Hello reader! If you’re reading this, it might be because you read my Alternates game Recaps, or maybe you don’t! This post should be accessible to anyone, even if they’ve never read any Alternates “episode” Recaps.
This week we didn’t have a game because I had work stuff, so there’s no Episode to Recap!
So I wanted to take this chance to talk about the world of the Alternates and how I build up an RPG world that is hopefully engaging and deep for my players. So here goes!
Leaning on the Metaverse
One great thing Christopher and Adam have done with Sentinels is to create a “superpowered character universe” where comic book stories happen, as well as a “metaverse” where the comic books are published. “The Alternates” leans heavily on the Metaverse concept. This makes world-building a lot easier in some respects.
I write the meta-story when I write the story. When I’m thinking about a villain or a hero, I ask, “Why are they in the episode? How are the writers using them? How do the writers feel about them? Where did the writer get the idea for the character? How do the fans feel about the character? What’s the reaction when fans see the character for the first time?”
I tend to ask myself the same kind of questions when running other games, like, “How does this character move the story along,” but I’ve found thinking about an imaginary audience and imaginary showrunners and writers and executives really helps me frame the stories in a way that essentially matches how most of us watch and read stories. A Dungeons & Dragons game doesn’t usually feel like an episode of a television show, or even a couple pages of a novel, even if the story is engaging and the games are fun. Abstracting the game sessions to an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic helps me frame the story in a way that my players are used to seeing stories - self-contained parts of a serial, with twists and side-stories and contrived endings… and even with end credits (and a soundtrack).
I developed a Metaverse story about how The Alternates television show came to be. Who would make a TV show about a comic series that wasn’t even set in the main Sentinels timeline? Well, I think about “Into the Spider-Verse” a lot - it’s a very weird movie with a main character unfamiliar to mainstream culture, with a very weird premise, and very unique animation style, and it not only got made, but it was very popular and successful.
Now, I’m going to go deep into the whole backstory I've created, because I think it relates to something someone told me years ago about performing on stage - the audience only sees about 10% of what you put out there, so you need to work 10 times as hard on stage just to get their attention.
The Alternates Metaverse Story
“The Alternates” became a TV show because a famous comedy writer-turned-star (the equivalent of a Conan O’Brien, Tina Fey, or Seth Meyers, because most other comedy writers never get famous) wrote the comic book. (To be honest, I based it on Seth Meyers - who loves comics - and/or John Mulaney - who did the voice of Spider-Ham in Into The Spiderverse). Basically, this writer (whose name is Ari Litvin) was a big fan of a less famous superhero from Sentinels lore - Starshadow.
Now, there was an Internet stir about Starshadow a few years before the Alternates comics came out. Basically, every character made it into the Oblivaeon crossover event, even really obscure alternate-universe versions of characters, like the Telenovela-verse characters. But, for some fans, one character was left out - Starshadow! Sure, he hadn’t been in any comics for 10 years or more, but that was no excuse.
One person was especially annoyed - Captain Cactoid, aka Adrienne Costello, who hosts the most popular comic book “ViewTube” series. She did a series of tongue-in-cheek “rants” about Sentinels comics forgetting her favorite all-time character, Starshadow, in the Oblivaeon event, including videos like, “How Could They Forget Starshadow? 5 Facts About Sentinel Comics Best Character” and “7 Ways Starshadow Could Have Defeated Oblivaeon” and things like that. It created a kind of “fandom” phenomena of people, mostly jokingly, commenting about Starshadow’s absence with memes and the like.
Ari Litvin, again, was a fan of Starshadow (though not as big a fan as Captain Cactoid), so after his second comedy special became hugely popular (in which he did a bit about being a comic book fan), Sentinel comics approached him to write a comic book. The comic book that Litvin developed and wrote was The Alternates.
Litvin wanted to branch off his own timeline so he could do more off-the-wall and unique storytelling, so The Alternates wasn’t set in the main Sentinels timeline. Remember a “Disparation” story from the early 1980s (which wasn’t actually in the pages of the “Disparation,” book, although it’s a comic mistake that people think it was) in which we see an alternate universe where Starshadow kills Baron Blade, Litvin took that universe and brought it up to date, through the Oblivaeon event.
Litvin also picked other “heroes” who were “left out” of the Oblivaeon event, although characters like Dr. Comet were probably in less than five issues, ever, and characters like “Jersey Devil” weren’t even really characters from the Sentinels comics universe, properly, but rather characters that Sentinels Comics owned the rights to.
The Alternates comic starts after the Oblivaeon event, with all the heroes dead, and just starts immediately telling the story of the Alternates, then later reveals what happened to the A-List heroes during the Oblivaeon event. The Alternates volume #1 went for 25 issues, then there was a short break, and volume #2 went is still going at issue #37. Litvin is still a “writer” on the series although he is more like an editor, and other writer/comedians are doing the hard work of writing every story point and piece of dialog.
The Alternates television show spun off of the popularity of the Alternates comic book, which many people got into. Much like Game of Thrones or the Marvel MCU series, lots of people watched and loved The Alternates television show without reading the source material - the show is more popular than the comics were.
