The Menagerie is an online roleplaying game using the Masks: A New Generation game. Masks is a Powered by the Apocalypse game meant to evoke teen-super fiction like Young Justice (2010) or Teen Titans (2003).
The game has five player characters who form a Super Team called "the Menagerie".
- Charade (Alycia Chin), the ex-super-terrorist who acted as Jason Quill's nemesis
- Concord (Adam Amari), whose emotions power his construct-creating abilities
- Ghost Girl (Charlotte Palmer), a Civil War-era ghost with a variety of mystic powers
- Mercury (Harry Gale), a speedster from a family of speedsters
- Radiance (Summer Skye Newman), a perky robot girl who works as a barista
Two characters have since retired:
- Jason Quill, a Jonny Quest Expy with a protective nanobot vest made by his father
- Link (Leo Snow), a powered-armor pilot who built robot friends
So far they have interacted with individual villains such as Iconoclast, adult hero teams like the Halcyon Heroes League (HHL), other teen teams, a band of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic superhero fangirls, and high-tech invaders from another dimension. But for the most part, what messes them up is each other or their own families...
The game's homepage is http://menagerie.team/
, and links to the forums and live-session videos are at the top.
This game provides examples of:
- Adaptive Armor - Jason's nanobot "vest" can save him from falling out of the sky, disassemble cars and turn them into exoskeletons, analyze security camera footage, project an image of his evil girlfriend...
- Archnemesis Dad - Everywhere. Link's father is an actual supervillain, Jason's saddled his son with an experimental piece of tech that's destroying his mind, and Ghost Girl's may be involved in an Ancient Conspiracy tied to a current plot.
- Beware the Superman - The HHL's most powerful hero, Transcendent, has occasionally turned evil and started down this path.
- Building Swing - Link's power armor doesn't include weapons, only a multi-purpose grappling system that can do this.
- Bus Full of Innocents - Or cars-full. Or schools. Whatever. One menace sucked a bunch of cars into the air with a black hole.
- Can't Stay Normal - Members of the HHL sometimes stay in "the life" because the alternatives are worse.
- Captain Ethnic - The HHL's Tatanka is a Lakota Sioux psychic who turns psychometric energy into psychokinetic energy. His power is the sacred relics of his ancestors, though it's the respect that his people show for them that provides the power.
- Chest Insignia - Concord's triangular chest insignia, which is symbolic of the balance of his emotion-driven powers.
- Combining Mecha - Link and his robot allies can "link up" in any combination.
- Cover-Blowing Superpower - Concord's powers are both emotion-driven and very obvious, making it risky for him to get too emotional around people who don't know he's a super.
- Fastest Thing Alive - the Gale family are legendary speedsters.
- Hard Light - Radiance can project hard-light holograms thanks to Jason Quill's tech.
- Heart Is an Awesome Power - A staple of the team's general approach. Link in particular used both of his in-game Moments of Truth to defeat unbeatable foes using empathy.
- Heroic Fatigue - The game is time-compressed, with almost fifty sessions covering a few weeks at most of time (albeit with a brief Time Skip in the middle).
- Heroic Host - Concord played host to the "Concordance Shard", an alien intelligence that provides him with powers.
- Legacy Character - Harry Gale, latest in a line of heroic speedsters.
- Love Triangle: Link, Pneuma, and her recent mental clone Numina aren't actively in a romantic relationship, but the girls and Link both have feelings for each other. May be slowly shifting toward a Love Dodecahedron thanks to Jason Quill's fascination with Numina and his existing feelings for both his nemesis Alycia and his teammate Ghost Girl.
- The Multiverse - The Sepiaverse is an alternate reality where hope is apparently muted or negated, and is connected to the prime reality by "wounds in the world" which Ghost Girl is duty-bound to close. The characters visited the "Bad Future", a parallel future reality where they failed to integrate as a team. "The Pidgeverse", where everyone is gender-swapped, is non-canonical (so far).
- Recruit the Muggles - "the Ponies", a group of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and superhero fangirls, have gradually started to make inroads with the team as moral support, but also have useful skills of their own.
- Robo Romance - Pneuma was built to be Link's robot girlfriend, but developed anxiety about the reality of her feelings. The two broke up, but remained best friends and teammates. They are now an item again.
- Rogues' Gallery Transplant - at least one of the Gales' rogues may have a kid who's now a rogue for Mercury.
- Super Hero Paradox - half the people the team has fought so far wouldn't have been a problem for anyone if they weren't a team.
- Triple Shifter - Jason Quill has run himself ragged keeping up with superhero shenanigans and his father's hyper-tech empire.
Sessions and story arcs of this game provide examples of:
- Brought Down to Normal - Any character who lost their superpowers when they body-swapped, and hasn't adjusted to the new reality yet.
- Brought Down to Badass - Mostly though, the swap has worked out to you being a different kind of awesome.
- How Do I Shot Web? - Every character must learn to use the powers of the body they've been swapped into.
