This is three pitches in one, with my personal opinions in a post to follow. Please add yours if you have them.
Recruit Teenagers With Attitude
This is option 1 - just run a new game, and instead of capturing lightning in a bottle, create some new lightning.
Masks II: Son of Masks
This is option 3, above. Move the timeline into the future about 20 years to allow for it, so it’s now about 2040. The Menagerie and other teams now occupy the spot the HHL held, but there’s new challenges and new bad guys, that means new heroes.
Masks-616
This is kind of a combination of options 2 and 4. The game is set in a Halcyon City with many familiar elements, buuuut with some key diversion that means the Menagerie never formed as such. Maybe the team’s members solved their own problems a different way, or maybe they didn’t come back from some key mission because they decided to do something else, or anything else you like.
I don’t know that I trust Leo’s vision of the future to anyone else at this point. If Leo made an appearance, I’d either expect that what he’s trying to do is getting done to some degree (and I have very specific ideas of what that looks like), or to hear why it’s not working out, and that’s basically “play Microscope with cute robot girls and Transformers”. This is probably not what everyone else wants to do.
Any future Leo has a hand in will not look super familiar to us, and that was one of the things we found appealing.
I feel like the stories of those PCs as Masks PCs has been pretty thoroughly explored, so revisiting them doesn’t do a lot for me.
That said, there’s a pretty big stable of secondary characters who could make appearances and have fresh stories told about them.
We’re going through this very exercise in my Saturday group already, and it’s “another city, another cast” and everyone is very juiced up about this already.
For that reason, I’m happiest with Recruit Teenagers With Attitude (start fresh, and if some familiar NPCs show up in new incarnations I’m okay with that), also okay with Masks-616, and not really a fan of Masks II: Son of Masks.
That said, I’m happy to play (or run) any of these options, if the crowd feels strongly about them. If someone has an alternate pitch, reply here.
Of these options, Masks-616 has the most appeal to me. “What we know, but with this alternate-history twist” is potential good times.
Alycia Chin is head of AEGIS, and has a well-known obsession with hunting down and stopping her father, complicated by some kind of “strange bedfellows” alliance brought on by the fascist space government called “the Concordance” that’s decided Earth is a A Problem to Solve after one of their agents died here, 15 years ago.
Stuff like that.
Actually, you could take that “Occupied Earth” setup from Masks Unchained and do a mild concordance-reskin…
Like Bill, I have zero faith in my ability to encompass Leo’s future (I only kept up about half the time (generous estimate) while it was instantiating during the last game), though I’d happily play the Microscope game where we find out what happens.
Masks seems like the kind of thing where we could do a whole different frame-up and have some fun. I’ve really enjoyed the Phoenix Academy framing I’m doing with Kaylee and the Jaimes, if only because the school focus seems higher. Turn that (and the NPC count) to 11 for My Hero Academia style craziness? Maybe…
I’d also go more for option 1 or 3 (off of Bill’s list). I’m personally happy where my story and everything left off and would rather look towards something new than try to figure out more stuff for the Gale family.
Like I said on the other thread, I’m down to play Masks in general. However the idea of playing some more one off or short sessions games had been proposed, which I doubt we’d do if we went with Masks, given our history with it. I don’t care the length, just putting this here so that we can get on the same page about timelines and stuff.
Yyyeah, I’d kinda forgotten about Leo’s plans for the future and how they would change things profoundly. And 2040 stuff gets weird anyway, so I’d drop “Masks II” as the most problematic.
I’d probably go for “Masks-616” as my top choice, if only because I would love for us to draw on some of the lore and characters we put together, albeit with alternative timeline zaniness. I’m not sure a guerilla war vs. the Concordance is at the top of my list, but …
I am also good with “Recruit Teenagers with Attitude” and starting completely fresh. Or something along the spectrum between the two of those (“if some familiar NPCs show up in new incarnations I’m okay with that”).
And, yes, I would expect this would be a longer-form game.
I brought @Margie up to date last night over dinner, and she’s good with it. She’s more inclined to space between What Was and What Will Be – mentioning playing on the West Coast, for example – but isn’t opposed to occasional cross-overs, whether Earth-1 or Earth-616.
“Would this be like an ‘Arrow’ and ‘Flash’ thing? Or an ‘Arrow’ and ‘Supergirl’ thing?”
“Well, ‘Arrow’ is actually over.”
“You know what I mean.”
“And, post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, ‘Supergirl’ is set on the same, single Earth as the other shows.”
“Never mind.”
(How the conversation would have gone if I’d been my normal pedantic self.)
I have the amusing desire to play a Beacon who is based on the Batman TAS version of Clock King who is has impossibly high standards for everyone (especially themselves). Not much more than that, but we’ll see if we can come up with something more by game time.
