Hi hi, love your work! While I see you don’t post about them much anymore, I love your work on Atticus Alley and the Seven Gates to Hell and was introduced to you through that project. I was always curious on the actual story with those characters though!
If interested, could you give us a summary of the story premise and lead characters?
Aw gee, this is real nice to hear! I'm always blown away when any of my original stuff makes a dent with anyone. Thanks so much for asking about it!
Atticus Alley and the Seven Gates to Hell is about this gal, Atticus Alley, whose the type of girl that when anyone who knew her found out she got hit by a car and died, they wanted to thank the driver.
The driver was Weston Roads. He's the kind of guy that stands on street corners handing out pamphlets with cracking titles like: "THE END IS NEAR" "YOU, AND THE APOCALYPSE" "THIS TIME, IT'S REAL!" So when he hit a girl with his car while driving to his family's doomsday bunker he didn't have the time to take her to the hospital. No one had that kind of time anymore.
Except the world didn't end.
A year later he runs into this girl that looks exactly like the one he creamed with his car, and she's even got her name, too (he checked her ID). She mentions how she went to Hell, came back, and how the world is going to end soon. For real this time.
Yadda yadda, they end up on a road trip to go kill THE DEVIL because when the world does end, Alley doesn't want to go back to Hell, and Roads is certain he has a one-way ticket there himself.
AA7GH is an idea I had to take a break from when Real Life became so hellish that thinking about hell so much felt tiring. I still like the characters, though, and I hope to revisit them and rework the story into something I can jive with more one day.
Hello, I feel I should tell you that Dandelion is one of those characters who set up shop in the back of my brain since the first time I saw him when looking through people's cool character designs, and I regularly feel the need to come back and scroll through all the art of him. All the art and all the lore tidbits scratch the creative part of my brain so good. And since that's happening again, I told myself I should thank you for his existence. Have a lovely day/night. (Your art style and the sense of 90s anime really drives me crazy because it tricks my brain into believing there SHOULD be an existing anime or comic that I could go read to see more of him!)
oh goodness, I saved your ask to respond to later when I thought I would have words, because it's just so dang kind it left me speechless. and it's still incredibly kind, and I'm still speechless, so all I can say is thank you so, so much, this really means a lot to me.
I've been meaning to reach out to say how much I adore your space cadet girl. Anytime it pops up in my feed, I hit that heart button. With that said, I wanted to know if you have any prints for sale, and additionally, are you open to people getting tattoos of your work? Like I said, I adore her, and she reminds me of a poem my parents had hanging in my room as a kid. So sweet. Anyway, please let me know if and where prints might be available for purchase. Take care.
Wow this is amazingly sweet, thank you so much!! I'm so curious what the poem was; if you can remember it, and are comfortable with sharing it, please send it my way!
I'm cool with people getting tattoos of my work (incredibly honored, I'd just wanna be able to see it). I only have one Cadet print up, but I might be able to get some more up if I can find some of my old files.
This is a gallery-quality giclée art print on 100% cotton rag archival paper, printed with archival inks.
Thank you so, so, so much for this message! Here's a lil Cadet, just for you!
Hello! Your Masks art is absolute joy, I love how dynamic and expressive it feels and your designs are beautiful :D
I wanted to ask if you have art of any supervillain npcs? I'm curious about whom your players fight, if they do... And if you have any tips on running supervillains it would be greatly appreciated – an aspiring Masks DM here, struggling with creating antagonists for the game x')
Ah hi!! Thanks so much, I'm so happy that you've enjoyed it and even happier that you wanna try DMing a MASKS game!!!!
Honestly, I still find running villains in MASKS to be difficult for me! I think the system itself has great stuff going on for running villains, but between running for 5 players and the amount of improv I still find it kinda tough. Over time it's gotten a little easier, but I still feel like I have a lot to learn.
First I'll note some things I've learned along the way, and after I'll talk about some of the villains I've run in our campaign! this is gonna be a longass post because there are seven episodes of villains to talk about, even if some of them are repeats
My advice would be:
Let your players know how villain encounters work! This is the most important piece of advice I have!! I went a long time without actually explaining how they work and I regret it, especially because my group all came from playing dnd where the solution is almost always gonna be BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THEM AND WIN. In MASKS where your villains essentially have about 5 "hit points" max and the game is not about beating people up and winning, it's about the interpersonal drama between the characters, if you go in with the dnd instinct of a combat simulator where it's gonna naturally be LET'S BEAT THEM UP, LET'S SEE HOW MANY HIT POINTS YOU HAVE OLD MAN, then it's just not gonna feel good. Especially because in MASKS the villains are supposed to get away sometimes! losing is part of the fun. So yeah, my big advice is let them know how the villain encounters work, that they clear conditions every time a Directly Engage a Threat lands, and how they clear conditions because they are of course different than how the PCs do. This'll help everyone understand how to tell the story better together!
In fact, show em the whole GM moves section. There are a lot of things in there where it's better to know that this is part of the system, these are the things I as a GM can and am expected to do, I'm not just making stuff up here!
