UNMASKED: A REVIEW OF THE NEW CYPHER SYSTEM SUPERHERO SETTING

Some are satin, some are steel
Some are silk and some are leather
They're the faces of the stranger
But we love to try them on...

-Billy Joel, "The Stranger"

1986...

It's the year the Challenger exploded, the year Chernobyl blew.  It's the year Halley's Comet revisited us, and the first PC virus, Brain, made its debut. Thatcher is in London.  Reagan's in Washington.  Gorbachev is in Moscow. "Money for Nothing" and "Addicted to Love" are the two hottest things on MTV.  And your life, the life that you have been living, is about to change.

Just a few weeks before your first day of high school, you wake up different. You somehow are able to see. All around you, all around town, random little objects now pulse, shimmer, with power. A soupspoon. A broken shard of glass. A bird feather. The hands of a clock. Somehow you can see which objects have been imbued and which haven't...and if you touch these objects, you somehow know what they can do. Each one of them has a trick, a spell, a power. Use the power once and its gone.

But wait...

...some of these random little things call out to you, whisper in your brain. Not many; just a select few. Somehow you just know which ones you need to collect. Somehow you just know what they want you to do. You collect these charms and they teach you, they show you how to make it.

Your Mask.

When you put that Mask on you are not you anymore. You are something more powerful. Something greater. Something more than human...something superhuman.

And this is how it all begins...

Origin Stories

Unmasked (192 pages, $44.99 hardcover, $17.99 pdf) is the latest offering from Monte Cook Games.  Unlike Ravendesk's Vurt, this is not a stand-alone game powered by the Cypher System, but a setting and sourcebook for the Cypher System Rulebook itself.  You'll need that book to use it.

Unmasked is the welcome return of veteran game designer Dennis Detwiller to the superhero genre. Part of the team that brought the world "Cthulhu meets X-Files" classic Delta Green, Detwiller was later the driving force behind Godlike, a 2001 RPG that married superheroes to the gritty, "war is hell" setting of WWII.  Godlike was very well received as a fresh take on what was already a bit of a warn-out RPG genre.  It's protagonists, called "Talents," eschewed the costumes and the masks for a much more grounded, realistic take than we had seen before.  This is a bit ironic, because Unmasked is literally all about the masks.

Funny things, masks.  They seem to embody the very concepts of transformation and mystery.  Their earliest uses in the murky origins of human society seem to be shamanic; in putting on the mask, the wearer channels or even becomes a god or spirit.  Even the word itself, "mask," is problematic.  We have no clear idea where it comes from or what it really means.  It might derive from a proto Indo-European word meaning "black, obscure," the Spanish más que la cara ("more than the face"), or even the Arabic masakha, meaning "transformed."  All of this feeds quite nicely into the mythology Detwiller is creating here, marrying the mythic, almost religious mask traditions with the concept of the "masked man" or masked hero.  The result is a game about perfectly normally teenagers compelled to create and wear Masks that transform then, body, mind, and perhaps even soul.

That is something critical to understand here.  This is not a game about super beings who put on a mask (or pair of glasses) to conceal their identities.  The Teen and the Mask are two different entities.  A Mask might be a different race, a different gender, a different species from the Teen that crafted it.  It might have very different drives and agendas.  The protagonists in this game are more like Billy Batson than Peter Parker.  This is where the game's much promoted "horror" elements come in.  The Mask isn't you...or is it?

We Could Be Heroes

Because this is a Cypher System Rulebook supplement, from here on it we will assume you know that game.  If not, following the link above for any of what follows to make sense to you.

Mechanically, Unmasked builds on the rules Monte Cook gave us in the core game.  Characters are once again defined by being "An (Adjective) (Noun) that (Verbs)."  This time, however, there is a twist.  The character sheet is split into the Teen and the Mask.  The Teen is defined only by a Descriptor and some appropriate skills.  He or she might be a "Tough Teen," or a "Naive Teen," a "Driven Teen" or a "Weird Teen." The Teen then gets his or her own Stat Pools (each starts at 6, with two additional points to assign).  This is the unmasked character.

