The Road to BricksCascade 2015 - The CRISIS Collaboration

Parallel Earths.  Alternate realities.  An infinite number of other dimensions. 

I’ve always been a fan of cross-overs.  Not only the type that serve as the basic building blocks for any shared universe, but also the ones that feature characters jumping from their universe into someone else’s.  A common staple of comic books and science-fiction, the intercontinuity crossover is the kind of place where you can find stories about characters like Hellboy, Doctor Strange, and John Constantine teaming up to fight the demonic hordes coming out of the Hellmouth that just opened up…beneath Riverdale.  (No, that’s not an actual published crossover.  But wouldn’t you read it if it was?)

The intercontinuity crossover is the premise behind the “Crisis on Infinite Baseplates” collaborative build taking place at this year’s Bricks Cascade (Mar 12–15 in Portland, OR).  Existing as a subtheme in the superheroes section, this is the ideal place to stage encounters between superheroes from one reality and supervillains from another. 

(I don’t care about questions like, “Who’s stronger: Superman or the Hulk?”.  And the sad, overbeaten-horse trope of, “Heroes meet for the first time and fight before realizing that they’re on the same side,” really has no place at my table.  So it’s going to be good guys vs. bad guys.) 

As befits the title of the thing, our basic unit of measurement is going to be the standard 10”, 32 stud baseplate.  One baseplate is the minimum MOC size for this collaboration.  If your MOC needs more room than that, you build on more than one baseplate.  Easy. 

Everything is minifig scale.  (Although in a genre that has gamma-irradiated monsters, galactic giants, and size-changers of all variety, not all of your characters have to be actual minifigs.  They just have to conform to that scale.) 

Also:  Each MOC must incorporate the use of an A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. Gate.  [A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. = Alternate Reality Transit Inter-Face and Interdimensional Convergence Engine.]  It’s how all of the people in this particular intercontinuity continuity travel between realities, and instructions to build one of these things can be found as the first ten images posted to the Crisis on Infinite Baseplates Flickr Group. 

Now get to building!  It’s less than eight weeks until the con! 

(Oh… Maybe I’d better get to building, too…)