Masks: A New Generation RPG – Page 135 – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

Secret Identities.

These are sometimes a thing! When I envisioned this game, I thought of two of the best two teenager hero shows I’d seen-Teen Titans and Young Justice. Which… do not feature much of the secret identity life. Its not something that comes up, not nearly as much as just being a hero and working together.

Not so in Masks. While the Transformed, Outsider, and Legacy are unlikely to need to care about hiding who or what they are, its at the very core of the Janus character.

What are some ways you use to make secret identities relevant? How do you keep them involved and interesting?

Just ran my first game of Masks, and we had a blast.

The heroes are:

Prophet, a Legacy best described as Sherlock Wayne, played by Jinny.

Razorback, a Transformed high school linebacker transformed into an orc-like beast, played by Andy.

Zero, a silver-skinned, shape shifting Outsider from the 31st dimension, who also has mental powers, played by their 13 year-old son.

‘Tank’, a Bull with confidence issues, and powers that manifest as a touch-ranged inertial dampening field, played by Nick.

In their get together fight, they wrecked a multi-level subway station, battling ‘The Mass’, a gravity/density controller who had been created by Dr. Elias Cambridge, head of research at the Halcyon City Technical Institute. Dr. Cambridge secretly has a bit of a mad scientist streak, and is experimenting to create supers. The Mass was his first noteworthy success, and Elias is really not fond of the team after they took down his creation. (The team doesn’t know any of this backstory, but the players came up with this great backstory to meld everything together.)

After getting concepts settled in and going through the questions, they were hanging out in the Prophet’s ‘bat cave’, when an alert came through. The Collector was on the loose, ransacking the Halcyon City Technical Institute. The Collector shows up in Halcyon almost at random, causes a lot of havoc, and leaves, taking apparently random people with her. Nobody knows where she comes from, or what her goals are. Her most ‘interesting’ feature is that when she fights supers, sometimes it is as if she has never even heard of them, even though she has fought them before, other times she knows virtually everything there is to know about the hero and how to counter him/her.

They arrive on scene quickly, using a combination of the Bull’s inertial dampers and the Outsider’s flight power to make their way downtown.

Upon arriving, they see the Collector hovering in the middle of the quad, and her robotic spiders scurrying around picking up bystanders, scanning them, and discarding them. She’s looking for someone specific, but hasn’t found her target yet.

The Razorback and Tank jump into action, initially focusing on taking out the spiders so bystanders can get to safety. Prophet observes from a good vantage point, and quickly realizes that The Collector is seeking a specific individual, and she obviously hasn’t found them yet.

Zero wants to end the fight quickly, so he shifts into a pointed form, and goes hypersonic, trying to spear the Collector. Things go poorly for him, as she seems to have been expecting that. She turns to face him just before he hits, and as he spears her, she gives him a sad, disappointed smile (as if she really didn’t want to have to do this), giggles, and unleashes a massive electrical charge into Zero, who is now Insecure and Afraid. (He just speared his target through the gut, and she was prepared for it.)

Meanwhile, the Prophet ransacks damaged spider-bots for intel, discovering that the Collector’s target is none other than Dr. Elias Cambridge himself. She relays that information to the team, and campus security, while she works out a plan.

Tank narrowly evades a new swarm of spider-bots thanks to the quick thinking of Razorback, but ends up in a poor location. Thinking quickly, she sprints off the rooftop, manipulating her inertia so she could make the jump to the Collector, still hovering above the scene. Landing a solid blow, she drags the Collector and Zero to the ground, and Razorback piles on hoping to distract/disable the villain long enough to take her out of the fight.

Thinking quickly, Zero tries to figure out what the Collector’s overall plan is, probing her mind for information. He gets only a quick flash of an image: a blasted, wasteland, completely devoid of life, except for the Collector herself, grief-stricken and sobbing at the sight. He gets the distinct impression that she’s not responsible for whatever scorched the world clean of life. The visceral, mind-breaking sight freaks out Zero, causing him to destructively unleash his powers, throwing Razorback, Tank, and a few dozen spider droids a good distance from where the Collector had just been. (She had teleported away after summoning more bots.) Prophet scolds Zero for his recklessness, and he accepts her evaluation of his actions (-Superior, +Danger).

Distraught, and angry, the Collector tried to pin down Prophet with a stasis field, and sent some of her spider-bots to endanger bystanders in order to buy time for another group to hunt down her newly located prey.

Prophet leaps into action, fending off the bots long enough for a crowd of fleeing students to get clear, managing to grab the memory core from one of the disabled spiders in the process. Tank gets creative, and decides that the parking lot would make a good barricade. She goes a bit overboard, and instead of simply flipping the pavement over onto the spider swarm, she flips it like a table, and it lands leaning up against the building the droids were heading towards, blocking all of the entrances on that side of the building with 6″ of asphalt.

