Modern LXG

[David Johnston2]

If I were to do an LXG the most important guideline I'd set is that they can't be Americans. I'd also probably rule out Marvel comics UK as a potential source just because those guys are already superheroes and the whole point of LXG was to take people who weren't comic book superheros and turn them into comic book superheroes. Yes, Modesty Blaise is a comic book character, but she's a comic book action hero.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Some time ago, someone wanted to do an on-line campaign that used characters from the action adventure cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s.

I wrote up Race Bannon. Someone else did Modesty Blaise. There were other characters such as that. It was GURPS 3e, and the characters were 200-300 points.

The campaign aborted before it really got started, but I think a limitation such as that is quite useful, although the GM really needs the ability to articulate his or her vision for the setting.

For instance, one wouldn't want a party that had (effectively) special operators such as Bannon and Blaise, alongside (for instance) Transformers and Smurfs.

Too much of a mish-mash and, without some controls, the whole thing starts to look like a Gnorfles thread.

This^^^^. Again, for emphasis, this^^^.

You see the same thing in fanfic a lot, as well as RPGs, you have to be careful with crossovers if you want them to 'work'. While it's true you can do anything in fiction, not everything makes sense.

Race Bannon encountering, say, a Transformer could work in theory, but it would change the nature of the setting if done in a serious way. Bannon and the Quests would be living rather different lives and doing somewhat different things if caught up in the Autobot/Decepticon war. (Just as the presence of that ought to change Earth radically.)

Race Bannon and Papa Smurf turns the whole thing into a Silly setting, almost by definition.

Race Bannon and, say, the Thunderbirds...could actually work fairly easily. They could even fit into the same universe without too much trouble. Or Race Bannon and Napoleon Solo, same deal.

It would be perfectly in-tone for Benton Quest and Race Bannon to discovery the old, original Nemo's Nautilus hidden somewhere, or for the government to find it and call in Quest and Bannon to investigate it. So meeting up with Nemo's great-grandson that way would make perfect, total sense.

It's a fine art, and some combinations might be made to work that you wouldn't think would, while others that sound reasonable can actually blow up if tried.

Bannon meets and fights Dracula...could work. Dracula exists in the shadows, and while discovering that vampires are real might shake Bannon up, the world as a whole would look the same and Bannon could realistically continue living his life more-or-less as before, along with some internal conflicts maybe.

A perennial favorite is Doctor Who and anybody, because in theory the TARDIS could go anywhere. But dropping the Doctor, and knowledge of his existence and nature, into another setting ought rationally to change the people and setting, so you want to use that very carefully.

You want to make sure you know what genres and backgrounds characters are actually from, too, which isn't always the one they appear to be from.

For example, would a crossover where you team up Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke and The Lone Ranger work very well? No without a lot of care, because Gunsmoke is a mix of police procedural and Western, and that's the Dillon's setting. The LR is a superhero, for all that he's set the same time frame. Mix 'em in a serious story or RPG setting and something will have to give.

Which isn't to say wild crossovers can't be or shouldn't be done, in games or stories. Only that they require care to come out well.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by vitruvian

There was a Modesty Blaise cartoon series on TV? Really?

No, but she did have comic books, and a newspaper comic strip, for years -- the same as Alley Oop.

I was using the term, "cartoon" more generically.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

This^^^^. Again, for emphasis, this^^^.

You see the same thing in fanfic a lot, as well as RPGs, you have to be careful with crossovers if you want them to 'work'. While it's true you can do anything in fiction, not everything makes sense.

Race Bannon encountering, say, a Transformer could work in theory, but it would change the nature of the setting if done in a serious way. Bannon and the Quests would be living rather different lives and doing somewhat different things if caught up in the Autobot/Decepticon war. (Just as the presence of that ought to change Earth radically.)

Race Bannon and Papa Smurf turns the whole thing into a Silly setting, almost by definition.

Race Bannon and, say, the Thunderbirds...could actually work fairly easily. They could even fit into the same universe without too much trouble. Or Race Bannon and Napoleon Solo, same deal.

It would be perfectly in-tone for Benton Quest and Race Bannon to discovery the old, original Nemo's Nautilus hidden somewhere, or for the government to find it and call in Quest and Bannon to investigate it. So meeting up with Nemo's great-grandson that way would make perfect, total sense.

It's a fine art, and some combinations might be made to work that you wouldn't think would, while others that sound reasonable can actually blow up if tried.

