I’m seeing a fan playbook, and part of me is inspired to try and write one of my own. The onus is that the mask would be a character from the past (anything from the Stone Age to the Silver Age is fair play) that’s been brought to the modern day, who is unfamiliar with modern social and technological conventions, but whose heroic spirit means that they’re going to go forth and do good in spite of it. If you need an example, Captain America’s the big one, but TVTropes has a big section on it under “Fish out of Temporal Water”.
What would be a good, catchy name for this playbook? What moves would work for it? Is there anything this type of character would need that I may not be thinking of?
(As of right now, the main mechanic is “Curiosities” – a list of modern things that the playbook finds noteworthy – which could equally mean fascinating, terrifying, or a bane to society, depending on the character. How these work mechanically is something I’m still hammering out.)
I’d call it the Specter (as in, “specter of the past”).
The concept is similar to The Outsider, except no calling home. As for names… The Fossil.
I like the Fossil too, or the Relic or Artifact. Jeeze it’s hard to come up with pithy names for this that don’t also sound a bit pejorative…
I like Curiosities as a mechanic. As for moves, in my experience one of the main cool things time-displaced characters do is know things the others can’t, like having first-hand knowledge of an event that happened long ago.
Could this also work for a character sent back from the distant future?