Tags
Related Posts
Share This
New X-Men Volume 2
(This post is part of my ongoing look at superhero comics and RPGs, Project Yellow Sun.)
New X-Men Volume 2
Volume 1 of Morrison’s New X-Men was kind of a greatest hits reprise for classic X-Men tropes, and that trend continues into volume 2, but with a twist. With Prof. Xavier exposed as a mutant, mutant culture becomes less of an underground (no Morlocks living in the sewers) and more of a counter culture. The X-Men become the forefront of a movement, we get to see mutant towns that resemble Haight-Ashbury or Harlem.
There’s still plenty of superheroics, plus an excellent locked room mystery, but it plays out at the head of a culture, not just as costumed heroes. This part of the X-Men arc is the furthest from the basic game concept I’m shooting for, but it’s still a great read. The most memorable parts of the volume all deal with mutants as a culture, with Magneto as a kind of Che Guevara and teenage rebellion at the school.
The tone still works, there’s still plentiful action and threats and all the stuff that makes a comic tick. It’s just an extension of the idea that a superhero teams deals with threats related to who they are, individually and as a team. In the last volume the X-Men dealt with the traditional mutant threats of sentinels and space invasions and hostile mind takeovers, this volume casts some of those old conflicts light of how we might view mutants today.
It’s not too hard to see, in Stan Lee’s original concept, the roots of the X-Men as the outcasts of society, in fact that’s a big part of why the characters work. Morrison looks at how we treat outcasts today, with the fetishization of subcultures and the other, and puts the X-Men into that modern arena. It actually makes a fair amount of sense that a mutant movement would look like gay pride or the Harlem renaissance, and that normal people would have mixed, sometimes backwards, opinions about them. Instead of the straightforward fear and hatred that they started with, the X-Men face the insidious evils of “we like your kind here” and that subtle distancing.
The deliberate shift in focus to mutants as a movement modeled on real world rights struggles is something that would transfer horribly to superhero games. Not because games can’t talk about real issues, but because every superhero game I’ve read gives the GM so few tools to work with, so little guidance on how to actually run a straightforward superhero game, much less heroes at the head of the next step in evolution.
Morrison is able to clearly move the X-Men into a slightly different style of story because the basic superhero tropes are established. The X-Men can act as something other than a world-saving superhero squad (though they do some of that too) because the creators of the comic understood what they were diverging from.
Maybe this is just high standards from recent books like Apocalypse World and The Adventure Burner, but I want a game that has a similar strong idea of what it’s designed to do, so I can know when I’m pushing the rules and when I’m within them. Every supers game I’ve read has some handwaving about supers being anything you want and describing potential tones with meaningless words like gritty and four-color. I want the supers game that says: this is it, this is the tone this game does, this is the kind of stories it tells. If you want something else, it’s possible, but you’ll need to do more than just say “we’re being gritty now.”
A great game, like a great comic, is focused.
Gaming Idea
I already covered the concept of a supers game that is as focused as most great games, so I won’t belabor that point. The standout arc that would be interesting as a game is the mutiny at the academy, where several secondary characters take the spotlight. The (anti-)hero of the arc is the leader of the riot, he’s more interesting and gets more attention than any of the X-Men. I suggested before the idea of a team roster, the X-Men suggest the idea of a tiered roster, where main characters show up pretty much all the time, but the supporting cast has a role to play too. In that construct, the riot at Xavier’s is the odd session where all the player characters come from the supporting cast list, not the main characters. I’d be interested to see something like that in play.
