Masks Actual Play Report

Masks Actual Play Report

All right folks, tuck in for a long one! So, I ran  my first one-shot of #MasksRPG over Hangouts this  evening. Am planning on running another game  tomorrow, though that game will be unrelated. Ah, also I believe this qualifies as mission progress for the #HalcyonJailbreak as well!

The Prep

Following the advice in the GM materials, I  prepared a villain, as well as a situation for the  heroes to be stuck in with said villain. I had  envisioned a bronze-age ideological cape-hunter  type, who had no powers and wanted to wipe supers  off the face of the planet. Think Amon from Legend  of Korra, with a bit of Deathstroke thrown in. Mind  games, lots of physicality, meeting the opposition  with overwhelming force, that kind of thing. I had  two names (one for backup, to alleviate improv  panic if one of the PCs picked the name I had in  mind as their hero’s name): Sawtooth, and  Razorback. The situation I had in mind was that  they would have kidnapped someone close to one of  the heroes. I had intended to ask a few questions  of the heroes:

1) Who was kidnapped?

2) Where are they being held?

3) Which of you specifically are they calling out?

It turned out that I only needed to ask the first,  as the background and “when our team first came  together” questions provided very natural answers  to the other two. They also provided a name for the  villain, and a bunch of other fleshing-out  information, but we’ll get to that in a minute.  First, let’s set the scene so you know who the PCs  are.

The Cast

Diego “Shiver” Salazar, The Legacy

Shiver, lightning-fast manipulator of vibrations  who can put himself or matter out of phase with the  surrounding environment, is the latest in a proud  and broken line. The Shivers are not world- renowned, but their identities are not secret;  Diego’s grandmother is still very active in the  world of villain-busting, though his father retired  several years ago after a fight with a supervillain  left him crippled. His niece Sandra, probable next  in the line, is in middle school and has yet to  awaken to her powers. Diego’s upbringing left him  with little choice but to become a superhero–and  also left him with three generations of enemies.

Axel “Black Fox” Katakana, The Protege

Black Fox, gadgeteer genius and highly trained  martial artist, is learning to be a hero from a  mentor who doesn’t respect his skills. Like many  recent graduates from Halcyon City high schools,  Axel joined up with a loose group of locals who  claimed they wanted to fight crime–but unlike Axel,  they didn’t take the responsibility seriously.  Enter Red Jackal, old and power-suited superhero  who took Axel under his wing. Red Jackal believes  that for people like the two of them, with no  powers, the only way to survive and get the job  done is to suit up in the heaviest, most advanced  power armor they can build–while Black Fox takes a  more streamlined approach, to let his martial  talents carry him through. It’s a source of  tension, leading to a lot of angry lectures–but for  the moment, Red Jackal continues to train him, and  even supports his new team with comms and other  equipment. It’s better than letting Axel go off on  his own and get himself killed, right?

Jackie “Freefall” Palmer, The Janus

Jackie just wants to live a normal life, graduate  high school and get a degree–and Freefall, absorber  of energy and defyer of gravity, is the mantel she  wears to vent her anger and frustration at the  problems she faces. It’s the only outlet she has,  but it also puts her deeply at odds with her  family, as her mother’s sister was accidentally  killed by a superhero named Titan several years  ago. Suffice to say, her oft-unemployed mother  hates supers–and every time a news report comes on  the screen about another city block leveled in the  fights they have, it pushes her one more step  towards packing the family up and moving them out  of Halcyon.

Marc “Coil” Sumner

Coil, barely-contained channel for electricity and  magnetic forces, comes from a broken home. His  mother died at a young age, and his father crawled  into the bottle soon after, only coming up to  physically abuse his children. Coil’s powers first  awakened when he had a dream of rescuing his sister  from their father–but when he attacked his father  in the dream, in reality he attacked his sister.  She survived, and soon after both of them were  taken into the foster system and away from their  father, but the scars run deep for both of them.  Coil feels he has no choice but to be a superhero,  believing that he must exercise his powers if he  ever wishes to control them so that he can avoid  hurting anyone else–and finding a team of people he  can trust to keep his head on straight is a  blessing.