Bannon meets and fights Dracula...could work. Dracula exists in the shadows, and while discovering that vampires are real might shake Bannon up, the world as a whole would look the same and Bannon could realistically continue living his life more-or-less as before, along with some internal conflicts maybe.

A perennial favorite is Doctor Who and anybody, because in theory the TARDIS could go anywhere. But dropping the Doctor, and knowledge of his existence and nature, into another setting ought rationally to change the people and setting, so you want to use that very carefully.

You want to make sure you know what genres and backgrounds characters are actually from, too, which isn't always the one they appear to be from.

For example, would a crossover where you team up Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke and The Lone Ranger work very well? No without a lot of care, because Gunsmoke is a mix of police procedural and Western, and that's the Dillon's setting. The LR is a superhero, for all that he's set the same time frame. Mix 'em in a serious story or RPG setting and something will have to give.

Which isn't to say wild crossovers can't be or shouldn't be done, in games or stories. Only that they require care to come out well.

This is a cogent analysis. You must select the setting first, and have a decent idea of the general sorts of stories you'd like to tell, and then pull in the fictional characters that work well with those premises.

Now, then. It's perfectly okay to throw in a twist, but it's not good to come out of left field and create a setting completely bizarre and alien to those characters.

For instance, a party that consists of Race Bannon, Modesty Blaise, Corto Maltese, Brenda Starr, Steve Canyon, Torchy Brown and Alley Oop need to focus on adult-themed high adventure of some sort. The arrival of Alley Oop could be the twist -- Doc Wonmung has become aware of a threat to the time-stream, and has sent Alley out to recruit people who can help fight the threat.

Along the way, of course, our heroes found out that the threat comes in the form of aliens who back some of the weird science stuff discovered by the Quests, and those same aliens back some of the more ruthless opponents faced by Blaise, Maltese and Canyon, in the past.

Meanwhile, the quick-thinking Starr and Brown act as the faces and infiltrators for the group, because women were often overlooked in the past and the more attractive they were, the less brainy they were perceived to be. Blaise doesn't hesitate to ruthlessly use that blind-spot to her violent advantage, and Starr and Brown have worked with it, as well, in situations that were equally perilous, if less immediately lethal.

Base the setting in the years 1955-75, or so, and you can throw in a Cold War twist. Are the alien infiltrators pulling Stalin's strings, or have the Maoists in China learned that they're manipulating an increasingly-desperate Chian Kai-shek, or has Mao himself become a mind-controlled marionette of one of Heinlein's puppet-masters? Are the puppeteers, themselves, just bio-weapons created by the extra-dimensional grays?

The lens you use can vary. It can be sci-fi horror, or Action!, or a GURPS: Mystery investigation in which the heroes discover what's happening, and then call in the SAS or the Green Berets to help with the violent bits.

But, what you don't do is throw in Smurfs, or Li'l Orphan Annie, or the Star Hawks (too modern) or Dagwood and Blondie, or Buck Rogers, or the comic-strip Peter Parker, or the Peanuts Gang, or Doctor Who. The presence of any of those blow out the boundaries of the setting, and it quickly loses any semblance of coherence.

[Anders]

I want to play Ash from Evil Dead.

Groovy

[Infornific]

The key concept (in my opinion) of LXG was taking weird Victorian characters who could have met each other and turning them into a proto-superhero team. So the key is to come up with a set of previously existing fictional characters who could arguably have existed in the same world all along. You can do variations on that for later eras - pulp fiction heroes in the 1930s or tv spy show characters from the 1960s. It's easy to imagine Doc Savage meeting the Shadow or Napoleon Solo teaming up with Emma Peel. In the modern era I think it gets a little tougher - the heroes in modern pop culture who are weird/supernatural/etc tend to belong to well defined universes and it's hard to imagine them just happening to meet each other in the same world.



Probably not helpful, but entertaining - Barbara Hambly's Star Trek novel Ishmael implies that Star Trek and the tv Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s exist in the same universe but at different times. So when Spock is trapped in the Old West he runs into characters from Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Maverick, etc.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Infornific

In the modern era I think it gets a little tougher - the heroes in modern pop culture who are weird/supernatural/etc tend to belong to well defined universes and it's hard to imagine them just happening to meet each other in the same world.

It can be done, with a little care, and depending on what you call 'modern'. For ex, Michael Knight of Knight Rider and Stringfellow Hawke of Airwolf would work (if you call the 80s modern, it's borderline for this purpose, anyway).