The game calls its protagonists "Prodigies," and as hinted at above, they are normal young men and women who wake up in a world that has suddenly changed, but only they can see it.  Some event--and the nature of that event is very much up the the GM--has littered the world with cyphers (in this setting, called "Mementos").  As in other Cypher games, these are one use objects each containing a single special power.  Prodigies are the only people who know a Memento when they see it, and when they touch it they know what it can do.  Likewise, they are also able to identify each other.  What transformed these teens and these objects?  That is part of the story, and Detwiller gives the GM specific rules to decide the nature of the changes (Psychic? Mutation?  Mystical?) and guidelines on how to reveal the answers over the ongoing campaign.  However, the Prodigies are haunted by dreams of a nightmarish figure, the monstrous Prester John, who seems to be hunting Prodigies the way the First was hunting potential Slayers in the final season of Buffy.

Some Mementos call to Prodigies more powerfully than others, compelling the Teen to assemble them and use them to create a Mask.  Each Mask is unique.  When the Teen puts the Mask on, he or she becomes a completely new character, this time with its own Descriptor, Type, and Focus.  These Masks also have their own Stat pools and skills.  Most importantly, perhaps, they have "Power Shifts" (Cypher System, p. 270).  These shifts automatically lower difficulty levels by one step each.  So a Mask with 4 shifts in "Feats of Strength" would automatically lower any difficulty of that type by four, even before effort or other assets are applied.  This is part of what makes them truly superhuman.

Descriptors:  Given the nature of the game and the genre, any Descriptor from the Cypher System Rulebook or even Numenera or The Strange might be acceptable with GM approval.  While the game introduces new Teen Descriptors (Metal Head, New Wave, Punk, and Show-off) there are none that are Mask specific.

Types: The four standard Types have been reworked a bit here into the Smasher (Warrior), Thinker (Adept), Mover (Explorer) and Changer (Speaker).  They Type determines your initial stat pools (still a total of 34 points, but with the base values altered a bit), suggests where you put your Power Shifts and what Focus you chose, and gives you additional Power Shifts and abilities as you rise through the tiers.  

Foci:  Surprisingly, Unmasked introduces relatively few new Foci; Flies by Night, Lives on the Dark Side, Travels back from the Future, and Wants to be Adored are the only new entries.  Groups will need to really on the core rulebook (and possibly Expanded Worlds) for these power suites, and given the nature of the genre, any applicable Foci from Numenera or The Strange as well.

What emerges is a superhero form that is an entirely different entity from the Teen character.  This recalls heroes like Shazam, Thor (in the old days), and the Hulk, and introduces all sorts of role-play contradictions.  The Teen and the Mask share memories, but do they share goals?  Values?  Agendas? Are they operating in concert or at odds?  These are character design questions each player will need to consider as they craft their Masks.

Once a Mask is made it forms an almost supernatural bond with its Teen.  It cannot be "lost," and will always somehow return to the Teen who made it.  It cannot be destroyed by anything other than another Mask.  If a normal human tries to destroy it, the Mask will miraculously survive.  Even for other Masks, it is a level 15 difficulty challenge to destroy a Mask; doing so unleashes an "explosion" of power only other Masks can sense, and creates a half dozen or so new Mementos (cyphers) in the area.  Removing a Mask from another Mask is also an epic task, with a difficulty of 10.  Note this means Unmasked follows the Superhero genre conventions in Cypher by expanding difficulties from 1 to 10 to 1 to 15.  Since normal humans lack Power Shifts, tasks beyond 7 remain nearly impossible.

Two other points need to be made about Masks.

First, a Mask cannot be killed.  It has a separate damage track from the Teen wearing it, and when its Pools are depleted, the Mask simply falls off.  It cannot be worn again until a recovery role is made, and though the Mask and the Teen have discrete damage tracks, they share their recovery rolls.  This could easily result in an exhausted and beaten Mask falling off of a Teen and leaving them vulnerable in the midst of battle.  Teens can be killed.

Second, the Mask advances using XP, not the Teen.  Despite this, the Teen can gain XP for the Mask by (for example) doing their homework and fitting in at school, keeping their connection to the Mask a secret, and keeping the whole Mask phenomenon under wraps.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Unmasked is very concerned with its setting, with the world the Masks inhabit and bringing it to life. More than half the book is devoted to this.

In broad strokes, this is a world in which Teens have gained impossible powers and are drawn into a secret war.  The game focuses on the 1980s as the backdrop, but other eras, such as the Roaring 20s, the 1960s, or even our own could be selected instead.  A modern campaign probably provides the biggest thematic challenges; how can we believe in a secret war in an age when everyone has cameras and the Internet?

