The greatest comic that you can’t read
The 600-session Masks campaign that has its own tag on Archive of Our Own.
There is a beloved, long-running comic book series that you cannot read. You can experience it, have it read out to you, and even contribute to it. But there are no store shelves that stock it. When the time comes, its creators and I settle in for some chatter. We figure out who the characters in this newest issue will be, and what kinds of storylines they’re hoping to find. Finally, when we’re all ready, we speak the sacred words: “Welcome everyone to Young Heroes of Halcyon.”
Back in early 2017, Magpie Games released Masks: A New Generation. It landed like a bomb into the Discord server of Stop, Hack, & Roll, a game design podcast and associated network led by game designers, James Malloy and Brandon Leon-Gambetta. The podcast started in 2016, and, by 2017, it had attracted a core fan base of gamers interested in design. Perhaps the most excited was one gamer who posted under the handle, TheObserver.
There were a few one-shots run in the SHR Discord in March 2017, historically called the “Byway City One-Shots.” You’ll find conversations months later of people talking excitedly about these Byway City games and yearning to play Masks with everyone again. By September of 2017, James and Brandon created SHR’s Masks actual play series Protean City Comics. PCC was very popular in its niche, and the community would balloon during its run.
On the sidelines, TheObserver was a highly active member of this community. After every new episode of SHR, they would post “Notes from the Gnome,” a series of in-depth thoughts they had about the episode. They engaged in many conversations—the nerdier the topic, the more they engaged. Conversations about Masks and how to play it continued to fill the server, until TheObserver saw fit to evolve those conversations in November 2017.
“Observer had been chatting with us for a couple of weeks about Masks,” Brandon Leon-Gambetta informed me. “Their home group had swapped over to playing Masks, and they posted pretty casually that they were thinking of running a game of Masks on the discord. A couple of people dropped interest emojis and it legitimately just kind of rolled forward from there… I don't think it was meant to be this enormous thing it became.”
The game was organized in the first week of November under the name “Halcyon City Herald Limited Editions.” The purpose was to be a West Marches-style Masks campaign, where available people would run for whoever wanted to play during the week. How long it was supposed to run is uncertain, but many early storylines being closely linked together implies it was supposed to end. The game was, in part, based on the stories established during the original Byway City games. By the second week, it seemingly reverted to just “SHR Masks.”. By the third week, its true name was coined: “Young Heroes of Halcyon.”
