Pax Unplugged 2018 Play Report
Pax Unplugged was my onramp to Masks. After hearing about the game through the BAMF and Whelmed podcasts, I decided to give the game a go at the Games on Demand room at Pax Unplugged 2017. Which was a good enough advertisement that I marched up to the Magpie booth and made my purchase.
Since then, I introduced Masks at my FLGS Indie Gameday, which segued into a monthly game, and I also ran it at Camp NC Gameday, where it was the best received game I ran.
But it occurred to me that I would be running masks at NCGD and other venues again this year and I would likely have some repeat players. Though the collaborative character building introduces fresh elements in one-shots, I still needed to step up my stable of skeleton scenarios to allow for variety in play experience. Further, several supplements have been published since then, and experienced players might want to try new playbooks and playsets.
Thus I resolved to create what I call a “one-shot kit”, which I had previously done for other games.
The One-shot Kit
What I call a “one-shot kit” is a step between a pre-written scenario and on-the-fly creation. It’s a short bundle of resources that I use when GMing a game where I don’t know what the scenario will be when I sit down at the table.
My reasons for needing a one-shot kit for Masks is slightly different for Masks than for Traveller. For Traveller, I created the one-shot kit to facilitate sandbox play.
For Masks, I needed something that would:
1) Give repeat players different experiences, and
2) Facilitate flexible scenarios that I can “plug in” to ideas created during the playbook character creation.
3) Allow exploring supplemental playbooks and playsets. This is less a “need” than a “want”; I was interested in exploring some of the material introduced in supplements that I may never get to try out at my own table in the current ongoing game.
So I wrote up a page for each playset, including the “default” Halcyon City situation as well as three of the Masks Unbound playsets: Iron Red Soldiers, the Spiderweb, and Apocalypse Sonata. I could have written up one for Phoenix Academy, but as I have been running my players in my local game in Rook Academy, I wasn’t interested in exploring it. I started a page for Secrets of AEGIS, but didn’t finish that page as I was less interested in it.
The kit includes an intro primer “script” page, one page for each playset, as well as a few pages of stock villains (which I use in addition to the deck of villainy) and one page summarizing the GM moves for the supplemental playbooks (the GM sheets have these for the core playbooks).
Each playset page has:
1) A listing of recommended, “advanced”, and “banned” playbooks. I ban the Joined in all playsets (too convoluted for one-shot play), otherwise it’s written to address the feel of the playset.
2) A short list of inspirational media I can rattle off to the players
3) A list of scenario “skeletons”
4) A list of complications that can be used to add nuance and gameplay possibilities to the session, as well as “plug-in points” for material the players create during character generation.
5) A list of stock villains (either from Deck of Villainy, or new villains I am re-using from my home game.)
Pax Unplugged Sessions
My intent was to survey the table to see how many players were already experienced with Masks. If the majority of players were new, I would use the default playset, otherwise offer one of the supplemental playsets.
The reality: one of my sessions was all newbies, and one was 3/5 newbies, so I ran the default Halcyon City setup for both sessions.
In the default scenario, my intent was to offer all core playbooks but the Doomed to new players. (The Magpie crew apparently thinks of the Nova as an advanced playbook as well and exclude it from their pre-printed packets, so I added that to my “advanced” list on the fly.) Experienced players could request any playbook they could name (minus the Joined). It takes enough to explain just the core playsets to new players that I think explaining all the supplemental playbooks would eat up too much time.
Saturday: Chaos (Khaos?) at the Christmas Party
This session was all new players, a group of friends. Their characters:
• Flow (The Protégé) – Student of the established hero Hustle.
• Kid Khaos (The Legacy) – Arrogant entitled scion of a hero family
• Query (The Delinquent) – Got psychic weapons and teleportation powers from an encounter with an alien spacecraft for “reasons unknown”. (The player for this one left early)
• K-17 (The Outsider) (?) – Shape shifting alien described as looking like a “green mattress”. Not a stretch to think of Gumby
• The Element (The Janus) – Son of politicians who are trying to pass supers-control regulations.
One of my major stock skeleton plots is “the players are at a public place that gets attacked”. I decided to re-used the premise and villain I originally used in the first game I GMed: Nano (from the Deck of Villainy) attacks a Christmas party being throw at his father’s company, Astro Robotics.
Tapping into the elements the players created, Kid Khoas put on a contest in which the heroes in attendance would be there on dates that were auctioned off for charity. But of course, The Element had a date there in his secret identity and Kid Khaos blindsided him with the heroic-ID charity date thing, because he’s a Janus and of course has these sorts of complications. Additional flavor came in the form of the dates the heroes would have to deal with. Some are vapid children of wealthy families; others are geeky superfans who ask the wrong questions. If this wasn’t a one-shot with limited time, I could have gone so much deeper with this.
