Chase Cameron, aka Showtime - Alternate Futures with Will Malkus (Masks: a New Generation)

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You can create these worlds, you can tell these stories, where the good guys win, where the reality of the world matches your ideals.

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90s pop culture understanding of what an AI is is much closer to the fashy future robot.

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It doesn't actually matter how much Batman gets beaten up.

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It doesn't actually matter how much Superman gets punched.

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The only way they lose a fight is if they give up.

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Not stealing tips.

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Listen, listen.

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Despicable.

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Hello, friends.

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This is the last episode of season three.

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I'll be back with season four in January.

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I'm taking a break as, well, October is my birthday month and my daughter's birthday month and my favorite holiday of the year, Halloween.

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It's also the busiest time of the year for nonprofit fundraisers like me.

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I'll be spending this time preparing for season four, editing some video episodes and some bonus content, and getting the word out about the podcast.

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Also, stay tuned for an actual play project I'm very excited about.

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I'm keeping it on the down low for now, but if you sign up for my newsletter at characterswithoutstories.com, you'll be one of the first to get the skinny.

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This episode I'm joined by Will Malkus.

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Will is an ex librarian, ex music journalist, ex photographer, and current streamer, producer, and editor, mostly for the not-for-profit charity TTRPG studio Live from the Apocalypse that he co-founded in 2021.

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Outside of Live from the Apocalypse, you can usually find him lifting heavy things for fun like a freak or occupying various corners of the internet under the handle, a will M scream.

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Will, thank you so much for coming on the show.

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Thanks for having me Star.

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It's a pleasure to be here.

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So, Will, you have worn a lot of hats.

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What got you to streaming for TTRPG content?

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I have, I guess, worn a lot of hats.

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I have been playing TTRPGs, it's funny actually, I was just having a conversation with somebody about how long I've been playing TTRPGs for, and I, I shortened it to 20 years.

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My dad introduced me to it when I was about 12 years old, and I said this to somebody, And they said, wait, you're not 32.

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And then I realized that it's actually been longer than 20 years.

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It's been about 23 years.

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So I've been playing TTRPGs for a very long time, different ones all over the map.

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But it wasn't until right around the pandemic that I got started with streaming them.

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Actually, Live from the Apocalypse, the aforementioned not-for-profit TGRPG studio that I helped found.

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TGRPG studio just being sort of a fancy way of saying Twitch channel and also we make some podcasts.

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Originally, me and some IRL friends who are the ones who started Live from the Apocalypse were planning to try our hand at recording some of our games as podcasts.

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We had plans to do, um, an Urban Shadows game, and we also had plans to do a Masks game.

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Right around the same time we were gonna meet up at our friend's house and he had bought all of this equipment and we were going to try to make these into a show as we played and the day that we were set to record for the first time was the day that lockdown was declared for the state

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Oh no.

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Yeah so we had a lot of conversations about what we wanted to do with it We decided eventually to try to record online, which none of us knew anything about at the time.

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It did not go well.

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Everybody just was using their sort of on board laptop mics.

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Oh yeah.

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Recording themselves in Audacity.

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None of us had any sound equipment or anything.

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And in those early days of the pandemic, it was actually pretty hard to get your hands on a microphone.

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So we tried to record them for a while.

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They are unlistenable.

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They will never see the light of day.

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But we kept playing those games, even though we decided to stop recording them and agreed we weren't going to release them as anything.

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And that kind of got the ball rolling so that when we were a little bit deeper into the pandemic, we were all kind of feeling trapped and alone in our houses.

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We had a conversation about whether or not we wanted to try to make this into a streaming thing.

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And specifically, that came with the caveat, we all agreed, that we absolutely, unequivocally did not want to have money be a part of this equation whatsoever.

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With the understanding that when you make a Twitch channel, eventually it becomes monetized.

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Eventually there's the potential that you'll get some money or something like that.

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So we kind of decided right off the bat that in the interest of our, of our friendships and our relationships with each other, the easiest way to go about this would be to just remove money from the equation entirely.

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We all had some experience with streaming for charity.

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We had done extra life.

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Pretty much every year.

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And we basically just decided to keep that model, that model being instead of encouraging people to donate to whatever the charity that we were platforming at the moment was instead of subscribing or interacting with the fake Twitch currency in any way, shape, or form.

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So that's basically the model that Live from the Apocalypse was founded on.

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We have been doing this for a little bit over three years at this point.

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We pick a charity beneficiary, and we raise a certain amount of money, X amount of dollars for them, and then we pick a new charity and we move on.

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And it's kind of just something that is always going on in the background of our content.

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We try not to overly emphasize it, I guess I'll say, but the goal is basically just to have a charity campaign always available as an alternative to giving us your money.

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We do not want it.

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I cannot overstate how little we want your money.

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That is unusual, I think, when a lot of people are trying to find ways to monetize, but I see that that could be dangerous when you are a bunch of friends, existing friendships, trying to make it together and, and then money kind of gets in the way sometimes.

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It does.

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Yeah.

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And I mean, the thing that I always say about Live from the Apocalypse and its relationship with the landscape of streamers is that our model does not invalidate anybody else's model.

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The only reason that we are able to do the things that we are able to do is because other people are doing the things that they do.

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If everybody was doing the same thing, constantly, constantly asking for people to donate to charity and things like that, people would get overwhelmed.

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Nobody would be able to afford to give money to anything, whether it was directly to the people making the content or to the charities that they were platforming or anything like that.

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So our model is only viable as an alternative to what other people are doing.

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You're called Live from the Apocalypse.

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I'm assuming that's because you like Powered by the Apocalypse games.

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Personally, I love Powered by the Apocalypse games.

