Welcome Beacon!

Step one is to answer the Backstory questions on your Playbook. You don't need too much detail at this step, just some quick-sketch ideas, and then we'll see about filling them in.

How did you gain your skills?

- Given her parents' science background, let's go with the traditional lab accident.

When did you first put on your costume?

- Last week?  Given that she's young and new to the superhero game, she probably hasn't had an official costume for long, even though she's been training for years.  And to begin with she may have had something that was more like workout gear than an actual costume.

Who, outside of the team, thinks you shouldn't be a superhero?

- Her mother.  Having found out about her daughter's abilities somehow (accidentally, perhaps from running tests on her daughter after the accident, or possibly Susanna just broke down and told her mother) she now worries every time she does any sort of crime-fighting.

Why do you try to be a hero?

- Someone has to.  If everyone thinks that someone else will step up, then no one ever will.  And it's the right thing to do.  A minor power is still a power.

Why do you care about the team?

- Because they gave her a chance, possibly when no one else would.  She's grateful for the opportunity to prove herself and wants to do her best for them in exchange.

Okay, great. Let me pick at a couple of threads.

Standard workshop disclaimer: I like to pick at things and dig into them, looking for places to add conflict or seed narrative or draw out themes and motifs. But it's your character, not mine. Nothing I say or suggest in this process is binding. I'm just throwing mud at the wall and you can decide what sticks and what doesn't. Similarly, you're not obligated to answer any questions I ask or follow me down any given rabbit hole. I'm just  pointing out things I find interesting. If you don't think it's interesting too, fair beans, we'll drop it.

The whole deal with the Beacon is that you're in over your head but you refuse to get out of the water. So the important touchpoints for a Beacon are: why did you get in the water, what makes it so you're keeping your head up but just barely and why won't you quit?

So, for Susanna, some things that jump out:
-She got her power (teleportation) in a lab accident. We decided that her power is minor and/or relatively inconsequential. Did the lab accident happen years ago? Was that when she started training?

-What was it, all the way at the bottom, that made her decide 'minor teleportation abilities means I have no choice but to fight crime'? She says 'someone has to' and that's good, but in a city overflowing with super-powered people, what makes her think that someone is her?

-Who's fault was the lab accident? Was Susanna somewhere she shouldn't have been? Was something not as safe as it should have been? Was anyone else involved? What harm was done and to whom? Did it have any impact on Susanna's life (home life or otherwise) aside from giving her powers?

-Susanna has minor teleportation powers and she's decided that means she needs to fight crime and THAT means she needs to spend years training. What does that chain of events feel like to her? Is this all a burden? Or a gift? Does she think she's been conscripted into someone else's war? Or does she feel that she FINALLY has the chance to do what she wants to do? And/or some combination?

-When Susanna thinks of herself 'fighting crime' what does she picture as her weight class? Muggers? Gangsters? Crime lords? Cyborgs? Tentacle monsters? Super villains? Did something happen in her life, or was something happening near her or at her, that sort of focused her efforts in one direction or another?

-What's her mother's role in all this? How does she relate to the accident? What's been her reaction since? She must know (or suspect) that Susanna's been preparing for this for years (unless Susanna has managed a significant deception), so what's the relationship been like up to this point?

-Does Susanna have siblings? Does she have aunts or uncles? What's her non-Mask family life like? What does she wish it were like?

-How did her father die? And/or what's she been told about how her father died? How does the memory/story of her father relate to her desire to be a Mask? Is his example part of her journey? And/or was his death something a Mask could have stopped (or maybe he died in a way that any onlooker could have stopped but no one did)? Does she take a different meaning from the story of her father than her mother?

-We'll do the "When the team first came together" in a bit, so I know we don't know what it is yet, but do you think of that as Susanna's very first outing as a Mask? Or maybe she had one or two outings before that, and that was her first REAL FIGHT?

That's a good start, I think. I welcome your thoughts!

The accident was some years ago, yes, around the same time her father died.  (More on that later.)  Say she's eighteen now, twelve at the time of the accident.  A short time later, something happened to trigger her ability -- something dangerous was rushing towards her and she instinctively got out of the way.  After that, she asked to take martial arts lessons and since then has trained as hard as she can.



She doesn't just bring her -- admittedly minor -- ability to the table.  Her intelligence, her science skills, and, yes, her moral compass are also of value.  Given her limitations, however, she also realized that she'd be better off as part of a team, which will help bring her together with the others.