Masks tends to naturally complicate things, so I kept the action going a long time just on that premise. But the building was saved and Nano sent packing with about 45 minutes left, so I pulled out one of my stock twists: “The heroes stop the thief, established heroes and/or the news give accolades , but they discover the easily-stopped thief was a ruse or distraction, and they have to go after the sneakier thief that got away.”
When they went back to the building after saving the bigwigs kidnapped by Nano, AEGIS was on the scene, and all guests at the party were accounted for… except for The Element’s date, who went missing early. Of course, she’s secretly a manipulative assassin-thief villain (in my head, an expy of The Operative from Sentinels of the Multiverse), who had snuck into secret vault that has been there since the days of Nano’s father’s old super-team. There she was stealing the biotech of Grendel, an old hero secretly turned villain. There were lots of neat props for the players to use in their moves (by this time they get the whole fiction-and-move thing), which made for a nice final fun bash in which the true villain monologues about how easily Nano was manipulated while beating them down with her biomorphically altered form.
Sunday: Treachery at the Tech Expo
This session had three newbies (a father and his two sons), and two experienced players (one of them being my daughter). I let the experienced players pick playbooks from supplements. They chose the Scion and the Reformed. It seemed like having that much criminal background in the same session might be too much, but it actually gave them lots of ways to logically link their characters, so it worked out.
The characters were:
Kid Legacy (The Legacy): Son of established hero Legacy, with shadow powers. Played by the younger son.
Aliotech (The Outsider): Somewhat Starfire-like hero exiled from an alien society that he did not fit in. Played by the father.
Blur (The Janus): Phasing and weapons, works as an intern at a tech company. Played by the older son.
Alloyed (The Reformed): Ex-villain with metal-shaping powers. Did not publicly repent or serve time, just came out with new hero identity after she had a change of heart. Played by my daughter.
Prestige (The Scion): Son of a magic villain and tech-thief Showtime, who avoided the takedown of some villain group because he was more like a supplier than a frontline combatant. Prestige has his own magical talents that he has turned to fighting crime.
Again, I went with “heroes are at a public place under attack” premise. This time, Blur’s background as a tech company intern and Prestige’s father’s role as a technology thief made the Tech Expo premise the obvious one. The expo is one marketing anti-super tech to places in the world that have a supervillain presence but lack the superhero presence of Halcyon. As the demonstration of a giant mecha-like suit is about to begin, the suit animates and grabs the pilot before he can climb in!
The initial action here is less complicated than the Christmas Party scenario, and the group more experienced. Having experienced players showcase powers and moves helped get the new players up to speed. So we cut to the twist a lot earlier in this scenario. Before the fight with the rogue mecha was done, Kid Legacy’s shadow-senses lets him detect the Tech-Ninjas sneaking into a nearby building. At first the action is split into two areas, with Kid Legacy and Blur taking on the Tech-Ninjas while the rest are still struggling with the mecha.
The vault heist is where the meat of the hijinks occurs, including Prestige feigning a heel-turn to get the trust of the Tech-Ninjas getaway team, and a move to save the magic apocalypse sword that ends up delivering the sword to the hands of Raum, the Black Knight-esque evil client.
From here, there is a brief investigation and roleplaying scene as the young heroes profess their innocence (they were the last people seen entering the building) and track down Raum and his lackeys at a site that lets them unleash the sword. There they have the final confrontation.
Impressions
I wasn’t sure how the audience was going to look for Pax Unplugged, but was a little disappointed that I didn’t get a chance to toy with one of the alternate playsets. I think the gameday circuit is more likely to have more experienced players.
Nonetheless, running Masks is always a joy. In particular, though, I love how young new players quickly embrace the system and get excited about the cool stuff their heroes can do. This made the Sunday game my favorite of the two.
Overall, the One-shot kit seems to meet its intent, though I only really used the material for the default playset. Having a fairly simple scenario makes it fairly easy to attach bits from the backstories that the players created, and the “twist list” seems to be enough grist to keep the session interesting. Masks’ move mechanism tends to naturally introduce enough wrinkles into the game that not much more is needed.
As for Pax Unplugged itself: the RPG experience is improved from last year, but still needs a lot of work:
1) The system requires you to get up early and queue up if you want to get in an RPG.
2) The scheduling and seating for some events was chaotic. My oldest daughter signed up for a game (not in the Magpie room) only to find that the spot they thought they had to play had been claimed, and the game she was promised didn’t fire.
3) As smoothly as the Magpie stuff went, we still rely on the administrative wherewithal of wonderful people like Kate to make it happen. If you want a game from a company who hasn’t staked a claim to their own room… good luck.
While I am on the topic, super special thanks to Kate Bullock for making the Magpie events happen, and making a positive environment to play in!
