PDA

View Full Version : Stories of Crossovers



Quertus
2018-09-09, 04:02 PM
So, in another thread, discussing the history of one of my characters, I said that one of their items had been looted off their own dead body. The reason for the party (and, later, him) encountering his corpse was never explained (or, oddly enough, even really questioned by the PCs), but was likely intended as a tie-in to another, parallel campaign going on in the same world. A campaign rife with rampant Chronomancer time abuse.

This - and a dream about a Dresden universe Wizard (or maybe WoD Mage) pulling out a wand and intoning "accio True Seeing potion" to fight an invisible Demon summoned to slay a clan of ninjas harboring a rogue Easter Bunny trading chocolate eggs to children for their souls (don't ask) - has made me curious what stories of crossover games (whether crossing genres or groups or both) my fellow Playgrounders might have to share.

So, playground, whatcha got? Any cool stories of crossovers, or even tales of resounding failure?

Cluedrew
2018-09-09, 06:32 PM
Not a true crossover but I do remember helping a friend of mine, who was running a multiverse hopping campaign with some ideas for an alt-version of the party. Its main purpose seemed to be to highlight why some behaviours in the group, while not quite ban worthy, had been brought a bit to far. Not sure quite how that worked out.

SimonMoon6
2018-09-09, 08:15 PM
Over 30 years ago...

Back when I was in college, I had a group of friends that I would play RPGs with, every Saturday. We would take turns running different games in different systems.

Then, one day, I had an idea. With the approval of the other GM's, I ran a cross-over adventure that featured the PCs of five (I think? It's been so long ago...) of the various games. One of the players with artistic skill even made miniatures (paper, not lead) of all the PCs from all the games. I think it was a very cool idea... except I don't remember the adventure at all. I think I started with the typical "You can't go home until you kill the others" line, but obviously that wasn't going to happen. I think the group was then sent on a typical three or five part adventure to gather McGuffins. The actual plot may have been bog standard, but the idea was a cool one that I have never seen repeated in any group I've been in.

As a GM, I have had a character or two (such as a universe destroying entity) travel from one campaign to another, but nothing else that has been as significant.

Darth Ultron
2018-09-09, 09:57 PM
Back in old BECMI D&D: The players first encountered Rover(aka K-9, from the old FASA Doctor Who game) a 'tin dog' sent to explore their world, fight and destroy him...and then the gnome put him back together with a bit of magic. He then joined the group(as a new character for a player).

The evil group that sent Rover, then sent E.D. (the Elimination Droid from Robocop, in Classic Marvel Heroes stats ) and the Pcs had to fight him and destroy him....and then the gnome put him back together with a bit of magic. He then joined the group(as a new character for a player).

So now the PCs(with two of them robots) then gate over to stop the evil group on their space station(in a D&D, Doctor Who, Marvel Heroes mash up). All the characters die when they blow up the space station.

Then, using West ends Star Wars, everyone makes new characters as 'space cops' to find out why the station was destroyed and where the 'strange magic folks came from'. They steal a space ship (Arthur from the movie the Last Starchaser Legend of Orin) and head to D&D world(the "Known World"). So it's star wars vs D&D for a while...until the climax where there is a huge Star Trek(FASA)/Star Wars(west end) space battle to seal the rift between 'magic' and 'tech'....but the Pcs do leave a small portal open.

Pax_Chi
2018-09-10, 01:07 AM
I'm a huge fan of crossovers. JLAvengers is one of my favorite comic book mini-series, I love the Batman/Ninja Turtles, Ghostbuster/Ninja Turtles crossovers books, I'm a huge fan of the Superhero Taisen Kamen Rider/Super Sentai crossover films and games like Namco X Capcom, Marvel vs Capcom, Super Smash Bros, Heroes of the Storm, Disney Infinity, LEGO Dimensions and Super Robot Wars make me absolutely giddy.

It's actually kind of a shame that RPG wise, we don't really have that many true "crossover" stuff. I mean, sure, the World of Darkness and various D&D settings can all meet up, but the only "company crossover" RPG I can think of is that Reality Storm RPG that had Hero Games Champions meet up with the Guardians of Order Silver Age Sentinels team The Guard.

In my case, I'm working on a homebrew RPG that I hope to Kickstart sometime this year or next, and I've been testing it out with a lot of different games.