On Condition Moves: Narrow down your options on the villain conditions moves in advance based on what you know about the character. It will save a lot of time umm-ing and uhh-ing as you look through all the options on how to clear that Angry condition that they just marked. Oh, and coming up with certain things they might say in response to these Condition Moves being marked in advance is useful, too!
Sometimes, set up ways to make Directly Engage a Threat harder to use. I have to do this a lot because I generally run for 5 players which definitely feels like the max amount of players one should have at the table, and that the PC team sorta has only one really Offense character while the rest I'd categorize more in Defense/Support. And there are a couple pesky powers in there that require a lot of thought beforehand on how to run a satisfying fight. So things like a bunch of goons they gotta get through first, or a shell that has to be gotten through before you can actually Directly Engage the villain, or civilians to save, environment getting in the way, etc etc.
Since these often come up with villains, also show your players the individual Playbook Moves in the GM section so they know what you're doing to them while you're doing it!
Some villain encounters aren't gonna be big fights. They can be completely social!
Create some antagonists they really can't do much about. For me, these tend to be high school bullies. They're the thousand cuts kind of villains; eventually, maybe, one day, something can be done about them. I do run a world where meta powers are rare, though, and these bullies are typically non-metahumans so fighting them when you're really so much stronger or trying to hide your powers or yadda yadda is complicated!
If you take the time to make the world around the PCs matter, then it feels extra good when they protect it during these villain encounters, and makes the villains stand out more when they threaten it.
oh yeah, encourage a lot of dialogue and PC interaction in the villain fights. for me this feels unnatural. i am used to saying i cast eldritch blast, rolling some dice, and then waiting for my turn again. but nah this system is all about the PCs and their relationships and whatever you can do to emphasize all this is great! seeing how the PCs grow during an encounter can be really rewarding!
There is an official Deck of Villains if you get stuck and want some stock villains to use! I have yet to use any, but it's handy to have around for inspiration on Drives and powers and yadda yadda yadda.
Okay, I think that's all I got for villains (I am sure I have forgotten something and will sloppily edit it in later).
Here are some of the ones from our game:
EPISODE 01: PATTY WOODCOCK (it wasn't stated on screen but her villain name was Atelier. hello to the 1-2 players of mine who may see this)
the disrespected assistant to acclaimed fashion desire Frederic Farrow. she sent letters labeled For the Most Beautiful to teenage girls she thought were pretty, offering them a free Frederic Farrow gown. when they arrived she would use Vitality Absorption to take whatever feature she thought was most pretty about them for herself (she was hotter when they first met her) and freeze them like mannequins. she also had telekinesis which she used to throw fashion stuff at the PCs like scissors and needles and rolls of fabric. anyway this was the first villain i ran and i had absolutely no idea what i was doing, it was our first time with the system, oh my goodness. i am certain i ran this villain encounter entirely incorrectly.
EPISODE 02: THE SMOKING MAN/"MILLS" AKA the one with REAL GUNS
second episode was a robbery at our favorite imaginary chain, Dino Donuts. it was pretty funny because the first session ended without the players knowing who the villain actually was, so as far as they were concerned they were up against 3 robbers who had loaded guns and they were shocked. but when the second session rolled around we found out the guy that hired the robbers was this dude, "Mills" or as the kids started calling him, The Smoking Man.
i knew a bit more about running villains at this point but... not enough. I started picking up on that I needed more points of interest in the battle to keep things going, so that's why there were some other baddies there, and civilians to protect. I wanted Mills to come off as a villain that maybe wasn't so bad (he said he told the robbers he hired not to bring real guns), and he started coughing a bunch and seemed surprised by all the smoke that was coming out of his mouth, like he didn't understand he had meta powers. this was also the first villain i tried to tie into another PC, with his glowing purple eyes matching the glow of the eyes that The Doomed gets when he uses his powers, and that they both could use Vitality Absorption on anyone but one another (something something to do with the parasite in them)
and he got away! which was great, because who doesn't love a villain that comes back?
Note: Episode 02 had another villain in it as well, The Doomed's Nemesis, but she only appeared in a phone call taunting him.
EPISODE 03: CARNA and BELLA V (the GIANT EEL!!!)
again realizing i needed more than one thing to hit in our villain encounters, this time i went with an accidental villain: Carna, a little girl with electricity powers she doesn't have great control of (she is essentially a Nova). and her friend, Bella V, who turned out to be a giant electric eel living underneath the city (it got giant from her sharing her electricity with it, apparently). I put in things called Monstrosities in our game which are non-human, just big animal/monster type things to fight, and to do that I just made up a system that I am still figuring out. they are there mostly to take damage, and they generally only can mark conditions like Angry and Afraid, animalistic stuff. essentially they are a shield/distraction for whoever the human "villain" is, especially in an encounter like this one, where it was a little girl who was upset that the PCs were hurting her "friend" after it started attacking them (and her!).