Razorback is shaking off the pain from an awkward landing, as Zero tries to talk down the Collector. He manages to get her talking to him, and she tells him, “I need certain people…so many people. If they aren’t there, I won’t be able to stop it. I can’t let it happen again! But maybe this isn’t the right time…” before she and her spider-bots vanish back to wherever they came from.

Having defeated(?) The Collector with no loss of life, and without her managing to collect her prey, the team retires back to the Prophet’s ‘bat cave’ to recuperate and debrief.

Zero tells the team what he’s discovered, and it gets them all thinking about what the Collector might be trying to prevent. (Is she really a villain? Is she a misguided hero? Or is what she’s doing actually necessary? If so, what does that mean for them?)

As they recover, they find themselves watching the news, as the Collector fights the Collector, trying to prevent an abduction, screeching about how, “It’s not the right time! You can’t take him yet!”

Sensibly, the decide not to get involved…this time.

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Zero ends the night, -2 Superior, +2 Danger, realizing for the first time that he’s really not that much better than everyone else, and he’s got to think things through more instead of just reacting, or he’s going to get people hurt.

Legacy ended the night with 3 Potential marked, and a greater attachment to the team.

Tank ended the night Insecure, but with 1 Potential marked.

Razorback ended the night feeling less connected to the team, despite their reassurances that he had been valuable in the fight.

It was a great session, with everybody agreeing that they’d like to continue with things. (It’ll be a periodic back-up game for when someone can’t make it to our regular gaming night.)

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The Collector is a time-traveler, somewhat inspired by Kang the Conqueror, of Avengers fame. Her seemingly random experience with the heroes’ powers is because she’s encountering them in non-linear order from her perspective. The first time a hero fights her, might be the 3rd time she’s fought them, but the first time she fights a hero might be the 8th time they’ve fought her. She is trying to prevent a world-ending disaster, and has determined that the only way to do so is to get the right people together, in the right place, at the right time. To do so, she’s jumping through time as she identifies her targets, kidnapping them at some crucial juncture. But every change she makes to the timeline complicates the process of finding the right combination of people. She’s been at it for centuries, maybe millennia, and is growing progressively more desperate, and less gentle with her methods. At this point, she is willing to do ANYTHING to ensure that she gets ‘her’ people, because if she fails the world will end, and she might not survive it again this time…

Someone mentioned the thought that you might want to lock a label low to solidify that as part of your personality.

The example was perhaps Spider man was a negative two Danger as he goes out of his way to not been seen as the menace Jameson makes him out to be.

My question is … Without directly the engaging an opponent Move, how would you actually deal them a powerful blow to give them conditions?

(Edit to clarify – How do the heroes deal the Villian a condition without directly engaging..ie without using danger )

What are your thoughts on how this plays out or looks like?

“Create a second character”

What’s the intent behind this advance? Should the player create a second character and be able to play both at the same time, or have a different character that they can swap to depending on the session?

Either way, to be honest those sound like play style decisions that should be made by the table, rather than by mechanics. I’m curious why it’s there, and what it’s expected to add.

So, my group has a mechanics conundrum.

So, my group has a mechanics conundrum. We’ve got a few NPCs joining the main PCs team while they help rescue their allies from a psychopath villain.

What kind of mechanics would you suggest to continue to put the “Team” theme farther out there while not narratively letting the NPCs fall by the wayside?

I was considering adding more Team to the pool (“Red team” since we use blue stones) that when you use it puts the NPC in danger ala Dungeon World, or specifically making a move per NPC (When you directly engage a group and Dynamite is present, roll +Danger) or for the NPCs as a whole (When you engage the enemy with allies who aren’t part of the team, decide what label they stand for and roll+that), or something else…

What do you guys think?

So how are other GMs going about enforcing limits on their players for how powerful they are?

So how are other GMs going about enforcing limits on their players for how powerful they are? Some of these powers are very open ended, by design of course, but that is giving me some trouble in the game I am running.

Let me start by saying our group has a meta gamer. Every game we play he looks for a very optimal build because that is how he has fun. When we started I pushed heavily that this will be themed around teen super heroes ala Teen Titans, so they would not be wanting to murder people, they would be trying to apprehend people to bring to justice. I also encouraged people to set their own limits on power because it is more fun when those limits get pushed and broken, so our Legacy that can open shadow portals can only do it in shadows he sees (story related, another member of his legacy got trapped going through a portal to a shadow that he knew should have been there but wasn’t), our telekinetic cannot lift anything heavier than 100 pounds at a time, ect. I told them I would not force limits on them since the rules didn’t, but encouraged stuff like this.

