Masks: Unmasked
- Jon
- Jul 19, 2019
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 22, 2020
My friends and I tell stories.
Every other week we gather at someone’s place for around 3-5 hours, with pencils, paper, and some dice. We have some rules to guide our storytelling; a system of rolling dice at the most opportune moments, letting random chance guide our tale down uncertain pathways. My friends each play the role of one of the main characters, while I rotate between narrator and a colorful cast of non-player characters. We’ve been doing this for over two years now, and it’s honestly one of the best experiences of my life. Our group has played three long stories (called campaigns), and has just begun our fourth.
I want to tell you about Masks: Terusan City, our most recent campaign, and one of my favorite stories I’ve ever crafted or experienced.
From June 2018 to May 2019, we told the story of a fictional island city-state called Terusan City, located somewhere off the coast of southern California, and the team of teenage superheroes who somehow managed to save it. Over the course of 16 “issues,” the dysfunctional heroes of Teen Tempest fought each other, their own inner demons, and occasionally, supervillains. We laughed. We cheered. We cried. Tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) thrive on improvisational storytelling, where everyone is both writing their dialogue and acting it out at the same time, all while trying to embody a character's desires and foibles and craft a compelling narrative. It’s a challenge, it’s time-consuming, and it works best when everyone is truly invested in a vulnerable, collaborative, imaginary space. RPGs can be lighthearted fun - and maybe that’s what we thought a story about teenage superheroes was going to be - but it takes a lot of luck and skill to make something that’s legitimately moving, something that can be entertaining to experience even when you’re not a part of it, and something that can leave a group of six adults literally crying.
Have I mentioned how much fun this was yet?
The story of Masks: Terusan City would mean nothing without its cast of player characters, the five super-powered, super-emotional teens created, scripted, and acted by my five friends and players. The five heroes of Teen Tempest are as follows:
Ana, the young protege of Captain Indigo, the city’s square-jawed hero protector, and a driven perfectionist who gained her powers of regeneration and gravity manipulation through the world’s most intensive voluntary internship.
Michele, the off-beat daughter of Captain Indigo who would rather make her own name as a journalist than follow in her family's footsteps, despite her powers of super-speed and wind manipulation.
Chrys, the dangerous one from a broken home, with the world-shattering ability to wield true alchemy and change any element in any other.
Phoebe, the melancholic energy-absorbing one, still haunted by the loss of her twin brother years ago to a dangerous anti-supers cult.
Ollie, the delinquent trickster skater boy with the ability to teleport and create illusions, forever looking for his missing mother.
Each one of these characters has their own complete narrative arc, complete with a Moment of Truth - an element baked into the game’s mechanics - where they take charge of the narrative and prove to us, but mostly themselves, who they really are. See, rather than rolling dice and adding or subtracting numbers based on individual competency and skills like most RPGs, the game of Masks has characters roll with traits based on how they perceive themselves: Danger, Superior, Mundane, Savior, and Freak. These labels can shift up and down through a session, based on the influence of authority figures, friends, lovers, and teammates. It’s an incredibly fun mechanic that perfectly matches the storytelling focus of teens learning who they are and who they want to be. It’s a thrill to watch the characters come to terms with their own fledgling adulthood at the same time as the players find out who the characters really are too. So despite the powers and action and adventure, Masks: Terusan City is really a coming-of-age story, wrapped in the aesthetics of a superhero story.
Superhero stories have been with us for almost a century now (and far longer if you count mythological heroes as proto-superheroes), with no sign of stopping. Taken as a whole, they're power fantasies; assurances that the world’s greatest evils can be solved by heroic individuals through strength, courage, quick-linking, and occasionally, lots of cool tech. It’s no coincidence that the most well-known superheroes were created in America, a country that prides itself on a rugged individualistic optimism, where "one person can make a difference." Superhero stories - at their best - can be stirring examples of true heroism, and provide a hopeful vision of a world where evil is soundly defeated.
But they’re, well, not true in some deep ways. In reality, the people with the most power aren’t usually there to defend us, despite what they say. In reality, evil oft goes unpunished and is even celebrated as heroic. In reality, the true evils of society can’t be punched or blasted away, and even those that can just sprout back up again like weeds.
I won’t claim to be well-versed in superhero comics, so I’m sure there have been lots that tackle these issues in better ways, but from what I’ve seen, most superhero stories only pay lip service to the idea of power. They’re inherently unbalanced tales, where the solution can only come at the hands of a few great people, better than everyone else. Even the stories that delve into the superheroes' darker sides and weaknesses still raise the idea that these people are just better, or at least more capable. The only way evil is defeated is through a few brave and superior souls. I don’t think that’s how the world improves, or how problems are really solved.
