Marvel might have coined (or at least popularized) the term \u201ccinematic universe,\u201d but it\u2019s not a new idea. It\u2019s the way comic book universes have worked for decades, and according to one theory nearly every TV show ever made takes place in a cinematic universe inside a snow globe. A cinematic universe is basically a universe with crossovers, and in my opinion the crossover points are what differentiate a cinematic universe from just a shared world. A shared world has a sense of continuity (the PCs from another campaign are now kings and high priests and guildmasters), a cinematic universe has a sense of coexistence (the PCs from another campaign are out in the world doing things RIGHT NOW).<\/p>\n
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My first experience with an RPG cinematic universe was the super-heros game that \u00a0(QAGS co-creator) Leighton Connor started running when we were in college. The game started out as a standard supers game, but as time went on we started occasionally playing sessions that didn\u2019t revolve around the PCs we normally played. Sometimes they were \u201czeppo\u201d type episodes about supporting cast members, sometimes we\u2019d play another team of super-heroes that had previously appeared in the game, and sometimes we made up entirely new characters, usually based around a specific theme like \u201cteenage wannabe supers\u201d or \u00a0\u201cprofessional monster hunters\u201d (which was how M-Force was born). Sometimes we even played the villains. Most of these games were contemporary with the main campaign, but we did sometimes play historical games as well as games set in the (possible) future, mirror universes, and lots of other weird places in space and time.<\/p>\n
One of the things that I think contributed to the success of the game (we played it for something like six years) was that Leighton didn\u2019t GM all of those spin-off games himself. He ran some of them, but he also left plenty of room for players to say \u201chey, how about next week I run a game about Australian super-heroes?\u201d Whenever we players took over a little chunk of the world for our own game, it got us more invested in the world as a whole and the primary campaign Leighton was running. It also introduced new ideas that probably wouldn\u2019t have ever come up if Leighton was the sole GM. Even if nothing from a side-game ever appeared in the main story, the fact that it was there made the whole world seem more alive and vibrant.<\/p>\n
Want to give it a try for yourself? Here\u2019s my advice:<\/p>\n
Marvel might have coined (or at least popularized) the term \u201ccinematic universe,\u201d but it\u2019s not a new idea. It\u2019s the way comic book universes have worked for decades, and according to one theory nearly every TV show ever made takes place in a cinematic universe inside a snow globe. A cinematic universe is basically a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3843,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2062],"tags":[43,153,1563,1642,1687,1698,1712,1713,2190],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-gaming-articles","tag-qags","tag-m-force","tag-leighton-connor","tag-ficton","tag-avengers","tag-campaign","tag-cinematic-universe","tag-marvel","tag-agents-of-s-h-i-e-l-d"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3204,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions\/3204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}