My favorite cross-over event in comics, when I was first getting into them, was Acts of Vengeance. It had a great ad, at least — it was the weirdly identifiable feet of a bunch of super villains, standing in a circle around the broken pieces of superheroes’ iconic weapons. The idea was that all the villains were going to switch nemeses, and thus be assured victory (this might have been the case, but came undone thanks to villainous egos). It was pretty stupid. But I liked it better than Secret Wars.
Secret Wars was a big deal, though. Got a toy line. Got a special campaign adventure for the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. In short, The Beyonder, a David Hasselhoff looking dude in a white disco suit, assembles Battleplanet out of the pieces of a bunch of worlds (including Denver?) and then kidnaps a bunch of heroes and villains to makes them fight. I suppose the appeal of this is self-evidence, honestly; I’m just a curmudgeon. Oh, and it’s where Spidey got the black suit.
The module is…well, all of that. A big map of Battleplanet. A whole bunch of attribute blocks for heroes and villains. It’s a battle royale. I mean, it aims to simulate the whole storyline, and accomplishes that through a series of events (some of which are as brief as “Spider Woman shows up”), but it is at heart a battle royale. Players either take the role of one hero, or control a team (and one lucky player gets to be Magneto, since he’s considered a hero here). And they go at it against the GM? Who, in addition to running the villain team, also gets to run Galactus as another faction?
I think I want to run this.
Getting the stat blocks for so many characters all in one place was the HUGE benefit to the lucky folks who owned a copy of this. Secret Wars and Secret Wars 2 were more or less the largest concentration of hero stats outside the two X-men compendiums and tha Avengers one. I tried to run this adventure when I was maybe 12 and it turned into a huge mess; I only had two friends to play with and they didn’t understand the system and they both just wanted to be Wolverine, while neither of them wanted to play “lame” characters like members of the Fantastic Four or Captain America. Needless to say, we didn’t get very far with the adventure as written, though the maps and character stats got loved to death.
IIRC the Beyonder isn’t statted until Secret Wars 2. I remember