One-Shot: Nextwave

Source image used without Permission

According to “Deputy-Director” Dirk Anger, Nextwave is a H.A.T.E. (Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort) team designed to deal with the most dangerous threats to S.H.I.E.L.D. To that end he gathered unique agents from throughout the world, travelling in Airborne Mobile Command Station, a C-17 transport modified for stealth and VTOL operation.

The thing is that S.H.I.E.L.D. has no records of the H.A.T.E.program or this team being formed.  Dirk Anger is not listed as an agent and the Airborne Mobile Command Station has been listed as decommissioned.

Despite this, Anger’s team operates without being hindered by S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives.  Their plane gets clearance to land at most airports and no one has attempted to interfere or investigate Nextwave activities.  Indeed, there seems to be some evidence that Anger’s insistence that they are a deep cover element of the organization is true, though why they allow such a dysfunctional and unstable collection of individuals operate unsupervised is still a mystery.

Current Membership 

Dirk Anger: Played by Samuel L. Jackson.  The leader of Nextwave is a complete and total mystery to even his teammates, especially with his uncanny resemblance to S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury.  Its been theorized he may have been an body double that has gone rogue after his psychological conditioning started to break down.  Indeed, Dirk has all the skills and knowledge of a top S.H.I.E.L.D. operative and a knack for charismatic leadership.  He also is highly emotional, prone to violence and more than a bit mentally unstable.  Regardless of this, he does have a great deal of loyalty from those he commands.

Elsa Bloodstone: Played by Sarah Michelle Gellar.  The daughter of infamous monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone, Elsa was raised to fight mystical threats from an early age, though she often attempted to maintain a normal life.  After her father’s untimely death, she inherited all his possessions, among them was the Bloodstone from which the family gained its name.  The Bloodstone is a artifact which grants Elsa some of the powers of the creatures she fights – strength, endurance, physical regeneration and mystical “sixth sense”.  It also slowly drains her life force and she knows eventually she will share the fate of her father.  Besides her powers, she has a thorough knowledge of weapons and occult lore.

The Captain: Played by Colin Farrell. Rescued from an Oscorp holding facility, The Captain is an apparent test subject for one of Dr. Mendel Stromm’s super soldier serum.  Like most of Stromm’s guinea pigs, he underwent severe side-effects, but was lucky to ultimately survive the process.  Suffering from complete amnesia, “The Captain” is for being extremely cynical and belligerent, constantly pushing the boundaries of his actions until his team-mates have enough of his antics.  Strangely enough, he listens to Dirk Anger and treats him with a surprising amount of respect.  As a recipient of a powerful variant of the super-soldier serum, The Captain has been enhanced to the height of human ability.

Monica Rameau (Photon):  Played by Tracie Thoms.  A former officer in the New York Police Department, Monica was exposed to strange extra-dimensional energies during the Battle of New York.  As a result, she has manifested the Gifted ability to manipulate photons and is able to generate bright light and amplified laser energy.  Recruited into Nextwave because of her natural leadership qualities, Photon serves as their field commander where she tries control all the extreme personalities on the team.  Monica has concerns about the leadership of Dirk Anger, but continues to work with him for the good of the squad.

Tabitha Smith (Meltdown): Played by Brea Grant.  When Tabitha began to manifest her Gifted ability to generate explosive spheres of plasma, she found herself ostracized and feared.  Forced to flee from her comfortable life in suburbia, she found herself on the street where she learned to survive and a thief.  She was recruited by Dirk Anger after her failed attempt to steal their vehicle led to an altercation with the rest of Nextwave.  Brash and confident, Tabitha fights with The Captain for the title of most rebellious member of the team.  She constantly bickers with Dirk Anger, but secretly appreciates allowing her to join her new family.

Aaron Stack (Machine Man): Played by Alan Tudyk.  After his son Aaron was severely injured during the Battle for New York, cybernetic genius Abel Stack saved his life through the use of advanced cybernetic and robotic technology that was being developed by Cybertek Industries.  The implants boost his physical attributes, provide sub-dermal protection, and house a host of configurable gadgets.  Dubbed “Machine Man” by the staff at Cybertek, Stack managed to escape the facility after his father was murdered by unknown assailants.  Aaron is cold and logical most of the time, but occasionally he manifests a dry wit and deadpan sarcasm that surprises his teammates.  He supports Photon and Dirk Anger’s leadership but is not afraid to challenge their assumptions.