Bella V got away, and the other "encounter" was figuring out what to do with Carna. Carna came with some plot threads and difficult decisions; orphan girl who has powers she can't control, but she doesn't want you to tell anybody, because what if she disappears like her older sister with powers did?! so do we report that this powerful girl is running around here, or do we go along with her wishes and hope she gets her powers under control?! the kids went with the latter!
onto...
EPISODE 04: .....................
actually this one had no villain. it was a cleaning up loose ends sort of episode involving the Outsider alien girl's alien battery that ended up super powering a car with two classmates in it and they had to chase the car down before the classmates got WRECKED and the battery discovered.
and so,
EPISODE 05: THE TAXIDERMIST
it's halloween and the PCs are at the annual DEVIL'S DANCE to party and get drunk in the woods!! but there's a WEREWOLF on the loose?! and it took our friends!*
*ok only one was a friend. the other was a big dumb jock.
except it's not a werewolf at all! it's an invisible man! in a werewolf suit! and he wants to skin your friends to make himself a HUMAN SUIT.
this was a single villain, which they handled pretty quickly, but he got some conditions reactivated which extended the encounter. there were some other elements at play here involving encounters with other students and wandering through the woods and games where kids get buried alive in a coffin. the usual.
they got him taken care of but another superhero, Feral, took all the credit for their hard work!
EPISODE 06: CARNA IS BACK! AND SO IS BELLA V! AND SO IS... WHO IS THAT?
i brought carna back for another episode, even though she wasn't really a "villain" this time, she still thought she was because she had supposedly "hurt/killed a supehero" which makes her a villain. the kids suspected she may have shocked Bionic, a cyborg superhero who had mentioned that too much electricity can make him shut down for a while.
but when they found carna they found the actual villain of the episode: Bella V! she's back! and she's mutated!! she's got all these arms now and every time you take her out, she grows a new head! HYDRA EEL!
and then another vigilante teenager showed up dressed as Apollo, the top superhero in the city, and claimed to be him. even had his powers, too! during the fight he was mostly helpful, looks like he had the ability to copy powers, but maybe showed some hints at being a villain, like holding the city's worst villain in high regard.
anyway the kids save carna, kill bella v for real this time, and this new kid now named Copycat ran off when a real hero showed up.
EPISODE 07: THE SMOKING MAN & A GIRL NAMED ARC
the kids got to fight The Smoking Man with powers he could now (mostly) control for real this time when he was caught robbing a bank. this time he had an additional ability: he became a huge ash monster, which made it extremely difficult for the PCs to Directly Engage him while he was buried deep within it (choking, it seemed this ash monster thing was new to him, too). this was supposed to be an unwinnable fight to be able to introduce the Protege's Mentor there to save them... however I quickly became aware that the players wanted to take this ash monster down, and so they did!
Fortunately, I had a backup villain prepared for this: a teenaged girl with electricity powers named Arc (it is very obvious that this is most likely Carna's missing sister). She kept the encounter going, blasted a PC into unconsciousness and tried to kidnap him after he mentioned Carna, and was the villain who managed to take down most of the PCs so the Mentor could show up. She seems like she might have a connection with Copycat, too.
now these next ones aren't actual super villains (yet?) but they are the constant antagonistic threats of high school:
Blake Borisov: bully jock, this boy is MEAN
Jade Jensen: bully cheerleader, this girl is EVIL
Nedrick Dubinsky: incel who recently gained superpowers and claims he wants to be a superhero but has so far only used his powers for things that are OBVIOUSLY EVIL
okay that's all i got. this is long as fuck. i hope it was somehow helpful? and if you have any other MASKS questions i'd be happy to answer! thank you for letting me ramble about ttrpgs.
Would you ever sale an art book or zine featuring your characters? I love your work! Also, did anything/anyone specifically inspire your style?
oh geez I would love to make a zine featuring my characters, I love them all so very much. maybe if I felt enough people would be interested in something like that? it wouldn't be all too pretty, just a bunch of sketches and info on them mostly (though I personally love seeing people's sketches)
I think my biggest style inspirations come from stuff like Ranma 1/2, Cowboy Bebop (i've never seen it but i've always liked the style, woops), Lupin the Third (also never seen it. uh), Gainax/Trigger stuff, Guilty Gear, J.C. Leyendecker, CLAMP is probably in there somewhere, older Disney movies, we got a stew going. my mom is also a painter, and while our art looks absolutely nothing alike, i imagine she inspired me to think that making art all the time was a totally normal thing to do.
can I just confess that your Masks art is impeccable and the sole reason I want to play Masks (and even started to work on my own superhero comics)? So thank you so much :)
anyone that has known me for a long time can tell you one of my top priorities in life is to try and get people to RP more and draw more so hearing that you want to play MASKS and that you're working on your own comics because of my art...? i am so so so so so touched and happy to hear it. thank you for letting me know! i hope you get to play some MASKS and have a wonderful time making something with people (so many of my close friends are ones I met through getting to RP and make things together), and i hope you have a lot of fun seeing your ideas on the page in your comics! go go go!!
