On History: FF Compendium

Back in the 1980s, the Marvel role-playing game from TSR provided a wealth of information about the various Marvel superheroes and the universe they inhabited. TSR seemed to worked relatively closely with Marvel, and did a pretty good job updating information based on the current stories being told at that time. What's more, in some cases, they were allowed to expand upon what was presented in the comics. While this wasn't done very often with the characters themselves -- as much of their information had already been fairly well-documented, mostly by Mark Gruenwald -- some of the seemingly tangential elements were left up to the writers with TSR.

One case I found particularly notable was the Fantastic Four's headquarters. While the original Baxter Building had been detailed pretty well in the comics, their (then) new base of 4 Freedoms Plaza had not. David E. Martin expanded on that greatly in the Fantastic Four Compendium, using his background in architecture, but much of his original text didn't ultimately make it into the book. However, years later, he returned to the idea and "re-published" the Compendium in digital form with the updated information. In the process, he also included the initial draft of an adventure in the book, which had been cut early on for space reasons.

I had talked a bit with Martin a little over a decade ago when I was running my Fantastic Four fan site, and got a copy of the updated book in PDF form. (Thanks, in part, to the now-defunct Zan's Super Home site.) I dug up a copy of that updated Compendium and thought I would share it here as a snapshot of what Marvel fans were using as secondary source materials back when I was a kid.

Download the updated Fantastic Four Compendium here.

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