Because I have a sickness, I went ahead and adapted Masks into a game I am affectionately calling Jedi Hearts (a play on words inspired by Monsterhearts).
In Jedi Hearts, you play students in Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy (or another similar scenario from another SW era) who have to deal with their tremendous power, the burdens of the Jedi code, and who they have a crush on.
I’d love to hear your feedback if you have the chance to check it out.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n683xbhk90i17lt/Jedi%20Hearts.pdf?dl=0
Sounds great!
😀
I am now imagining this adapted to the Sorcerer Families and secret societies in Divine Blood.
Gods, Demons, most supernaturals at age 12 (even if it is not the first time they’ve been 12): You are kids stay out of it.
Sorcerer families: You chose this, your soldiers now.
You are an evil, game-tinkering bastard. You know that, right?
Weird you took out the Kirby Craft move in a space game where it’d be really, really useful.
There’s a typo in every book: Unique: it’s has a special colour or hilt.
I like what you have. How do you differentiate force powers (which are basically reskinned superpowers?) Could the Beacon represent someone non-force sensitive?
<3
Dear lord, may Mr Medeiros catch some mild cold from time to time…
So I can be Kylo Ren, yes?
Adam Goldberg, thanks for catching the typos. You’re right about the Kirby craft, I’ll fix that. For force powers I just assumed everyone has similar power sets. I like the Beacon idea too.
Tim Franzke, naturally. I’d consider him a Legacy character.
I’ve fixed the typo and added back in the space craft move to the Outsider.
And now added in the Groupie (aka the Beacon). I’m quite happy how it turned out.
The first step in finding healing is recognizing you have a problem, Andrew. 🙂
I CAN STOP ANYTIME! ☺
You might change “physical intimacy” to just “intimacy”, because it fits better within the genres. As an example, Kylo Ren (legacy) decides to share a moment of intimacy with Rey (Hotshot maybe?), removing his mask and offering insight into who he is. He doesn’t see her as an equal, so he shifts up Consular and shifts down Knight. Narratively, she uses this to discover a secret about Kylo Ren’s true feelings, which he uses to clear an Angry condition.
You COULD play this out through rolled moves too, but I think in a general sense intimacy in Star Wars is more about letting down your guard for a moment. When Han and Leia have intimate moments in the original trilogy, it is pretty much always in moments of duress that emphasize their humanity in the face of the chaos around them.
Andrew Medeiros Of course you can. (nods sagely, backs toward door) Certainly! (ahem) May have to try these rules out.
Jason Cox , solid call. Change made.
I would call the Groupie the Scoundrel, since that’s what it is in all the other SW games.
I think you’re good: next step is probably explaining what all the stats mean (positive and negative) and rewriting the explainer text so someone without Masks can know what the fudge “The Rancor” represents.
Adam Goldberg I don’t wannnnnaaa! That’s the hard work part, I just like writing moves. 😀 😉
The work of the expansion writer is never done, it’s only temporarily halted.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RX1ov1KyvwG61dZaBGvZ_UqmYuNOOmi9iaGzjz6_EIQ/edit#
It looks great. When are you going to run a playtest that you won’t invite me to? 😉
Rob Wakefield, as soon as I can! 😛
What Rob Wakefield said. I’d run this, too. Just sayin.
Andrew Medeiros WHEW!
Bryanna Hitchcock, can we both run a playtest and not invite Rob?
Andrew Prosser Bryanna Hitchcock Please do. Anything to feed my FOMO would be appreciated.
Andrew Medeiros Done.
whispers Rob Wakefield pm me. I’ll run for you. 😉
Admittedly, I’ve had a problem getting into Monster Hearts. As I’ve said at the table, I typically want to play games where I’m someone who’s bigger than life, the protagonist (or antagonist, really), with abilities beyond my own. Monster Hearts didn’t feel like that for me, even after doing my best to mould it into something that felt comfortable for me. MH, as everyone has said, is about not having the right tool for the job, and being terrible at what you can do.
Mixing the idea of MH with MASKS and coating it with a healthy dollop of Star Wars is pretty appealing. I could really see myself Kylo Ren’ing it up pretty hard.
I don’t see any mixture of Monsterhearts in here, except in the name. Which is perfectly fine. 🙂
I’ve always thought of Monsterhearts as the game where you can be great at what you do as long as someone gets hurt.
The Monsterhearts influence was from the original idea of taking MH and making it for young Jedi. But then Masks came out and I thought it was a good fit. But I love the name too much to give it up.:)
I looked at Monster Hearts because I have an interest in both slice of life and urban fantasy. Unfortunately what I and my friends found was that each Monster Heart skin was based on a dysfunctional personality type and that turned us off completely. The skins as written were all leaning toward abhorrent personalities.
Masks is much closer to what I was looking for.
My friends and I were looking at pathfinder because we like people who sing and cast spells, but we found it was filled with killing monsters and finding paths
I found pathfinder filled with charts and lots of rules.
I don’t think Monsterhearts is a bad game and it itself is very upfront about being a reproduction of the bad-end/mutually poisonous relationships in things like Twilight. I was directed to it after making a post on the apocalyptica forums about trying to adapt MotW to more slice of life style where the focus was on hijinks and character interaction with supernatural being more in the way of flavor. I specifically referenced El Goonish Shive as an example. Someone suggested Monsterhearts was what I was thinking of. All it took was looking at the skins to realize it really, really wasn’t what I wanted and my play group were likewise turned off by the heavy focus on being selfishly manipulative of the other players. Also while I was looking for a flavor of story where there a person is a person is a person regardless of abilities and being able to change into a wolf is no big deal, Monsterhearts dwells on the idea that people with supernatural abilities or natures are fundamentally different in terms of emotions and thoughts.
It’s a great game for what it is intended to be. But it is also in several ways the opposite of what I was looking for.
By contrast, the Masks Playbooks have superpowers of various sorts but they are largely flavor with the Playbooks defined more by personality type in most cases. Reasonable exceptions such as Nova and Doomed not withstanding. In addition the influence is less heavily implied to be active manipulation of people and more or less just characterized as emotional attachments in general allowing for mutually supportive relationships more easily. It is entirely conceivable to play a group of kids with pretty much the exact same powers but approaching it from different Playbook perspectives. Which is essentially what has been done here in making it around the Jedi academy.