Coulson returns to the game just in time to deliver the real reason he was brought in. Or at least, the primary reason. Giving Thor and the Midgardians a reason to work together was obviously important, but he and Idris have been working together on the real plot the whole time.
Oh, the fun game of "Will they/won't they" when it comes to superhero team names. I mean, there have been a bunch of teams in ol' Marvel's history that never really caught on, but still have something of a legacy. I mean, the Defenders predated my time reading comics, but I do remember the short-lived sequel series, The Secret Defenders.
To the Defenders' credit, for a long time they were billed as a "nonteam" or "un-team", a bunch of disparate misfits who really had no business being in a group (case in point, their original members are Doctor Strange, Hulk, and Namor).
There was a bit where the name was associated with a street-level team up thanks to the Netflix shows and cross-media synergy, but it seems like the comics are pivoting back to the original concept. Case in point, Al Ewing's starting a miniseries in July where the team is made up of God of Stories Loki, America Chavez, Blue Marvel, Tigra, and Taaia, the mother of Galactus.
In hindsight it's probably fitting that the working name for the team in this comic is the one that isn't really a team, but in the actual writing process it was mostly just because "Avengers" didn't seem like much of a name for a team dedicated to protecting the Earth and "Defenders" seemed like the most fitting alternative. XD
Aye. Though I never read their stuff, I consumed supplemental material (as in articles about comics) enough to be familiar with The Defenders of old. Don't know anything about the modern one. Kind of like The Champions. It is weird, I probably know more about The Great Lakes Avengers (or whatever they're called now), and I never read any of their books, either. XD
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Now that would be an Easter Egg if you could ever work them in, even as just a name drop. ;)
It probably should have occurred to me before this, but I do wonder how they'll tie everyone together into a team. So far, Kevin hasn't said anything about wanting to get individuals from different campaigns to join into one group, iirc. In fact, I think this is the first time a "crossover" has been brought up. It's one thing in a comic or movie universe, where everyone is known to share a universe, it just isn't always addressed. Getting very different people to gel together in one gaming group is a very different story...
Yeah, Kevin's original plan wasn't really a "crossover" so much. As of the end of Iron Man 2 his prospective roster was Rob, Don, Scarlett, Clark, Jeremy, and Mark (so basically make a campaign for most of the Iron Man players and add Hawkeye and Hulk). He was 100% not planning to mention these plans to anyone in the Aesir campaign.
Unfortunately for Kevin, bringing Clark into this campaign meant bringing in someone who knows that a superhero game is being put together, and once Coulson saw what Thor was capable of... well, like Clark said, he can't really help but try to recruit.
It depends on the group. My players don't have constant schedule, so I'm GMing three different campaigns, and only one player has (different) characters in each of them. If Kevin's group is similar, there could be day when there wouldn't be enough players free to play either of campaigns, and as they share the same universe, an idea of crossover could spontaneously appear.
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