So a Doomed, a Delinquent and a Transformed walk into a bar – Actual Play Report
So yesterday we played Masks.
Meet the Heroes:
Ladybug: Touched an Egyptian bug artifact her archeologist father discovered and was transformed into a bug monster. Chitin place, multiple arms, mandibles and bug eyes. Super strong though and armored to the hilt. She ran away from home but decided to become a hero when she saw a burning factory (or chem. plant? can’t remember…) and went in to safe innocents.
Played by Anne W
Echo: Was on her way to prom when she was zapped with cosmic powers and became the guardian of a portal to other (evil) dimensions. She and Ladybug were actually neighboors before one of their families moved away. They met during that fire. The connection to the portal allows Echo to summon echoes of monsters from these worlds.
Played by Sascha Müller
Kid Kool: Is a mix between Mr. Terrific, Static and a Punk. He has technopathy and transform into lightning to teleport. He really wants to be a hero but do it in his own way. The most important thing: everything needs to AWESOME!
Played by David Reichgeld
The team really came together when they fought Dr. Darkness against the direct wishes of the Fantastic 8 for no one to engage him. They came out triumphant but it destroyed the cities power grid for about a week and smashed a statue of the major. Therefore Major Jim Chun and media mogul Amret Al’Habir really are not their fans.
Other history elements are that Kid Kool really wants to make Ladybug feel better. „Chitin is so awesome!“ and all that. Echo however wants to kiss KK before her doom comes but of course she couldn’t just tell him.
We start at the Halcyon City Zoo with a picture of super cute atlantean creatures. Think Koala meets Pinguin in pink and purple. They are however about to be stolen/liberated by Cygnus (just too cute and awesome not to use in a one-shot). She was a teammate of the others for about a week before disappearing. Turns out she is a villain now, screaming about animals needing to be free and all that. Mostly for the cameras.
We roll for the enter a fight as a team move and there is some confusion because they are not really a „team leader“ kinda team. The roll gets failed and I put Echo and Ladybug directly into the lions den.
Ladybug throws Echo out of cage and gets pummeled by lions who are not really dangerous to her armor but man, it is not nice. Echo tries to engage the flying Cygnus, fails and C. tricks her. Flying past her and pulling her robe over her head making Echo tumble down.
KK gets back on his feet and teleports behind Cygnus to grapple her down. C knows that trick from their fight against G-List villain The Sparrow and so she blasts him with sonic and Kid Kool falls down, directly towards a hot-dog stand.
Ladybug however monsters out, throws the lions off her but scares onlookers and bad tweets about her go out, reaching from „Superhero attacks innocent animals #peta“ to „Monster loose in Halycron Zoo“. Ladybug isn’t happy of course.
KK slows his fall by using his (totally not T-Spheres) Spheres he has orbiting around himself to slow his fall and is successful. Meanwhile Cygnus has nearly escaped with two of the atlantean creatures. KK however hacks her phone and sends her a text that she is right and he wants to team up with her (or something like that) and in the process access some of her texts and learns that her agent convinced her to become a villain because that would be way better for publicity.
Cygnus turns around, unsure what to do and Echo sends out a giant creature to catch her and bring her to the teams hideout (where the portal is).
Page turns to the team in the hideout. The atleantean creatures are running around and the team is eating hot dogs while Cygnus is cuffed. That is my chance to ask the transformed if she actually still can eat normally. Making her feel like a monster and all. Turns out she was vegetarian before but now can only eat flesh. The rawer the better, often with bones or bits of fur still on it. Making her feel like a monster accomplished. This was however the player herself providing that so huge props to her!
The interrogate Cygnus who tells them of her plan to be a villain. When you screw up as a hero you are a public menace and a problem. When you screw up as a villain it is kinda what you do anyway. She also mentions wanting to do stuff that is still fair and not really hurting anyone (like robbing bangs) because the other stuff is just wrong. To demonstrate the team puts on the TV and it paints them in a very bad light. Showing Kid Kool and Echo screwing up in a very comical way, showing Ladybug as a monster that scares people and attacks poor lions. Cygnus however is shown cool and competent.
This is the moment we see if their accept this massage or reject the influence. At this moment I feel like giving them +1 forward against that news anchor would be lame and tell them to take +1 forward against “The Media” as an adult. I feel like this is the way to go for things like that. Treat the media as one character and give it maybe 2 extra faces they can interact with as extra characters. That is not supported by the book sheets but I feel like that is a good thing to do. Opinions on that?
