I also have been watching Young Justice and Luke Cage, and I was thinking of setting a Masks game earlier in the continuity, in the fictional 70’s,so the heroes would be among the defining members of the Bronze Age, facing serious threats and Social Issues that their Silver-age mentors can’t even understand. This is the “Hey Green Arrow, your sidekick is a junkie!” era.
Also, talking muscle cars, Afros, and kung fu, of course, but really looking for that goofy 70’s mix of greater psychological realism side-by-side with comic book goofiness, without the modern Dark age deconstruction of comic book tropes.
Has anybody tried such a thing? Mechanically, it makes little difference but it’s hard to emulate specific sub genres like that.
My take: Put together a badass soundtrack and the rest will fall into place. 🙂
You might use Spirit of ’77 as a reference. It has a lot of great music and tropes to draw from.
I have found the most important component to doing such a thing is that more than half of the players have to fully invested and groking the idea, and the others have to be at least intrigued. It is not something that works when some people are “meh, but ok, if its what you want”.
That being said, a few minor hacks can go a long way to changing tone. In a Masks ’78 context, for example, hacking the Influence rules to be both stronger when someone has influence, and also more powerful when you reject influence, could get part of the way to the right tone.