One game was for my local group that was the closest I've ever come to a crossover between campaigns we played in was a game based on the Exiles Marvel Comic, where the players were characters from parallel universes that were traveling to other parallel universes trying to fix things. Only I allowed for any fiction universe instead of just Marvel, so we had a three Marvel characters from different universes, a version of Ravenshadow from Rising Stars, a Lunar Exalted and a version of Rand al'Thor from the Wheel of Time.

After the game ended, I ran a one-shot that reunited the characters, and had them save the multiverse against some villain who had his own team of mind controlled heroes. The heroes in question? Were all my characters from previous games we'd played together, so the final boss was literally different versions of me they'd played with over the years in different games. Got quite a laugh out of them.


The other games were more straightforward crossover games I ran at conventions. Was was called "The Toybox Wars", a game that was based on the then popular games Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions. For those that don't know, both Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions were part of the relatively short lived "toys to life" video game genre where you'd buy physical figures and place them on a base, and then base would read the data stored on the figure, letting you play a whole host of characters in the games.

Disney Infinity let you play as nearly 100 characters from the classic Disney films and shows (Mickey Mouse, Aladdin), more recent Disney films (Frozen, Big Hero 6), Marvel Superheroes (Capt. America, Iron Man, Spider-Man) and Star Wars (Classic Trilogy, Prequels, Rebels and Sequels).

Meanwhile LEGO Dimensions let you play as characters from LEGO franchises like the LEGO Movie, Ninjago, Chima, the LEGO Batman Movie and LEGO City, but also DC Comics superheroes, video game characters (Sonic the Hedgehog, Portal), television (Dr. Who, the A-Team, Knight Rider, the Simpsons) and a ton of movies (Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Wizard of Oz, Mission: Impossible, etc.), about 75 in total.

So for this series of adventures, the idea was that the toy/figures from these two games had been put into a toybox together, and within said toybox it'd created this sort of merged setting where you had all of these character settings existing in the same world. But then, the Dad of these kids put some of his old toys in the toybox, mostly his old 80s toys, and now there was a war going on between these new invaders assaulting the worlds of the heroes.

One adventure was about how the bad guys from the Masters of the Universe toys had helped Sauron conquer Asgard, with Sauron actually possessing the Destroyer armor. The player characters include Thor, Wonder Woman, Mulan, Mauii and Aragorn who had to come up with a way to free this city of gods that had been taken over. Another adventure had Anakin Skywalker, Green Lantern, Iron Man and several others trying to the Empire and the Decepticons from locating Unicron's head, with the hopes of attaching said head to the Death Star. Another adventure had Batman, Spider-Man, Capt. America and several other heroes trying to prevent the Foot Clan, Cobra and Hydra from using Central Park as a testing ground for cloning cybernetic dinosaurs.

Then I had a final adventure where you could play as heroes from any of the previous games as you lead this assault on this fortress that was a combination of Cobra's Terrordrome, Shredder's Technodrome, Snake Mountain, a Star Destroyer and a few other old villain bases.

It was a LOT of fun, something I'll have to consider running again if I get the chance.


Another game series was an East vs West Superhero game, where I ran three games. One was from the perspective of Western Superheroes from film and television, such as Superman, Iron Man, Batman, Spider-Man and the like. Another was from the perspective of Japanese live-action heroes like Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, Sailor Moon, Fullmetal Alchemist, Dragon Ball, etc. And then the third game opened with both teams fighting each other, before moving on to the rest of the adventure where they had to team up to stop their respective villains from teaming up with the real bad guys, the Michael Bay Transformers.

This was also a lot of fun.


Lastly was a series of games I'd done as a way to sort of show the flexibility of my setting, and it was another crossover game, but this time I used role-playing games as the crossover material. In essence, I wanted to showcase the versatility of my system, so I ran games set in 4 different "time periods" that had a mix of character archetypes from other games, which I would build using my system, showing how you could run similar characters and adventures in my game.

So I had a fantasy adventure with character archetypes taken from Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Exalted, Legends of Wulin, Legends of Five Rings, 7th Sea, etc.

I then had a Pulp-era game using character archetypes from Call of Cthulhu, Hollow Earth Expedition, Spirit of the Century, Savage Worlds Weird War 2, Indiana Jones, Atomic Robo, Pulp Hero, etc.