Quite a fascinating team! Made even more so in…

Character Questions

I won’t go through question by question with these,  but I will go through some of the major highlights.  The players were all really on board with  reincorporating fiction, conservations of NPCs and  the like. Shiver and Black Fox in particular gave  me an open invitation on the villain front; when I  asked who the Shiver line’s old nemesis was, he  just gave me the name Talisman and said he didn’t  have any more than that. Bingo! Villain’s name  became Talisman. Black Fox was of course asked who  outside the team knew about his training, and he  answered that it was “whoever is going to cause  trouble for us this evening.” Fistbump for that  one, friend.

Side-note: before play, I was a little shaky on how  it would play out to have both a Protege and Legacy  in the same team, since they have similar schticks.  They are very different, though; I just couldn’t  really see it until I saw the players build them.  The Legacy is all about the line; they have the  responsibility that comes with it, and the support  that a collective of people who know what they’re  going through can provide. The Protege, though,  they’re not family; they’re an apprentice, and it’s  a very personal relationship. I guess I’d say that  the Protege has a relationship with a person, while  the Legacy has a relationship with… well, a  legacy. Well-named!

Anyway, a few other highlights:

The person who could help Coil keep a rein on his  powers was Professor Mark Jackson–also known as Red  Jackal.

Coil’s and Freefall’s sisters go to the same class  in Hillcrest Middle School. They hang out together  because they’re both named Alex. There may or may  not be 41 different Alexes attending that school  due to a probability-manipulating supervillain and  a prophecy about someone bearing that name being of  great importance; where’s the canon-line for table  chatter, again? 😉

Hillcrest was also the school that Black Fox  attended; his “Bush league superhero group” was  called the Hillcrest Falcons. In this version of  Halcyon City, starting a superhero group is kind of  like starting a band: a lot of people do it,  especially right out of high school, but most don’t  really take it seriously or stick with it  (especially if they don’t have the talent for it).

We also discovered that Hillcrest’s principal (who  I am ashamed to admit I did not record the name of)  is fighting to keep the school open; with all the  superpowered fights in the neighborhood, a lot of  parents and authorities are pushing to move schools  out of the inner city and into the suburbs, which  of course would be terrible for the poorer kids who  would have to take a 45 minute bus ride out of the  city to get to school every day. It was really  cool, I thought, to see superheroes set up as a  symptom of urban decay–especially with that  band/deliquency element we’d already set up.

This was especially cool and dramatic since the  school was kind of a hub and a safe place for most  of the PCs–and because their own actions as  superheroes were contributing to the kind of  neighborhood rep that could lead to it being  closed. Especially considering how the team first  got together: they fought an enigmatic villain  known as The Collector, a time-traveling serial  kidnapper who commanded an army of spider-drones [1], abducting people for reasons only she can  fathom. They fought her in a subway station, and  ended up overloading the entire power grid for  eight city blocks in order to stop the train  carrying her latest target; it took the city over a  week to repair all the damaged fuse boxes. On the  other hand, they did attract the approval of a  public works superhero named Foundation, who  approved of damaging property rather than people  (especially since he gets paid to repair the  former). It’s the kind of endorsement that you  don’t really want if you don’t want people thinking  you’re dangerous, really.

There were a few other revelations that popped up  during play and tied into the backstory questions  as well, but let’s answer those in…

The Session

Rather than starting in media res, as the GM  materials suggest, I started the PCs very briefly  in a mundane situation; I wanted to show the PCs  non-super life a bit, and to show Talisman as an  invader and threat to that life. To keep the  pressure on, though, I opened up the session by  asking “So, what were you doing twenty minutes  ago?”

