Sourcebooks I'd Like To See For Marvel Multiverse

With the recent announcement of the Godzilla Sourcebook for Marvel Multiverse, there are now four distinct types of physical publication for the game: the Expansion, the Adventure, the One-Shot Adventure, and the Sourcebook. For all intents and purposes, it looks like the Sourcebook will be to the Expansion what the One-Shot is to the Adventure; a shorter format, with a more specific focus. As such, there are countless possibilities for the subject matter of future Sourcebooks, even affording an opportunnity to reach depths of granularity beyond the contents of various chapters in previous Expansions.

With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of four potential Sourcebooks that I’d like to see somewhere down the line!

Marvel Comics as both a media giant and a fictional multiverse began during World War II, and it’s an era that creators throughout the company’s history have revisited and explored in a variety of ways. Much of the Golden Age Marvels laid the foundations for future interpretations of the characters we all know and love today, and of course some, like Captain America and Bucky, have survived into modernity with their identities more or less intact.

The Invaders were a team of superheroes who operated during World War II, but whose debut in comics was actually in 1975, in the dawning of the Bronze Age. Prior to their introduction, the All-Winners Squad had been a short-lived superhero team who debuted in 1946, and were thus retconned as having been the successors to the Invaders by the latter’s introduction.

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Timeline-wise, the Invaders serve as the “first” superhero team of what could be called the modern era. A Sourcebook focused on the Invaders could go in-depth on the various operations of the team during the Second World War and the years directly after, in which Steve Rogers was replaced as Captain America by a number of individuals while he was frozen in the Arctic, and during which Namor was robbed of his memory until he was discovered by the FF decades later. It’s a pivotal era of the history of the Marvel universe, and fertile ground for players who want to embark on a more “mystery men” style of campaign for their Marvel Multiverse seessions.

The book could serve as a means of providing profiles for World War II-era vehicles such as tanks and fighter jets, and character profiles for the likes of Union Jack, the Destroyer, the Blazing Skull, Spitfire, Miss America, and many others. Also, a rule-set for conducting superheroic action set pieces in the middle of the theatre of war would be a great tool for Narrators to make use of.

I co-opted such a feature from an old Dragonlance module for D&D called “the fray” which turns the environment around the player characters into an active battleground that’s dangerous to manouvre and may actually hurt any heroes trying to pass through it. Something like that, with characters no higher than Rank 3, would add some substantial stakes to such an encounter. This would even be the perfect opportunity to include rules for naval combat or aerial dogfighting. And as always, Brian Patterson’s cartography work could provide Narrators with some battlefields from across the Marvel Universe like Hydra fortifications, warring navy vessels, or decimated French countryside.

New York City is the focal point of the entire Marvel canon, both in terms of fiction and reality, even if they are moving the offices to L.A. A Sourcebook for the city would make for an excellent addition to a Narrator’s library, especially if they’re running a street level campaign or just want to be as knowledgable of the Marvel version of New York City as possible.

There are so many places in Marvel’s New York that make it distinct from its real world counterpart and those locations deserve maps and even Headquarters profiles in some cases. I’m sure we’ll see such things for the Baxter Building, Four Freedoms Plaza, and other FF-related locations in the Secret Wars Expansion, but there’s no reason that kind of material can’t be reprinted in a Sourcebook to make it more accessible and affordable for those who aren’t interested in the rest of the material in a larger Expansion or Expansions. After all, this sort of Sourcebook would be including places like Avengers Tower, Empire State University, and maybe even the X-Mansion.

Each location could be accompanied by a number of adventure seeds for Narrators to make use of, as well as profiles for key NPCs that tend to populate New York City like J. Jonah Jameson and other Bugle staff, the Kingpin and his various henchmen, sewer-dwelling Morlocks, and some proper nobody villains like Ten-Pin and Poundcakes (I just finished watching M.O.D.O.K.) to populate the Bar With No Name. In that way, it could serve as a means of republishing and updating several of the character profiles that up to now have only been included in the Cataclysm of Kang Adventure.

Armor Wars is a significant event in the life of Tony Stark during which his technology was stolen and appropriated by a number of individuals, most of whom were already foes of his that he had defeated countless times before. The story arc saw Iron Man having to wrestle with corporate espionage as well as frequent attempts on his life by some of his most dangerous enemies, now suped up with technology amplified by his own.

Battlesuits were introduced in the Avengers Expansion and quickly became a popular segment of the rules for people to tinker with. What wasn’t outright stated in the rules for their construction was that battlesuits conform to the rule regarding thematic bonuses that is typically applied to player characters. Having that information in print, even if it does end up in an online errata document, would at the very least serve as a neat and tidy way to address the fact officially. And where better to do that than in a book dedicated to the event that’s all about battlesuits?

Should there ever be a need to further expand the rules surrounding the construction of battlesuits or even add more materials for players to create them with, then an Armor Wars Sourcebook would make for an excellent addition to the MMRPG catalog. It could include the details of the story arc itself, as well as advice for Narrators on how to tell a story that truly compromises a character’s personal life. Outside of Demon In A Bottle, there aren’t many Iron Man stories quite as formative or infamous as Armor Wars, and the ones that are up there tend to touch upon similar themes; such as Extremis or even Civil War. More often than not, it is the corporate world of Tony Stark that is the source of much of Iron Man’s tribulations, whether his identity is known to the world or not, and providing people with a framework for conducting stories like that at their own tables would be invaluable.

Further to that, as Armor Wars is so firmly centered around a single character, it would be an ideal book to introduce rules for solo-play. Players have been clamouring for such a resource for a while, with some folks even homebrewing their own renditions to satisfy the itch. I’ve not got the time to lay any out for you right now, but if you check the Reddit sub, Discord or Facebook groups then you’ll find something there, I’m sure.

Everybody else wants an Alien or Predator Sourcebook. Well, you can have ‘em! I’m planting my flag firmly in the “Give me Throg, or give me death!” soil.

Seriously though, a sort of bestiary containing profiles for the famous furballs, fuzzballs, and assorted frogs of the Marvel Multiverse would go a long way toward diversifying both player and Narrator options for gameplay. There have been quite a few different iterations of the Pet Avengers over the years, and so there’s no shortage of potential character profiles for the back matter of such a Sourcebook.

Many of the members of the Pet Avengers have been companions to some of Marvel’s heaviest hitters, and it would be great to see rules introduced for the express purpose of keeping a critter companion during a campaign. It would make for a nice accompaniment to the solo rules I posited above for the Armor Wars Sourcebook. I can only speak for myself, but I do enjoy the idea of developing a relationship between my player character and a super-powered animal. I’m playing a Druid in my current D&D campaign for this exact reason.

There have been shockingly few profiles for the animal characters of the Marvel Multiverse thus far. Lockjaw was in Cataclysm of Kang, Lockheed was in the X-Men Expansion and Jeff the Land Shark was in the Avengers Expansion, but beyond those three we haven’t seen much attention paid to other animal sidekicks like Zabu, Redwing, Lucky the Pizza Dog, Bats the Ghost Hound, or Goose. And of course, it’d be a golden opportunity to bring Throg into the fold. I know I often harp on about not wanting or caring much for character profiles in official releases, but by gum if I wouldn’t get a kick out of an official Throg stat block.

Those are my four main hopes for future Sourcebooks, but what about you guys? Do you have a favourite option from the ones above or some other idea of your own you’d rather see first?

Let me know in the comments down below or cast your vote on the poll!

There will be no article next week, and then the following week the article will be dropping on Monday, August 3rd rather than on the Wednesday.

Till next time, have fun out there!