Masks Actual Play Report
All right folks, tuck in for a long one! So, I ran my first one-shot of #MasksRPG over Hangouts this evening. Am planning on running another game tomorrow, though that game will be unrelated. Ah, also I believe this qualifies as mission progress for the #HalcyonJailbreak as well!
The Prep
Following the advice in the GM materials, I prepared a villain, as well as a situation for the heroes to be stuck in with said villain. I had envisioned a bronze-age ideological cape-hunter type, who had no powers and wanted to wipe supers off the face of the planet. Think Amon from Legend of Korra, with a bit of Deathstroke thrown in. Mind games, lots of physicality, meeting the opposition with overwhelming force, that kind of thing. I had two names (one for backup, to alleviate improv panic if one of the PCs picked the name I had in mind as their hero’s name): Sawtooth, and Razorback. The situation I had in mind was that they would have kidnapped someone close to one of the heroes. I had intended to ask a few questions of the heroes:
1) Who was kidnapped?
2) Where are they being held?
3) Which of you specifically are they calling out?
It turned out that I only needed to ask the first, as the background and “when our team first came together” questions provided very natural answers to the other two. They also provided a name for the villain, and a bunch of other fleshing-out information, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s set the scene so you know who the PCs are.
The Cast
Diego “Shiver” Salazar, The Legacy
Shiver, lightning-fast manipulator of vibrations who can put himself or matter out of phase with the surrounding environment, is the latest in a proud and broken line. The Shivers are not world- renowned, but their identities are not secret; Diego’s grandmother is still very active in the world of villain-busting, though his father retired several years ago after a fight with a supervillain left him crippled. His niece Sandra, probable next in the line, is in middle school and has yet to awaken to her powers. Diego’s upbringing left him with little choice but to become a superhero–and also left him with three generations of enemies.
Axel “Black Fox” Katakana, The Protege
Black Fox, gadgeteer genius and highly trained martial artist, is learning to be a hero from a mentor who doesn’t respect his skills. Like many recent graduates from Halcyon City high schools, Axel joined up with a loose group of locals who claimed they wanted to fight crime–but unlike Axel, they didn’t take the responsibility seriously. Enter Red Jackal, old and power-suited superhero who took Axel under his wing. Red Jackal believes that for people like the two of them, with no powers, the only way to survive and get the job done is to suit up in the heaviest, most advanced power armor they can build–while Black Fox takes a more streamlined approach, to let his martial talents carry him through. It’s a source of tension, leading to a lot of angry lectures–but for the moment, Red Jackal continues to train him, and even supports his new team with comms and other equipment. It’s better than letting Axel go off on his own and get himself killed, right?
Jackie “Freefall” Palmer, The Janus
Jackie just wants to live a normal life, graduate high school and get a degree–and Freefall, absorber of energy and defyer of gravity, is the mantel she wears to vent her anger and frustration at the problems she faces. It’s the only outlet she has, but it also puts her deeply at odds with her family, as her mother’s sister was accidentally killed by a superhero named Titan several years ago. Suffice to say, her oft-unemployed mother hates supers–and every time a news report comes on the screen about another city block leveled in the fights they have, it pushes her one more step towards packing the family up and moving them out of Halcyon.
Marc “Coil” Sumner
Coil, barely-contained channel for electricity and magnetic forces, comes from a broken home. His mother died at a young age, and his father crawled into the bottle soon after, only coming up to physically abuse his children. Coil’s powers first awakened when he had a dream of rescuing his sister from their father–but when he attacked his father in the dream, in reality he attacked his sister. She survived, and soon after both of them were taken into the foster system and away from their father, but the scars run deep for both of them. Coil feels he has no choice but to be a superhero, believing that he must exercise his powers if he ever wishes to control them so that he can avoid hurting anyone else–and finding a team of people he can trust to keep his head on straight is a blessing.
Quite a fascinating team! Made even more so in…
Character Questions
I won’t go through question by question with these, but I will go through some of the major highlights. The players were all really on board with reincorporating fiction, conservations of NPCs and the like. Shiver and Black Fox in particular gave me an open invitation on the villain front; when I asked who the Shiver line’s old nemesis was, he just gave me the name Talisman and said he didn’t have any more than that. Bingo! Villain’s name became Talisman. Black Fox was of course asked who outside the team knew about his training, and he answered that it was “whoever is going to cause trouble for us this evening.” Fistbump for that one, friend.