Not sure if this was the best way to go about it,  but it put a very tight time limit on things and  kept the game from devolving into a planning coma,  which was the aim.

They answered that they were “celebrating their  one-month anniversary as a superhero team.” There  was some half-joking about who was actually old  enough to buy alcohol, and trying to talk Professor  Jackson into buying them some to celebrate, which  became canon and ended up with them spending the  evening cleaning up the shop in penance for asking  such a thing.

They then receieved a call on their comms, as  someone had hacked in–Talisman, asking if he was  speaking to “Shiver Junior.” Shiver recognized the  voice immediately; his family had fought this man  countless times, and he’d watched over a dozen  videos of those encounters. Tech-savvy Black Fox  muted his mic immediately so they could talk, and  the team followed suit–though not before Shiver let  out a torrent of swearing that confirmed his  identity to Talisman.

Before Shiver could share more than Talisman’s  name, though[2], the villain stated that he knew  Shiver was listening, and that he knew Shiver had  made some friends in the last few weeks and they  were likely listening as well. Shiver came back  with a taunt, asking Talisman if he was just  calling to see what having friends was like;  Talisman answered that he didn’t need friends in  his line of work, and that he didn’t need Shiver  either–but that both of them were going to be  unhappy this evening, because if Shiver and his  friends didn’t show up at the place where they met,  then there was going to be trouble.

Shiver then taunted again, asking if Talisman was  actually going to show his face instead of keeping  in hiding. Talisman answered maybe yes, maybe no,  but there was one voice that Shiver would see if  he came down to the subway station.

Shiver’s blood ran cold, and I asked him who it was  that had been kidnapped. I also opened up the  question to the other PCs, since Shiver had been in  the spotlight for a while. Table consensus ended up  with Shiver’s niece Sandra being the victim–made  the most sense, since she would likely be a new  Shiver eventually. Shiver originally suggested  Melissa, a girl at the middle school whom he  believed was Freefall’s secred identity–but  Freefall stated that would kind of eliminate the  mystery too quick, and Shiver agreed.

Meanwhile, Black Fox was working to scramble their  comms and eject Talisman so they could speak  safely. Shiver tried to get inside Talisman’s head  with some questions (Pierce the Mask), and Talisman  was more than candid about his intentions: if the  team didn’t come and rescue Sandra, she would die,  and if they did come to rescue Sandra, he would  kill them instead. His last words before Black Fox  cut him off were “You have twenty minutes.”

Just before we cut forward, an amusing moment  happened: Coil stated that he was smashing his hand  into the shop’s fusebox to drain the electrity and  charge his power, but he didn’t actually roll for  it until we prompted him to. The player was so into  the fiction and the character’s headspace that he  did the perfect setup for a move without even  realizing it! Good stuff.

So the team takes their vehicles (The team has one,  and Coil has one; Coil rides on his own because he  rolled poorly on charging his power and kinda needs  to vent), and heads to the subway station. Along  the way, Black Fox grills Shiver about Talisman,  and we discover pretty much what we’ve outlined  above. We also discover the source of his name, and  that he has a dual nature of his own; Shiver’s  player said he thought it would be cool if his  family knew a secret about Talisman, so I said yeah  that’s awesome and asked him what it was. So far as  most of the world is concerned, Talisman is this  mundanes-first cape-killer and that’s it. But the  Shivers have fought him for long enough to know  that he takes trophies from every super that he  kills; he has a sadistic, prideful streak, not just  an ideological one. They keep this a secret because  it’s shameful to them; Shiver’s father was crippled  in a fight with Talisman, and the latter took a  souvenir from him (though we didn’t establish what  it was).