So what happens every fight is our Trickster, with Illusion and Emotion control abilities, is invisible, has 500 illusions of himself, evil clowns, or other players active and interacting with the environment because he says his powers do not require him to sustain the illusions after creating them, and he is making all enemies suicidaly depressed. (He also has stupid good luck when rolling dice, so his plans pretty much always work)

What this leads to, especially in our recent session where I had them playing super powered keep away with a ball, is everyone feels so left behind. He has an answer for everything and needed no effort to get there. If I force a nerf on him he will stop having fun, but right now he is the only one that really is.

How are other people avoiding this or dealing with it? Surely there must be people with gravity control that are just turning their enemies into puddles or something else just as OP, how do we avoid that in this system?

What started as an absolute blast of a game to play has become something that I don’t know how to proceed on, or convince most of the group besides this one person to play again.

A final(ish) version of The Youth!

A final(ish) version of The Youth! I’ve updated condensed a few things, updated “Not the Baby” to reflect a new method of leadership (based on whether or not people are nice to you) and clarified some wording.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Htnv5KQdEgOROsfkO7TbwvyfJTj6e43nf_t0vQcwhBM/edit?usp=sharing

So The Jank Cast made me bite.

Is anyone offering/interested in a Masks Play by Post game?

Alberto Muti by any chance?

Some character ideas based on some of my past/current games and stories

Undine, aka Lyla Marsh, The Outsider

South Asian/European mix, Female, Athletic Clothes, Stylish Costume, Gills

Powers: Water Control and Aquatic Adaptation

Freak +1, Danger -1, Savior +0, Superior +2, Mundane +1

Belong in Two Worlds, Not so Different After All

Hey, this is the deal, once upon a time, my people were just minding their own business on the coastlines like we’ve done for thousands of years. Not hurting anybody or anything. And then some hater with an ironic name decided he was going to paint the lot of us as demon worshipping, inbred psychopaths…..that smell bad! So the navy ups and decides to torpedo our colonies and raid our surface towns and lots of people die. Then there all like, “oh sorry, we thought you were monsters, won’t happen again.” But Mr. Hatercraft decides to make a little money on the side and publish this book and so now everybody and their mother thinks people like me are worshipping some tentacled freak out in the Pacific. I mean, yeah, some of us can do the tentacled thing, but most of us are like me pretty damn human looking, so what the hell? So the for the last eighty fucking years my people have had to rebrand ourselves a whole different name because everybody thinks the old one means “psychotic, inbred, smelly fish-person demon worshipper”. So yeah, that’s why I do this, show that hey, most of us look really normal and hey WE’RE NOT PSYCHOPATHS. And stop fucking talking to me about fucking stars being right!

(More than a little based on the Lemurians from my Divine Blood game….do not call them that “Deep” name…they won’t like it….at all.)

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Miss Direct aka Reina Mason the Janus

Female, Asian/Black, Boring Clothing, Concealing Costume, Hood

Supernatural Senses – Self-Hallucination

Freak -1, Danger +0, Savior +0, Superior +1, Mundane +3

The Mask: Superior, Mild-Mannered, I’ll Save You

Obligations: Schoolwork, Delivery Girl, Gaming Club

So, my vision is like a editable UI. It didn’t start out that way, of course. I mean when I was a kid, all I would do is decide that maybe my friend looked better with blue-hair and it was done. Or I’d draw squiggles in the air nobody could see. Or maybe make up my own cartoons to watch…stuff that most people would take for just a kid with imagination. And then I started doing things like editing out walls, or making the room seem brighter or darker, or I’d mark my trail behind me so I didn’t get lost. When I started gaming and dealing with the PC…well, I just started blowing up with applications. Like I can designate this section of my vision here to rotate its POV one-hundred eighty degrees, shift its origin a little back so I’m not in the way and now I can see behind me. Or I can rotate my vision so that its sitting behind someone else and I can see the cards they’re holding (but that’s cheating, don’t do that.) Or I can mark that guy over there who’s trying to sneak up behind me so that he’s glowing like the Fourth of July no matter where he goes. Or copy down whatever I hear someone saying as they say it (but I get whatever I mishear, bleh…glitches). I’ve got this list of folders over here that’s a bunch of class lectures and stuff that I can pull up and see whenever…I’m not sure that’s cheating on tests, but maybe. Can’t do anything about what other people see, unless they get into my head, then I can mess with them…and I can usually tell when other people are messing with what I’m seeing. Some guy figured it out and called it “self-hallucination” but yeah, that’s why I can watch a movie from five miles away (now if only I could hear it too). Oh look, smoke bomb, gotta edit that out. (Why the name….because you think I’m actually going to give someone a clue how I do stuff?)

(Self-Hallucination is one of the powers I made for Divine Blood RPG and one of the characters I have planned to come in later books has it….don’t ask me to figure out how it works…there has to be some sort of fundamental unconscious knowledge of the universe going on for this to work)

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Greyskin, aka Megumi Morisato, The Transformed.

