Author: Alan Scott

The post further down by Matteo Suppo about genderqueer characters makes me wonder: how many people have played, or seen played, a trans Janus whose masked identity presents as their true gender, but whose mundane identity does not?

I could see such a character concept working well, but also really poorly. I haven’t had anyone play the Janus in my own games, but I get the sense that the skin is maybe most successful when the mask and the mundane are both true identities, which isn’t the case in this scenario at least when it comes to gender.

So, the history of Halcyon city in the gold and silver ages is pretty different in the final text than it was in the playtest materials.

Both address the idea that older comics lacked diversity and upheld a problematic status quo, but they do so in very different ways. In the playtest version, we’re presented with the world as it was perhaps remembered. The text describes a city bereft of diverse heroes and complicated motivations, and then it criticizes the city for that lack. In the new version, the text focuses instead on the world that was partly forgotten. Heroes that faced barriers based on race, gender, or sexuality, or defied ideological status quos.

I think the first approach is stronger in terms of broad theme of generational change, while the second is stronger in terms of verisimilitude in a superheroic setting. I’m not entirely sure which I like better, but am glad I had the opportunity to read both. What do other people think?

So, something posted in another thread got me thinking about Lois Lane and the whole archetype of plucky friends & love interests that don’t have superhero identities or superpowers but still proactively uncover and thwart villainous plots, even if they may need to call in their superhero friends to actually do the beat-up-the-villain part.  Now I’m pumped to play a Beacon who fits that archetype.  Lots of Provoke and Pierce the Mask, Straight up Creepin’ and Won’t let you down.

so, it’s probably way too late in the development process for this, but… It feels like characters stats are too high.  Between the ability to shift labels under certain circumstances and the resource of team, it seems like the characters in my game almost never miss when rolling moves.  This makes it hard to make the GM’s playbook-specific moves or the villain moves, which leaves certain situations feeling a lot more generic than I’d like.