Next up was a modern day game that had characters from Feng Shui, Spycraft, the Dresden Files, World of Darkness, several superhero systems, etc.

And lastly I had a sci-fi setting that had characters from Rifts, Star Wars, ShadowRun, Cyberpunk, etc.

Then I had one final adventure where you could play as any character from the previous games to thwart the big bad.


So those are some of the crossover games I've run in my time, and I hope to run more soon. :smallbiggrin:

Quertus
2018-09-10, 08:31 AM
Wow. I'm pleasantly surprised by the amount of love that genre crossovers are getting. Had I made a bet, I'd have lost, as I figured most posts would have been stories about group crossovers.

SimonMoon6
2018-09-10, 11:26 AM
Crossing genres is a thing that I have done a lot of.

There was a game I ran for a VERY long time. It actually grew out of another game that I was running, but the basic gist of things was this:

The PCs were the players themselves. There were in a setting which was the modern world except altered slightly. The gods of Law and Chaos from Michael Moorcock's fiction had become a part of this universe, and things had changed slightly. (Some people gained superpowers from the Chaos gods in an even akin to "The White Event" from Marvel's "New Universe" from the 1980s.) The PCs were sent on a quest that led them through five different universes: the Young Kingdoms world (the setting of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories), the DC comics universe, a destroyed version of the Marvel Universe, another universe (can't remember all the details now), and a Call of Cthulhu universe.

This quest was *supposed* to kick out the Moorcockian deities, and it did, but instead replaced them with the Cthulhu deities, which was actually probably worse.

Then, the PCs discovered that there were more than five other universes. They were shown that there were 23 universes, which were then called "The Twenty Three". (However, you could actually count them in different ways, depending on your priorities; it was the NPC obsessed with the number 23 who told them that there were only 23 universes.) These worlds included a variety of fictional worlds including the previously mentioned ones as well as a Star Trek universe and a Doctor Who universe. This was a setting for many kinds of adventures.

This game lasted for a very long time. It lasted through the loss and gain of players. It survived a change of game system (I needed a system that could handle EVERYTHING perfectly well, not just approximately well.) It even lasted up until the dissolution of our group of players. At the end, though, things got a bit weird. One of the PCs was allowed to ask a sort-of cosmic guy any one question, so he asked about the nature of reality. It turned out that knowing the answer destroyed reality, though a few pieces were left.

At the end, there were only five universes, but each one was using a different game system (and travel between them was more limited). So, everyone had a different character sheet depending on whether they were in the GURPS modern day setting, the generic D&D setting, the DC superheroes setting. That was weird but the game didn't last too much longer after that.

Pax_Chi
2018-09-10, 11:34 AM
Wow. I'm pleasantly surprised by the amount of love that genre crossovers are getting. Had I made a bet, I'd have lost, as I figured most posts would have been stories about group crossovers.

I'm surprised by some of the hate that genre crossovers and setting crossovers get sometimes. I completely understand that they aren't for everyone, but some people HATE the notion with the fiery passion of a million George Foreman Grills.

Myself, I love crossovers, be they genre mashups or setting crossovers. I love seeing Superman and Captain America shake hands, and I love playing in a game where you've got a cyborg, a paladin and a superhero fighting Cthulhu.

SimonMoon6
2018-09-10, 11:35 AM
Here's another cross-genre game that I ran:

Again, the PCs were playing as themselves. Prior to the game starting, I made them give me lists of some of their favorite characters.

The PCs found a magic something that suddenly gave them all the powers, skills, and equipment of all of their favorite characters. However, they were also turned evil...

Then, a wizard appeared through a magic portal and stopped time. He pulled out the true essence of each of the PCs. This meant that there was a "normal" version of each PC with no powers and a "super powerful and evil" version. The wizard sent them through the portal (after which he conveniently died), but not before explaining that their world was about to be assimilated into a patchwork world; one piece of their world would be saved and the rest would be destroyed. The entity behind this liked to have servants (the evil versions of the PCs). However, the PCs could go to the patchwork world and gain power there, possibly enough power to stop the evil versions of themselves (who would now be hunting for the "good" PCs) and then possibly stop the main bad guy too.