The team then makes a plan of auditioning for her Agent to meet some real super villains and put them away for good.
End of issue 1 and we do the end of session move and take a short break.
Issue 2 later today.
For my players, feel free to add further things!
That is super cool and I think some things you brought up are pure genius. “superhero attacks innocent animals #peta” is the best.
Alberto Muti I agree! Looking forward to more!
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Issue #2
We start with the team in a waiting room. It looks like they are there for a casting. KK tried to convince them all to get Black Trenchcoat to look more villainy and Echo nearly snapped since her costume is part of her role. She can’t ever wear normal clothes again, making her feel very inhuman. She is called in first to “audition”.
I wanted to have a scene with each of them being judged to have an opportunity to make playbook specific moves at them. Maybe I should have framed that harder or communicated more clearly what I wanted.
Alas…
So Echo enters a dark room with a centre headlight and hears a voice coming from the darkness. Apparently she has potential but should demonstrate some of her power. She sends an echo-fish-monster at the agent’s face and he is revealed to be a tall, black man in a nice suit. Behind thick security glass.
At that moment Ladybug and Kid Kool burst into the room, afraid they would brainwash (or worse) Echo.
The Agent immediately talks down Ladybug that ugly villains don’t get any press and that he would give her the number of a henchman-guy he knows to maybe help her out. She rejects his influence and gets angry.
Time to smash through the glass. She uses the Be a Monster moves and makes him flee as she smashes through the glass. Before he flees he activates the gun turrets though.
Kid Kool quickly hacks them and redirects their fire forwards the door the agent just escaped through to shoot it to pieces.
In the smashing of the glass Echo gets hit with glass shards though (no mechanical effect there yet) but as Ladybug makes her way through the gunfire (that is still aimed at the doorway) some of the bullets ricochet at Echo. She takes a powerful blow but rolls well enough to not have any effect.
Our Transformed follows him through multiple offices until the end of the building where the Agent jumps through a glass window that doesn’t get destroyed because the glass shards bond to his body like armor.
(In my head this is “flexible glass” in a city of super hero fights big glass fassades get destroyed all the time. Therefore some super genius developed glass that can reform itself into a window after getting shattered. The agent has hacked the glass in his building and is wearing a vest that provides an anchor to it. I came up with this a moment later as you will see)
So he jumps through the window and lands on the next building’s roof. Ladybug jumps after him, wanting to smash him when she lands but he easily dodges and taunts her that his sunglasses are recording the hwole thing.
Echo arrives at the smashed window and uses her newly acquired Nova Burn but fails and takes conditions. She is about to have a meltdown as KK arrives and looks around for something that could calm her down. In that moment he gets lifeted by Echo’S power as she throws KK across to the next roof where the action is.
The Agent releases his glass armor and the window shards fly back to their regular position. (that is when I had the idea) but KK is in the way and would be hit directly. Ladybug jumps up to throw him out of the way. The glass shatters against her armor and that doesn’t really hurt her but the force of the impact throws her across the roof and into some hanging laundry, getting her another condition as she is embarrassed.
The whole thing seems pointless to the Agent and he is about to leave the roof through the nearest roof access (I love a villain just going “I can’t deal with your antics; I am out). But KK uses his Trick move to keep him there for a moment longer (can’t remember exactly how) and he gives them a short moment more. He has a helicopter coming to pick him up anyway.
KK then hacks the Helicopter controls and makes it crash against the building. The Agent becomes Hopeless and I look at the move list. “Burn the world down”. mh
There is helicopter fuel leaking from the crash and he pulls out his zippo.
Echo manages to catch the zippo last minute with her telekinesis.
Ladybug ruches him to “hug” him. She manages to take his phone away, smother him unconscious but his vest activates, delivering a strong electric blast to her before she can crush the vest too.
Then we cut to the team in their hideout celebrating and we trigger the corresponding moves. They are watching the news that shows them in a much more favorable light for once.
End of the issue.
Stay tuned for a few more thoughts about mechanical stuff and whatever else I can think of.
Thank you for reading.
That’s awesome, Tim Franzke!
I definitely think something I wanted to bring up in the book was treating larger entities as single units sometimes—the media could have Influence over you, and a specific reporter could have Influence over you. So rejecting the Influence of the media and taking +1 forward against them sounds perfect to me!
I’m on track. Awesome.