So, I just discovered Masks today and have been reading and toying with the system. Here are some of the character concepts that I have come up with and I am wondering if they fit and are categorized right.
Grin (The Beacon) – A brilliant but bored young woman who takes to super hero work to find a real challenge in her life. She is a master of martial arts and acrobatics along with just being generally pretty good at everything (I also want her to do tech but that isn’t an option expressly available to the Beacon, can she have it anyway?).
Raptor (The Janus) – A popular young man looking to do something of meaning with his life. He has developed flight as a super power including the tertiary powers of enhanced vision, biological avionics, and enhanced physique. A frightening experience where a villain discovered his secret identity early in his career has made him hyper vigilant in separating his secret identity from his superhero identity to protect the people he loves. Little does he know that his new girlfriend is the very villain who discovered his secret in the first place.
Mark 5 (The Bull) – A robot created to be the ultimate war machine. Imbued with the ability to learn in order to evolve past the previous failed models, Mark 5 quickly grew past their initial program and developed a personality all their own. Mark 5 hates being treated as a thing and not a person more than anything else in the world. They are dedicated to proving their humanity. Strong, Tough, and self repairing, with an encyclopedic knowledge of combat techniques, and no capacity to feel physical pain Mark 5 is hard to keep down.
Unchained (The Nova) – A young apprentice wizard opened the wrong book and ended up getting the Ur-Spell, the root of all sorcery, stuck in his head. With a mortal mind he can only express tiny fragments of the spells potential at any given point. This still makes him one of the worlds strongest raw magic users. How much of Unchained’s personality is the young sorcerer and how much is the spell reworking his mind is up for questioning.
It all sounds great. I think the “popular guy Janus” is a good inversion of the usual “harried nerd” Spiderman trope. Popular people often take their obligations seriously, it’s one reason people like them.
I shudder to think what horrors might be meant by “biological avionics”.
Mark 5 seems like the definition of The Newborn, one of the stretch goal playbooks which should be in one of the later books at some point.
I could see Unchained as being The Doomed instead of The Nova, where his doomsigns allow him more and more power as the living spell comes closer to completely overwriting his mind.
I love the plot twist with Raptor’s girlfriend, which adds a whole new level of danger to misses on his obligation rolls.
Biological Avionics is short hand for supersenses that allow Raptor to manage his flight powers. Built in ability to sense north, ability to sense altitude, sensing how wind currents will effect a flight path. Nothing creepy.
So what would it be called if he could just suddenly grow wings and/or stuff like that? Biological aviation?
Oh, okay, I was thinking of something like flaps and hydraulics.