Brainstorming/Interest Check: Living Halcyon City
So, I was recently inducted into the Greybark Adventurers’ League, a living campaign setting for Dungeon World, and it seems pretty darn cool so far. The adventuring guild setup provides a fictional framework for characters to link up on the fly and create a big network of relationships, and the lore of the world is built up out of all these different sessions run by multiple GMs. There are also non-canon sessions for when people just want to play around without worrying about setting consistency. Like I said: cool stuff!
Naturally, this got me to thinking about how to do the same kind of thing in Masks. Luckily, the superhero genre provides a pretty close analogue to an adventurers’ guild in the form of larger super-teams. I’m thinking something along the lines of maybe my favorite supers cartoon, Justice League Unlimited, with a rotating cast of thematically disparate heroes working together to fight evil and work out their personal issues.
I think using a similar setup with Masks would work. Not sure how much NPC adult membership there should be, if any; that’s something to brainstorm, of course.
Other concerns also spring to mind, and I’d love to hear thoughts on how to handle them:
1) The biggest thing is that Masks is at its best when it’s focusing on the PCs’ inner and interpersonal lives, and keeping the focus there could be difficult with rotating players and GMs. In Dungeon World, it’s comparatively easy to set up a ‘mission,’ because a lot of the fun is exploring the world; throw in some monsters, magic and mystery and you can’t go too wrong. But if you spend every session of Masks just punching supervillains, you’re going to be missing a lot of the juicy parts.
Best thing I can think of for this is to advise GMs to include some social scenes in each mission, and to pepper the fights with personal touches. Also, naturally, take very good notes about each character, so other GMs know where everyone’s head space is at.
2) Masks has probably the most ridiculously in-depth group character generation I’ve ever seen–which is awesome, but doesn’t lend itself great to an unstable team roster. I’m thinking the initial setup can be done by a communal answering of the “how the team first came together” questions, and as new characters are introduced we can have them tell us how they became involved with the league by answering a few specific questions about their first mission, likely drawn from that same list. This will be a chance for them to either introduce new threats (that have been here the whole time, it’s just we haven’t dedicated an episode/issue to them yet!) or latch onto existing ones.
Similarly, whenever PCs meet for the first time we need to assess the Influence situation between them. Tracking Influence in general could be a lot of bookkeeping due to the larger number of characters–but then, you only need to worry about Influence for the characters present at a given session, so it shouldn’t be too bad.
That’s all I have for now. Any other concerns that I might have missed? Would anyone be interested in this kind of thing, as either player or GM or both? Share your thoughts below!
In Greybark, we had to really change some of the thinking on things. Bonds, world building and control of persistent elements. Those are some off the top of my head.
Looking at masks, I could see influence system being major area of concern. If cast is changing constantly then how do you handle this?
The team building I wouldnt even worry about. Instead its whoever was sitting around HQ to respond to whatever happened.
I think it could be an interesting setup though and wish you luck!
What about a kind of tiered structure? The characters in JLU tend to hang out in groups based on relationships based on backgrounds or common interests, with the big guns effectively serving as grown ups for everyone else. You may also be asking for a much more complicated system than the game is designed for though.
Hey James, I’m excited you’re enjoying Greybark! I think a continuing multi-GM game of Masks would be awesome!
I would be happy to help if you need advice.
Like Michael said, you have to tweak the character creation a bit, but it’s all solvable. Our Greybark community is always sort of in flux, we have weekly community meetings to iron out ideas and talk through problems, but it’s more of a process than just a final product.
We basically just got a bunch of interested players together and started a game. We fleshed out the world a bit, like you do in the first session of Dungeon World, and then we just talked through every problem as we came to it.
We’ve had to tweak bonds, alignment, duplicate playbooks in the same session, how much loot to distribute, and so many other things. But we just tackled each thing as it arose.
The best advice I can give is keep track of things as you go 🙂
Let me know if you’d like to chat at some point!
Thanks for the responses and kind words, everyone! It’s especially helpful to hear from the Greybark crowd, and I’ll likely be coming to you folks for advice if/when this thing takes off. Go to the experienced when seeking wisdom, and all that. 🙂
Apologies for taking so long to get back to you all, also!
Michael Kennedy I think the Influence system should work fine with changing casts; you’d need to keep track of who everyone has Influence on, including character who are off-screen, but you need to do that in a regular game anyway. Since the start-of-campaign Influence questions from each playbook wouldn’t really apply, the only real tweak I can think of is that characters need to address what their existing relationship is and whether or not any Influence comes out of that when they first meet at the table. Beyond first contact, the regular back-and-forth of gaining and losing Influence should hold up–though the master spreadsheet would get pretty big after a while. Keeping the information organized and manageable is definitely something to keep in mind.
The team building thing, I mostly meant that those questions would be a good jumping-off point for answering how new characters first got involved with the league and weaving them into the story thus far. Session-to-session, yeah, totally agree–mission goes to whoever is available!
Jason Cox If by tiered structure, you mean that there could be a few adult heroes at the top to keep an eye on things, I think that would be a fine feature to have. Playbooks like the Legacy and Protege already have baked-in adult supervision, so it’s a natural step from there to have their grown-up counterparts be part of the league. I’ll put the question to the players, though, as an all- or mostly-young league would also be a very cool thing and I don’t want to take that possibility off the table.
If I’m misinterpreting what you mean by tiered structure, let me know!
Ben Badger That’s really good advice, actually. I was kind of in the mindset of trying to figure out everything up-front, but it definitely makes more sense to start small and build out, as you say. Thanks! And I may very well ask y’all for insight. 🙂
Anyone else following this: since we should be getting a rules update later this month, I will revisit this idea and get things started then. Feel free to follow this post and/or just generally express interest between now and then!
James Etheridge You got the gist of what I was saying, though you could take it farther so that each preceding generation has disproportionate influence over the one immediately following. That might get crazy though.
Aye, that sounds like an unnecessary level of complexity. The only influence that the game mechanically cares about is between PCs and NPCs anyway, and the PCs are all the unnamed latest generation. It’s worth considering how much temporal power a given NPC has outside of the Influence situation, but I wouldn’t set it up in tiers like that. Doesn’t necessarily map to the fiction, plus it’s too much homework, heh. 😛
If you want to introduce the Threat, you could make it broader.
“When did you first encounter the Tharnaxians? Who have you fought them alongside?”
If the tone of the campaign is “Teen heroes get no respect, so they hang out together”, it makes sense to have a rotating cast. Don’t trust anyone over 20, don’t distrust anyone over 12. 🙂
Oh, and approve The Youth as a base class. 🙂
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