Masks: A New Generation RPG – Page 134 – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

A Janus for consideration:

Mirror aka Jean Hannah aka Hana Jin

Woman, Asian (Japanese), Formal Western Clothing/Elegant Japanese Clothing, Iconic Clothing, Helmet.

Abilities: Heightened Physical Abilities, Impossible Movement (teleportation) and Supernatural Senses (telepathy)

Labels: Freak -1, Danger +0, Savior +0, Superior +1, Mundane +3.

The Mask embodies Savior

Game Face

Mild- Mannered.

Secret Identity: School work, Significant other, family honor

I’m going to assume you’re asking me about Mirror because of the fact we’re both Japanese. How do I know she’s Japanese? Well let’s look at the footage. She goes around in “wearing” what looks like telekinetic samurai armor topped off with an actual kabuto and menpo. She speaks perfect accentless Japanese. If she’s not Japanese then she’s one hell of a poser. Me, I took the oath a month ago. And I’m officially in the system as Jean, J-E-A-N, Hannah. I’m American now and I’m too busy getting into law school to care about some fool stuck in the past and banging heads in a romantic notion that that will solve things.

Konnichi-wa. Hana Jin desu. Hello. Don’t worry about Jean. If she really felt the way she claims I wouldn’t exist the way I do. See. She still believes in justice, love, all that stuff. In proof of that. She just doesn’t believe in herself. She needs all that to be “someone else”. Eventually she’ll accept herself and we’ll be whole again. Until then I’ll be around to let her do what she thinks she can’t do.

Note. Jin and Jean have different colored eyes. Something about the shift causes the melanin in her eyes to change. Both eye colors are exceeding rare but do occur in real life. Jin has gold eyes. Jean has red eyes. Before the first time Jean’s mind split she had brown eyes. To add to the difference, Jin uses the same psychokinetic powers that manifest her armor to make it seem like her hair is glowing gold. At least when helping. Jin occasionally takes over outside of heroing.

Jean is capable of using telepathy without triggering Jin. But it is difficult. She doesn’t like to do it and it mostly happens on accident. Her other powers only manifest while Jin is active.

Jin keeps Jeans secrets. Unless Jin has already revealed a secret to someone she won’t break that trust unless there’s an absolute need.

We updated our character sheets to the new version for today’s session.

We updated our character sheets to the new version for today’s session. Unfortunately, my Protege wasn’t around today, so I can’t speak much to those changes, though they seem a bit more focused, especially for newer players. In V2, my Protege felt a bit like he had less cool stuff than the other players around the table.

The changes to the Doomed are fantastic, though. My Doomed player had a really hard time navigating his sheet in V2, and wasn’t really playing towards his doom the way I was hoping. Within five minutes of setting up the new sheet, he was focusing on how he could work to prevent his doom while fearing a discussion about it, as that could bring it closer. The other players also have a better sense of how the doom fits into the rest of the game a bit better.

Overall, for a group of players who are relatively new to role playing games, these changes seem very positive. The shift to comfort and support also led to better interpersonal play during this session.

Problems with the Protégé’s Powers

Alliteration aside, I’ll be the first to admit that v2’s Protégé’s abilities were far too broad and unfocused. In a game designed around guiding archetypes and letting people enjoy narrative niches, “Common Power” and “General Power” didn’t do much to inspire. However, I feel that v3 went too far in the opposite direction and closed off a lot of the Protégé’s narrative potential.

First, several of the available abilities are either too narrow or uninspiring. Hacking is a power more suited for the Beacon and can easily be covered by weapons and gadgets (ie, a hacking minitool). Detective skills is a nice subset, but not very versatile as a main power. Powerful armor is just dull sounding, even if it was meant to invoke the idea of Power Armor. A counter example is power mimicry, which is very cool and versatile and adds to the narrative potential (especially in the case of the Protégé mimicking their mentor’s power as part of training exercises). The current list mostly nudges Protégé’s towards one specific role and in the words of my own Protégé player, “Not every Protégé is Robin.”

