Masks: A New Generation
A giant robot is smashing down Main Street. Your best friend tried to kiss you. Your mom thinks your grades need work. Your mentor thinks your team is bringing you down. Oh, and your costume is ripped. Just another day in Halcyon City... Masks: A New Generation is a superhero roleplaying game in which a team of young heroes fights villains, saves lives, and tries to figure out who they are—noble paragons? Dark avengers? Or regular kids? All against the backdrop of Halcyon City, the greatest city in the world.
Originally created by Brendan Conway
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Masks: A New Generation is a fresh take on the classic superhero stories, placing you squarely into the action as a teenager trying to figure out where you fit into this world of powerful heroes and sinister villains. The game constantly tugs on the characters, forcing them to make decisions that impact their abilities. Do you take care of your mundane responsibilities and do your homework, or be the savior and answer the call from 4 blocks away you hear on the scanner? Whichever way you choose, your stats are affected, making future tasks easier or more challenging. But you can always take some time talking to your friends, who might be able to boost your confidence and help you see the hero you were always meant to be. Masks is a wonderfully delightful experience that encourages roleplaying in the world of big superheroes. The stats tell you whether you accomplish something without limiting what your imagination might consider, allowing for enormous comic book-style battles raging over the world and beyond.
TL;DR: Masks: A New Generation is the premier coming-of-age teen superhero simulator. If you want to run a game that hits the same notes as Teen Titans, Young Justice, or Into The Spiderverse, this is the game you’ve been looking for. Most superhero TTRPGs are designed as "superpower simulators". They have complex systems for calculating how many tons you can lift over your head, how many city blocks you can run across in a single round, or how many gadgets you're allowed to have on your utility belt. But in their focus on simulating the physics of comic books, many of these RPGs miss the heart and soul that gives the superhero genre an enduring appeal to all ages. The best superhero stories aren't about how many tons Superman can lift over his head or how many gadgets Batman can fit on his utility belt. The best superhero stories are about what it means to be a hero, about doing the right thing even when it makes you miserable, about standing up for what you believe in, about fighting back against impossible odds and finding a way through. And that is what Masks: A New Generation is all about. Masks: A New Generation is a a game where you are an aspiring young superhero, one who’s still trying to decide what kind of hero they want to be. And therein lies the major theme of Masks: identity. In this game, everyone has expectations of you - your friends and family, teachers and parents, heroes and villains, all of them have a mold that they want you to fit in. Everyone is telling you what you should be, but in the midst of it you’re trying to figure out who you are. This is represented with the brilliant Labels and Influence system, which allows people to change your stats by telling you who you are, what you should be, or how they believe the world works. You can accept what they say and let them change you, or you can try to reject it at the risk of taking Conditions (emotional statuses that can weigh you down in a time of crisis and serve as this game’s substitute for hit-points). In comparison, the mechanical representation of superpowers are streamlined in this system. It doesn’t matter if you’re hacking a supercomputer or catching a plummeting jet out of the sky - you roll 2d6 plus your Freak label to Unleash Your Powers. Now, we both know those are different actions in the fiction - we know that Superman doesn’t hack computers just like Batman doesn’t catch airplanes with his bare hands. But we don’t need to assign ranks across lists of skills and superpowers to decide who’s allowed to do what - that’s where the playbooks come in. During character creation, you will choose one of the available playbooks to build your character. These playbooks represent broad archetypes of superheroes, focused first and foremost on character drama with superpowers that support the theme. For example, the Nova’s drama is about having huge awesome powers that could easily cause mass destruction if you lose control for even a second. As a result, the Nova can choose from broad options like “elemental control”, “telekinesis and telepathy”, or “sorcery’. Compare that with the Beacon, which is the classic underdog who wants to be a superhero even when everyone tells them that they aren’t good enough to hack it. This playbook most likely to rely on training rather than powers, or to have powers that are very weak or subtle like invisibility. Each playbook also has unique moves that reinforce the archetype’s narrative beats in the story, encouraging you to play into familiar archetypes but also to make them your own. Masks: A New Generation is the best superhero TTRPG I’ve ever played, in that it perfectly recreates the beats of its genre but leaves plenty of room for you to fill them in with your own characters and stories. It truly plays out like a comic book or animated series where everyone at the table is writing the episodes as they play out before you. This system won’t work for playing straightforward grown-up superheroes like the Avengers or the Justice League, but that’s because it was never designed for those kinds of superheroes. If you’re tired of busting out a calculator during character creation and want games that focus on identity, idealism, and what it truly means to be a hero, then Masks is the game for you.
I’ve played many Masks games and can’t get enough - it’s my favorite system! It’s incredibly easy to learn and a blast to play. With just two pages of basic moves and mechanics, plus two pages for your playbook, you have everything you need to jump right in. The system encourages you to focus on the story first and foremost, letting your character’s actions drive the game rather than worrying about which move to use. The mechanics respond to the narrative, not the other way around, making the story feel natural and immersive. Like most Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games, Masks embraces the principle of “play to find out.” You collaborate with the other players and the GM to explore how young heroes grow, change, and define themselves. The story often takes unexpected turns, creating dynamic and exciting gameplay. You never have to worry about failing or succeeding rolls - every result moves the story forward in a meaningful way. Plus, failures grant experience, reinforcing the idea that your character learns and evolves through their struggles. One of my favorite mechanics in this game is Labels - a flexible take on stats that constantly shift based on how your character sees themselves and how others perceive them. This fluidity makes character development feel organic and deeply tied to the story. If you haven’t tried Masks yet, I highly recommend it. It’s one of the best narrative-driven RPGs out there!
