I just ran Masks reskinned for fantasy over the weekend. Mostly I just changed the names of the “back stories” and some of the moves. (“Dragon”, “Fated”, “Hero”, “Trickster”, “Weapon”, “Protege”, “Other”, “Outsider”, “Hidden” and “Paragon”. The main difference was that I didn’t want to emphasis “teen”, so I was loose with Influence and treated it more like Respect.
The PCs were members of a Kibbutz-inspired group of settlers. In the time of their great-grandfathers, the Landsmen had beaten back the dragons and started the settlement. In the past few years, Orc raiders had moved in and tensions mounted. The situation was that the Landsmen had recently achieved a Pyrrhic victory over the Orcs, and were now working for peace. In play, the Orc leaders were divided, the Orcs themselves were insulting and arrogant, and there were Landsmen prisoners of war being abused as servants. Lots of reasons not to make peace, but they ultimately did to save their community.
It was planned as a one-shot (so that no-one had to commit to more before knowing anything about it), but I was glad to hear talk that they might want more. People were definitely frustrated about having their labels shifted (You moved my stats!), but I think they started to get more used to it in the end. In particular, they are a mostly D&D group, so they weren’t really used to thinking about small scenes of interaction about comforting each other or opening up about fears.
Now I want to run a teenage dungeon crawl.
I like the idea of having it be Respect rather than Influence. How did you handle it with NPCs, did they automatically have the Respect of the PCs at the start, or did you do something different?
Colin Spears I used the default that the PCs were inexperienced. Like new graduates at a first job. They may have lots of ability and potential, but at start, they Respect almost everyone and almost no-one Respects them.
Longer term, I’m sure there would be some adults — e.g. a random farm hand — that the PCs don’t automatically Respect. To me, that fits with the idea of the PCs as exemplars for the community. What do they do when the leaders have bad ideas, or when other people start emulating them and looking to them for leadership.
Thinking about it right now, I might give them a free rejection of Respect for anyone they meet as long as they show why they think that person doesn’t deserve respect. Since they are from an egalitarian Kibbutz, that type of display about thinking they are superior to others is likely to get them into trouble.