And I’m really just touching the major points here. There’s a lot more ideas in my head than I have time to write down in this post, and more than you want to read! But the point is, again, my players only see 10% of what I’m writing, and I tend to think up 10 times what they need, so… really… mathematically… they’re only seeing about 1%? And if you read the Recaps, you’re really only getting about .01%. And I’m sorry for that, if it’s not enough for you.
FUN FACT: Because the Alternates comic series has to come years after the Oblivaeon Event, and the Alternates Animated Series has to come years after the comic series, it’s probably at least 2022 when The Alternates premieres on television. So none of this has even happened yet, in the Metaverse sense.
Be Your PCs’ Biggest Fan (But Also Your NPCs!)
In games like Dungeons & Dragons, or maybe Rifts, or GURPS, or Paranoia or - if you’re a glutton for punishment - Dungeon Crawl Classics, the GM/DM is often very adversarial to the players. And that’s fine. But world-building an immersive game really requires the GM/DM to fall in love with the player-characters (and the NPCs, too).
And this is one of the hardest things for me, honestly, because my head is full of ideas, and I could literally sit around the table with 5 “players” and just tell them what their characters do and what the NPCs do and then the whole story, if they’d just agree to sit there and be silent and roll the dice sometimes.
But… that’s just not what players want to do, unfortunately.
So I have to learn to love the player-characters, and what they do, even when it’s not what I think they should do!
And if you love the PCs, then you must build a world that they can thrive in. You can’t just build the world that you want, then throw them into it. I mean… you can, but it won’t be as good, and it won’t be world-building.
It’s like a zoo. You can go to a zoo where all the animals are in metal cages with straw tossed about the floor. Or you can go to a zoo where the animals have space and are placed in something of a “natural habitat,” somewhere where the animals feel more comfortable and behave in ways more consistent with their “wild” behavior.
Which zoo offers a more “immersive” experience? Which zoo is more uncomfortable and off-putting?
So you have to build a world where your characters can thrive and feel comfortable. You still need to disrupt that world so your PCs feel uncomfortable, especially so they want to return things to the way they were before. Or, even if the world they’re in is very unfriendly to them, and they’re in hiding and on the run, make sure that’s what suits the PCs and their archetypes. Legacy wouldn’t do well in a “on the run from the law” campaign (although I do wonder if he’s Team Iron Man in “Civil War”... hrm…), but a one-off story might work.
Also love your NPCs! Put thought into them, give them background stories, character flaws, and have them make mistakes. (I mean, unless they’re Starshadow. That guy’s the best.) Again, this follows the 10% rule - just accept that you’re going to do more work on the NPC than your players are going to see. Give your NPCs situations and stories where they can look cool, and it’s okay if they’re occasionally cooler than your PCs. Just don’t make them cooler at everything.
World-Build Your Plots
As a younger person, I would write plots that had solutions. “This thing happens, and the players have to do this specific thing to solve it.” It wasn’t a good idea, but I was young.
When I was about 21, I was running a game with a specific plot and I don’t remember all the details, but I had a specific idea of what the players should do to solve the problem. They were faced with a statue with its hands outstretched. The statue held some secret and they had to figure it out. The problem was I don’t remember what the solution was supposed to be. But a player thought, “Well, we need to show ourselves to be allies,” and he reached out and shook the statue’s hand. I thought in that moment, “Oh, that’s a better solution than the one I came up with,” and I just went with it.
It wasn’t the first time I let a player solve a problem in the way I hadn’t thought of, but it sticks with me because the player felt so proud to have figured it out, and I mean… he definitely hadn’t figured it out, but I made him feel good just by silently knowing his idea was better than mine and going with it.
Now… I try hard to write open-ended plots that are just stories that can be approached and solved by the players in any number of ways, and it’s really just a matter of, “Is this idea a good one given what I know about the plot?” or not. I still write myself into corners, and I still lead players down a path only to have them decided to take a left turn in the middle of nowhere right into the wilderness of “what I hadn’t thought they’d do at all.”
Anyway… the thing I do try to do is just make really deep NPCs with backstories and motivations, make plots with back-up plans and traps, then let the PCs walk in and just interact with it. It’s not a jigsaw puzzle, with one solution. It’s not a video game, with three choices that lead down three paths. I’m not perfect, but if I’ve made good NPCs, and they’ve created a situation, then they know how to act in that situation. If I’ve made a world with depth, then I’ll know how the world will respond to the PCs.
I guess this all goes back to the “the audience only sees 10% of what you’re doing,” so just add way more detail than you expect to reveal, but never plan exactly how things are going to go. Just know what kind of people your NPCs are, and what kind of world your PCs live in.
There’s So Much More… Probably Too Much?
Originally, this was just going to be a post detailing all the minor NPCs in The Alternates with their backstories. Specifically, the Freedom Seven (who are all dead now) and other heroes you know and love (and play in the card game), and how they differ from their “RPG timeline” counterparts and why. I figured that would kind of be a fun read, and also kind of an example that shows how I put 100 times more thought into things than my players end up seeing.
But I thought writing about writing was more interesting to folks, and less self-indulgent.
However, the next time there’s a week where I don’t run The Alternates, then I am totally going to go self-indulgent and just post about all the non-spoiler backstory I’ve written for The Alternates. So… look forward to that?
Thanks for reading!