Second, and this is admittedly a problem from v2 as well as v3, it’s unclear how to select the Protégé’s abilities. Everyone else is given a list with available checkboxes and told to check off a certain number. Even the Legacy is told to pick two to cross out. But there is no guideline for the protégé. Even now, I’m confused as to how you are supposed to pick them. My natural assumption is to pick one from each list, with the first two being yours, but I’m not entirely sure. I feel this should be made more explicit, at least on par with the other playbooks.

Thirdly, assuming my interpretation of how to pick character powers from above is correct, this new version cuts off one of the best narrative angles for the Protégé: the story of a mentor with an unusual ability finding a young person with the same and tutoring them on how to control it. The current shared abilities are all things you are trained in, not inherit gifts. With this ability set, you can’t play Jean Grey learning telepathy from Xavier or Sticks showing Daredevil how to use his super senses. You are only left with learned skills, like Robin or Speedy. Cutting off that narrative angle is rather disappointing.

My thought would be to have a list of narratively open powers, like Power Mimicry or Weapons and Gadgets, and have the player choose one of them to be Shared, one for Themselves, and one for the Mentor. That would make it easy to pick, remove the ambiguity, and allow the player to decide if they are being taught a skill or learning to master a shared gift. More clarity and more narrative freedom can only make the Protégé a more interesting playbook.

So the new Doomed playbook involves some big changes if you are currently playing one.

So the new Doomed playbook involves some big changes if you are currently playing one. Figured I would show some of the modifications I did on mine in case someone needs ideas for their own. (note these aren’t the live copies)

Old version:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PoqXIfQesgHzl9tm8JBhs0cYd1i2VdG3dlXHeWpML_Q/edit?usp=sharing

New version:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DmbqgP2U3rmfIAI5up9SdX-EjsO-ow6UFedtS-Ceut0/edit?usp=sharing

My players and I both like the changes so far. However, we kind of question the choice of comic sans.

Just looking for clarification briefly here: The Moment of Truth.

Just looking for clarification briefly here: The Moment of Truth. Once you unlock it, it says you can activate it at any time. I’m assuming that since it’s on advancement twice, once it’s been activated, it’s spent and can’t be used again until you buy it again, but it doesn’t actually seem to say anywhere?

Been running my own game of Masks for the past two weeks, decided to jump on board the community and share.

Been running my own game of Masks for the past two weeks, decided to jump on board the community and share. Not much playtesting notes right now, especially with the new version that just came out. But I’ll tell you about the heroes and what they’ve been up too!

Representing the poorer parts of Halcyon we have two heroes, first up the lovely Kinetica, adopted as a young girl she’s spent a lot of time growing up pretty normal. She had powers around 13 but she never used them. Until things started taking turns for the worst, her mom’s health is declining and they were forced to move to East Halcyon in the ghetto living off Social Security. Seeing all the crime forced Kinetica to put on the mask, but she’s walking a tight line between making the city safe and keeping her very old mother happy and healthy.

Around the same area of Halcyon we have Mindsnap. He mostly lives on his own, he’s kind of an Artful Dodger getting by on the scraps of others. But he dreams of being a hero despite his rough lifestyle all the same, he carries a guilt in his heart over killing his grandfather with his own powers that haunts even his dreams. He hopes to rise above being just a common thug, but he has a lot of emotional hurdles to jump.

In the central city proper there is a manor that looks like no other building in the area. Greek architecture, tiled roofs, a mighty statue in the garden of the Golden Age beauty Harbinger. Pulled from her own world in World War II, Harbinger fought in the war and settled in the city. She’s long since retired despite still looking as young as she did back in the day, her daughter having taken up her mantle. The next in line to try and inhabit it is the young Vanguard who took the title from her older sister when her older sister was injured. She might be a mighty hero in her own right, but it’ll take more to rise above her lineages storied drama and secrets.

Last but not least we have the terrifying visage of Infigar, sharp horns and eyes that blaze with a thousand year stare. Infigar was thrown into our dimension when his shit Delivar had some complications. His society is warlike, Warlords fighting for dominion on the land day in and day out. And Infigar was set to take the throne of a warlord had he not been stranded on Earth. He has skills in battle, but as we all know being a hero is more than just fists. Infigar is tasked with adapting to our society in order to survive and get back home. Hopefully he won’t have to give up his identity too much in order to accomplish that.