I didn’t want us to tell a story that just repeated the same trite platitudes. I knew that if we were going to play a story about teen superheroes, I couldn’t let either of those two descriptors overpower the other. Being thrust into combat, with the lives of millions in your hands, while also being a teen? How do you make important decisions that adults rarely handle well while also dealing with a mess of hormones and identity crises? It’s a plotline repeated endlessly in fiction now, but rarely given the real exploration it deserves.
The main characters of Masks: Terusan City faced down supervillains and tsunamis, but they also dealt with the loss of loved ones, the shattering of worldviews, grief and regret and shame and fear and all the things that we turn to stories to help us combat. We pushed our characters to really examine what having power means - what are the responsibilities of those with power? If you have the ability to get rid of power, should you? Who deserves to gain power? What should it be used for? Should it be used for more than protecting the status quo? Can power ever be used without corrupting the wielder?
I don’t think these questions can easily be solved, and I don’t think we did so in our story. But like the heroes themselves, we crashed up against them and tried to make something of all the broken pieces.
Many RPG players, exposed mostly to Dungeons & Dragons and similar games, think of the medium as a combat simulator, or a way to tell wacky comedic adventures and solve fun puzzles. There’s nothing wrong with those approaches, but when I run games, I want to create good stories above all else. And good stories have structure. It’s a flexible and breakable one, to be sure, and there’s no easy recipe to follow, but over the eons of time that we humans have been telling stories, we gravitate to certain elements and shapes that are the most rewarding. The best RPGs are structured to get players making these stories even without trying. But playing specifically with telling a good story in mind? It can do wonders. Knowing the ebb and flow of success, failure, and most crucially, mixed success, in plot, creates dramatic tension. Understanding character arcs makes moments of greatness and tragedy feel earned. Plot twists are all the more rich when you can look back and see the groundwork hiding in the grass like a snake, so obvious now that you know it.
I’ve defined most of my life around the dream of writing novels. I haven’t given up that dream, though the book I wrote and edited in some capacity between 2015-2017 has yet to be published. I haven’t written anything substantial since. Part of that is disillusionment from my lack of published accreditations, part from life just getting busier, and also, partly, because I’ve found a new creative outlet. Running and playing RPGs won’t make me money (though most authors don’t make much either), and definitely doesn’t come with the same prestige of being a published author. But in many ways, I feel just as, if not more, creatively fulfilled doing this than I felt when writing. Writing a novel is an intensely personal, solitary act, even if so much of it is funneled through the experiences of others and the feedback from other people. It’s a crystallized creation of the individual artist. It’s a declaration.
RPGs - especially the way we play them - are different. I don’t plan out a pre-written story and lead my characters along it like particularly unwilling action figures. Instead, we all work together to craft the world and the characters, and then I shape the story around the actions and ideas we all seem interested in. No one part of Masks: Terusan City is wholly mine. In fact, almost all the characters, even many of the characters I embody, were originally created by my friends and players. Left to my own devices, a story with this same premise would be very different. Maybe pretty good, but not nearly as great. I have my own storytelling hang-ups and preferred beats; the challenge of shaping something with others’ input and relying on dice to determine the results of the most dramatically interesting moments is just what I need to jump-start my creativity and to force the story into directions I’d never have taken it on my own. A good RPG campaign isn’t a declaration. It’s a conversation. It’s a question.
I suppose it might seem silly. I mean, technically, we’re a group of adults playing pretend. I haven’t really changed much since I was a kid. I still want to hang out with friends and make stories.
But ask any of us and I think we’ll tell you that Masks: Terusan City was one of the most rewarding pieces of creativity we’ve ever done. It was a whole lot of fun, made us laugh and cry, and even brought us closer together as people. I’ve written before about my feelings towards my family beach house - some of my best memories of that place were made in the past few years with this group of friends, playing these games. They’ve forged us into a makeshift family, no matter where we go from here. We’ve been more vulnerable with each other than we’ve been with most other people. We’ve cried just from being caught up in a good story.
Even if this thing we made never travels beyond us, never lasts through the generations or brings anybody any money, it made us feel things. It seems a simple thing, in the face of the real world and its hosts of real villains. But I can't imagine living without stories like this. And it feels so good to have made one with my friends.
We have high hopes and expectations for our next game. We’re going to record it, and hopefully release it as a podcast, even if it’s just so we can listen wherever we are. Without the built-in emotional relatability of a teen drama, it might not reach the same gut-punch heights of Masks, but I think it’ll be just as fun and just as interesting.
So here’s to the heroic, silly, tragic teens of Terusan City. Your stories may be over, but they’ll inspire more. And here’s to the wonderful, creative, inventive, supportive, and just plain awesome group of friends who’ve given me some of the best times of my life.
Captain Indigo would be proud.
Comments