So the team arrives at the station and cautiously  enters. Black Fox sticks close to the entrance at  first, Assessing the Situation. I tell him for  free that the subway station is suspiciously empty,  and he discovers a few things on top of that:  Sandra is hung from the ceiling by a high-strength  cable, just over the electrified third rail. The  cable is held in place by some kind of remote  device, so that Talisman can trigger it and drop  her to be fried. The fuseboxes the team fried a  month ago have been replaced, should the need  arise. When Sandra sees Shiver, she calls out to  warn him that this is a trap.

The question is then asked if they are entering a  battle against a dangerous foe as a team, to which  I answer that there needs to be a dangerous foe for  that to be the case–and, before they get too  comfortable, follow it up by giving them one, in  the form of Talisman’s sniper fire smashing into  the wall next to them. When Black Fox rolls as the  team leader, he rolls a miss, and I decide to  capture someone; the single fire is turned into  automatic fire, driving the team into the tunnel  and cutting them off from the outside world. The  fight is on!

Coil is eager to leap into the fray, and sprints  down the railway shooting lightning at Talisman’s  muzzle flashes (clearing Insecure by enacting a  terrible plan). As Coil’s lightning arcs down the  tunnel, striking the weapon’s barrel, the bullets  in the magazine cook off; this throws off the  gunman’s aim, but a round still wings Coil, causing  his powers to go into overload. The lightning arcs  out, powering up the tunnel’s arc lamps and  revealing Talisman’s location to the rest of the  team. Talisman’s weapon is melted into slag, so he  drops it and pulls out a small remote, declaring  that he’s been fighting capes for decades and isn’t  about to be taken out by something like that. He  triggers the remote, and dozens of places along the  walls and ceiling of the tunnel shimmer as optical  camouflage is dropped, revealing that the station  is wired with mines.[3]

Meanwhile, Shiver focused on rescuing Sandra, and  attempted to phase past the mines and up to her. He  rolls a miss on unleashing his powers, and I  decide to compare him to the past. He gets  through the mines and up to Sandra just fine, but  when he touches the cable he feels himself snatched  back into phase; the cable is coated with a  material that Shiver established during play as  being a weakness of his. Of course, Talisman has  fought Shivers in the past and knew all about this;  the material absorbs and redirects Shiver’s  vibrational energy, temporarily nullifying his  powers–and on top of that, he’s now stuck to the  cable with Sandra. She did tell him that this was  a trap!

(Although I had no idea the cable was booby-trapped  until he rolled the miss, of course)

Before Talisman can take advantage and drop them  both to be fried, though, Freefall leaps into  action–literally! She’s got the strength to snap  the cable, and gravity is basically an option for  her, so she leaps up to grab the Salazars. She  also, however, rolls a miss on Unleash, so I  choose to endanger someone from either life (the  super one, in this case); she snaps the cable and  pulls the pair free, but underestimates her own  strength, and the three of them land right on a  mine!

I’m feeling generous, so Freefall gets to take the  powerful blow for all three of them. Naturally,  she rolls high, and chooses to lose control of  herself or her powers in a terrible way. Her  biggest power is absorbing and redirecting energy  [4], so after a bit of chatter we decide that she  reflects the blast backwards and outwards, setting  off all the mines on their half of the tunnel. I  don’t hit anyone with another powerful blow after  that, but half the tunnel is collapsed at this  point and things are looking a bit grim.

We then cut to Black Fox, and see that he’s Been  Reading the Files on Talisman in addition to his  chatter with Shiver. He rolls well, and we discover  that the last time he was defeated it was because  the Shivers invited outside help from another  super. I ask Shiver who it was–and we discover that  it was Titan, the super who accidenally killed  Freefall’s aunt. This was also the fight in which  Shiver’s father was taken out of commission, so  there was a lot of fallout and collateral damage on  that day. Talisman is also missing some badge of  honor or trophy that he used to wear on his armor  before that fight, and I ask Black Fox what it was;  we struggle with this question, and finally settle  on a very honorable medal from a foreign country.