The patchwork world was very fun. In each patch, only the things native to that setting would function. So, first they were in a generic fantasy world where magic worked, but not high-tech or superpowers. Then later encountered many other patches, such as a high-tech robot-controlled world, a fairy tale world, some superhero worlds, a generic "universal monsters" horror world, a Roman world, a martial arts world, an opera world, a "beach party" world, a kids cartoon world, and so forth.

In each world, there was one magical gem that would grant the PCs *some* power related to their favorite characters, so in theory, they could eventually become just as powerful as their evil selves. But they had to try not to draw too much attention to themselves because their evil selves could find them and destroy them instantly.

SimonMoon6
2018-09-10, 11:38 AM
It's actually kind of a shame that RPG wise, we don't really have that many true "crossover" stuff. I mean, sure, the World of Darkness and various D&D settings can all meet up, but the only "company crossover" RPG I can think of is that Reality Storm RPG that had Hero Games Champions meet up with the Guardians of Order Silver Age Sentinels team The Guard.

Don't forget TORG. The whole point is that a bunch of different-genre worlds cross over into our modern Earth and start trying to take over.

SimonMoon6
2018-09-10, 11:39 AM
Oh, I once ran a GURPS game, where I let people make any GURPS character from any setting.

Then, they all met up in a storyline inspired by the novel series edited by Philip Jose Farmer, titled The Dungeon.

SimonMoon6
2018-09-10, 11:45 AM
and a superhero fighting Cthulhu.

My first major cross-genre game was inspired by a comment made by one of the players. He whined that all the Cthulhu monsters were all the same to him, since any of them could instantly kill his character, whether it was a lowly ghoul or a mighty god. That inspired me to think, "What if a superhero fought Cthulhu and/or the other Mythos monsters? THEN, he'd see the different power levels of the various Cthulhu monsters."

So, I made a game where that could happen.

Arbane
2018-09-10, 11:59 AM
And then there's 'how NOT to do it' (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?275152-What-am-I-supposed-to-do). :smallbiggrin:

A lot of the games I played as a kid were crossovers or mashups - GURPS was in its heyday then, and world hopping kept things from getting predictable.

Pax_Chi
2018-09-10, 12:17 PM
Don't forget TORG. The whole point is that a bunch of different-genre worlds cross over into our modern Earth and start trying to take over.

Well, that's genre crossover stuff, which you can get in RPGs like Rifts, TORG, etc.

Reality Storm is the only time I can think of where two RPG COMPANIES had their primary settings crossover and interact. This was the equivalent of having the the Justice League and Avengers meeting up in a comic.

Though I can understand why some companies might be hesitant to do this kind of thing. While many RPG fans love collecting tons of books, a lot of players also tend to stick with a few core systems.

If, say, HERO Games and Mutants and Masterminds did a crossover adventure where the Champions and the Freedom League interact, you'd have to have stats for both systems in a bid to encourage fans to check out the system they're unfamiliar with. Which could lead to them jumping ship to the other game system if they like it more.

Though I imagine most fans would just buy both, because we're kind of obsessive like that.

Knaight
2018-09-10, 03:39 PM
Way back when I was 12-14 or so I ran a few setting crossover games, most notably a portal fantasy game loosely inspired by (of all things) the particular visual aesthetic of a SSB trailer around warp portals. Some of the characters were extant media characters, some were new, all came from fairly distinct settings that people warped between.

I haven't done setting crossover since, and have come to generally dislike it. That said genre blending is a matter of routine, from a campaign with the inciting incident being a spaceship crashing on a fantasy world a days walk from a mage compound to a sci-fi buddy cop game to my industrial fantasy setting with major themes lifted from history and science fiction to the steam/cyberpunk genre crossover I ran entirely because the group was arguing about how well they'd crossover before a game started and I decided to just demonstrate that it would work. I've also set games in settings based on historical periods and areas particularly heavy on cultural blending, and often ramped that up for the setting.

Then there's Nomad's Gift, the campaign that I ran most recently (aside from a few dozen one shots anyways), which tends to get the most interest and general positive reception when described on this forum. My general campaign start process is to get a group of players together, and see what genres, concepts, and themes that group of players is particularly interested in exploring. This usually ends up heavy on the genres, and usually end sup with either a consensus on one genre or two that fit together.