Mulder and Scully could be a inking theme for some kinds of characters.

Hmm...you have a point, though. Once you get past about 2000, it does get trickier to find workable crossover characters, at least from a SF/fantasy/horror POV, while they were pretty common before that. I wonder why.

Probably not helpful, but entertaining - Barbara Hambly's Star Trek novel Ishmael implies that Star Trek and the tv Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s exist in the same universe but at different times. So when Spock is trapped in the Old West he runs into characters from Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Maverick, etc.

I once saw a fanfic where Leonard McCoy meets a man while on shore leave, far from Earth. The encounter is brief, but the character is actually Quentin Collins, from the old Dark Shadows supernatural soap opera, preserved into Kirk's time by a Dorian Gray style magical portrait (the character actually dates to the late Victorian Age).

Many of the old Western TV shows could cross over relatively easily, as could many of the detective shows like Rockford and Mannix and Barnaby Jones. Ditto some police procedurals.

Imagine this scenario: It's November, 1979 and the last known voyage of the Seaview, from the old Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, involves the vessel being thought lost with all hands, while on route from Norfolk VA to the Panama Canal to return to their base in Santa Barbara. (VttBotS was broadcast in the 60s but set in the 70s, remember.)

Aboard were two men traveling under assumed names, but who are actually Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin, tracking a couple of THRUSH men who have infiltrated the Nelson Institute for Marine Research. (THUSH seems to think that any civilian oceanic research group allowed to be armed with nuclear weapons is worth infiltrating, on general principles).

There could be a few other selected people aboard, too, as convenient.

(GM's call if Admiral Nelson and Captain Crane know about their guests' real nature.)

Sabotage from the THRUSH men forces Seaview to the surface for repairs, unable to dive or maneuver for a day or two. Nelson is worried because a late-season hurricane is in the area, but it looks to miss them. Apparently, though, the storm changes track at the last minute (hurricanes are notorious for that), and to all appearances Seaview is lost with all hands. No bodies and no wreckage are ever found.

It looks natural enough, the storm was a Cat 4 and Seaview was crippled when it apparently caught them. Only a few fringers and conspiracy theory types note that Seaview's last reported position was almost equidistant between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, and only a few rumors leak out of NIMR and the DoD about the last transmissions talking about 'green skies and the sea looks wrong'. The disappearance officially is put down to weather and the disappearance of Seaview becomes an occasional story on Coast to Coast AM.

Of course in fact, it was the Triangle, and Seaview was not destroyed, it was sent forward in time...

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

It can be done, with a little care, and depending on what you call 'modern'. For ex, Michael Knight of Knight Rider and Stringfellow Hawke of Airwolf would work (if you call the 80s modern, it's borderline for this purpose, anyway).

Mulder and Scully could be a inking theme for some kinds of characters.

Hmm...you have a point, though. Once you get past about 2000, it does get trickier to find workable crossover characters, at least from a SF/fantasy/horror POV, while they were pretty common before that. I wonder why.

Not if you avoid overlap. If you have a series or movie that has vampires, then it's hard to cross it over with another series that has vampires, because everyone's vampires are different. But you can easily crossover say, Lost Girl, Continuum, Person of Interest, James Bond, Primeval, and the Tomorrow People because while all of them have fantastic elements, none of their fantastic elements overlap. (Primeval has time travel, but it's different time travel from Continuum).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Infornific

Probably not helpful, but entertaining - Barbara Hambly's Star Trek novel Ishmael implies that Star Trek and the tv Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s exist in the same universe but at different times. So when Spock is trapped in the Old West he runs into characters from Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Maverick, etc.

No, it was a one season wonder called _Here Come the Brides_ which happened to have a good bit of overlapping casting with TOS. Mark Lenard (Sarek) was most prominent but there were several others, David Soul being among them.

The show and novel were set in early Seattle and no characters from classic Westerns showed up.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

No, it was a one season wonder called _Here Come the Brides_ which happened to have a good bit of overlapping casting with TOS. Mark Lenard (Sarek) was most prominent but there were several others, David Soul being among them.

The show and novel were set in early Seattle and no characters from classic Westerns showed up.

The bulk of the plot is a crossover with Here Come the Brides but Spock and some of the other characters travel to San Francisco and meet a number of characters clearly from other TV Westerns. Spock plays chess with the lead character of Have Gun, Will Travel. It's largely lawyer friendly cameos.