't a thing yet. There were stories that had been told, but plenty more still to come.
Knowing that Kurtis Rowan was going to be the big bad villain, I decided I wanted a big death to kick everything off, but didn't want one that was too major of a character. Thus, Daredevil was chosen. This is a decision I would regret soon enough when the Daredevil tv show came out. But still, the first session opened with Daredevil being killed. It was meant to be some kind of mystery, although I don't really know if I had any plans. There was definately a police cover up that was happening(Now, this can be explained away as Sean OLeary and Kurtis Rowan working together as members of HYDRA... Perhaps this was the start of HYDRA's terror attacks). Spencer blindly chosing Kurtis Rowan as a childhood friend threw a wrench into the plans a bit(Kurtis Rowan was meant to be in his mid 30s or so at the youngest... as well as being the main villain).
In the first session, Will Jones tried to investigate the polic cover up of Daredevil's death, and was attacked by someone. This was meant to be Kurtis Rowan in an early stage of building a supersuit of some kind. However, he was immediately bodied by Will Jones, so it changed to being a henchman of some kind.
Due to the more episodic form of the early sessions(it was basically just the ttrpg to play when someone wasn't able to come after all), this caused a lot of the plot with Kurtis Rowan to go forgetten, or at least unattended to until later attempts to play more consistently.
Most often, early sessions were just me pulling something out of my ass last minute from the piles of villain sheets I had printed out, most of them Spider-Man or Iron Man villains.
While Thor would eventually be introduced during the Year2019 era, plans were to include him much earlier with a plan involving an original villain known as "The Exorcist." He would have been a villain who was capable of opening up wormholes of some form. Upon his death or defeat(likely death I know how Team Metal operated back then lol), he would have like exploded in a wormhole or whatever that went to Asgard.
If you've ever noticed, the Green Goblin never came up as a villain. Why? Because he was going to be some kind of big bad for multiple sessions for Team Metal.
This never happened, and instead Green Goblin is just a villain that had been defeated by the time that y'all were active heroes. (Effectively Spider-Man defeated [Norman Osborn] sometime directly after the death of Gwen Stacy, which occured about a year before the campaign began I do believe).
Daredevil and Clint Barton are the two characters who were changed after the fact as a result of the movies and shows. Daredevil came back to life, and Clint went from being Agent Barton to being his own character since Agent Barton was intended to be a bit of a joke.
The HYDRA Attacks, the Avengers, and "Phase 1"
As we played, I weaved some of my story ideas into things, but largely kept a lot of the overarching plot lines to a minimum. I didn't really want people forgetting details between sessions when we might only have a session once a month, if that. Plus, there were cases such as Justin, who only got to play once or twice, as well as the fact that I think the most consistent group of heroes was SteelWolf and The Cobalt Archer since we'd play on half-days and during finals and such.
At some point, I thought it'd be interesting if Will Jones had the symbiote. I have no idea what happened to that plot line to be honest.
There was a session that got so derailed because I didn't print out extra copies of the handouts(some police reports and such for a mystery story) and Nick freaked out and ripped them up that we just like redid that session the following week.
A large goal was to have the players help form the Avengers, and I based some of it on Avengers: The Origin, which I had read around this point.
By this point, a number of sessions had been played, and I had grown tired of the bullet train. So I concocted an idea that would see HYDRA carry out terrorist attacks on our heroes, that basically ended up having the bullet train be the only real one of consequence. Of note, while Will Jones and Hiroshi Matsumoto did not have anything I could easily take away from them(I didnt want them to lose their jobs), there was a plan to have Justin's character(Black Gold) bare witness to the murder of like an entire classroom of his students in some way. There was also the fact that the A.I. that Thomas Anderson created escaped around this time as well, possibly near the end of a session prior to HYDRA's terrorist attacks. Regardless, both the A.I. escaping and the bullet train blowing up were plans carried out by Kurtis Rowan, although I don't know if this was ever stated.
The Avengers Incident was concieved to set up a lot of plot that I had planned: That S.H.I.E.L.D. was untrustworthy(this had been hinted at), that HYDRA was a big threat, that the Avengers wanted to do things a better way, and to start some arcs for Steve Rogers in the background. It also allowed our heroes to interact with some of the big name heroes that they might not have been able to prior.
