Some questions about AE

As far as I know, all outdoor maps lack front/middle/back structure, so all details are placed randomly.

Most likely because they don't have enough friendly and/or enemy spawn points to accomodate all the details you've added. Remove details to fit the map you want, or pick a map with more of the spawn point you need.

I'd steer clear of any published by Marvel or DC.

IP rightsholders are always looking to evergreen their rights, with or without any basis in the law. If the copyright's expired, claim the trademark; if the trademark's not applicable, claim a similar trademark; etc., etc. And if all else fails, just pretend and tell everyone the rights are still valid, and people will listen because, win or lose, federal lawsuits are expensive.

If someone sends you a list of characters they'd possibly sue over, like the lists Marvel and DC sent NC back in 2004, you don't take chances with that, do you? You don't go and research each and every name on that list for legal validity, and risk a costly court battle. It's so much easier to generic and delete players. Players don't have lawyers. (And never mind that this CYA strategy failed when Marvel sued NC anyway.)

So, which characters are on the lists? Try plugging the name "Wolverine" or "Batman" into character creation, then plug the name of the public domain hero you're interested in into character creation, and see if you get the same result.

Adding a note to your arc that the characters are public domain may help. GMs rely on player reports to enforce third party rights (or pretend-rights), so informed players should be less likely to report you.

Set the surrounding enemy spawn size to "Single". Pretend it says "None," since that would make more sense. No enemies will spawn around the ally, the ally will count as rescued as soon as he spawns (this may result in unintended behavior, so playtest it), then will begin following the first player to get next to him.

Under US copyright law anything published before 1923 is public domain. Things after that might be in the public domain if the copyright holder allowed the copyright to lapse or intentionally released it into the public domain. Since that's a very tricky area, you'd be best off avoiding anything you find on some website that claims to be public domain that was copyrighted after 1923.

There's no reason to use copyrighted/trademarked characters anyway. Make something new and interesting instead of recycling someone else's creations!

Is that list published anywhere? Because there are some pretty obscure characters in both companies that if not on the list, most people won't remember...for example, the 3D Man from Marvel.

I would love to see that list.

ALSO:
Is there a place to check for expired copyright-trademarks? 15 years ago I worked in the comics field for independent companies, and one of them went out of business. I would love to see if all of those characters are still held.

Yes.

It is permitted until a GM decides it's not. You can argue trademark/copyright law all you want, in the end it's their game and they'll err on the side of caution more often than not. Homage characters should be ok as long as they're not too blatant.

Because their usage, even as the bad guys, might offend people. This is a pretendy funtime game where offending people should be avoided, hence the 5th are never directly referred to as Nazis in canon even though they obviously are.

Also, the stupid profanity filter is stupid, and won't let me use "Gunslingers" in a title because "slingers" cannot be used as part of a word in a title, even if said word is referring to an in-game enemy. I'm assuming this is because it's the name of a Marvel team and not some obscure profanity nobody has used since the 60s.

Because Reichsman is a giant sack of HP that requires a special temp power to defeat. Gyrfalcon was added, so it's not that the boss list hasn't been updated to include the TFs he appears in. It doesn't explain why the LRSF Ms Liberty is available.

I don't believe it is.

But I do know there are very obscure characters on the list. A character by the name of Veridiana got genericked because her name was similar to Veridium, a minor DC character she had never heard of.

And I suspect every name on the list is banned by the server if you try to create a player character or MA story arc title with that name. There was a board thread about "gambit" being banned from MA story arc titles some time ago. So if you're curious about a name, try it and see what happens.

Copyright expirations depend on authorship and jurisdiction. For works of corporate authorship in the United States, the term is currently a ludicrous 95 years from the year of publication, thanks to industry lobbyists goading nations into protectionist one-upsmanship -- they call it "harmonization". There is an exception for works that didn't carry a copyright notice during the old days when notices were required, and an exception for 1922 and earlier works that expired in a short window between the last two term extensions, but otherwise, this bloated, multiply-extended 95 year term is retroactive.

But again, beware, because trademarks never expire. And, as we've seen from Marvel v. NCSoft, comic publishers are quite happy to sue on the basis of both copyright and trademark, even if they have a losing case on the trademark end.

(Cliffs Notes version of Marvel v. NCSoft: Marvel sued saying players were infringing their trademarks and copyrights. Judge ruled that using Wolverine as a game avatar is a non-commercial use, non-commercial uses cannot be trademark infringements, and Marvel's trademark infringement claims were therefore dismissed. The separate copyright infringement claims were settled out of court, thank goodness, before going to a clueless jury brainwashed by misleading "FBI Warnings" on every movie they see.)