Long-running games usually evolve and change over time, and the Exemplars campaign is no exception. Here's a summary of the various phases of the campaign to date.
Sessions 1 to 104 (27 January 1991 to 18 April 1993)
Game Dates January 1984 to March 1989
The first session immediately followed on from the end of Uncanny X-Men #180 (published April 1984), but the odd machine in Central Park was a trap set by Arcade for the X-Men, and not the Beyonder's portal to take the X-Men to the Secret Wars.
The early years of the campaign drew heavily on published comic storylines and concepts, often used very deliberately in new ways. For example,
We were using 4th edition Champions as the game system, so a significant number of villains from the Champions Universe were introduced into the game. The import with the greatest impact on the campaign was Mentalla from Eurostar, who became the first NPC member of the X-Men and Rogue's best friend. Aura (the "heroic" codename Mentalla changed to after joining the X-Men) is the NPC who has had the largest impact on the campaign: she has been on screen in over a third of all sessions of play, and is the reason other prominent NPCs, such as her half-brother Menton, her other half-brother Challenger, and her son Strife (who looks like Stryfe but has a very different backstory) are part of the campaign.
Sessions 105 to 210 (25 April 1993 to 18 June 1995)
Game Dates March 1989 to September 1990
In hindsight, this is one of the most innovative phases of the campaign.There were two X-Men teams, one with the PCs in New York, the other made up entirely of NPCs in San Francisco, and the players decided there should be a third team in Europe, also made up of PCs. Every player had two characters, one in New York and the other in Europe, and sessions alternated between the two teams: the New York team had the "mutants are hated and feared" storylines, while the European team had the magic-themed storylines.
I can't clearly recall why we ended this phase of the campaign, but I suspect it was linked to the turnover of players as people finished university, started work, and left Brisbane. There were six players at the beginning of 1995: twelve months later, there were four players, and two of them were new.
Sessions 211 to 255 (26 June 1995 to 12 May 1996)
Game Dates September 1990 to June 1991
This year saw a series of transitions in the campaign, break points with the past that moved the campaign's tone away from that of the X-Men comics for good. The key break points were:
From this point on in the campaign, the PCs were a legal superhero team that cooperated (to varying degrees) with the authorities, had a public base of operations, and were largely trusted by the public.
This is also the period of the campaign where I stopped assigning issue numbers and titles to sessions, as if the events of the game were continuing the publication history of the Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants, and other comic titles. The last session I did this for was session 233, which was split between Uncanny X-Men 469 ("Superbowl Party") and X-Men Annual 16 ("The Power of Love").
Sessions 256 to 309 (19 May 1996 to 14 September 1997)
Game Dates June 1991 to March 1992
During this phase of the campaign, the PCs were based in Texas at Fort Hooker, a surplus to requirements military base near Lubbock.
The longest-running player started the campaign during this phase with her longest-running character Stellar, and has played continuously ever since. Two of the original six players were still playing during this phase, which makes the combination of the longest-running player with either of them the only combination of players who have been involved in the entire campaign.
Sessions 310 to 442 (21 September 1997 to 1 October 2000)
Game Dates March 1992 to February 1993
The X-Men relocated to San Francisco and took over the defunct San Francisco X-Men team's base, beginning the campaign's lengthy association with San Francisco as the PC team's base of operations.
This phase of the game saw a heightened focus on realism in the campaign, with detailed monitor duty rosters, training regimens, armoured costumes having to be an inch thick, and so on. The X-Men incorporated in session 325, adopting a corporate leadership structure with an executive officer, a board of directors, and provisional and confirmed team membership that could be suspended for code of conduct breaches. From this point onwards, the team did not accept members who were not legal adults: Magik, who was sixteen when the team incorporated, became a provisional member who couldn't go on missions until she turned eighteen. Many of these changes were instigated by the team leader, Strike.
During this phase, I experimented with greatly slowing the passage of game time (covering less than 4 months of game time across 41 sessions in 1998) to make the PCs feel that they were very busy and getting worn down constantly dealing with emergencies and problems. I don't feel this worked for most of the players, however.
Towards the end of this phase, the NPC team based in New York disbanded, with some members joining the PC team in San Francisco at their new base, which the team used throughout the rest of their time at San Francisco. This significantly increased the number of NPCs who were part of the PC team: having more NPCs than PCs would be a defining feature of the campaign for many years to come.
Strike's player left the campaign after session 442, leaving behind as his legacy a corporate team structure that would still be in place when the campaign finally left San Francisco.
