Silver Age Design Journal #5: "In Search of..."

By Christopher McGlothlin, M.Ed.

I'm Christopher McGlothlin. You may remember me from such Mutants & Masterminds publications as Worlds of Freedom, Freedom's Most Wanted, and an entire paragraph of Book of Magic. Join me as we take a sentimental journey down memory lane all the way back to the late winter of 2010, a time I'm sure we all recall as when we got our first look at the Silver Age sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds.

In the many minutes since its release, historians and theologians have analyzed its pages searching for answers to the enduring question surrounding the book: "Dude, WTF? I mean, seriously, WTF?" Join us now as we pierce the veil of mystery surrounding the fourth chapter, cryptically titled "Gamemastering the Silver Age."

The bulk of Chapter Four was written in a eighteen-hour marathon session just prior to boarding a train bound for Indianapolis and GenCon 2009. By the time I finished, miniature clones of Howard Zinn dressed as a pirate were climbing up my legs, and the Earth Ro-Man from Robot Monster had stopped by to pat me on the back and offer moral support. Seeing as how all I had to do was tell Gamemasters everywhere how to recreate any superhero comic written between 1956 and 1986, I didn't sweat the hallucinations.

Much to my surprise, the on-page results of my hours of caffeine-fueled hysteria were not only in readable English, but actually kinda good. Or at least that's what Ro-Man told me ("To write...like the Hu-man! To stat block...like the Hu-man!").

The first step was trying to explain the Silver and Bronze Age storytelling aesthetics to the uninitiated, and do so in a way that keeps readers who weren't even born then from saying, "Was everyone on drugs or something?" to a minimum...mainly because the answer is, "Yeah, pretty much." It's also useful for people who're already fans and need to get across the feel of the era to their players in just a few storytelling bullet-points.

That done, attention had to be paid to those in the audience who find villains with giant slingshots and cities of talking gorillas to be... well, a bit silly. I know, I know―they totally Fredo me, too: they broke my heart, they broke my heart. Still, it's understandable that the real-life events of the Cold War period are closer to the type of campaign they want to run than the comic books being published at the time. So if, say, you want your series to be more like heroes that keep a watch, man, go ahead and buy Silver Age. It'll make your head explode just like a teleporting giant alien squid.

Whether you're aiming for the Silver Age or Bronze, the book also fleshes out your Supporting Cast considerably with a heaping helping of new archetypes. You'll get such Silver Age essentials as Girl Friday and Snoopy Girl Reporter, as well as Bronze-ier folk like the Teenage Politician and the ultimate 1970s villain "The Man," as in "being kept down by."

Lastly, there's a whole dessert cart of evil for Gamemasters to choose from in our many new Villain Archetypes. Since these are what a lot of M&M fans clamor for―like waiting for Frampton to go into "Show Me the Way"―here's what's there and why.

Communist Brute: Seriously, could we not put this guy in the book and still call it Silver Age? No way, Ivan! He's a big, bad Red Nightmare in iron come to destroy your capitalist heroes... kinda like 50% of all Silver Age bad guys.

Corrupter of Youth: I've always been fascinated by the degree to which mid- and late-Silver Age writers misunderstood the changing youth culture of the 1960s, particularly how tone deaf they were to all that loud, rude, vulgar rocking and rolling. Before giving way to the Bronze Age, comics saw their fair share of villains which were essentially crude personifications of the Boomers' preferred music. The Boomers were simply fulfilling their generational obligation to shock and annoy their elders, and the Corrupter of Youth is indicative of their parents' rebuttals.

Fallen Golden Age Hero: The more popular Golden Age heroes returned in glory during the Silver Age to spike summer sales figures, while the less-popular ones reappeared as crazy-old-men menaces. As a rule of thumb, if only Roy Thomas remembered a character, he was coming back bonkers. In many ways, the Fallen Golden Age Hero says a lot about how passionate and knowledgeable Silver Age creators were about the previous era, and how Bronze Age writers felt about the seemingly blind patriotism and old-fashioned ways of thinking they attributed to the Older Generation.

Femme Fatale: Frankly, I was a little surprised we'd never done a villain archetype whose main power is she's too smoking hot for the lunkhead male hero to ever throw her in jail for her crimes. So here she is in M&M at last, bad and drawn that way.

Giant Monster: The go-to menace at the dawn of the Silver Age-just check the debut issue of your favorite 1960s super-team. I dedicate the one in Silver Age to my friends in Denmark, for reasons well known to them.

Gimmick-Weapon Master: This is the other 50% of Silver Age villains that aren't Communist Brutes. We should hold a reader contest for the weirdest weapon a Gamemaster bases this archetype around ("You'll never catch The Trebuchet, hero!")

Toxic-Waste Creature: So how did the Silver Age change to the Bronze? Well, for one thing, the Giant Monster came back with a Very Important Social Message attached, and this was the result.

Transformer: Call this author's fiat, but it just isn't the Silver Age unless the heroes are being turned into something weird on the cover every third month or so. This is the archetype that can make that happen. Funny story: when I finally got to GenCon 2009, Steve Kenson told me how the quintessential Silver Age villain is a guy who can turn straw into gold who inexplicably decides to rob banks. This happened about 24 hours after―unbeknownst to Steve―I'd finished typing up the Transformer.

And there you have it-the complete inner workings of the Silver Age sourcebook. Nothing left to say but, "So buy the book, already!"

Be on the lookout for a brand-new Caper I wrote up to go with the Silver Age, too. It's coming very soon and includes a new group of villains who cause a lot of mayhem on their own, but even more when they bring about the Deadly Day of the Dread Destructus!