Out-of-Character:  

Now for something completely different.  When I was running X-Men After one of my players was running Tabitha Smith.  Since I always have at least one semi-humorous episode per campaign, it was a natural to have Nextwave show up for an adventure.  While I never got to use Nextwave in our game, the idea still appeals to me.

In the comics, Nextwave is a satirical look at both the characters and the Marvel Universe as a whole.  I wasn’t comfortable bringing that aspect into my Marvel Cinematic Universe.  So, the trick was how to bring a bit of comedy into the story without having it effect the overall feel of the universe.

Dirk Anger was an ersatz Nick Fury in the comic, so having him played by Sam Jackson was a given.  However, because of the over-the-top nature of the character I wanted him to be played like Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction.  The possible rogue body double is my idea to explain the character’s existence in the M.C.U.

When Elsa Bloodstone debuted in 2001, she came off as Marvel’s answer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Kinda made sense to run with that idea…

The Captain was sort of a drunken Superman in the comics who gained his power an extra-dimensional artifact.  I wanted to keep things low key, so having a failed experiment of the super-soldier serum was more appropriate.  It also give a hint to what I am doing with Oscorp in Marvel’s Spectacular Spider-Man.

Monica’s story parallels her actual origin from the comics.  The big difference is that I have alluded to the fact that she is a mutant rather than getting her powers from energy from an alien weapon.

Tabitha back-story is similar to her actual Marvel Universe history, except that she joined Nextwave instead of being a student of the Xavier Academy.

There are currently no Androids in the Marvel Universe (at least until Avengers 2), so I decided that Aaron Stack was a cyborg rather than a robot.  Tied his origins into Cybertek from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

 

X-Men Factions: Weapons Plus

Source image used without Permission

With the death of Abraham Erskine at the hands of HYDRA agent Heinz Kruger, the Super-Soldier project was effectively dead.  With Erskine’s knowledge of the Vita-Rays taken with him to the grave, there was no way to stabilize the super-soldier serum and doomed any test subject to a painful end.

After the war ended and the Strategic Science Reserve was being dismantled in favor the new S.H.I.E.L.D. organization, there was a renewed interest within the United States Military for super-soldiers.  With the new communist threat in Soviet Russia, the idea of closing the conventional military gap with enhanced soldiers was appealing.  Drawing surplus resources from the remains of the war-era projects like the Reserve and gathering funding from black budgets the Biological Force Enhancement Project was formed, though was known in the military and intelligence community as Weapons Plus.

The initial project within Weapons Plus was the continuation of Erskine’s original work with a team headed by Dr. Josef Reinstein.  Reinstein was a contemporary of Erskine’s and worked as an assistant on the same project that resulted in the creation of the Red Skull.  He had come to America through the efforts of Operation: Paperclip and was offered a position in exchange for immunity from prosecution for the war crimes he committed as part of HYDRA.  Though the Doctor’s reformulation of the serum proved promising, he was unable to completely remove the instabilities from the super soldier serum, leading to genetic and mental breakdown in his test subjects.  He died in 1969 still unable to unlock the full potential in Erskine’s formula.

While work on the super-soldier serum continued sporadically after Reinstein’s death with scientists like Dr. Stromm, Weapons Plus expanded their human augmentation program with forays into genetic engineering and cybernetic implantation.  However, the most promising results came from their “Weapon X” program which explored the special abilities possessed by those possessing the so-called X-Gene sequence discovered by Dr. Charles Xavier.

Acquiring dozens of Gifted test subjects, the program worked to both understand their powers and find ways to augment their special abilities.  Though the program had a measure of success, its test subjects were often difficult to control.  Failure to contain the test subjects lead to several incidents where rampaging patients caused severe damage to Weapons Plus facilities.  Eventually the casualties from the program eventually forced Weapon X program to be shut down.

In recent years General Thunderbolt Ross reactivated Weapons Plus in order to resume work on the super-soldier serum, this time using Gamma rays as a substitute for Erskine’s original Vita-Rays.  This led to the creation to two genetic anomalies, the Hulk and the Abomination.  The Battle of Harlem ended government support for the serum, forcing Ross to look elsewhere for his augmentation.

With the rise of Gifted after the battle of New York, General Ross has been ordered the Weapon X program to be reactivated.  Already his special operations teams, nicknamed The Mauraders have gathered up known Gifted to their secret facilities throughout the United States.  There Ross hopes that an alternative to the super solider serum can be discovered.

