If you ever run into any tabletop game lovers who were big into games at a certain point, it’s

If you ever run into any tabletop game lovers who were big into games at a certain point, it’s an all but certain guarantee they’ll have a copy of the Breeder Bombs adventure module. And if you buy out collections, you’ll find this adventure as numerous as Topspin and Twin Twist jumpstarter figures are to Transformer toys. It’s as if this module can breed. I own three copies myself, just from picking it up from collections. 

Why was this adventure everywhere? Well, most of the TSR Marvel Superheroes game was about the “core marvel universe,” and at the time, that was not quite as popular as the X-Men. Or perhaps I should clarify: in the 1980s, the top selling Marvel hero was Spider Man on the spinner rack and newsstands, GI Joe, a rural favorite, was the top seller by subscription, but X-Men was the top seller to the fan audience through the new development of comic book stores. That audience of superfans had COLOSSAL overlap with people who were tabletop gamers. 

And this one was catnip to the superfan: it had both Magneto AND the Sentinels, perfect to get the “core X-Men experience,” and finally resolved a nerdy, nitpicky point of order that went unsolved in X-Men comics itself: what was the deal with the Magneto robot who employed Mesmero and captured Lorna Dane in Mutant City? This mystery went unsolved by the comics themselves for literally a decade and it wasn’t even resolved in X-Men comics proper, but by an offhand little clue in Byrne’s Captain America (much like how Nefaria’s lost Ani-Men mystery of Dragonfly went unsolved in X-Men but was instead resolved in Gruenwald’s Quasar run 15+ years later).