After defeating the Prime Ape and stopping him from stealing all the supplies from a Military Transport. Our heroes were picked up by the Meta-human Extraction and Defense Corporation, a privately funded paramilitary that handles superhuman affairs around the world. As it turned out, in our heroes haste to defeat the villain, they forgot to follow up on what exactly the Prime Ape was doing with that military motorcade.

Well as it turned out an experimental weapons system called only the X-9 was targeted and stolen by the Prime Ape and his Guerrilla fighters. So our heroes were given an ultimatum. Find and capture the Prime Ape before he implemented the weapons, or join him in his ultimate fate in the spike. They didn’t know where he was going with the weapons, so they had to hit the streets… Or rather… Hit the skies.

The only person that would know about goods that hot would have been the Clear-sky Corsair. A self styled Sky Pirate with a crew of bi-plane brigands. The battle was fierce and fast, the Corsair nearly knocking Delivar out of the air in their approach. However they were able to land on the airship, and with some teamwork force the Corsair to stand down and give the information up.

It turns out that the order for the weapons was perpetrated by a much bigger force within the city. Countess Spider, who Vanguard revealed to be a major enemy of her mother the Harbinger back in the day, making her much more dangerous than any of the other villains the group had faced. She’s a known manipulator, with an army of loyal soldiers at her back, if she’s looking for an experimental weapon, then there must be more to the plan then simple implementation.

So how will our heroes handle The Lair of the Spider? Only time will tell

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18D2OgX0Jhc_zlVpgijjoVkl4yjqptxWaCpr_q5afeUo/edit?usp=sharing

So, with Living Halcyon on the horizon, there’s going to be a lot of teen heroes flying around. So I created twenty new relationships that you could drop in to play with, if only to avoid a 38-way unspoken crush pileup. Feel free to add your own!

Some moves and moves-language I’ve used in my games that might be up for some discussion:

“When you save the city and get credit for it, roll +Savior. On a 7-9, the city likes you; take a +1 forward towards the next normal person you roll a move on. On a 10+, the city loves you; take influence over the city and its mundane crowds of nameless inhabitants. On a miss, the city doesn’t trust you; tell me why, and gain a condition.”

I used the Team-generating “When you lead the team into battle against a dangerous foe” move for when the group went to a big party thrown by a rival team. Does everyone trust the leader and the team? Yeah, we do… Do we all have the same purpose here? … NO!

My reasoning for this one: Even at a party (with this game, ESPECIALLY at a party) people are going to be rolling moves like Defend (for when the Transformed tries to make small talk with a girl and gets told he’s gross and the Beacon comes in to tell her she is too) and Directly Engage (when the Outsider and the Doomed are having an argument because they’re both crushing on the same girl) and Provoke (when the Legacy is trying to get a girl to make out with him in the broom closet) and Change Self-Image (for when the Beacon rallies the Transformed, pep-talks him and sends him after the girl that the Legacy, Doomed and Outsider are all squabbling over…). There’s a lot of moves that might go out! The theme of this game is twofold: “Hurting people’s feelings and then apologizing” and “We are a team”, and the team has each-other’s backs. The best way to really show that is to have Team in the pool so people can spend it to have eachother’s backs.

“When you go to the big Sky City party, decide: Do you mingle with people who have similar interests, or people with similar powers, and roll +Mundane for People and +Freak for Powers. On a 7-9, choose one. On a 10+, choose 2. — Someone wants to meet you; — You gain influence over someone at the party; — Someone at the party loses influence over you; — You learn something about a person, place or thing you didn’t know before.”

“When you take a powerful blow from the Laughmaster, you’re breathing in his laughing gas. On a hit, you see your worst fear; on a 10+, you have to struggle against it to continue the fight. After the fight, if you’re Afraid, you can clear Afraid by sharing what your worst fear is with someone else (likely by sharing a vulnerability or weakness at the same time).”

“When you seek the wisdom of Athena, you can roll to Assess the Situation with +Savior. If you do, the team can choose one character to ask a Pierce the Mask question of you, and you must answer honestly. That character knows the answer to that question intrinsically and without explanation; mirrors reflect the truth, but they also reflect part of yourself as well.”

How does your group feel about custom moves and which ones have you used? Have you used any regular moves in weird context? Let’s talk about it.

Category: Masks: A New Generation RPG