Detailed rules are given to walk GMs through creating the town the Teens inhabit and the high schools they attend; rural like Smallville?  Suburban like Buffy?  Urban like Spider-man Homecoming?  Something else?  There is ample support in the book to craft these key elements of the setting however you like.  

Also to be considered is the nature of what is going on.  Where do these Masks come from?  Who is the villainous Prester John?  Are their evil Masks to fight?  What do the police know?  What does the government know?  Unmasked walks you through all of this, and your choices will make each campaign unique.  Your game could be a supernatural one like Buffy, connected to alien technology like Smallville, extra-dimensional like Stranger Things, or a half dozen other options.  

Unmasked offers guidelines for making these choices and then structuring the campaign around them, Tier by Tier, to build a satisfying arc.  To my mind, this is where Unmasked shines the brightest.  It painstakingly details how to guide the players through becoming Masks, mastering their powers, encountering their first threats, dealing with the Big Picture, and confronting the final foe.  Several model campaign arcs are outlined, as well as a complete example campaign setting.  Since the rules are already covered in the core rulebook, Unmasked devotes its bulk to actually using those rules to create a vibrant campaign.  It is a page count well-spent.

If you have been itching to play superheroes in Cypher, this is the perfect opportunity to do it.  Dennis Detwiller has proved the old adage wrong by making lighting strike twice.  While Godlike and Unmasked are light years apart in many ways, both are stories of ordinary young people dragged into massive and monstrous conflicts by powers they struggle to understand and control.  They are both extraordinary tales of superhumans (and come to think of it, Unmasked would work very well in Godlike's WWII setting as well).  I highly recommend Unmasked to lovers of the Cypher system and lovers of the supers genre.  It doesn't disappoint.

PSYCHONAUT: THE ART OF BLUEFLUKE

"...it is my position that art, language, consciousness and magic are all aspects of the same phenomenon. With art and magic seen as almost wholly interchangeable, the realm of the imagination becomes crucial to both practices."

- Alan Moore

Magic seems to go hand in hand with artistic impulses.  It only makes sense; Magicians and Artists work at manipulating symbols, and the act of "creation" is integral to both.  Rattle off a list of modern Magicians and you find a pack of artists as well.  Crowley was a poet and prolific writer.  Spare was a renowned visual artist.  Anton LaVey was a gifted musician keenly interested in the idea of the image as essential to magic.  Andrew Chumbley's works combine striking visual imagery with magic and poetry.  Grant Morrison and Alan Moore are both comic book high priests and public Magicians.  Indeed. if you dig deeply enough for the Indo-European roots of the words we use, it is even likely that magic and imagine derive from the same source (possibly PIE magh- "to be able, to have power").  It goes back to the shamans who painted on cave walls to ensure a good hunt, to the idea of seizing an idea from the hidden realms and shaping it into something tangible.

  

What we now call "chaos magic" originally was just referred to as "magical art" in seminal works like Liber Null and Psychonaut.  Generally viewed as the offspring of Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin (the latter of whom liked to use the term "the theatre of magic"), chaos magic was born in the 1970s as an attempt to look across the broad field of magical traditions in an attempt to distill the techniques and practices common to all.  It was meant to be magic ripped free of tradition, a highly individualistic path that encouraged the development of one's own symbol sets.  If Carroll and Sherwin were the parents, Austin Spare was clearly the grandfather (though to my mind, LaVey does not get the credit he should for being a sort of uncle).  At the core of sorcery, chaos magic wanted to tell us, was the exploration and manipulation of consciousness. "Belief," in this quest, was "a tool."  I would liken this to LaVey's "suspension of disbelief."  The idea was that magic invested symbols--any symbols--with power, irregardless of where these symbols were drawn from.  The Magician could invoke Isis or Gabriel or Alice in Wonderland so long as in the course of the ritual these beings were animated by belief.

Obviously this flies in the faces of hardcore Traditionalists like Julius Evola, who tended to see their symbols as a sort of Truth handed down from time immemorial.  This iconoclasm gave chaos magic its sort of "punk" glamor.  Chaos magic was a post modern field where magic was liberated from dusty grimoires and kabbalistic laundry lists.  Now magic could turn up anywhere.  Even, as Morrison and Moore have demonstrated time and time again, in comic books.