A roleplayer's delight. Character growth is motivated by failure, character powers are defined broadly, giving creatives loads of room to flex. Nowhere near as crunchy as other superhero games like Mutants and Masterminds, great for rules-lite enjoyers. Huge, huge fan of this system for games about younger characters learning who they are and how they fit in to the world.
MASKS: A New Generation, like most Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games, is a fantastic genre dive into the tropes of teenage heroes and trying to figure out how to grapple with their developing powers. Do you fight villains? Are you just trying to survive the demands others place on you? Maybe you're just looking for someone you can connect with. Masks presents opportunities for all of us to consider the effects of how our characters deal with sense of self, how others view you, and to be amazing heroes at the same time. It's not always the ones throwing punches that launch villains to the moon who win the day, connecting with people you're close to or sympathizing with an evil genius trying to lash out at the world holds just as much power. If you enjoy young heroes, stories about self-discovery, and getting in, way, way over your head, Masks is the perfect game for you.
How to play Masks: A New Generation
Masks makes use of the same rules-light engine as Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, Urban Shadows, and Epyllion to create stories about young superheroes in the vein of Young Justice, Young Avengers, and Teen Titans.
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The Bull
Gruff, tough, passionate, big-hearted. The Bull’s a heavy hitter with big feelings. They get into a lot of fights, both interpersonal and superheroic, especially thanks to their signature move, The Bull’s Heart. A lot of the time, they’ll be Angry. They’re a big, gruff wrecking ball, and you should have fun smashing them into things.
The Delinquent
Rebellious, joking, attention-seeking, manipulative. The Delinquent is the class clown, or the punk with the stash of weed, or the rebel without a cause. They’re the spoiler, most often just because they can be more than out of any particular desire. They trick other people, they mess with people, they cause problems.
The Janus
Stressed, responsible, dual, heroic. The Janus is two people in one, and their struggle is about balancing that paradox. You have your regular life and all its responsibilities on one side, and your superheroic life and all its madness on the other. And ultimately, you don’t want to give up either one—but they both pull and pull at you, building up the tension until you feel like you’re going to snap. That’s okay, though. Your story’s all about that tension, and overcoming it, especially thanks to the people around you.
The Legacy
Capable, impressive, burdened, famous. The Legacy comes from a long line of superheroes, meaning they have a superheroic family, either biologically related or connected through their shared legacy. Their story is about the support of that family, and the pressure of carrying on the family name. They have many benefits and advantages that the other PCs might not have—the name of their legacy itself probably carries weight with the city— but at the same time, the expectations and responsibilities placed on them are even higher.
The Nova
Powerful, unrestrained, vulnerable, destructive. The Nova is power incarnate, capable of affecting the world and changing reality on a level their teammates can’t possibly match—but that power comes with enormous risk, both to the Nova and to the world around them.
The Outsider
Strange, curious, naïve, arrogant. The Outsider isn’t from here, but that won’t stop them from creating a life for themselves right here on this planet. At least, for now. But can they find a place here? Will they even want to, once they get to know this world more? Or will they answer that siren call, and go home?
The Protege
Focused, well-trained, driven, unsure. The Protege is defined by two things: their training and their mentor. A Protege has a level of skill and preparation beyond nearly any of the other PCs—even the Legacy wasn’t necessarily as well-trained as the Protege. The Protege might have innate powers, sure, but they were also guided in how to use those abilities and more by their mentor. That also means they’re devoted to being a superhero in a way that none of the other PCs may be—a Protege made at the start of play has been training for quite some time to get into this life.
The Transformed
Troubled, titanic, grotesque, lamentable. The Transformed used to be human, without any powers or superhuman elements, until something happened and they were changed, obviously and permanently. They might be a cyborg, or a strange monster, or made of electricity—just so long as they’re strange and inhuman, with no way of hiding it. The Transformed’s story is about what you do with your new life and form, and how you react to the way other people treat you now.
The Beacon
Hopeful, excited, understanding, human. The Beacon is the most directly mortal and least strange of all the playbooks. They haven't been shaped by anything else they could choose to leave this life behind, if they wanted. Which is exactly the point. They're here because they want to be here. They want to do this. And that gives them a purity compared to the other characters.
The Doomed
Tragic, melodramatic, powerful, driven. The Doomed is a character best served by long-term play, even though their story is about time pressure and not knowing how long they have left. They’re the only character who starts with a clear-cut enemy—their nemesis—and a dangerous timer on their character’s lifespan. They’re also the only character that explicitly faces death by the end of their story. As a result, adding a Doomed to your campaign inherently adds a level of drama, gloom, and danger to your game—death, while not a constant element, is now on the table.