Though not quite in a restricted area, she was a little out of bounds at the time of the accident, yes.  I'm picturing some sort of 'bring your child to work' day, so inside the building with permission, but her father allowed her to watch some sort of test run that she wasn't supposed to get too close to.  And I'm toying with the idea of the father having died as a result of the accident, so potentially a huge impact on her life.

Though still officially labeled an accident, the precise cause is unknown to this day.  And if permissible, one of the more recent events that's been used to help turn public opinion against the lower-level / lesser-known Masks, bears a striking similarity in some way to this lab accident, which has also spurred Susanna on to greater heights of crime fighting.  If there's some sort of serial saboteur at work in her city, she wants to know about it.



Until the accident, she always assumed she'd follow her parents' footsteps and be a scientist.  And that was fine, she liked the idea.  But gaining her powers made her realize that there had also seemed to be something missing from that plan, and now it wasn't missing any longer.  While she does sometimes feel like she's been dragged into someone else's fight -- some days even she's convinced that the good guys will never be able to get ahead of the bad guys, and that's frustrating -- the whole process of training has been a gift, letting her see what she's really capable of when she sets her mind to it.



Right now, she's young and still learning.  As things are, she's only really a match for a crime lord, at the outside.  But she always knew that someday, either she'd get the skills to fight stronger villains, or she'd join forces with others and be able to step up her game.  It all started when she witnessed a mugging, say a year or so ago, and jumped in to help.  Then, she gradually started going out on patrol, seeking out those in need of help.



After her father's death, she and her brother (see below) grew very close to their mother, so the relationship has been solid.  As a fellow scientist, Mom has spent a fair amount of time over the years trying to find the truth behind the accident, with limited success as far as Susanna knows.  That's the one thing they don't tend to talk about anymore.  But her daughter's relatively sudden obsession with martial arts was her first clue that something was amiss.  A few years ago, Mom realized the truth for herself -- say she witnessed one of Susanna's teleports without being seen herself -- but at first didn't say anything about the knowledge since it didn't seem to have significantly changed her daughter's life.  Later, when Susanna was sneaking back in after a late patrol, the two of them each 'fessed up to the other.  Since then, Mom has been trying to gently dissuade her from the life, without success.



One younger brother, Brandon, currently fourteen.  Though her mother was an only child, her father came from a fairly large, close-knit family, and for the first part of her life there were plenty of big get-togethers -- barbecues, reunions, weddings, the whole deal.  Since her father's death, though, the family he left behind have been left out of these events more and more, until now they're largely cut off from all of them.  She misses those days -- another reason she's glad of the team, as a new extended family.



My other thought as to the way the father died -- and either would be fine -- was that he died doing some small but brave thing.  He saved a child from being hit by a car at the cost of being hit himself, perhaps.  In that case, Susanna views his death as an example of the price heroes sometimes have to pay, while her mother thinks of it more as an example of the cruelty of the universe.

In either case, the father had his own secrets, as mentioned, that are free for you to play with.



The first REAL FIGHT, definitely!  Her previous exploits were just in her own neighborhood, minor run-ins at most.  Just something to whet her appetite.  :D

It's been a week since I updated you. I'm so sorry.

Okay, this all sounds excellent. Only a couple of final thoughts, in terms of just trying to gather some of the threads together:

1. The fact that there has been a string of "accidents" and that these have helped turn public opinion against young Masks is now canon. Any ideas you have about these accidents, I'd love to hear about them. Otherwise, we'll wing it.

2. One of the two things I feel like Susanna is missing (and this might just be me, feel free to tell me to buzz off) is a moral imperative. Some sense of what she stands for, as a person, as a Mask, and a clear source of that stance (whether by confirmation or denial). For example (and this is just off the top of my head, so feel free to disregard): her father was a scientist who could have made billions in medical research but instead gave away his discoveries for free because he felt strongly that the highest principle was service to humankind. The accident that killed him, there's some hint that maybe his altruism got him killed (big corp did it, he trusted someone he shouldn't have, his assistant betrayed him for money, etc). And her mother, now with kids to feed one one income, took a more pragmatic approach after his death and took a high paying job that was maybe morally dubious. So for Susanna the loss of her father was also the loss of her moral centre, and her training to be a Mask was partly about recapturing that.