As his anything-goes question, he asks if there’s  any sign of how Talisman hacked into their comms. I  answer that he sees one of the Collector’s wrecked  drones hanging from his equipment belt. Leftover  from their fight with her? Equipment from a future  version of the Collector who knew their weaknesses?  Questions for later, were this a longer game…

For this game, though, Black Fox sees the missing  medal as an opportunity to get under Talisman’s  skin, and he takes it. He provokes Talisman,  asking him when he stopped collecting trophies and  started collecting school kids, and telling him to  step out of the shadows and face him one on one. He  rolls a 6, but Freefall assists by adding in taunts  of her own, taking one out of the Teamwork pool to  bump it up to a 7. I actually miss that I’m  supposed to be the one to choose an option, and  Black Fox states that Talisman overreacts.

Naturally, Talisman follows through on this  overreaction and draws his sidearm, stepping out of  the shadows and down the track, firing off a  barrage of bullets at Black Fox[5]. He snaps out a  pair of metal tonfas from his armored arms and  blocks a few of the bullets–but he rolls a miss to  unleash his powers, so I elect to endanger his  mentor. After a few blocks, Talisman’s ricochets  actually start bouncing off of the tonfas and  hitting Black Fox’s body; he stops his firing and  states that he thought Black Fox’s style seemed  familiar. “You were trained by Red Jackal, weren’t  you?”

Before this menace can go anywhere, though, Coil  spends the last of his Burn to get a 10+ on  unleashing his powers, electing to magnetize the  third rail–which, thanks to Black Fox and  Freefall’s taunting, Talisman is now standing over.  Talisman is lifted off the ground by all the metal  in his equipment, and fired back through the tunnel  and out of sight, as if the tunnel were a rail gun  and he was the bullet.

The team, battered and beaten, takes the  opportunity to collect Sandra and retreat before he  returns, and everyone makes it home safely. But  not, of course, soundly.

In the aftermath, the Halcyon Evening News declares  “Subway Super-Smashers Strike Again!” As Jackie  “Freefall” Palmer watches on with her family, her  mother shakes her head in fear and worry–doubly so,  since Sandra goes to Jackie’s school. She looks at  her daughters, terrified that it could have been  either one of them, and mutters under her breath  about leaving this city. If only she could find a  job that paid enough…

Meanwhile, Diego “Shiver” Salazar is called onto  the carpet by his furious grandmother. Sandra was  in danger, kidnapped by Talisman, and his answer  was to run off and rescue her without calling in  the rest of the family? Previous talk about a  special training regimen at her super-base is  suspended; clearly, he’s gotten too attached to  this new team of his and it’s gotten foolish ideas  into his head. He’s going back to the basics…

Back at the tech school, Axel “Black Fox” Katakana  delivers his after-action report to a quietly  judgmental Professor Mark “Red Jackal” Jackson[6].  Between the damaged armor, the half-demolished  subway and everything else that went down, the  Professor asks how much simpler this would have  been if Black Fox had just been armored like a  tank, so he could walk right up to the gunman and  take him out without worrying about the gunfire.  Considering Talisman now knows they have a  connection and got away with that knowledge, maybe  he has a point…

Coil, lastly, has the closest among them to a quiet  night. His foster father was delayed by the subway  disaster, and he has a lot of time to himself to  think–about how hard he pushed himself and his  powers, how close he came to the edge. He was the  one who finally got them out of there, but if any  of the rest of the team hadn’t been there to do  their part things might have gone down very  differently. It’s a chilling thought…

The Wrap-Up, and Closing Thoughts

After those brief epilogue scenes, which were just  narrated and not played out as we were running long  on time, we did roses and thorns. The only critique  is down below; apart from that, the system and the  group played together really well. I loved so much  how everyone’s stories tied in together, and how we  were able to reincorporate… pretty much  everything, at least once.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure how this would  turn out; I was just kind of stepping up to run  because nobody else seemed especially keen to. But  this was the most fun I’ve had running somethign in  a long time, and I’m really looking forward to  tomorrow’s session!