Out-of-Character:  The villainous government organization in X-Men comics is actually Weapon X.  Weapon Plus was a creation of Grant Morrison in 2002 to encompass both Weapon X and all the other secret research organizations into one group.   I chose Weapons Plus because of the nameplate serum vial in The Incredible Hulk,  which allows me to have an existing tie-in.  Also, there are too many Mutant-related organizations that use the “X” in their title – so I wanted to stay clear of that.

The name Dr. Reinstein was also on the serum nameplate.  Josef Reinstien was the original name of the maker of the super-soldier serum in the comics, later retconned to Abraham Erskine.  In my M.C.U. it was much easier to make this a separate character and explains helps explain the differences on how the serum worked in The Incredible Hulk as opposed to how it functioned in Captain America: The First Avenger.

It was also important for me to stay away from the Ultimate Comics vision of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the super-soldier serum.  While I do see shades of grey in how Nick Fury and his organization operate, having Weapons Plus as a part of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a bit too dark and would have immediately made them an enemy of the Gifted.  I want them to be neutral at best, so therefore it was preferable that Weapons Plus and S.H.I.E.L.D. be separate agencies.

X-Men Factions: The Brotherhood

Source image used without Permission

The Brotherhood first came to the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D. in 2012, during an incident in Massachusetts.   Agents were called by the Boston Police Department to pick up a teen offender John Allerdyce who had been arrested on charges of arson, assault, and resisting arrest.  Normally this would have been a matter for the regular justice system, but the source of the fire seemed to have come from within John himself.  Being identified as an Unregistered Gifted, protocols indicated that the individual be turned over to S.H.I.E.L.D. and all evidence of the arrest be expunged from all records.

When the agents arrived at the safe-house to pick up the suspect, they found the entire building in ruins with nearly a dozen police officers and detectives either dead or severely wounded.  Footage gathered from nearby surveillance cameras showed that the destruction was caused by just a handful of individuals, all of them possessing special abilities.  All of the attackers were Unregistered Gifted.

Over the next two years, similar attacks occurred throughout the United States, Canada, Great Britain and the rest of Europe.  As S.H.I.E.L.D. investigated the crime scenes, it became clear that these incidents were connected and part of a larger organization, one that was known simply as “The Brotherhood’.

The Brotherhood is a cult of personality, centered in the United States, which gathers Gifted from around the world with the supposed aim of mutual protection and shelter.  As most of their members have been rescued from the hands of throwbacks (their term for unpowered humans), or from the hands of government agencies, the members of the Brotherhood find commonality through their shared discrimination, detention, and mistreatment.  Almost all of them are fiercely loyal to the Brotherhood and its leader, the enigmatic Gifted that calls himself Magneto.

Very little is known of Magneto, other than his nom de guerre derives from his Gifted ability to manipulate forces of magnetism.  He has proven himself a very cautious leader, rarely appearing in public and relaying his commands through trusted advisors.  From the few eye-witness reports of him in action, he is believed to be the most powerful Gifted known to exist and S.H.I.E.L.D. believes him to be an Avengers-level threat.

Magneto’s aims on the surface seem altruistic.  He provides shelter and support for Gifted members and there is much talk about freedom from oppression and living alongside humans after revealing themselves to the world.  However, this Great Revelation has a sinister side.  Magneto’s idea of freedom and coexistence seems to come only after a show of force so great, that peoples of the world will have to accept the Brotherhood’s terms.  Terms, that seems to revolve around Gifted self-rule, without the interference from mundane governments and agencies.

Since discovering the Great Revelation, S.H.I.E.L.D. has renewed its efforts to root out the Brotherhood.  If they are allowed in enact their plan, the United States and the rest of the world may be engulfed in a war that will make the Battle of New York seem like a border skirmish in comparison.  In the eyes of Director Fury, the Brotherhood may have reason for existence, but it’s still a terrorist group like any other.

Out-of-Character: The depiction of Magneto’s faction has changed differently over the years, ranging from the scenery-chewing Brotherhood of Evil Mutants of Jack Kirby to the philosophical-opposed Brotherhood of the Claremont era.  My MCU version of the Brotherhood is going to more in line with Claremont’s vision, borrowing significantly from Bryan Singer’s interpretation (especially from the first X-Men movie).  However, I am not going to be drawing from real-life groups, as I really want to stay away from allegory.

This version of the Brotherhood is a dark reflection of the Xavier Academy.  When Xavier has brought to together Gifted with the hope of friendship and solidarity, Magneto has gathered his members with the goal of protection and defiance.  The Brotherhood does not care about coexisting with humanity; they want to force the world to leave the Gifted alone.

