For a little treat, let’s look at a villain for Masks.

Edgelord was the first villain I ran in Masks. Masks is possibly my favourite superhero RPG and I’ve run a lot of them. It’s about young superheroes who haven’t quite figured out who they are as people or heroes. The moves all relate to how the heroes see themselves and instead of hit points you have ‘conditions’ such as ‘angry’ or ‘afraid’ which have effects and can be removed by certain actions in play.

The first session included character creation and I had to have a villain ready who could be a one shot enemy worthy of both setting the tone and getting out of the way when I figured out how to use the origin details the group made into a wider story. They gave me the Periodic Table of Evil which is just fantastic. In the meantime though, I had a piece of paper with “Edgelord” on it.

The group were at their headquarters which was a sofa and a small patch of land on an island just outside of Halcyon. It was decided that there were so many superheroes that the oldest, most famous ones had statues on little islands all down the coast, like a ton of Statues of Liberty. The group were on an island which had a half-destroyed statue of a hero who’d been completely forgotten. This meant no visitors anytime soon (it would later be attacked and destroyed by Krill the Conqueror). They heard about a villain holding a bunch of kids hostage in an ironworks where a school tour was happening.

The group found the ironworks has suspiciously powerful defences in it which had been activated, linking back to Apollo, a liquid metal boy who was the group’s Newborn. But then there was Edgelord.

One class of kids was held hostage by him, an angry, sweaty boy who’d home made his villain outfit on the fly and had a pair of hands which kept changing between different kinds of bladed forms. The group fought him, but ultimately it was seeing beyond the mask which worked. Stalker, a nerdy kid whose body had been turned into a bladed alien, performed the move. He realised that two of the kids being held hostage bullied Edgelord and put his hands in some experimental metal goo which is how they got changed into what they were now.

The group eventually got him to stand down and they went out to a Vietnamese restaurant/karaoke joint called “Pho Show”. Edgelord started to turn his ways round. I loved that the ‘guilt’ condition was able to make him stop what he was doing.

Later on Edgelord was seen trying to be a bit more considerate and well-behaved as hero, even having a Blademobile, although it got stolen by the heroes when they needed to race around town stopping a bunch of their villains from ruining a parade. Later, when the Periodic Table of Evil took over the city by pretending to be heroes, Edgelord was the first ‘villain’ they captured. He was seen a couple of times in their super-prisons, but that’s been it so far.

You can read about Edgelord and the other villains the group fought against at Who Dares Rolls. I’ve even included the rules to run them in your own series.