Let me say up front that I love everything Magpie Games has ever put out. I go out of my way to play their stuff, and I’ve run nearly everything they’ve ever put out. Starting with Epyllion way back in the day, through Urban Shadows, Bluebeard’s Bride, Cartel, Zombie World, Pasión de las Pasiones, all just terrific, eminently playable games. But somehow, despite having played maybe six one-shots of it, I’ve never run Masks, their teen supers RPG. I fixed that oversight with a three-shot last month, and it was so worth it.

I think some of that comes from comics not really being my jam. Heck, I even worked in a comic book store when I was a teenager. But the teen hero genre never got its hooks into me. But like with any well designed game that adds to its genre rather than simply aping it, it doesn’t really matter! A well designed game will deliver despite your subject matter expertise, not because of it. I got a great mini-campaign out of Masks despite the hole in my knowledge.

The Overview, If You’re One of the Five People Who Don’t Know

Masks is a game about teenage superheroes in Halcyon City, ground zero for supers from around the world. Halcyon City has been a supers city through several eras: the Golden Age of its founding heroes, through the cosmic-scale Silver Age, the darker and more cynical Bronze Age, and finally the modern era.

Rather than running up against old-timers like Champions or Mutants and Masterminds, or more new wave takes like Sentinels Comics or Brave New World, Masks makes no effort to model the physics of super powers. In a very crowded gaming space, Masks broke genuinely new ground via the typical PbtA approach: deconstruct and model the dramatic beats of the genre’s fiction, not the material facts of the game space.

The killer app of Masks is that your stats are five labels describing your character’s self-image: danger (how dangerous you think you are), freak (how strange you think you are), savior (how much you think others depend on you), superior (how much better you think you are than everyone else), and mundane (how much you think you fit in). Those values can be positive or negative: you can be low freak (not very strange at all) and high danger (dangerous despite your normality). The cool trick is that your values move up and down based on others telling you, a teenager, what you are and how the world works. All adults in your life have influence over this by default, but you can hand that influence to PCs and NPCs as well. Labels are zero-sum as well, with one value going down as another goes up. Feeling more superior, for example, means feeling less…something else.

This constant dialogue with your own self-image and how adults (mostly) impact it is such a sharp insight. As the parent of a soon-to-be teenager, I’ve seen both sides of this. Sometimes she grows or shrinks based on what I tell her, and sometimes she rejects it outright because she knows herself better than me. Smart, smart design.

Oh Those Playbooks

As a purely practical matter, the spread of playbooks that comes with the core rulebook (there are scads more in other books and on DriveThru) always delivers a good time. Between my six sessions of play and this three-shot I just ran, such good stuff emerges from any combination of characters. To its credit, the rulebook also has lengthy essays covering every single playbook, both player-facing and GM-facing. The balance of moves, setup questions, everything is just exquisite. I have yet to discover there’s a must-have playbook, nor some combination of books that step on each other’s toes.

Because the game isn’t concerned with the specifics of how powers work, playbooks that seem like they would outshine everyone else just don’t. The Nova, for example, is practically a walking nuke. Meanwhile the Beacon is literally a non-powered hanger-on. Those playbooks have no trouble at all coexisting in Masks scenes because the game is about how they’re both teenagers, not about which one can fly faster or punch harder.

To be sure, turning powers into pure description and fictional positioning isn’t going to work for every gamer. Look, I’ve put my time in in the Champions mines. I get the pleasure of engineering a clever math trick, an exploit or loophole, an optimized solution. But for me at least, superhero stories aren’t compelling because of math. Give me a good metaphor and human needs any time.

Showing Its Age

Masks came out in 2016. I’m not sure many PbtA games have come out since then that handle their subject matter better. For me, it’s a high water mark in the form. But it’s been eight years! How is it holding up?

Information design-wise, the game could use a little freshening up. Influence, the core of the game, should really be broken up into several moves or categories on the help sheets. However, if you use the additional deck of cards you can pick up for $20, all becomes clear. Cards are absolutely a cleaner way to deal with Influence. Same with conditions: the cards clarify exactly what the conditions do to you, and how to get rid of them. It’s so clear that I feel like the influence and condition cards are a must-use addition to the game.

System-wise, I still love everything about Masks except the system for building villains. You give your villains between 1 and 5 conditions, and when those conditions are all hit they’re exposed to being “taken out” by one more hit. That reads fine on paper, but in actual practice? Hardly ever happens. Instead, the fiction itself would tell us when the villain was down for the count. In a three-shot specifically, my players’ first (and usually only) advancement was to take their “Moment of Truth,” a special move each playbook has that finishes off a villain without further adieu. Pro tip: don’t allow Moment of Truth as an advancement in a short run game!

There’s also the question of moving from a more solidly physics-oriented approach to a narrative-oriented approach to using superpowers. It’s probably the main deal breaker or maker for folks. The specific triggers for various moves tend to be more open to interpretation than many PbtA games, leading to regular pauses to navigate the difference between unleashing and directly engaging and defending with your powers. Your powers can color literally any action you may take. Fictional positioning looms larger here than in many other RPGs, because you have to constantly filter the game effects through the lens of “okay but how are you comforting someone with your fire powers?”

Another notable facet of Masks I’ve found, both playing and now running it, is that players have to look more at outcomes than inputs to nail down the “right” move in many cases. You can’t just talk and talk until you fictionally trigger moves. Instead, you have to decide what you want out of the action and backfill with the right fictional trigger to get there. It’s not terrible! But gameplay ends up being more tactical than I expect from other PbtA games. It might also be low-key thematic: supers don’t just stumble into using their powers.

Tl;dr

For an eight year old game, Masks is still one of the strongest offerings in the PbtA space and the superhero space. I’ve looked at Spectaculars and Sentinel Comics and I’ve played Champions and honestly? Just thinking about playing a superhero game that isn’t Masks makes me ask myself why I would bother. I say this because comics are not my jam! And I still think about the next time I’ll get to play Masks.