Specific, brief thoughts of my own:

~I’m glad to see that the power sections of a  couple of playbooks have been loosened up in V2.  The Protege in particular feels very Bull-like, and  I mean that in a very good way.

~Brian Poe’s advice to push conditions on every  hard move was very helpful. I started off every  hard move with “first, take a condition. Also…”  and it kept everything really tense.

~Unleash Your Powers is a lot like Defy Danger, in  that it gets defaulted to a lot.

~This didn’t come up so much, but I really like  that you can’t actually get taken out of the fight  unless you choose to be. You can always choose a  different option when you Take a Powerful Blow.  This didn’t really click for me until play, but I  totally see how that move plays with the Nova: the  Nova loves having conditions for their powers,  which means that if they want to stay in the fight  they’re going to be causing collateral damage all  the time when they take a powerful blow. Which is  what the Nova is meant to struggle with. Damn,  that’s so cool!

~Towards the end, we actually had Shiver Take a  Powerful Blow from Freefall lashing out at him to  clear one of her conditions (this was during their  retreat). It was a powerful emotional blow,  because he was looking bad in front of his niece.  Cool that the move can work like that!

I feel like I may have had further thoughts, but  I’ve been typing away for a while and have  forgotten them. I also need to get some sleep. So!  I will turn this over to you, and if any of my  players have anything to add, please feel free!

[1]It was very amusing to me that we had the one  thing that GMs hate most (time travel) and the one  thing that players hate most (spiders) in the same  character. 😛

[2]The question came up of whether or not Been  Reading the Files would trigger here. I ruled not  in this case, as a voice on a phone doesn’t give  much leeway to say what’s different about them, and  because they would probably have more fun in the  in-person encounter they were going to flash- forward to shortly.

[3]This was a bit complicated in-play. Coil of  course cleared his condition, and then Directly  Engaged with Talisman. He only got a 7, and  decided to create an opportunity for the team. He  was taking a powerful blow, so I had him roll for  that as well before narrating the outcome; he gave  ground, so Talisman also got an opportunity. The  positive opportunity was the lighting; the negative  opportunity was that Coil stopped halfway down the  tunnel, wide open for another attack. Talisman took  the Angry condition, so he escalated the situation  dangerously by revealing the mines; reveal a trap  already in place was also one of his villain  moves, so that dovetailed nicely. In the roses- and-thorns, the biggest critique I got was that I  got bogged down in rolling for all the moves before  narrating, and that it would have been better to do  mini-narration for each roll to keep things going.  The buzz-phrase we came up with was “one move per  panel, not a bunch of moves in a splash page,” or  something to that effect. I also tend to over- narrate moves in general, which I think was a  lesser problem for the rest of the encounter.

[4]I briefly considered saying that Freefall  nullified all kinetic energy in the tunnel,  freezing the team in place. This was of course a  terrible idea, since it would have just kept people  from doing things instead of driving interesting  fiction, so I smarted up and didn’t do that.

[5]I was briefly thrown off my game here, as there  is no obvious “Defy Danger/Act Under Fire” style  move in Masks. I could’ve just said that he is hit  and Takes a Powerful Blow, but that didn’t seem  quite right, and he wasn’t fighting back so it  wasn’t Directly Engage either. So we defaulted to  Unleash Your Powers (which happened a lot over the  course of the game). Jonathan, Black Fox’s player,  explained that it’s kind of a case of stating  what’s happening and asking how the PC reacts–which  is how PbtA works anyway, it just threw me for a  loop that there was what felt like a big gap in the  basic moves compared to other PbtA games. It worked  out, but it took a bit to wrap my head around it.

[6]One observation from Jonathan here is that there  isn’t really a ‘reporting to your mentor’ style  move in the playbook. On review, I suppose Fireside  Chat is pretty close, but: bringing it up anyway,  since it was mentioned.

Magpie Games