Yet, I don’t want them to seem completely villainous. There is some truth to their grievances against humanity.  Humans do discriminate against the Gifted.  There are shadowy government organizations that kidnap, torture, and kill those with special powers.  Yet, what puts them at odds with Charles Xavier and the rest of the world is how they deal with it.   Their fear of humanity and the lengths they will go to “protect” their own kind (and exact revenge) is why they are the enemy.  In this campaign there are no plans for world domination, but brutal attacks on government institutions – both those that actually harm Gifted and those that are a symbol of the oppression the Gifted feel.  If there is any evil in the Brotherhood, it’s that Magneto and his followers have little qualms about murdering anyone that stands in their way.  It’s simply recompense for the crimes that have been perpetrated on the Gifted for years.

As for Magneto, I have ventured a bit from both the comics and the movie-incarnation of the character.  He has to be active and strong with great charisma, and as much as I like Ian McKellan’s portrayal of Magneto, I picture a much younger version of the character.  Maybe he should be a few years older than Michael Fassbender, but not a senior citizen.

Because of his younger age, I cannot use his concentration camp history.  In fact, I want to keep much of his backstory a mystery as possible.  I might be alone, but I felt that Magneto was a much better character in the comics when we didn’t know his real name or his backstory.  So his past is going to be kept very nebulous except that he has had some history with Charles Xavier and that something is fuelling his hatred and mistrust of humanity.

Though I have basically ignored most of X-Men: The Last Stand, I am going to keep one thing from Ratner’s version of the X-Men:  Magneto’s power level.   I need Magneto to be an Avengers-level threat in order to explain why S.H.I.E.L.D. has been unable to capture him for so long, as well as establish him a credible threat to world order.   He needs to be the front and center bad guy in an Avengers movie and not the villain-of-the-week for the cast of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

X-Men Factions: The Xavier Academy

Source image used without Permission

The Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters was founded in 1963 as by Dr. Brian Xavier, noted nuclear scientist and founding member of the Future Foundation think-tank.  Located in Westchester County, the purpose of the Academy was help facilitate the next generation of scientists and great thinkers though the highest standards of education.  To that end, the Academy had a generous scholership program, allowing the brightest minds to attend the school irregardless of their income or social status.  Despite its lofty goals, the Xavier School never had the prestige of some of the older schools in New York and New England.

When Brian Xavier died in 1975, his son Dr. Charles Xavier became headmaster of the school.  It was then that the name of the school was changed to the Xavier Academy of Higher Learning.  Due to poor attendance, the school was shut down in early 1992.

In late 2012, the school quietly reopened its doors with Xavier once again its headmaster.  He reformed the school’s policies and expanded its scholarships even further.  Even more students from underprivileged families were allowed to join the school, and the focus of education was expanded from formerly Arts and Sciences-heavy curriculum.

The real truth was that the Xavier Academy had become home to a growing number of Gifted students, most of them gaining their powers as a result of exposure to the strange Chitauri radiation from the Battle of New York.  Xavier himself was a Gifted psychic possess a great amount of Telepathy and an innate ability to detect the subtle mental changes that occur within Gifted minds.

At the school, the Gifted are taught how to safely use their powers, with the aim of quietly co-existing with the rest of humanity.  This often goes against the wishes of some the students, especially those who had suffered because of their powers.

The world of the Xavier Academy is about to change.  Charles has noticed that this so-called Brotherhood has been gaining many members in the last few years.  students with friends involved in the cult speak of a “Great Revelation” which will lead the Gifted into a new world.  Xavier fears that is only another name for bloodshed.

His senior students believe that Magneto and his Brotherhood need to be stopped, and have petitioned Professor Xavier for permission to train for combat.  While Xavier has allowed them to practice self-defense, he has currently shown no intention of broadcasting the existence of a school of Gifted to the world.

Yet those same students have seen a host of activity at the school unrelated to academics.  Although Xavier is not a member of the Future Foundation, members of that renowned institution have been visiting the school with increasing frequency.  There have been extensive renovations made to the buildings, including the installation of underground infrastructure.  Whispers of a Project: Cerebro filter through the halls and at least one student has glimpsed blue-prints for something called The Danger Room.

Magneto’s Great Revelation might drag his school into the spot-light along with the rest of the Gifted, but it looks like Xavier will be prepared when it happens.

