287 – Welcome to the Age of Apocalypse

To: Pat Dooley

I’ve always been a big fan of playing the X-Men and Marvel Stuff using Marvel Super Heroes rpg from TSR. You can find most of the material here: http://classicmarvelforever.com/cms/. Ben Riely posted supplements on an old-chool Angelfire website that translated characters from the Age of Apocalypse (it is kind of buggy, because it is an Angelfire website, but right click and open in new tab should get you passed all the weird popups).

There is also a nice D20 Conversion of MSH here: http://classicmarvelforever.com/cms/d20-conversion.html

And another one here with an explanation as to how the conversion works: http://classicmarvelforever.com/phorum/read.php?3,65820

So that can at least help you convert some of the AoA characters into your D&D-style campaign, if you wish to do that. Also, there’s Sentinels of Echo City, that basically takes Marvel Super Heroes and recreates it with old school D&D: (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/150863/Sentinels-of-Echo-City?src=also_purchased) and Mutants and Marvels 2.0 that does the same thing but with D20 (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/132623/Mutants–Marvels-20?src=also_purchased).

Hope this is helpful to you (and anyone else who wants to adapt specific AoA into their games.

What issues will be reviewed in the next episode? I would like to read ahead. I sold off my X-Men collection years ago, but kept my AoA issues because I loved them so much.

Scattered thoughts:-

-I’m always on the lookout for when ‘90s X-books have some connection to the actual 1990s, and this is a very ‘90s, well, apocalypse.

As a dystopia in an X-book, it’s obviously always going to be in dialogue with Days of Future Past. (The parallel deployment of Magneto as a heroic figure in both is significant.) In contrast to DOFP, AoA is making an effort to evoke something contemporary, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, especially in its opening pages, with their focus on the combination of genocide with displacement on populations.

It’s not clear to me yet what, if anything, AoA has to say about that, but one immediate thing that strikes me is that AoA may be less complacent about the reader’s moral superiority than DOFP. DOFP was very much about putting the reader in the place of the oppressed, who were oppressed by actual robots with whom it would be rather hard to identify. This has an intimate connection with Reagan-era idealizations of the US.

This is why I think the most interesting move in AoA so far is making Scott, Alex, and Hank guilty of horrific acts. Unfortunately, I think our hosts are right that it’s muddled, especially in its handling of Scott: the story does not seem to want to confront the reader with what Scott has done, and the only thing that I’d add is that Alex’s role should also implicate him in his own crimes. Instead, both are played off against Hank, who is reduced to a straightforward monster (a cheap trick to make Scott seem OK in comparison); and Scott is in turn played off against Alex.

But insofar as there’s a hint of a story here that does not let the reader off the hook as easily as DOFP does, I think it possibly has a connection to one particular aspect of discourse surrounding the former Yugoslavia in the ‘90s, which was the unsettling horror of that sort of thing “happening again in Europe.”

There were racist and Western-centric aspects to that reaction, obviously. (Contrast how Rwanda was covered.) And AoA does reinscribe that – the only two parts of the world that we hear anything about are North America and Europe.

– Our hosts commented on the way the switch from Cruz to Epting produces some very mismatched Apocalypses. One thing that adds to this is that Cruz’s big splash page introducing the big A makes him look very goofy indeed. I found it absolutely hilarious how mismatched the captions were to Cruz’s depiction: He has a voice that the thunder would envy… …and a presence that would snape the gods to attention… had they the courage to approach him. He is APOCALYPSE, ruler of America… …and soon.. the world.” The art’s just not selling that, Mr. Waid.

(Although, that’s how you reference an ‘80s classic from the “Comics can be for grown-ups!” era. You do something *different* with it that makes a point = Apocalypse has replaced Captain America as the defining figure of the former US. Take note, everyone who repeats that bloody line from Watchmen.)

– Also, I’m not entirely sure that the digital revolution in coloring was well-timed for this, at least in combination with the cartooniness of Cruz’s opening pages. This can be one happy-looking grim genocidal reality. Although sometime this works, as in the way that the horrific anonymous coloring of the masses of dead humans in shades of brown that contrast with the brightly-colored principal characters like Magneto.

-One thing that I did not like is something that, admittedly, I hate about this era in general. One thing that’s always interesting about these sorts of alternate versions of characters is that they reveal what’s supposed to be “essential” about the character, because that’s what they choose to riff on.

And it was terribly predictable that, yes, Rogue has been reduced entirely to her romantic relationships, and that what makes an alternate Rogue alternate is “She’s with Magneto and not Gambit!” But what’s clearer than before is that her relationship with Mystique is now considered surplus to requirements and is not something worth riffing on. Mystique now goes in the “Nightcrawler” box, not the “Rogue” box.

-As someone with an affection for glam rock, I object very strongly to our hosts so persistently associating it with this dark alternate reality.