This brings us to Arch-Traitor Bluefluke.

Since I first tripped across Bluefluke's work, it has become a destination I recommend to anyone trying to get a sense of what chaos magic is  ("Curious about chaos magic?  Go check out http://bluefluke.deviantart.com").  All the hallmarks are there.  The Magician comes at you with a striking visual style simultaneously mystical, anime, and punk and a "magical name" that sounds like a rave DJ.  Bluefluke writes and illustrates with the same cocktail of respect/disdain for tradition that fuels zen, a yin-yang fusion of opposites essential for reaching "qabbalstic zero" (or again, Crowley's n + -n = 0).  In a way, this Magician is performing the same trick that LaVey used in slapping Satan across his magic...many will look at Bluefluke's art and think "this can't be taken seriously" and wander off (LaVey was going for the more "frightened off").  The intellectually curious, however, will stick around and suddenly discover how deep the well goes.  This is an ancient trick, my friends, separating the initiates from the voyeurs.

And Bluefluke is worth sticking around.  The Psychonaut Field Manual, at this writing in it's 3.5 incarnation with four of five chapters finished, is a free grimoire containing a completely workable system.  The title is obviously a wink and a nod to Peter J. Carroll, and this combined with the focus on gnosis (qabbalistic zero again), the Discordian touches and the frequent appearance of Michael Moorcock's star of chaos all plant Bluefluke firmly in the chaos magic stream, but the tech in its digital pages is universal.  This isn't to say that Bluefluke's work isn't highly idiosyncratic and recognizably unique, nor that the particular synthesis of ideas here isn't new (it is), but rather that this very uniqueness is showing by example what chaos magicians should be striving for.  "Take these tools and explore thyself."

I'm still fond of Grant Morrison's "Pop! Magic" essay as an entry point for chaos magic, but The Psychonaut Field Manual is meatier on a thousand different levels.  Browse the illustrations alone and the Magician communicates this approach to magic; they seem at once hieroglyphic and Pokemon, stained glass and Cartoon Network.  This gives the images a punch that even, say, Chumbley's illustrations did not have.  They seem to say "magic is not all spooky and scary...it is spooky and scary and cotton candy Wizard of Oz.  That alone is heady stuff.

So what is actually in this system?  It starts with the familiar chaos magic idea of gnosis, a transcendent state wherein opposites are reconciled and thus nullified, including the subject/object dichotomy.  This mental "void" state is akin to the yogic samadhi and Buddhist nirvana, a deep meditative state in which the mind is silenced.  It is in this state that commands are implanted, causing subsequent change in the Magician and his Microcosm.  Part of this process involves overcoming the Ego, which Bluefluke terms the "Selfconscious."  This is the "I" that most people identify themselves with, the "I" that speaks, goes to work, and pays the bills.  The Selfconscious is really just a construct, however, a complex operating system running on our brains that is built by our experiences. Bluefluke tells us the Selfconscious is just one of a Trinity of "selves", and these three must be brought into alignment to enter gnosis.  Its partners are the "Subconscious," which is the body and its animal drives, and the "Superconscious" which is the artist, the visionary, and idealist.  Exercises are offered to bring these into "Soul Resonance," alongside visualization and meditative techniques.  This is the core of the system, which always runs along the lines of "Invoke Soul Resonance, enter gnosis," and then perform whatever specific act of magic follows.

The rest of Psychonaut deals with techniques like sigilization, invoking and evoking, god forms, and astral projection...among a great deal else.  There is a lot crammed into this deceptively simple little work.  Along the way Bluefluke offers a new way of looking at traditional consciousness mapping like chakras or the Qabbalistic sephiroth, looking at these as evolutionary stages of brain development in a new eightfold system partially inspired by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.  

This is a beginner friendly system, but also a refresher course for those who are old hands at all of this.  Like most chaos magic is it stripped entirely of "religious" elements, pared down to simple techniques and workable exercises.  It's a manual you are going to want to actually use to understand.

As with Bluefluke's artwork, the writing style is refreshing.  It is playful while taking itself serious, irreverent while speaking reverently, and relentlessly modern while teaching tricks used since before the mammoths went extinct.    The Psychonaut Field Manual will entertain you, challenge you, and delight you.  What more could one want in a grimoire.

