On Staying in My Sand Box

I keep instinctively looking at ways to 'expand' the game for Stalwart '85. I keep thinking of what I want to do 'next', or how to move the game/story/world 'forward' in some way. I keep wanting to make new 'main characters' to pick up pieces of the narrative and carry them in other directions. I originally planned last summer to hand over the reigns from Doc to Skye, and to start to tell her story instead.

But Doc always comes back into the picture. I started play testing the Cataclysm Across the Cosmos this week, and realized that it's not that story unless Doc is there. Doc is the center of gravity for the whole thing. 

In the last few days, I've been scrolling through some old scans online of Marvel 2-in-1, thinking it would be cool to have a character like the Thing who could go around and team up with other heroes to expand the world. Oh. I already have him. He's Doc. He's already doing that.

In fact, he's been doing it for 264 issues as of the time Stalwart '85 comes out. 

It always comes back to Doc. That's the future - it's the past. I was thinking about how to develop adventures for the game, and realized that I have a database going of great adventure ideas in seed form - I have re-organized this a bit and posted it so you can see the living database, but the answers are all right there. I should be publishing adventures for the game, but they can be rooted in adapting the existing 264 comics. The game is set in April of 1985. It's a fixed point in time. I can now spend my time going back and filling in as many gaps as possible. It's a bit of a strange creative enterprise for me - my job is to spend my time going through the 'back issue' bins, organizing things and adding to them. I don't have to generate 'new content' - I can just spend my time building up the catalog of what already exists as of April 1985. That should keep me busy enough. This is the entire sand box I have to play in. I can stay within these walls and never run out of things to work on - if you figure an average Doc story was 16 pages, and there are 264 of those, that's over 4,000 pages I haven't figured out yet. I think that's enough to work with. 

Plus, the whole idea of the game itself is that you're with me in April of good old '85. You bought the game, you own some comics, and you're itching to start your own game set in this world. You have no idea what storylines or continuity or strangeness is ahead, and you start building a game based on the comics you have. As you go, you hit conventions or comic shops or mail order and start to fill in your back issue collection. My job now is to help you do it.