Female, Unidentifiable ethnicity, grey and scarred skin; burned out and dead eyes; Concealing costume; Clawed hands

Powers: Phasing and Supernatural Senses

Freak +3, Danger +1, Savior +1, Superior -1, Mundane -1

I am not my Body, Not Human Enough, Unstoppable

I always knew I was going to get powers. It’s the alien in me, see, we’ve been mixed since the late 1800s and the aliens activate something in the human genome that makes us super. So I always knew I’d go super….but most of us stay looking normal. It wasn’t really my powers that changed me, see, it was my powers activating that let me survive. There was a fight see, I think it was the Spears of Achilles (you know those super-mercs) and the Aesir (I was in Norway with my brother) and there was some toxic waste…and it ended up on me. Now, my powers activated so I sort of phased out of this reality in time to live but not in time to prevent being burned to hell. I’m sort of healing…but I’m not healing back human…or either of the aliens I’m descended from. I got these…claws that aren’t really useful for anything like delicate stuff. And…I got this mental block on my phasing, it takes a lot of focus, and sometimes I freak out and get stuck in things…but I can cancel out mass and sort of half-phase so I sort of act like one of those super-strong bricks. And…I don’t really see anymore…well I do…but I see…umm dimensional bonds between people and objects and such. I can do most of the stuff you can with normal sight like read and such, but try to explain colors to people and sometimes shapes…and uh….yeah, I mean I don’t see colors anymore blue ink has different sorts of anchors than black ink…I think it was black and blue anyway…but yeah…there’s that. But still, I was meant to be super from the beginning…so…so I can figure out the hideous burns and monster thing…and I won’t get stuck in another wall after a panic attack…I hope.

(Greyskin was a Champions character of mine with superstrength and resistances based on interweaving through various other realities http://fav.me/d5e41br … http://fav.me/d9dyoiy)

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Medusa, aka Terra Black the Nova

Female, Mixed Ethnicity, Common Clothing, School Uniform

Powers: Sorcery (Transformation, Rebirth, Dimensional Barriers)

Freak +2, Danger +1, Savior +0, Superior +0, Mundane +0

Burn: Elemental Awareness, Shielding, Worship, Boost

So, like, it started with that, you know amulet thing. I was on a field trip in the museum, I think..it’s hard to think of it. It wasn’t long after well, the thing with my father…and the ice…and the car…you know? Anyway, so I see…I’m a gorgon, by way of Germany, Russia, China, India, Libya (because, you know, Alexander the Great took slaves and some of those were gorgons that just hadn’t…you know gorgoned yet) Anyway…soo…like I also got the Mantle of Medusa…so my life is now going to go like this: I get to be the mediator for Earth with other realms, you know heaven, hell, etc…phenomenal cosmic power, probably have a kid at some point (because the Mantle will, you know, want to keep the family going) and then get my head cut off because someone will want the Mantle, like if they’re a gorgon trying to make themselves Medusa or some magician trying to power some artifact or something else. Yay, I get to be a, you know goddess but won’t get to enjoy immortality….and none of my clothes fit any more because apparently Medusa comes with ridiculous comic book build…Yay.

(Thought about Doomed, but doesn’t really fit…she’s not really doomed, her position just comes with lots of enemies

Extended origin: http://fav.me/dcqw6o)

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Tender Bar, the Bull

Tall, Slender, Female, Middle-Eastern, Ragged Clothing, No Costume

Pure and simple rage.

Freak +1, Danger +3, Savior -1, Superior +1, Mundane -1

The Bull’s Heart, Thick and Thin-Skinned, Punch Everyone

Don’t ask me how I can do what I can do. I just get mad. I get mad and things break. Best I can do is make sure I only get mad around things and people that need to break. There’s no genetic marker. No Magic. I’ve never trained in martial arts. No psychic powers. No nano-machines. Trust me, I’ve been tested for it all. I just get mad. Been that way since I was a kid and I had to take an anger management class. There was some shrink with an experiment or something, and hell, I was just a foster kid, right? Got to be able profit from me some how, right?

(Tender Bar was a brute I had from CoH, sort of based on Durarara!!!’s Shizuo Heiwajima http://fav.me/d3l1r75 had a set of scripts for her that would advance her costume to be bloodier and bloodier and progressively jumble up my controls so she behaved erratically…solo only scripts for that reason…and her speech would get more and more brutal…so she eventually broke Mot…)

Okay, I think The Bearer is about as done as I can get it without seeing the main rules text or being able to…

Okay, I think The Bearer is about as done as I can get it without seeing the main rules text or being able to playtest it.

The last things I added were the “when the team got together” prompt and one new move: Feet On The Ground, Head In The Stars.