Sessions 443 to 626 (8 October 2000 to 9 January 2005)
Game Dates February 1993 to February 1995
To help make the PCs important during sessions and reduce the number of NPCs accompanying them on missions, the X-Men formed sub-units for field missions. Initially there were two field teams, the White Team (PCs plus one or two NPCs) and the Blue Team (all NPCs): over time, the X-Men gained a Red Team and a Support Team (the NPCs who didn't go on missions), and then a Green Team.
Both of the two remaining original players left the campaign during this phase:
This phase also saw the first changes to the game system, starting with the transition from 4th edition Hero System to 5th edition in May 2002. Significant changes followed, including removing Speed and giving everyone one action a round (August 2002), changing the resolution mechanic so that high rolls were always good (December 2002), and replacing the Hero System combat system with the d20 combat system (March 2004) so that we had zone of control mechanics and no longer had to worry about facing. These changes didn't initially reduce the battleboarding aspect of combats, but those aspects were increasingly de-emphasised over time as the focus in combats shifted from tactical play to narrative events.
Sessions 627 to 776 (23 January 2005 to 29 December 2008)
Game Dates February 1995 to December 1996
During this phase, we went back to having multiple X-Men teams (now called franchises) in separate bases connected by teleporter platforms. The first franchise was in New York, later joined in September 1995 (session 683) by a third franchise in New Orleans, resulting in 4 PCs being teammates of 28 NPCs.
The imbalance between PCs and NPCs was exacerbated by the lowest number of active players in the campaign's history: there were only two players for all of 2007 and the first three months of 2008. Those two players were active throughout this phase of the campaign, with other players coming and going. Their main characters during this phase were Southern Cross (who joined the team in session 658) and Stellar, who finally left the team in session 710 after 442 sessions and 9 years and 10 months of continuous play, making Stellar the longest-running character until her record was finally overtaken by EQR in November 2021.
Towards the end of this phase in April 2008, we introduced our first explicitly narrative game mechanics, with players (and the GM) getting cards that they could use for narrative or mechanical effects.
Sessions 777 to 920 (6 January 2009 to 6 May 2012)
Game Dates January 1997 to February 1999
This phase began with the three franchises combining back into a single team, based at San Francisco, and with a significant reduction in the number of NPCs in the team. This was achieved, in part, by Rogue leading a team of X-Men to travel between dimensions in search of their missing teammate Guardian, who had become "unhinged from time" and was now with the Exiles. This ended Rogue's association with the PC team: in her subsequent appearances on Genosha, her X-Men team was in competition with the PC team for "naming rights".
In response, the PC's team held a series of votes, culminating in a decision to change their name (session 874). They announced their new team name, the Exemplars, on 11 June 1998 (session 877). From this point onwards, being a "mutant team" was less and less important to the team's identity: NPC team members included the former Avengers Hawkeye and Hercules, and Spiderwoman was one of the most important PCs. Vitality's player also joined the campaign in session 813, and would play him with very few interruptions for 358 sessions.
There were major additions to the house rules during this period, including changes to Characteristic values, replacing "game inches" with metres, renaming Disadvantages as Complications, and removing Elemental Controls. The transition to 6th edition Hero System in April 2012 was straightforward enough, but the house rules were now extensive. This may have been an impediment to recruiting new players if they were interested in the Hero System, but by this point in time new players were interested in the setting, not the rules system.
During this phase, the first part-time players joined (or re-joined, in one case) the campaign. Fold's player joined in session 880 and played on a fortnightly basis through to session 1294, making Fold the third-longest-running character at 9 years and 3 months of continuous play. One of the original players also rejoined on a fortnightly basis, and has been playing EQR since December 2011, making EQR the longest-running character at more than 10 years of continuous play.
Sessions 921 to 1090 (13 May 2012 to 6 December 2015)
Game Dates March 1999 to September 2001
This phase started with the transition of two of the full-time players to new characters. Spiderwoman's wedding and departure from the team was in session 918, and Southern Cross left the team to take up his responsibilities as Defender of the Pacific in session 920. Their replacement characters, Songbird and Crucible, would be important team members and drive storylines throughout this phase and the next phase.
The house rules were further modified during this period, with modifications to derived characteristics, attacks of opportunity and skill checks in September 2012, followed by new rules for calculating damage and knockback from the attack roll in February 2013.
Sessions 1091 to 1181 (13 December 2015 to 25 February 2018)
Game Dates September 2001 to March 2003
This phase began with the campaign's substitute for the 911 terrorist attacks (which still took place, but were caused by pro-human terrorists from the future trying to stop mutants taking over the world, and were mostly stopped by superheroes). In order to have something take place that would have the same world-changing impact as the 911 attacks in the real world, in the campaign the bottled city of Naldor was reset to full size, making an alien city appear in rural Oklahoma.
