Indie RPG Spotlight: ‘MASKS’, Your New Favorite Way to Be a Superhero
Grab your masks and capes! Today you’re becoming the teenage superhero you always wanted to be with MASKS.
When I was young I would spend hours daydreaming about superpowers and adventures, about going home from school and having more to do than homework and walking the dogs. Who didn’t? And if Avengers: Endgame finally beating the box office records set by Avatar is any indication, people love a story about a superhero (or two or three or thirty). I would fantasize about flying or telekinesis, having a secret and a small tight-knit group of allies and friends. I probably watched the X-Men animated series and Sailor Moon too many times, but that’s the exact sort of person whom the MASKS rpg was written for.
MASKS
For the GM at the table, the MASKS rpg allows for an amount of creativity in world-building that I don’t often see in tabletop systems, letting a city be built around the players and their decisions. This can be an incredibly freeing aspect of gameplay and creation, but can also become daunting and leave a lot of GMing to imagination and improvisation.
MASKS is a system that encourages creativity and maintaining interpersonal relationships between your characters, making it a perfect game for someone who prefers role-playing to the more crunchy game mechanics. It’s quick to make a character, simple to learn, and fun in a way that wants you to let loose and live your wildest teenage superheroing dreams.
Character Creation & Game Play
MASKS is a game in the Powered by the Apocalypse system. Even if you haven’t encountered the superhero branch of the Apocalypse family, you’re probably at least passingly familiar with the game. After all, the larger system has seen a massive boom in popularity in recent years. Everything from Monster of the Week to Avatar Legends use the PbtA system. So what makes MASKS different? Teenage superheroes.
The game mechanics are easy, just requiring two six-sided dice and a system where you succeed, fail, or sort of do both. The character sheets are by and large pre-fabbed for you. You just pick your hero archetype’s sheet, fill in some blanks, and you’re ready to start saving the world.
The simplified mechanics, however, never overlook the most important part of any teenage superhero’s greatest storyline with a built-in way to track group dynamics and feelings. Is your character embarrassed by a failure allowing another member of the team to hold influence over them? That’s a markable stat. Has your character instead accidentally stepped into a leadership role? Mark that condition! This makes the simple teenage concept of “coolness” a very real and tangible factor in your game. The characters interact and form bonds, rivalries, and frienemships.
Meguey Baker, Mother of the Apocalypse
We can’t talk about MASKS or a Powered by the Apocalypse-based game this week without mentioning Meguey Baker. Baker is a tabletop RPG designer and is most well known for designing the PbtA system with her husband, Vincent Baker. And unfortunately, she was diagnosed with breast cancer just last month.
Members of the RPG community have come together to support Baker. And if you would like to as well, she has a MealTrain which is accepting donations to help make her recovery time a little easier.
If you would like to play the MASKS rpg for yourself, you can find more information on the Magpie Games official website.
Have you played MAKS before? Is it your favorite superhero-themed tabletop RPG, and if not which is it? What kind of hero would you be in the game and in real life? Let us know in the comments!
Happy adventuring, heroes!