For Nomad's Gift, everyone wanted fantasy - but they wanted two seemingly incompatible genres. Half the group wanted a game about the discovery of magic, and the other half wanted a magitech setting. I managed to bridge that gap, and ended up making one of the most unique games I've ever run in terms of how it played.

Drascin
2018-09-11, 04:05 AM
I remember at one point I ran what was basically a Planescape campaign, except instead of having boring Outer Planes connecting with Sigil, there were all sorts of other worlds entirely, including other RPG settings and even from other pieces of media. Used M&M as the system because I needed versatility.

This meant that the players could play whatever the hell they wanted long as they could work in a team of planar troubleshooters. And that is how I ended up with a party that included a future soldier in power armor, a telekinetic weaponmaster, a magical swordsman in the vein of Dragon Quest's Hero classes, and a shapeshifting vampire. It was not a serious game in the slightest and never meant to be, but we had a lot of fun.

SuperFerret
2018-09-11, 10:09 AM
The closest I've gotten was a Star Wars game where I tossed beholders into the mix and a superhero game where the alien invaders were illithids. Neither game lasted long enough to recall much though.

Resileaf
2018-09-11, 10:29 AM
During my Warcraft campaign, the wizard's teleportation spell went awry. His percentage die made a misshap happen, so he and the group were teleported somewhere random. Now, the spell's description states that he'll just appear at an area similar to where he wanted to go, which would mean just a minor problem as the group would just rest for the night and teleport again the next day, but I felt like doing something special with what would probably be a unique event. Everyone was sent into different places instead.
The caster was sent to a similar place to where he wanted to go and got imprisonned by the faction there, the group's fighter was sent somewhere random in the surrounding area (in hindsight, I should have given him a unique event like the others), the cleric/monk was sent back in time to when he used to be a petty criminal, and the gnome magus was sent to the Warhammer Fantasy universe (specifically the unplayed ending to an abandonned campaign one of the other players was GMing before that). I was quite proud of having turned a minor inconvenience into a special adventure.

Later on, the players fought zergs (from the Starcraft universe) when they stumbled upon a rift between universes caused by the aftereffect of the failed teleport.

DMThac0
2018-09-11, 01:20 PM
I'm running a homebrew world/campaign called Loromir, in it I have many different NPCs and most have some fun personalities, names, etc. I have a blast taking characters from other games we've played and tieing them into this homebrew as homage. Here's a few:

I have an NPC named Aerik who is the patron to my players, he ended up becoming a PC in my wife's Strahd game after much begging and pleading. It seems they really liked him and wanted to explore his history. Well, I've since tied in comments here and there about the goings on in Strahd to the Loromir game as asides just to give my group some love. There's a player in Strahd who almost TPK'd us on our 3rd session, about a year into our Loromir game the group was talking to Aerik about some artifact they found and I had him reference the mistake that was made in Strahd. I loved watching the whole table break down in fits as they realized what I had just done.

---

In a Hoard of the Dragon Queen game that is being run, I was asked to cameo in to the game. The group wanted to give me something to do since I was supposed to be in a different game but it had been cancelled. I quick rolled up a character that had been rolling around in the back of my head, and bore to paper Utgar Baulderkin and he was an immediate hit with the group. He was loud, simple minded, entertaining, and had a poor Aussie accent.

A few months later I was running a game where my players ended up in a Dwarven kingdom and one of my players was running around asking for an Utgar, I had no clue what he was up to. To my surprise his character was written up to be a descendant of the character he'd played in Hoard, so when we ended up in a Dwarven Kingdom, he went to look for his friend Utgar Baulderkin. I ended up crafting this one shot character's grandson as an NPC and spent the whole night RPing a player's character going all fanboi with an NPC I made up on the fly having a drinking contest.

---

In a LMoP game I had my wife run as her first time DMing she fell in love with the NPC Thistle, she went so far as to tie Thistle into her second adventure Strahd. She somehow managed to create a story of how the Vistani had spirited her away as she was the daughter of Madam Eva and Madam Eva didn't want her soul tied to Barovia. She also made it so that Thistle was the mother of Aryvist, who is of the same bloodline as Madam Eva, making the whole mess of Strahd's bloodline and Eva's bloodline all kinds of crazy.

---

I'm always trying to find ways to bring in characters from past games, it just makes the players feel like they're more connected to the world, even if the worlds they've played in don't necessarily interact.