# Masks: A New Generation tags: #game/rpg/masks ![[Masks - A New Generation (cover).jpg|600]] **Masks: A New Generation** is Brendan Conway's **[[Powered by the Apocalypse|PbtA]]** teen-superhero game for Magpie Games — and it's the rare supers game where the most important fight is with your own reflection. You play a team of young heroes in Halcyon City, newly graduated to the big leagues and drowning in older supers' opinions about who you're supposed to be — and the mechanics make those opinions the *game*. ## Setting Halcyon City is a massive, bustling megalopolis, the focal point of the super-powered world since the 1930s, a contradictory blend of darkness and light, crime and heroism, corruption and hope. Your young heroes — friends, rivals, love interests, teammates — are out to make their own way among a city full of veterans and a government agency (**A.E.G.I.S.**) that arose to handle people like them. The whole book is pitched as a comic: over-the-top, team-based, and utterly sincere about teenagers trying to figure out who they are while saving people. ## Mechanics The core is the **PbtA** roll — **2d6 + a stat** against the 10+ / 7–9 / 6− ladder — and the basic moves cover the usual comic beats (Directly Engage a Threat, Unleash Your Powers, Assess the Situation, Defend Someone). But the signature machinery is what replaces traditional hit points: **Labels** and **Conditions**. Each hero carries five **Labels** — *Danger, Freak, Savior, Superior,* and *Mundane* — that other people try to shift as they tell you who you are; and instead of harm, characters take on **Conditions** (*Angry, Afraid, Guilty, Hopeless*), emotional states that drive the fiction and, when they stack up, take you out of action. Combined with **Influence** — which NPCs and teammates hold over how much your Labels can wobble — the whole engine is about *becoming*, not brawling. The ten core **playbooks** (Beacon, Bull, Delinquent, Doomed, Janus, Legacy, Nova, Outsider, Protégé, Transformed) each frame a different adolescent identity crisis with superpowers bolted on. ## Editions - **Masks: A New Generation** (2016) — Brendan Conway / Magpie Games. *In the library* (playbook edition, basic moves, playbooks, GM sheets). - Supplements *in the library*: **Secrets of AEGIS**, **Unbound**, and the **Halcyon City Herald Collection**, with their playbooks. ## References - [Masks: A New Generation — Magpie Games](https://magpiegames.com/masks/) - [Masks: A New Generation — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/186231/masks-a-new-generation)