Author: T. Franzke

Highlights from this session of Masks:

Super Pizza, a pizza place frequented by superheroes (with signed photographs on the wall (the photographs are actually panels from older comics)) whose mascot is an anthropomorphic slice of pizza wearing a mask and a cape and punching a villainous salad.

Solid State the Janus ordering only a salad at this place – leading to the nickname of Salad State.

A Superhero (Ronin) involved in an illegal smuggling of alien deathlazors. Against his will of course.

The Protege going invisible and stealing the weapons.

The Reformed taking pictures about Ronin doing this.

A group of drunken punks telling the Newborn that Superheros should use their powers to fight ‘the man’ and making the Newborn write it down as a lesson for the future.

The revelation that Ronin is a character that was created (in fictional publication history) to draw in the manga/anime fans but who had a really great writer early on that did tons of interesting stuff with Ronin, reconstructing a lot of tropes of anime and making a very memorable run. Nowadays he is still around because the character was so popular at the time but now no author one knows what to do with him.

The revelation that the Protege Whisp is mainly doing the hero thing because her mentor forces her to. This actually came out of a nice snowball of moves going Reformed sharing a triumphant victory -> protege sharing a weakness as the answer and the Janus comforting her.

Playtest Report: The Reformed

There is a problem with the way the obligations the Reformed has play out in our game. For one there was no reason so far for the Reformed to get back to her villain contacts for help. Now that is on both the player and the GM of course but a character wanting to get away from these villains wouldn’t really go directly back to these characters for help especially when they come to them with their own problems all the time.

In addition the calling in of a favor or crashing into the reformed’s life takes up way too much screentime. In a 2 hour session all playtime can be taken up by that thing, especially when the reformed is eager to work off their debt. While this has lead to one story development that everyone enjoys (I think) other times it feels like a drag that we need to get through before we get back to that other cool stuff.

In addition the move triggering every session has proven to be a problem. A session can easily take up very little in game time. Last session one of the Reformed contacts asked them to guard an exchange of contraband vs. cash for them and we didn’t get to that evening happening before the session wrapped because moves snowball. So next session by the wording of the move the same character would call our Reformed again for help even though the thing they were supposed to be doing hasn’t even happened yet.

To fix the timing problem we will move that trigger to “when time passes”, just as the Janus does. We will also add a Janus to our game and so we will see how their downtime moves feature differently in the game and how much time it takes.

How were your experiences with the Reformed’s contacts in your game and how did you handle it?

Extra thoughts: What the hell hero has been used 2 times so far I think, both times to just inflict a condition. The character also has the A Mirror Darkly move which I fully forgot about so far because for that character I was focused so much on their contacts. Will try to bring people he hurt more into the spotlight now that I remembered.

Brendan Conway and 1of3 may like this.