There was never any real plan for an ending, or really a closing of a chapter. I really don't know why I set up a timeskip. But I did, and to steal some terminology from the MCU, that would mark the end of Phase 1. I don't even really think it ended with a big event or anything, it just ended a little after the forming of the Avengers. Perhaps this was when Ethan was leaving for college, so I put an ending for his character? I don't really know. I think Silver Swordsman and SteelWolf had a number of smaller scale adventures at this point, as well as some solo adventures depending on who could make it. Still, I'd consider that to not be within phase 1, although its not quite "phase 2"
At the start of playing, and largely until the end of 2019 got delayed with some exceptions, the Marvel sessions more or less took place in real time, that is to mean any gap between sessions was largely meant to be taken as a gap between larger adventures for our heroes. If we went 3 months between sessions, 3 months would have passed in game as well, more or less. This was something that is wholly unwieldy, but it is an idea that was mostly dropped whenever more regular sessions would be happening. Still, the idea remained more or less that the current year was the same as the one in game.
Here's a fun fact, the timeline as it exists right now, is not an accurate representation of events. I moved things around and compressed the time between some events so as to spread things out a little more evenly, and so that things made a bit more logical sense. I think as it happened, Steve Rogers dropped the Captain America moniker before Will Jones and his exposes, for example, but in the timeline, its now that those exposes happened, and then he made he renounced the title.
The timeline was also in part created so that any other groups that I ran in this world had access to more public information regarding the world state. This meant that I avoided mentioning things overly specific to Team Metal, and kept things relatively broad, mostly mentioning Team Metal's heroes in the same way that I would any other heroes, basically in only the broadest and most publically known about ways. I wish I didn't do this, if only because if I included more, some pieces of story wouldn't be completely lost. This is also why it bares no mention of the time Kurtis Rowan sent Team Metal all the way to the Arrowverse. It simply wasn't something any other hero would really be aware of, but more on that even later.
I don't quite know why I orignally didn't want to touch the X-Men, I just know that I didn't want to. I think just to keep things less involved, not as complicated. However, I planned on them eventually showing up, possibly as having existed for some time, perhaps not. At some point, I watched First Class and Days of Future Past and decided that I wanted the younger Erik and Xavier from the films. This presented a big problem. I wanted to keep a lot of the ideas from First Class, while also allowing them to be young in 2015. This lead to the big time travel story at the heart of the X-Men in our marvel game, that Erik and Xavier traveled to the future(sometime in the mid to late 00s) from the 1960s, not too long after they cofounded the Xavier Academy and the X-Men. They would leave Logan in charge of the school for some time, and he'd basically shut down the X-Men until something in the last 90s caused Storm to persuade him to form a team with some of the students.
When I revealed mutants to officially be a thing, I paired it with some big event where the Brotherhood of Mutants did some kind of attack on Detroit, that the X-Men stopped. Originally I think I planned this to be an event involving the players, however I thought it worked really well as an event to open a session with, especially as it opened a session that was us returning from a break from playing the game.
The early days of involving the X-Men in things was rough... Like really rough. I wasn't sure on what to do beyond my small plans, and I didn't know enough about them to actually come up with stories for them like I had for characters like Iron Man and Spider-Man. Despite this, I still tried to involve them as best I could, although some of their involvment with the Avengers has now been retconned away. Or really, forgotten away.
"Living Breathing World"
One of the core tennants I set for myself when we first started playing this campaign was that the world needed to feel alive, interconnected, and like things were always happening, similar to how marvel comics feel, and the MCU felt. Character were always and actively going through their own stories, even if that might never really intersect with what the players are doing. Mostly, this was capable of being done by me just having little idea throughlines with various characters, such as Tony Stark going through a lot of character development mostly unseen since the players never interacted with him. Steve Rogers is another example of that, with his arc to becoming Nomad. Largely, the players didn't interact with any of the more major players other than Spider-Man, meaning often these ideas just went on in the background passively.
The other major piece of this is that it meant that as time progressed, new characters would show up, and others would become more like background players depending on how things go. Since for example, Steve Rogers is doing much more international superhero work as Nomad, the players aren't running into him unless they leave the US, which they rarely did.
This guiding principle was also a major contributor to how I ran things when I had more than one group in the same world. For example, Steve Rogers gave an interview with a player character when he renounced the Captain America mantle. Also, two different player characters ran into Frank Castle on his way back from his military service before his family was killed. Also, what happened to Thomas Anderson's AI from the very first session of Marvel was a plot point in the games I was running with another group. It was meant to lead into the Ultron Legion reveal. Each group's actions had ripples that effected all other groups.
"Phase II" and the Crossover that Never Happened
wip