The appearance of technologically superior Malvan aliens in the American mid-west on 9 September 2001 - undeniable proof of the existence of aliens - changed the world forever. Anti-alien hysteria replaced anti-mutant hysteria as a campaign theme. Instead of the War on Terror, there was the War on Aliens, with the authorities searching for undocumented aliens in case they were plotting to conquer the world.
In early 2017, we started discussing whether we wanted to play through the Bush presidency. It had been a long time since the campaign had emphasised irrational public hostility, and it was proving to be a major tone shift that wasn't very fun in play. The campaign had drifted out to being 15 years behind the real date, making it harder to remember the details of what was happening at the time of the game date. The PC team had been based in San Francisco for almost 20 years of play, and the "leaner" team still had 5 PCs and 13 NPCs.
I also wanted to have a game system that provided more support for narrative play than the Hero System. The final updates to the Hero System house rules took place in April 2017.
Sessions 1182 to 1193 (4 March to 3 June 2018)
Game Dates March 2003 to February 2008
In my opinion, the most innovative phase of the campaign to date. The 5 PCs and 2 NPCs (one of whom was going to leave the team early in the story arc) were sent through a space warp to a distant galaxy, and were to make their way back to Earth over a year of travel only to discover five years had passed. In addition to having an overarching story arc and being conceptualised as something like a season of a television show, each session for this season was a self-contained adventure on a different planet with a different theme and genre.
Finally, we trialled using a different game system, Supers (Revised edition), that had a much stronger narrative focus than the Hero System.
Vitality's player replaced him with his new character TNT at the start of the story arc, Crucible's player left the campaign during the story arc, and Songbird's player introduced her new character Ember at the end of the story arc.
Sessions 1194 to 1219 (17 June 2018 to 3 February 2019)
Game Dates February 2008 to October 2008
The Exemplars came back to a world that had gone through the major events of the Bush presidency and out the other side. Major events from the War on Terror were replaced with campaign analogues for major comic story arcs, such as the Fifty State Initiative, the Skrull Secret Invasion, and World War Hulk, in part to incorporate into the campaign more recent comic book content that potential new players may be familiar with.
The lean new team of 4 PCs and 1 NPC (later joined by a second NPC - my planned maximum number of NPC team members) were placed in a new city, Boston, and given a new supporting cast and opponents. We stayed with the new game system, which allowed me to draw on new character designs published on the Supers forums. In combination with the five year gap, the changes resulted in a level of world building activity not seen since the early years of the team being based in San Francisco.
This phase of the campaign didn't have as strong a story arc as the previous phase. Instead, there were two recurring themes running through the story arcs for the season, aliens and the 2008 Presidential election, which culminated in Obama and Biden beating McCain and Donald Sutherland Junior, the Senator and former superhero (and suspected supervillian) Invictus.
Sessions 1220 to 1265 (10 February 2019 to 23 February 2020)
Game Dates November 2008 to November 2009
As a counterpoint to the previous phase's themes of aliens and science, the theme for this phase was magic and the supernatural. There were magic villains, magic guest stars, and the supporting cast expanded to include Elsa Bloodstone and the Monster Hunters.
At the same time, thematic elements from the previous phases of the campaign continued throughout this phase. Strife joined Hound as the second NPC in the team, and the Invictus storyline wrapped up with Ember discovering he really was a supervillain (not that anyone could prove anything) and leaving the team to join her relatives in the Fantastic Family.
Sessions 1266 to 1291 (22 March 2020 to 4 October 2020)
Game Dates November 2009 to April 2010
The plan for this phase was to have self-contained adventures set in various locations around the world, and try to emulate some of the distinctive aspects of the Lost in Space phase. Each of the players were also asked to develop a story arc for their character for the phase, with varying degrees of success.
The phase began with our first game on Discord because of the Coronavirus lockdown and ongoing physical and social distancing requirements. The campaign has run on Discord since then, as new players from interstate and overseas joined the campaign.
Gaining new players made the format of this phase increasingly problematic in a way it hadn't been at the outset. Showcasing different parts of the game setting every session was making it harder for the new players to get a sense of what the base-line of the campaign was supposed to be, and updates about places and non-player characters who had appeared in earlier sessions didn't have the same impact for them. In response, we moved on to the next phase earlier than I had initially planned.
Shortly before the end of this phase, the longest-running player became the first player to participate in 1,000 sessions of the campaign.
Sessions 1292 to 1345 (11 October 2020 to 28 November 2021)
Game Dates April 2010 to December 2010
No longer the only superhero team defending Boston, the Exemplars find themselves locked in competition with the Bay Battalion for the hearts and minds of the civilians they protect from crime and villainy. Will this new rivalry spur the Exemplars to greater heroism than ever before, or see others take their place as the premier defenders of Massachusetts?
