An Introduction to the Ultimate Avengers

Welcome, True Believers, to the official blog site for the Ultimate Avengers MURPG! It is here where I, your humble GM (or at least one of the GMs), shall regale you with necessary and/or useful background information for this exciting game that was started some three years ago to overall enthusiastic reception and now, through the sheer force of fate, shall be resurrected amongst our humble band of geeks and freaks!

Now, Waffleman and myself (I shall refer to ourselves by character names for the purposes of confidentiality) are very familiar with the background of the Ultimate Avengers, the group of superheroes those of you who play this game will be signing up with. But I for one know that many of you will be new to this story, so, being your friendly neighborhood GM (and inspired by Sir DM of the DnD game "Vision") decided it might be a good idea to give you all at least some kind of introduction before we get into the game proper. For this post, I'll explain what I mean when I say "Ultimate" Avengers, and indeed what the heck "Ultimate" has to do with anything.

A few years ago, like right after the first X-Men movie came out but before the first Spider-Man film was released, Marvel Comics hypothesized that they were going to receive a huge boom in new customers/fans due to the popularity of the movies. While this is all well and good at first, in the comic book business holding on to such fans can be a bit troublesome. Why? Because of the issue of continuity. Every comic you pick up today has literally decades of backstory behind it. For Marvel, many of its flagship comics (X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four) are nearly up to five decades of existence, while DC comics can now boast nearly 80 years of background for such mainstays as Batman and Superman. What this means to new readers is that they have about a 7% chance of actually understanding what's going on in the average comic they pick up. This, of course, is a problem, for if you don't understand what's happening, why would you continue to bother buying comics? Nowadays Wikipedia can help ease you into modern storylines, but at the turn of the century Wikipedia wasn't quite as big as it is now (I'm not even sure if it existed, frankly).

So Marvel, ever aware of this conundrum and the obstacle it presented to them gathering in the new readers eager to learn more about those characters they saw on the silver screen, came up with a simple but brilliant solution: start over. No, really, just wipe the slate clean and start over. Start up brand new versions of the X-Men, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers as if they'd never been done before. Oh, the regular comics would still be maintained (Marvel didn't want to lose their faithful fans from years past), but these new lines of comics would be introduced for people who a.) didn't know what was happening in the mainstream lines, and b.) didn't want to spend weeks upon weeks researching them to figure out what was going on. And so Marvel introduced the "Ultimate" Universe (though "Ultimate" was technically just a title, not meant to insinuate this was the "ultimate/better than anything else" universe). First came Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spider-Man, then soon followed just "The Ultimates" (the original Avengers under a name more appropriate to their new setting) and, finally, the Ultimate Fantastic Four.

The Ultimate Universe proved to be a big hit, and what made it all the more appealing was that writers were free to reinvent beloved characters in whatever way they deemed fit, sometimes in new and surprising ways. Ultimate Iron Man, for example, needs a 100-man ground crew just to make sure his suit is working. Ultimate Hulk was actually a botched attempt at recreating the Super Soldier Serum that created Captain America (in fact, a large percentage of the folks in the Ultimate Universe got their powers through some random botched attempt to recreate Cap; a reflection of the real-life arms race so many superpowers are caught up in in the real world). Ultimate Spider-Man was once again a teenager, and he was only able to build his webshooters because his father had been working on some similar devices before his untimely death.

At this point in time the Ultimate Universe has been heavily developed, and now sports a continuity that is impressive in its own right. This new line has been going now for almost 8 years, and hence there's quite a lot of ground to cover (although not too much, hopefully, especially where our game is involved). In the next post I'll try to run through the basics of the Ultimates Universe, to give you all a frame of reference for where all your favorite characters fit into the whole mess, and how they might relate to our own game.