LEGACY 2020: Introduction

(This post was deleted for several months, but is now reinstated -- since the campaign in question is actually about to start. I apologize for the purple prose... but don't expect to see the last of it. When writing comes easily to me, it tends to come in violet hues.)

For the first time in his long decades, Your Obedient Serpent has fallen under the siren sway of Marisumene, the little-known but oft-encountered Muse of Fanfic.

I have in recent years overcome the common disdain in which many hold this pursuit. The distinction between those who write unauthorized tales of popular characters for their own pleasure and those who write "authorized" tales of popular characters in return for a corporate paycheck is, in fact, the paycheck and little more. As just a single example, Alan Moore's much-revered League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is unabashed fanfic concerning characters who have (for the most part) lapsed into the public domain.

As an aside, I must credit Paul Gadzikowski and his webcomic, Arthur, King of Time and Space, for removing the last barrier in my mind between fanfic and "respectable" fiction. Much of AKOTAS incorporates a reworking of Gadzikowski's older fanfic tales featuring Doctor Who, the Star Trek crew, and others into an integrated, intricate, and ambitious retelling of the reign of King Arthur -- and it easily could be argued that any retelling of the Arthurian Cycle is in itself "fanfic".

When I realized that I would not have read Gadzikowski's fanfic stories, obstensibly because they "didn't involve original characters", but thoroughly enjoyed the same stories when the cast was replaced by characters older by centuries, I realized that the distinction was, to be charitable, arbitrary.

My own foray into Marisumene's demesne began this weekend past. Our Mutants & Masterminds campaign had stalled, disrupted by conflicting expectations and play styles 'twixt Game Host and Players, and, like a third-string DC book in the face of the Blizzard of '78, cancellation loomed. As a result, one of my fellow players and I began discussing other possible settings for a superhero game.

I grew up on the cusp of the Silver and Bronze Ages, that time when the term "Silver Age" had been coined, but we'd no idea that later epochs would include us in it. Unlike many of my era -- or Argent Afficianados of more recent vintage -- I don't see the "Spirit of the Silver Age" as retelling the same stories, or perserving the characters of that time inviolate and eternal. To the contrary, that contradicts what I consider the true spirit of the times (at least on the DC side of the fence): change and innovation, but with a sense of legacy.

DC, in this period, was regularly publishing reprints: back-up stories in their line of monthlies ("52 BIG Pages! Only 25 cents!"), annuals and specials, filler issues whenever the Dreaded Deadline Doom loomed large*, great tabloid-sized reprints of classic First Issues, and even entire titles dedicated to reprinting classic tales.

* Wouldn't it be nice if they gave us classic Golden and Silver Age reprints each month instead of clinging to the fiction that a quarterly book like Wonder Woman was still a "monthly" that was "running late"? The most implausible fantasies between the glossy covers of today's comics are in the indicia.

Fascinated at the glimpse of archaic characters from another time, I devoured these offerings ravenously, along with weighty, hardbound tomes: collected tales of Superman and Batman "from the '30s to the '70s"; Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, which in those early editions actually contained reprinted tales of the characters he both exalted and castigated; any history of this magical medium upon which I could lay my eager talons, but most especially those which offered the elusive images of those ancient pages.

Alas, these items no longer reside within my hoard. If you thought Smaug irked by the loss of a single golden cup... But I digress, as I so often do.

The concept of "Earth-Two" enchanted me, of course, particularly when DC started publishing stories that took place there: the Bronze Age revival of All Star Comics, the recurring Mr. & Mrs. Superman feature in Superman Family, the stories of the Huntress, and more. The idea of a setting where these characters were allowed to have children, grow old, and, above all, change rather than remaining in an ageless stasis appeals to me to this day.

Needless to say, I was the target audience for John Byrne's Generations -- not to mention such works as James Robinson's The Golden Age and Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier.

As for the relevance of all this to role-playing games... Aaron Allston, I believe, once described his own long-running Champions campaign as a world in which every superhero, from every publisher, debuted in action at the same time their comics debuted in our world, and aged normally from their, with the child of Superman and Mary Marvel patrolling the skies of Metropolis.

And thus, there is precedence. And this, then, is the lure that has brought me into the clutches of Marisumene, the same lure that brings us all into her arms: given the freedom to rewrite the histories of these characters to my liking... what would I do? Which elements of their history would I retain? What latter-day retcons would I incorporate into their stories from the beginning? What new ideas could I introduce?

In the days and weeks to come, I intend to explore these ideas in this oft-neglected journal.