All the players were asked to nominate at least one rival for the phase - a recurring opponent who mattered to them and who wouldn't be easily defeated or overcome. Most (but not all) of the requested rivals were supervillains, but the rivals included another superhero team, the Bay Battalion.
The shift towards new players from interstate and overseas continued, with Fold and TNT's players leaving early in the phase and more new players joining after their departures. By February 2021, the number of players had increased to six for the first time since 1998 - but only two of those six players had been part of the campaign before the shift to Discord a year before. The online format also seemed to foster increased player turnover - by November 2021, two of those four new players had left the game.
The changes to the player cohort proved to be very disruptive to the format of this phase. Player departures resulted in storylines featuring rivals that none of the remaining players were invested in, most notably the rivalries with the Bay Battalion and with Lord Chaos. We also found that some of the players were more comfortable with reactive play styles than proactive play styles, which resulted in some of the planned rivalries fizzling out because the rival didn't seem to matter to their character, while one player found their rival too threatening and didn't want the team to engage with them.
Sessions 1346 to 1425 (5 December 2021 to 27 August 2023)
Game Dates December 2010 to December 2011
Once again firmly established as the premier defenders of Massachusetts, the Exemplars find their attention drawn again and again to intruders from other times and other worlds - including Strife II, the daughter of Hound and Strife from an alternate future timeline. What does the future - or futures - hold for the Exemplars?
The theme for this phase was time and dimensional travel. Among other problems caused by time travellers and extradimensional beings, multiple versions of Strife II, Strife and Hound's daughter from the future, tried to influence events in the year their parents started dating, became engaged, and got married: the most notable result of their meddling was Silver Cobra's marriage to Strife's sister Emily. The theme was less prominent in the second half of this phase, after Strife and Hound's marriage and Void's departure to travel through the depths of space.
Player turnover continued to be an issue during the first half of this phase, with two players starting and finishing in 2022, a third player finishing at the end of that year, and a new player starting at the beginning of 2023.
At the beginning of this phase, EQR became the first character to reach the milestone of 10 years of continuous play.
Sessions 1426 to 1438 (17 September to 17 December 2023)
Game Dates January 2012
Reality has been changed, and nobody remembers how the world is supposed to be except for a handful of the Exemplars. Who or what has caused this dramatic change, and how will the Exemplars make things right and reverse the transformation?
When we were discussing possible themes for the next season, one of the players suggested that it would be interesting if reality changed around the player characters, and they were the only ones who remembered the original reality and knew things were out of alignment and needed fixing. I took that suggestion and ran with it, placing the player characters in the sandbox of an altered world as alternate versions of themselves and giving them the collective problem of figuring out what had happened and what to do about it. In addition to letting players explore "what if" situations for their characters' abilities and relationships, it also gave players more opportunities to experience consequences for their actions, such as Wild Wolf being arrested and imprisoned, and Iris hospitalised with the mutant plague as a result of not being vaccinated.
As several of the players had reactive play styles, I made sure there was one NPC who remembered the original timeline and wanted it back so the player characters would have someone to remind them of that if they got too distracted exploring the sandbox. This was good, because in the absence of a team structure helping to shape and direct behaviour, the characters tended to scatter, focus on personal priorities, and create problems for themselves.
Sessions 1439 to 1489 (24 December 2023 to 2 March 2025)
Game Dates January 2012 to July 2012
Reality has been set right again, but the experience of a different world has left several of the Exemplars changed - including EQR, who has stepped down as team leader and handed the reins over to Husk. Will the change in leadership help or hinder the Exemplars as they strive to restore their battered public reputation and rebuild their relationship with the FBI?
The theme for this phase was the long-term disruptive effects of the World Turned Upside Down timeline on the characters who had experienced the alternate reality. This included the impact on Silver Cobra's marriage to Emily, which was exacerbated when Melody partially transformed Husk into her counterpart from the alternate reality, giving her over a decade of memories as TG of being married to Silver Cobra's counterpart and changing her abilities and appearance as Thor Girl.
Other notable events during this phase were the birth of Strife and Hound's daughter Emmy (the future Strife II), the end of Spider-Woman's college years at MIT, and EQR laying a dragon egg.
All five players who were playing at the start of 2023 were still playing at the start of this phase, making 2023 the first year since 2019 in which there were no changes in the player roster during the year. However, there was a significant turnover of players early in 2024 as we trialled a return to in-person play, with the three interstate and overseas players leaving and two new players subsequently joining the game.