Out-of-Character:  This is sort of my own version of X-Men First Class.  Before the costumes, before Cerebro and the Danger Room.  Just a bunch of Gifted students learning about their powers and their place in the world.  The status quo is about to change and its change on the students and the school will be profound.

Charles Xavier stays pretty close to the movie version of the character played by Patrick Stewart.  I really like that portrayal and I don’t think it really does the setting any good by incorporating the darker Xavier shown in later core Marvel and Ultimate Marvel comics.

In this version Charles is a principled and patient man.  A man with a detailed plan on how the Gifted will fit into society.  He is not naive by any stretch of the imagination – he knows that humanity has a tendency to strike out in fear against things they don’t understand (or want to understand).  That is why his first phase is to foster a generation of Gifted that are educated  and able to control their powers.  This has to be done in secret as there are forces in society that would seek to sabotage this if they were made aware.

Nonetheless, he knows that Gifted cannot be secret forever and he also knows the threat that the Brotherhood poses to the future of Mutant-kind. That is why he is already planning for the creation of what we would know as the X-Men.  Using the Avengers example, creating a group of young Gifted that can not only oppose the actions of the Brotherhood, but also be an positive example of what Mutants are capable of.

The biggest challenge to Xavier is that the Brotherhood’s actions accelerate his timetable, something he is not sure the School or his students are ready for.

Perhaps the biggest divergence from comics canon is that the Mutant-detecting ability lies within Xavier himself, rather than Cerebro.  Cerebro in this setting is a psychic amplifier, allowing Charles to expand his detection radius to the national and international level.  Partly this was done to explain how Xavier could find gifted students upon reopening the school, and partly to align things more with the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe, which apart from some S.H.I.E.L.D. projects hasn’t really shown this level of technology.  Also, it explains why Charles is the only one who can use Cerebro and why the government wouldn’t immediately get their hands on Mutant-detecting technology by attacking the Mansion.

Note that the Future Foundation is the means which the X-Men will get advanced technologies such as Cerebro, the Danger Room, and the X-Jet.  Its also a link to another team of four empowered individuals which I will detail later.

Marvel’s X-Men: Overview

Source images used without Permission

S.H.I.E.L.D. calls them Gifted. In the future, the media will label them Mutants.

If Dr. Xavier is to be believed, they have existed as long as long as mankind has walked upright, a unique genetic sequence granting them strange and wondrous abilities. Although this sequence, the incorrectly-named X-Gene, exists in millions of people, only a select few were known to develop powers.

That is about to change.

The dawn of the atomic age caused the first spike in Mutation, though even then the number of known Gifted on S.H.I.E.L.D’s databases were only a few dozen. After the Battle of New York, however, the reports of Gifted spiked dramatically. Whatever strange and exotic energies the citizens of the Big Apple were exposed to on that day, it heralded the start of a new wave of empowered individuals.

The Gifted are largely still secret. While the populace knows about Captain America and Iron Man, they are still largely unaware that their neighbor or best friend might secretly possess super-powers.  Those that are discovered, however, are often met with distrust and fear, with governments all too willing to abduct them for “observation and study”.

This reality has already made many Gifted hostile to the rest of humanity, their mistreatment at the hands of people that they once trusted. Unfortunately this makes them perfect recruits for the Brotherhood, a cult of personality that preaches that relations with humanity can only be done from a position of strength.

The opposing view point can be found in private school in New York, in Westchester County. In Xavier’s School for Higher Learning, Gifted are taught to control their new-found abilities and learn to co-exist with humanity. Dr. Charles Xavier, Headmaster of the School, believes that this is the only way of his people to survive in the future.

As the Brotherhood gains members by the hour, it is whispered their leader is planning to reveal the presence of the Gifted to the world in one fearsome display of power. The man who calls himself Magneto believes that showing the world what Gifted are capable of is the only to make the governments of the world listen to his demands. Charles Xavier knows from history that this will only bring about hysteria, conflict, and death. Yet at this time, Professor Xavier seems unwilling to openly to have his students oppose the Brotherhood, fearing that even with the presence of the Avengers, the world is still not yet ready to become aware of the Gifted.

Circumstances, however, might leave him no other choice…

Out-of-Character: In the pilot of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, we established the term Unregistered Gifted was S.H.I.E.L.D’s term for people with special abilities that they were previously unaware. Granted, that term didn’t just necessarily apply to those with super-powers of the X-gene kind, but it does serve as a pre-revelation term for Mutants.