Side-note: before play, I was a little shaky on how it would play out to have both a Protege and Legacy in the same team, since they have similar schticks. They are very different, though; I just couldn’t really see it until I saw the players build them. The Legacy is all about the line; they have the responsibility that comes with it, and the support that a collective of people who know what they’re going through can provide. The Protege, though, they’re not family; they’re an apprentice, and it’s a very personal relationship. I guess I’d say that the Protege has a relationship with a person, while the Legacy has a relationship with… well, a legacy. Well-named!
Anyway, a few other highlights:
The person who could help Coil keep a rein on his powers was Professor Mark Jackson–also known as Red Jackal.
Coil’s and Freefall’s sisters go to the same class in Hillcrest Middle School. They hang out together because they’re both named Alex. There may or may not be 41 different Alexes attending that school due to a probability-manipulating supervillain and a prophecy about someone bearing that name being of great importance; where’s the canon-line for table chatter, again? 😉
Hillcrest was also the school that Black Fox attended; his “Bush league superhero group” was called the Hillcrest Falcons. In this version of Halcyon City, starting a superhero group is kind of like starting a band: a lot of people do it, especially right out of high school, but most don’t really take it seriously or stick with it (especially if they don’t have the talent for it).
We also discovered that Hillcrest’s principal (who I am ashamed to admit I did not record the name of) is fighting to keep the school open; with all the superpowered fights in the neighborhood, a lot of parents and authorities are pushing to move schools out of the inner city and into the suburbs, which of course would be terrible for the poorer kids who would have to take a 45 minute bus ride out of the city to get to school every day. It was really cool, I thought, to see superheroes set up as a symptom of urban decay–especially with that band/deliquency element we’d already set up.
This was especially cool and dramatic since the school was kind of a hub and a safe place for most of the PCs–and because their own actions as superheroes were contributing to the kind of neighborhood rep that could lead to it being closed. Especially considering how the team first got together: they fought an enigmatic villain known as The Collector, a time-traveling serial kidnapper who commanded an army of spider-drones [1], abducting people for reasons only she can fathom. They fought her in a subway station, and ended up overloading the entire power grid for eight city blocks in order to stop the train carrying her latest target; it took the city over a week to repair all the damaged fuse boxes. On the other hand, they did attract the approval of a public works superhero named Foundation, who approved of damaging property rather than people (especially since he gets paid to repair the former). It’s the kind of endorsement that you don’t really want if you don’t want people thinking you’re dangerous, really.
There were a few other revelations that popped up during play and tied into the backstory questions as well, but let’s answer those in…
The Session
Rather than starting in media res, as the GM materials suggest, I started the PCs very briefly in a mundane situation; I wanted to show the PCs non-super life a bit, and to show Talisman as an invader and threat to that life. To keep the pressure on, though, I opened up the session by asking “So, what were you doing twenty minutes ago?”
Not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but it put a very tight time limit on things and kept the game from devolving into a planning coma, which was the aim.
They answered that they were “celebrating their one-month anniversary as a superhero team.” There was some half-joking about who was actually old enough to buy alcohol, and trying to talk Professor Jackson into buying them some to celebrate, which became canon and ended up with them spending the evening cleaning up the shop in penance for asking such a thing.
They then receieved a call on their comms, as someone had hacked in–Talisman, asking if he was speaking to “Shiver Junior.” Shiver recognized the voice immediately; his family had fought this man countless times, and he’d watched over a dozen videos of those encounters. Tech-savvy Black Fox muted his mic immediately so they could talk, and the team followed suit–though not before Shiver let out a torrent of swearing that confirmed his identity to Talisman.
Before Shiver could share more than Talisman’s name, though[2], the villain stated that he knew Shiver was listening, and that he knew Shiver had made some friends in the last few weeks and they were likely listening as well. Shiver came back with a taunt, asking Talisman if he was just calling to see what having friends was like; Talisman answered that he didn’t need friends in his line of work, and that he didn’t need Shiver either–but that both of them were going to be unhappy this evening, because if Shiver and his friends didn’t show up at the place where they met, then there was going to be trouble.
Shiver then taunted again, asking if Talisman was actually going to show his face instead of keeping in hiding. Talisman answered maybe yes, maybe no, but there was one voice that Shiver would see if he came down to the subway station.