And while you are there, do check out Bluefluke's Tarot Trumps.  I might prefer the Thelemic re-alignment of the Thoth deck better, but there are some fresh, powerful images there.





  

       

REVISITING THE X-MEN

It's easy to dismiss comic books. Certainly as I was growing up, they were seen as a childish form of entertainment best grown out of quickly. If you were ten and reading comics, nothing was amiss. If you were twenty and still reading them, you could expect some eye-rolling at your expense. And this attitude was reflected in how other forms of media treated comic books. Saturday morning cartoon versions took comic book stories and characters and wrote them "down" for an even younger audience, and the few stabs made at them in cinema and television were "camped up" to make them palatable for adults, as if the material was too light weight to be treated seriously. But all of this began to change, and change in a big way, at the turn of the 20th century, largely thanks to the cinema adaptation of one of the best-selling comics in American history; Marvel Comics' X-Men. The success of the first X-Men film in 2000 was instrumental in Hollywood's modern love affair with the comic book, showing that if the material was treated with respect, and presented by top-notch writers, directors, and actors, then comic book adaptations had powerful stories to tell. Stories even adults could appreciate.

The X-Men were a perfect place for Hollywood to start. For those who aren't familiar with the series, the X-Men comic appeared in 1963 and has been running, continually, for nearly fifty years. It centers around the idea of "mutants," human beings who carry a gene which produces some sort of mutation that usually erupts and expresses itself during adolescence. These mutations grant some sort of super-power--the ability to read minds, walk through walls, or fly--but are often uncontrollable, come with a side-effect, or cause a disfiguring transformation in the individual's appearance. Mutants are a very small percentage of the population, but are widely hated and feared for a variety of reasons. They might look freakish, be a danger to themselves and others, or just be so "different" as to make others uncomfortable. There are also uncomfortable implications surrounding them...as homo sapiens came along and replaced Neanderthal man, many believe that the mutants (or "homo superior") are here to replace man.

From the very start, the X-Men saga blended comic book action with very real social issues. Appearing in the civil rights era, over the decades the mutants would be used to explore racism, the treatment of minorities in society, and even gay and lesbian issues. Mutants were the subject of military experiments, used as slave labor in foreign countries, and even targeted to be rounded up, labeled, and detained by conservative politicians in the United States. Most were forced into hiding, with mutant adolescents running away from home or hiding in "the closet."

In response, two opposing poles or forces arose. One was Professor Charles Xavier, a mutant who believed humans and mutant kind could peacefully co-exist. His opponent (and old friend) was Eric Lensherr, better known by his name Magneto. A Jew who had watched his family die in Nazi concentration camps, Eric had seen first hand how humanity treats minorities, and believed that co-existence would never be possible. Magneto formed a team of mutant terrorists to apply force to human society and push for mutant rights. Appalled by his violent methods, Xavier formed his own team, the X-Men, to oppose them.

In those early years, Xavier and Magneto reflected the approaches to African American civil rights as championed by Dr. King and Malcolm X, but as the decades passed the X-Men continually introduced new story lines to comment on current affairs. While the world watched South Africa struggle with Apartheid, the comic created the South African nation of Genosha, which became a global power built on a mutant slave class. When AIDS first appeared and fire-breathing pastors called it a "gay plague," the comic introduced the Legacy virus, a disease that killed mutants. In 1982 they made waves with "God Loves, Man Kills," a story about a minister preaching against mutants and a commentary on growing religious intolerance. Even the movies continued this theme. In the midst of the American debates on homosexuality and whether or not it could be cured, the third film created a plot of the government devising a cure for mutation. As a gay man, when a young mutant character asks "Is it true, they can cure us now?", and older mutant leader Storm replies "No they can't cure you because there is nothing wrong with you," I nearly stood up and cheered.

The X-Men are on my mind again because I recently started reading Ultimate X-Men, a series that ran from 2001 to 2009 and is conveniently available in 20 trade paperback editions (check out the first volume here). Catching up with fifty years of storylines and characters is daunting for newcomers, so Ultimate X-Men was a "reboot" of the story, modernizing and condensing what had gone before. It is a different take on the characters, and there are enough twists that a long-time fan will find new surprises, but it is ideal for new readers to enjoy the X-Men and get a taste of what the comic is all about.

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