Crafting a Hellboy Cinematic Universe

In another episode of the strange places my brain likes to go when I'm tired and bored, I struck upon the idea of building a "Cinematic Universe" where there previously was none. This isn't a new idea, look up the "Val Verde Cinematic Universe" if you're keen for some hardcore film-nerding, but why bother doing this at all, other than boredom? Well, for the same reasons I tend to run superhero RPGs in either my homebrew "Equalisers" setting or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Building the Equalisers setting took a long time, a great deal of effort and plenty of false-starts and retcons. I love my little homebrew setting, with its growing multiverse and generations of heroes and villains, but now it's getting to the point where if I want anyone to come play in my sandbox, I have to give them a heck of a lot of reading and even talk about the bits that only exist in my head. When I, instead, decided to run my MI-13 game in the MCU, all I had to do was say what film was our starting place, and we were in business. Of course, the ubiquity of the MCU was of great help there, but this isn't the only case where I've used multimedia to "prime" players for a game. 

One of my favourite roleplaying games is White Wolf's Hunter: The Reckoning, an oft-maligned side game in the World of Darkness setting, I love the struggle of humanity against much more powerful foes that already run the world behind the scenes. Unlike other World of Darkness games like Vampire, there isn't a great deal of popular media that informs Hunter, so I had to find some for myself. Getting players to read an entire book about their character's "Creed" is not always an easy task, but telling a potential Martyr to watch Fallen? Easy in. For me, unless my player group are all big comic nerds, choosing to set a Marvel game in the MCU is pretty easy, and if I were inclined to do a DC game, I'd be looking at the animated "Timmverse" for my setting. However, what if I want to go a little bit darker? Look, I like Hellboy comics, but their episodic and mood-focused nature means that there isn't a great deal of character development, something I live for in my media. That's why I'm such a fan of the films, they take the unique aesthetic and build more rounded characters to populate the world, and it's a shame that we never got more in the same series. But could there be more films out there that fit the setting? Is there an undiscovered "Hellboy Cinematic Universe"? 

Ok, first two are easy, Hellboy and Hellboy II The Golden Army form the core of our franchise, introducing that the setting is open to all sorts of fun stuff like Pulp Nazis, magic, hell, heaven, Lovecraft mythos, fae, super-science, ghosts, cryptids, psychic powers and more. Throwing in some of Guillermo del Toro's other works, like Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water is pretty easy, with fae being established already and surely the FBI (or whoever) are jealous enough of the BPRD to capture their own version of Abe Sapien. Now let's have some fun with an obscure Michael Mann gem from 1983, The Keep; in which Nazi soldiers accidentally awaken an ancient monster hidden in cyclopian architecture. Keeping on that theme, Dagon (2001) is patchy in quality, but is one of the better adaptations of the Lovecraft mythos with a modern twist. There aren't a lot of great fae films out there, but doesn't Firestarter (1984) read like an origin for Liz Sherman? Sure, it's not a brilliant film, but might be worth a look anyway. Last one is another obscure gem, Below (2002) features a WWII submarine crew dealing with a haunting and the paranoia that an enclosed space can bring. 

Is this an exhaustive list? Hell no. For starters, there were animated shorts that came out with the Hellboy film and used the same actors for the voices, but how about viewing Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) as an origin film for Rasputin, especially with the brilliant performance of Tom Baker as the Mad Monk. At a certain point, presenting your players with a stack of DVDs is going to be just as daunting as a stack of books, but having a grounding to work from can really help, and is a great excuse to check out new films and television. I also run the Doctor Who RPG and there's so much content there that I know I'll never get through it all, so why not chuck a few extra films at your players? I still wish there was more Hellboy, but when I watch The Keep and Below and wonder what else could have been, it dulls that want a little. Just the exercise of seeing how unrelated media can fit together can be fun as well, looking for connective tissue, characters and even actors that cross over if you squint at it just right.