Shiver’s blood ran cold, and I asked him who it was that had been kidnapped. I also opened up the question to the other PCs, since Shiver had been in the spotlight for a while. Table consensus ended up with Shiver’s niece Sandra being the victim–made the most sense, since she would likely be a new Shiver eventually. Shiver originally suggested Melissa, a girl at the middle school whom he believed was Freefall’s secred identity–but Freefall stated that would kind of eliminate the mystery too quick, and Shiver agreed.
Meanwhile, Black Fox was working to scramble their comms and eject Talisman so they could speak safely. Shiver tried to get inside Talisman’s head with some questions (Pierce the Mask), and Talisman was more than candid about his intentions: if the team didn’t come and rescue Sandra, she would die, and if they did come to rescue Sandra, he would kill them instead. His last words before Black Fox cut him off were “You have twenty minutes.”
Just before we cut forward, an amusing moment happened: Coil stated that he was smashing his hand into the shop’s fusebox to drain the electrity and charge his power, but he didn’t actually roll for it until we prompted him to. The player was so into the fiction and the character’s headspace that he did the perfect setup for a move without even realizing it! Good stuff.
So the team takes their vehicles (The team has one, and Coil has one; Coil rides on his own because he rolled poorly on charging his power and kinda needs to vent), and heads to the subway station. Along the way, Black Fox grills Shiver about Talisman, and we discover pretty much what we’ve outlined above. We also discover the source of his name, and that he has a dual nature of his own; Shiver’s player said he thought it would be cool if his family knew a secret about Talisman, so I said yeah that’s awesome and asked him what it was. So far as most of the world is concerned, Talisman is this mundanes-first cape-killer and that’s it. But the Shivers have fought him for long enough to know that he takes trophies from every super that he kills; he has a sadistic, prideful streak, not just an ideological one. They keep this a secret because it’s shameful to them; Shiver’s father was crippled in a fight with Talisman, and the latter took a souvenir from him (though we didn’t establish what it was).
So the team arrives at the station and cautiously enters. Black Fox sticks close to the entrance at first, Assessing the Situation. I tell him for free that the subway station is suspiciously empty, and he discovers a few things on top of that: Sandra is hung from the ceiling by a high-strength cable, just over the electrified third rail. The cable is held in place by some kind of remote device, so that Talisman can trigger it and drop her to be fried. The fuseboxes the team fried a month ago have been replaced, should the need arise. When Sandra sees Shiver, she calls out to warn him that this is a trap.
The question is then asked if they are entering a battle against a dangerous foe as a team, to which I answer that there needs to be a dangerous foe for that to be the case–and, before they get too comfortable, follow it up by giving them one, in the form of Talisman’s sniper fire smashing into the wall next to them. When Black Fox rolls as the team leader, he rolls a miss, and I decide to capture someone; the single fire is turned into automatic fire, driving the team into the tunnel and cutting them off from the outside world. The fight is on!
Coil is eager to leap into the fray, and sprints down the railway shooting lightning at Talisman’s muzzle flashes (clearing Insecure by enacting a terrible plan). As Coil’s lightning arcs down the tunnel, striking the weapon’s barrel, the bullets in the magazine cook off; this throws off the gunman’s aim, but a round still wings Coil, causing his powers to go into overload. The lightning arcs out, powering up the tunnel’s arc lamps and revealing Talisman’s location to the rest of the team. Talisman’s weapon is melted into slag, so he drops it and pulls out a small remote, declaring that he’s been fighting capes for decades and isn’t about to be taken out by something like that. He triggers the remote, and dozens of places along the walls and ceiling of the tunnel shimmer as optical camouflage is dropped, revealing that the station is wired with mines.[3]
Meanwhile, Shiver focused on rescuing Sandra, and attempted to phase past the mines and up to her. He rolls a miss on unleashing his powers, and I decide to compare him to the past. He gets through the mines and up to Sandra just fine, but when he touches the cable he feels himself snatched back into phase; the cable is coated with a material that Shiver established during play as being a weakness of his. Of course, Talisman has fought Shivers in the past and knew all about this; the material absorbs and redirects Shiver’s vibrational energy, temporarily nullifying his powers–and on top of that, he’s now stuck to the cable with Sandra. She did tell him that this was a trap!