(Hold that thought for a moment)

3. The other thing I think Susanna is missing is at least one big, complicated, unsolvable conflict that's impacts her daily life. Something that makes being a Mask a fraught choice. And makes NOT being a Mask a fraught choice. Something like, she can be a Mask and her family gets evicted or she can not be a Mask, keep the nice house, but then the drug dealers win. Ideally, this conflict would emerge organically from the moral imperative from my previous point.

Do you see what I'm getting at? There's a lot of really good, emotional stuff in Susanna's backstory and lots of good juicy drama inherent in her situation. I'd just love to see you tie it together to be both: 1. the core reason why she is who she is and makes the choices she makes and also 2. the reason why her choices are always going to be difficult.

What do you think? Am I overthinking?

1. Some of the incidents have been definitively labeled as accidents by the authorities, while others are still uncertain.  But there's enough of an underlying similarity among them to make some suspicious that they're all connected, and certainly that's what Susanna suspects.  I've been thinking that they all involved high-tech research and / or manufacturing in some way -- not necessarily all in the same field or the connection would be more definite, but all high-end in some way, all cutting edge.  Some think that it's just another case of science run amok, but more and more citizens are suspicious of a Mask or Masks being behind it all somehow, for various reasons.

2. She's very much got a moral imperative in my head, yes, so let's see about making that more detailed / clear.  Her father was always, always her role model as far as doing the right thing, even in the small, everyday things -- or perhaps especially in those, since small things happen all the time and can have a huge cumulative effect.  Part of the reason she wants to be a hero is because she feels it's what he would have done if she'd been killed and he'd gained powers instead.  So partly recapturing whatever of that morality was lost (r at least damaged) with his death, partly trying to be part of a legacy he would have been proud of.

Both her parents were doing some sort of government / charitable work involving medicine or perhaps biochemistry, which was how they met.  Something that would make life better for a lot of people somehow, like creating drought or pest-resistant crops, and as you say, while they made a decent living there isn't as much money in that as there is working for, say, big agribusiness.  But maybe big agribusiness was actively unhappy with what he was doing, feeling it was cutting into their profits too much, and that's one reason why Susanna initially began to wonder if it was really an accident that killed him.

My original plan was that Susanna and her mother were closer than ever after her father's death, and perhaps there is still some of that there, but if Mom has moved on to a more morally dubious career, that would be a serious wedge between them.  Maybe that's a relatively recent event, as she started worrying in earnest about how she was going to put two kids through college.  But now Susanna may feel as though she's lost both parents, if her mother insists on defending her new job.  And she's worried about her brother -- he's younger and doesn't remember their dad's example as well as she does, and she doesn't want him thinking it's okay to focus on getting rich and forget all about helping people.

3. As for how this leads to some sort of ongoing dilemma... there I'm a little stuck for the moment.  Maybe some local gang member spotted her on one of her early solo patrols and recognized her, and is using that knowledge to put some sort of pressure on her?  Possibly her brother is in danger somehow through this, with the gang trying to get him into the gang, either willingly or through blackmail?

As for overthinking, well, I do that all the time myself, so I probably won't be much help reining anyone else in...

I think Susanna's pretty much ready to rock.

I still think she would benefit from one significant conflict, though. The 'easiest' would be that her mother doesn't want her to be a Mask, or her brother hates all Masks, or something like that.

Other options:
-She's in some kind of high-powered, accelerated scholastic program that leaves her no free time.
-Same-same some kind of charity something, or work placement something.
-She has a friend or some other social connection that's at odds with her Mask persona and/or her Mask time and energy.
-Some kind of moral or ethical conflict. Like, I don't know, she'll be evicted if she's found out, or her mother's boss has vowed revenge on all young Masks, or the like.

Think about it. We don't need an answer right now (and it's possible that, once the game gets rolling, we won't need it).

But other than that, you're ready to start talking about Relationships. I'll open that thread in a bit.

Okay, how about this: We've established that Susanna's brother was wounded during an incident from our Reformed's recent past.  What if after that, he started growing steadily angrier at and more mistrustful of all Masks?  Susanna probably planned to tell him the truth when he got a little older, but now she's afraid that will turn him against her rather than making him feel more charitable towards Masks.

And she will be busy with school, certainly, possibly some sort of scholarship or work placement stuff as well, so sheer time constraints will be a perpetual problem...

Yeah, that's great. I think that'll work really well. We may never get into it, but it's good to have it in the background.