Chan Ho Yin in episode Girl in the Flower Dress is a pyrokinetic that gained his powers sometime after a nuclear reactor accident in Asia. He is pretty much a Muyant in all but name.

Also that episode reveals the existence of “The Index”, a database of Gifted individuals. Agent Coulson also states, that the Index is very short. So in my mind, that implies that the number of known Gifted is going to be very small. If there were tens of thousands of Mutants, it would be very hard for S.H.I.E.L.D not to become more aware of them and The Index  would be much bigger.

The Battle for New York was a perfect way for me to explain why Mutants are more prevalent in the last few years; we have seen in various episodes of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D how the legacy of the Chitauri invasion continue to have an effect on people years later. It made sense that whatever extra-dimensional radiation that came from the portals might jumpstart the activation of Mutants in ways that normal radiation up to now hadn’t. Its also a giant shout-out to the New York of the comic-book Marvel Universe, which has the greatest density of super-powered beings in the world.

One of the big things I am trying to address with the setting, is why the Avengers are beloved and Mutants are hated, even though both have super-powers. One of the answers, of course, is that there is a difference between a guy dressed in a bright costume fighting crime, and the guy next door who might have death-beams that shoot out of his eyes. Even in The Avengers, we saw some fear from citizens at the end of the movie, questioning the motives of the heroes even after being saved.

I am going for additional and different angle, though. The hatred against Mutants is going to stem from a singular event, a Brotherhood attack which in scale and intensity will nearly cripple the United States government.  Although ultimately thwarted, this pivotal moment will cement in the mind of the world that Mutants a force to be reckoned with (and to many a threat to be stamped out).  How that will ultimately play out will depend on the campaign, but the Sentinel Project is already on the books…

The “Marvel’s The…” Setting: An Overview

Source image used without Permission

The premise of the this setting is that in some alternate reality, Marvel Studios manages to regain the rights to all their properties, mainly the X-Men franchise, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man from Fox and Sony respectively.  The studio then decides to immediately reboot the franchises and bring them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hulk, and The Avengers.

Thus starting in 2015 we get Marvel’s X-Men and Marvel’s the Spectacular Spider-Man, with Marvel’s the Fantastic Four close behind in 2016.

In this greater setting, the Disney Marvel Movies are correct, while any of the new settings will have to conform to the continuity and setting elements established my these movies.  None of the events in the preceding movies will be taken as canon, although I reserve the right to use the old continuity should I desire it.

As this is a game setting, I won’t be dealing with actors and such.  I’ll also be staying away from actual X-Men profiles, except maybe prominent NPC’s such as Professor X or Magneto.  The point of this exercise is to craft a setting that would allow players to play alternate versions of familiar characters, so giving rundowns on Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Wolverine would be counter-productive.

Out-of-Character: In 2013 I ran a short campaign with Marvel Heroic Role-play that I called X-Men After.  It was intended to be an unofficial sequel to the Fox Marvelverse movie X-Men: The Last Stand, as well as incorporating the larger Disney Marvelverse as seen in Iron Man, the Avengers, et al.  While it was successful during its brief run, I came to realize some things.

First of all, while I love the X-Men, I am luke-warm about the continuity of the actual movies.  While X2 and X-Men: First Class can be taken without a pinch salt, the rest of the movies have issues.  From the “Magneto Machine” of the first X-Men, to the plot-alypse of X3, I found myself having to spend a lot of time reconciling the bad decisions of Singer and Ratner.  Indeed, I had intended to go with a “No-Retcons” policy for the game, but found I had retconned three-quarters of X-Men: The Last Stand by the time I had finished my second arc.

Moreover, I found that the Fox Marvelverse wasn’t really compatible with the Disney Marvelverse.  In the Avenger’s movies, the world might have been strange, but the weirdness was largely secret.  It was only with the emergence of Iron Man (and later the Avengers), that the majority of humanity learned about super-powers, real-life gods, and aliens.

In the X-Movies, the world already knows about Mutants and is coming to grasp with their existence.  As of X-Men: First Class, the Fox Marvelverse has shifted into full-blown alternate history, with Mutants altering the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis and (if the promo material for Days of Future Past is to be believed) the Kennedy Assassination.  Those two are hard to reconcile.

With X-Men After, I had focused on the X-Men movie continuity and shoe-horned the Marvel Cinematic Universe into it.  That was a mistake, as my love of Marvel movies really lies with the movies made by Marvel Studios and not with the movies of Fox.

So that brings me to the “Marvel’s The…”