(Although I had no idea the cable was booby-trapped until he rolled the miss, of course)
Before Talisman can take advantage and drop them both to be fried, though, Freefall leaps into action–literally! She’s got the strength to snap the cable, and gravity is basically an option for her, so she leaps up to grab the Salazars. She also, however, rolls a miss on Unleash, so I choose to endanger someone from either life (the super one, in this case); she snaps the cable and pulls the pair free, but underestimates her own strength, and the three of them land right on a mine!
I’m feeling generous, so Freefall gets to take the powerful blow for all three of them. Naturally, she rolls high, and chooses to lose control of herself or her powers in a terrible way. Her biggest power is absorbing and redirecting energy [4], so after a bit of chatter we decide that she reflects the blast backwards and outwards, setting off all the mines on their half of the tunnel. I don’t hit anyone with another powerful blow after that, but half the tunnel is collapsed at this point and things are looking a bit grim.
We then cut to Black Fox, and see that he’s Been Reading the Files on Talisman in addition to his chatter with Shiver. He rolls well, and we discover that the last time he was defeated it was because the Shivers invited outside help from another super. I ask Shiver who it was–and we discover that it was Titan, the super who accidenally killed Freefall’s aunt. This was also the fight in which Shiver’s father was taken out of commission, so there was a lot of fallout and collateral damage on that day. Talisman is also missing some badge of honor or trophy that he used to wear on his armor before that fight, and I ask Black Fox what it was; we struggle with this question, and finally settle on a very honorable medal from a foreign country.
As his anything-goes question, he asks if there’s any sign of how Talisman hacked into their comms. I answer that he sees one of the Collector’s wrecked drones hanging from his equipment belt. Leftover from their fight with her? Equipment from a future version of the Collector who knew their weaknesses? Questions for later, were this a longer game…
For this game, though, Black Fox sees the missing medal as an opportunity to get under Talisman’s skin, and he takes it. He provokes Talisman, asking him when he stopped collecting trophies and started collecting school kids, and telling him to step out of the shadows and face him one on one. He rolls a 6, but Freefall assists by adding in taunts of her own, taking one out of the Teamwork pool to bump it up to a 7. I actually miss that I’m supposed to be the one to choose an option, and Black Fox states that Talisman overreacts.
Naturally, Talisman follows through on this overreaction and draws his sidearm, stepping out of the shadows and down the track, firing off a barrage of bullets at Black Fox[5]. He snaps out a pair of metal tonfas from his armored arms and blocks a few of the bullets–but he rolls a miss to unleash his powers, so I elect to endanger his mentor. After a few blocks, Talisman’s ricochets actually start bouncing off of the tonfas and hitting Black Fox’s body; he stops his firing and states that he thought Black Fox’s style seemed familiar. “You were trained by Red Jackal, weren’t you?”
Before this menace can go anywhere, though, Coil spends the last of his Burn to get a 10+ on unleashing his powers, electing to magnetize the third rail–which, thanks to Black Fox and Freefall’s taunting, Talisman is now standing over. Talisman is lifted off the ground by all the metal in his equipment, and fired back through the tunnel and out of sight, as if the tunnel were a rail gun and he was the bullet.
The team, battered and beaten, takes the opportunity to collect Sandra and retreat before he returns, and everyone makes it home safely. But not, of course, soundly.
In the aftermath, the Halcyon Evening News declares “Subway Super-Smashers Strike Again!” As Jackie “Freefall” Palmer watches on with her family, her mother shakes her head in fear and worry–doubly so, since Sandra goes to Jackie’s school. She looks at her daughters, terrified that it could have been either one of them, and mutters under her breath about leaving this city. If only she could find a job that paid enough…
Meanwhile, Diego “Shiver” Salazar is called onto the carpet by his furious grandmother. Sandra was in danger, kidnapped by Talisman, and his answer was to run off and rescue her without calling in the rest of the family? Previous talk about a special training regimen at her super-base is suspended; clearly, he’s gotten too attached to this new team of his and it’s gotten foolish ideas into his head. He’s going back to the basics…
Back at the tech school, Axel “Black Fox” Katakana delivers his after-action report to a quietly judgmental Professor Mark “Red Jackal” Jackson[6]. Between the damaged armor, the half-demolished subway and everything else that went down, the Professor asks how much simpler this would have been if Black Fox had just been armored like a tank, so he could walk right up to the gunman and take him out without worrying about the gunfire. Considering Talisman now knows they have a connection and got away with that knowledge, maybe he has a point…
Coil, lastly, has the closest among them to a quiet night. His foster father was delayed by the subway disaster, and he has a lot of time to himself to think–about how hard he pushed himself and his powers, how close he came to the edge. He was the one who finally got them out of there, but if any of the rest of the team hadn’t been there to do their part things might have gone down very differently. It’s a chilling thought…
The Wrap-Up, and Closing Thoughts
After those brief epilogue scenes, which were just narrated and not played out as we were running long on time, we did roses and thorns. The only critique is down below; apart from that, the system and the group played together really well. I loved so much how everyone’s stories tied in together, and how we were able to reincorporate… pretty much everything, at least once.
