Masks: A New Generation RPG – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

Went back to illustrate a momentous session: The Salvatores came face to face with the Calamity Crew.

Went back to illustrate a momentous session: The Salvatores came face to face with the Calamity Crew. Sonia (The Soldier) burnt away to nothing, Torq (The Nova) unleashed a brutal moment of truth, Panic (The Doomed) got a dragon friend, Halfpenny (The Transformed) began to question his deal with Mr. Hunt, and General Bowmaster (The Beacon) leapt into a painting. The episode ended with the whole team captured.

PS: There’s a whole thread of folks Masks art over at the Nest. Come on over and contribute your stuff! https://www.magpiegames.com/thenest/masks/art-from-your-masks-campaign/#post-103

Hey rockstars!

I’m running a room for Magpie at Gen Con 2019! I need GMs badly!

If you run 2 or more games, you get a cool Magpie product of your choice! At 4 games, you get the swag and a weekend badge!

Click on this form to volunteer!

https://forms.gle/uvjKVvfZPZdjSj9NA

Excited about the new Magpie forums!

Excited about the new Magpie forums! I’ve made my inaugural post there recapping our latest session. Check it out here! (I’ll post the new PC art to whet your appetite.)

https://www.magpiegames.com/thenest/masks/salvatores-recap-a-cold-day-in-capstone-part-1/

Magpie Games invites you to join us in our new forums—The Nest—and we’re celebrating with a Buy One Get One Free…

Magpie Games invites you to join us in our new forums—The Nest—and we’re celebrating with a Buy One Get One Free sale on all of our classics thru March 20th! Head over now to our brand-new Magpie Forums at magpiegames.com/community-3/. We look forward to seeing you there!

Quick pre-google+ shutdown request for advice.

I appear to be running an ongoing open table game of Masks at a local games cafe (offering a one shot at their RPG night has mutated out of control!) So from week to week I might have any combination of new or returning characters and be picking up existing story threads or launching new ones (or both). Has anyone done anything similar?

If so I’m particularly interested in a) any mechanics advice – how you may have handled influence for example from week to week, b) any good ideas for fictionally justifying a rotating cast and c) how did it go – particularly did you manage to get into some heavier emotional teen angst amid ott young adult supers action?

Regarding b) thus far I’ve gone with a soft reboot of reality as the time stream resets – as happens when time displaced harbingers battle time eating super beings – and then the next week most of the team got sucked into a quantum disturbance ending up who knows where. This week the only hero common with the previous two sessions may have set up a new team in the hope of effecting a rescue although as the last thing they said tonight was “are we the baddies?!” who knows.

One thing I’ve been interested in for a while is an alternative to the Nova playbook.

One thing I’ve been interested in for a while is an alternative to the Nova playbook. The Nova as written has a Charge/Burn pool mechanic rather than a set of Playbook Moves, and this makes it play in a different, crunchier style than other Masks playbooks. It’s often excluded as an option from con games for this reason. In the spirit of the Mage alternative to the Wizard playbook in Dungeon World, I jotted some thoughts down for a Nova playbook that uses Playbook Moves like other books instead of a pool mechanic. Would love people’s thoughts on this, especially if you’ve played Masks with a Nova before:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aBG_ejRH3Nq-5Q3qtjasZYg8nY_f4ZCaWhEWg3FPs9Q/edit?usp=sharing

If you haven’t heard yet, this Pi Day is MagPIE Day!

If you haven’t heard yet, this Pi Day is MagPIE Day! Next week, we are launching our very own Magpie Games forum—The Nest—for our dedicated community. We hope this forum is the perfect place to discuss our games, and anyone who registered an account on our webstore can use the same login to access forum!!

Has anybody translated the playbooks and basic moves to Spanish?

Not all my players can understand English without delaying the adventure with clarification requests.

This game, man…

Just when I was thinking my game’s PCs were feeling a little basic:

• Night Gaunt (The Beacon) uses Persuade with Best Interests and (later) uses his Moment of Truth to convince Nano (from Deck of Villainy) that the best way to prove himself better than his father is to start a business leveraging his nanotech.

• In looking for playbooks to move into, the player of Yayael (The Transformed) decides to move into The Harbinger. Adding a little detail to his backstory, he clarifies the reason that he was under the care of the tribal shaman is because he was an adopted child, secretly from the future. And now he is getting recovered memories of the future.

• I improvised a bit for Emma Will‘s (The Janus) Secret Identity move where her father receives and destroys a letter from Emma’s missing mother. Though I did not say (or decide) where Emma’s Mom is, Emma’s player decided to build up the letter as a signifier that her mother is a secret hero, readying her move into the Legacy playbook.

A huge moment for our Doomed this session.

A huge moment for our Doomed this session. She’d discovered a costly way to push back her Doom, at the cost of a number of her memories. Here’s the custom move I wrote that literally brought players to tears:

When you wear the crown of glass thorns to purge yourself of memories roll +Doom Track markings.

No matter what, every player present will propose memories that you have lost. You and the GM can both add to or edit these slightly. Mark an appropriate Condition.

On a 10+, clear a Doomsign and choose two. On a 7-9, clear your Doom Track and choose three.

—One of your secrets comes spilling out of you in the process. Now others know it but you do not.

—Shift a pair of locked labels. Explain how your self-image has changed permanently.

—Lose Influence over someone important to you as you forget everything about them.

—Whoever helped you put on the crown also loses an important memory and marks a Condition.

On a miss, mark potential and clear two marks from your Doom Track, but your memory loss is severe. What basic move can you no longer use?