To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure how this would turn out; I was just kind of stepping up to run because nobody else seemed especially keen to. But this was the most fun I’ve had running somethign in a long time, and I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s session!
Specific, brief thoughts of my own:
~I’m glad to see that the power sections of a couple of playbooks have been loosened up in V2. The Protege in particular feels very Bull-like, and I mean that in a very good way.
~Brian Poe’s advice to push conditions on every hard move was very helpful. I started off every hard move with “first, take a condition. Also…” and it kept everything really tense.
~Unleash Your Powers is a lot like Defy Danger, in that it gets defaulted to a lot.
~This didn’t come up so much, but I really like that you can’t actually get taken out of the fight unless you choose to be. You can always choose a different option when you Take a Powerful Blow. This didn’t really click for me until play, but I totally see how that move plays with the Nova: the Nova loves having conditions for their powers, which means that if they want to stay in the fight they’re going to be causing collateral damage all the time when they take a powerful blow. Which is what the Nova is meant to struggle with. Damn, that’s so cool!
~Towards the end, we actually had Shiver Take a Powerful Blow from Freefall lashing out at him to clear one of her conditions (this was during their retreat). It was a powerful emotional blow, because he was looking bad in front of his niece. Cool that the move can work like that!
I feel like I may have had further thoughts, but I’ve been typing away for a while and have forgotten them. I also need to get some sleep. So! I will turn this over to you, and if any of my players have anything to add, please feel free!
[1]It was very amusing to me that we had the one thing that GMs hate most (time travel) and the one thing that players hate most (spiders) in the same character. 😛
[2]The question came up of whether or not Been Reading the Files would trigger here. I ruled not in this case, as a voice on a phone doesn’t give much leeway to say what’s different about them, and because they would probably have more fun in the in-person encounter they were going to flash- forward to shortly.
[3]This was a bit complicated in-play. Coil of course cleared his condition, and then Directly Engaged with Talisman. He only got a 7, and decided to create an opportunity for the team. He was taking a powerful blow, so I had him roll for that as well before narrating the outcome; he gave ground, so Talisman also got an opportunity. The positive opportunity was the lighting; the negative opportunity was that Coil stopped halfway down the tunnel, wide open for another attack. Talisman took the Angry condition, so he escalated the situation dangerously by revealing the mines; reveal a trap already in place was also one of his villain moves, so that dovetailed nicely. In the roses- and-thorns, the biggest critique I got was that I got bogged down in rolling for all the moves before narrating, and that it would have been better to do mini-narration for each roll to keep things going. The buzz-phrase we came up with was “one move per panel, not a bunch of moves in a splash page,” or something to that effect. I also tend to over- narrate moves in general, which I think was a lesser problem for the rest of the encounter.
[4]I briefly considered saying that Freefall nullified all kinetic energy in the tunnel, freezing the team in place. This was of course a terrible idea, since it would have just kept people from doing things instead of driving interesting fiction, so I smarted up and didn’t do that.
[5]I was briefly thrown off my game here, as there is no obvious “Defy Danger/Act Under Fire” style move in Masks. I could’ve just said that he is hit and Takes a Powerful Blow, but that didn’t seem quite right, and he wasn’t fighting back so it wasn’t Directly Engage either. So we defaulted to Unleash Your Powers (which happened a lot over the course of the game). Jonathan, Black Fox’s player, explained that it’s kind of a case of stating what’s happening and asking how the PC reacts–which is how PbtA works anyway, it just threw me for a loop that there was what felt like a big gap in the basic moves compared to other PbtA games. It worked out, but it took a bit to wrap my head around it.
[6]One observation from Jonathan here is that there isn’t really a ‘reporting to your mentor’ style move in the playbook. On review, I suppose Fireside Chat is pretty close, but: bringing it up anyway, since it was mentioned.
Magpie Games