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We're called Live from the Apocalypse because we were born from the pandemic.

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And it very much felt like the world was ending at the time.

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Yeah.

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I am a huge fan of Powered by the Apocalypse.

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Some of the other people that founded it with me, not so much.

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Some of them are very big D&D fans.

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I don't think any of any of us hate Powered by the Apocalypse, but I'm definitely the biggest fan boy.

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So you're bringing a character today for a Powered by the Apocalypse

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a New Generation.

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One of my favorite systems, we actually make a podcast now called Academy H, which uses the Masks system and it's, it's actually a direct sequel to the Masks game that I ran during the pandemic that we tried to turn into a podcast and failed to do.

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Set in that same universe.

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But this is a character you haven't had a chance to play.

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So you're talking about running a game of Masks and trying to create that into a podcast, but this is for an entirely separate game.

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Or was this something that you created for that and it just never happened.

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No, this was supposed to be for a completely separate game.

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I don't get a lot of opportunities to play Masks.

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So every time I do, I relish it.

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And this was a character that I made for a game that I just never got a chance to play.

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The game fell through.

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Well, let's get into it.

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Will, who are you bringing to the table today?

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Today I am bringing to the table Chase Cameron, superhero codename Showtime.

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In Masks terminology, he is the Innocent playbook, which means that he is from a different time period in the past; has been pulled forward into the quote unquote present day, where there is also a present day version of himself, who is much darker and more grim.

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The whole struggle of the Innocent playbook is that push and pull of seeing yourself in the future, trying to figure out what could have gone wrong in your life to bring you to that point, and potentially, hopefully, trying to avoid it, or maybe even trying to redeem your older self.

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This is not a multiverse, alternate universe.

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This is same universe, same person, different point in their life journey.

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Exactly.

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Yeah.

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I know that there's a lot of movies and television and all kinds of things that deals with time travel and there's often a lot of different approaches to it.

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Like what does that exactly mean?

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If they touch, then somebody gets erased or whatever.

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What are the rules in this game that you built Chase for?

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That's a great question.

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I mean, they're basically like with all great TTRPGs, the rules are whatever you decide the rules are.

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The central conflict of Chase as a person is that he's trapped in the present day with a darker version of himself who has an agenda and sending Chase back in time with the knowledge of what is happening in the future, who he becomes could potentially be disruptive to that agenda.

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It could change the timeline.

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So Chase wants to get back to his time, but it's in his present day self's best interest to keep him in the current time.

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And obviously it's not an option to kill him because then his present day self would also cease to exist.

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My head is already starting to get twisted.

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How did that happen?

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How did he end up coming from the past to the future?

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Chase, he was conceived of as a, as a sort of stereotypical nineties character.

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Loves to skateboard.

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Very laid back.

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From Southern California.

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Very much inspired by like your Brinks, you know, that school of media, and his powers come from a weird device that he found when he and his some friends were skateboarding through an abandoned construction site one night.

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He fell down into a hole that was being actively excavated or not actively excavated.

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It was nighttime.

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There was nobody there working, but he fell down into a hole.

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There were sirens, the cops were coming, his friends left him there.

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And at the bottom of this hole, he happened to come across this device, which looked like a very strange sort of technological wristband for lack of a better term.

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It was this sort of big bulky device that he was able to snap on his wrist, but part of it looked like a clock face.

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It was shattered, it was broken.

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In desperation, he kind of just grabbed it, he heard the voices of the police approaching the hole from above him, the device activated, and froze time.

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Just for a very limited amount of time, well, just long enough for him to pull himself out of the hole and get away from the cops, who saw little more than a green blur rushing by them.

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And this watch, this, whatever the origin of the strange watch that he found was, that was the, the source of his powers.

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He called it the Time Piece, for lack of anything better.

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At one point in his short lived superhero career, he came in conflict with an enemy, a villain, a supervillain who was powerful.

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The villain in question tried to hurt Chase, tried to blast him with energy.

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The energy was absorbed by the timepiece, something about those two interacting, accidentally catapulted him forward into the present day.

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This is very much in a certain kind of superhero tradition of somebody who becomes a superhero by finding an object.

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I think of something like Green Lantern, for example, is that the inspiration for this?

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A hundred percent it was.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Green Lantern is my favorite superhero of all time.

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Hal Jordan specifically, which is kind of a rough place to be these days because the entire conceit of the Green Lantern Corps have basically been turned into space cops within the last, I would say like 15 to 20 years of their run.

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I got into the Green Lantern before that.

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In those days, it was less like there's a Green Lantern cop on every planet, and there was more like there's a Green Lantern superhero on every planet.

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Nowadays, it's pretty much just a one to one parallel for, like, a buddy cop thing.

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And I kind of wanted to play around with that.

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The timepiece ended up being one of many objects very similar to a Green Lantern ring for an organization that had become defunct at some point in ancient history called the Century Centurions.

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And they were basically guardians of time.

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So Chase's present day self is called the Century Centurion, and he was able to restart basically the entire organization so that there are many Century Centurions spread across the universe on different planets protecting the timeline.

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Who is the supervillain that attacked him and set all of this off?

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That is actually very poorly defined and something that I think we were going to explore during the game itself.

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But, if I recall correctly, it was kind of a being of pure shadow who had no form or identity of its own that it was willing to provide.

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And I think one of the central conflicts of the game was going to be that each of the characters had encountered this figure in some way, shape, or form in their lifetime.

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Why did you decide to set this character in his original time in the 90s?

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Nostalgia, mostly.

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I just really liked the idea of playing Masks is obviously a system about playing teen superheroes and when I think about teen superheroes, I very much think about, like, the Young Justice comics of the late 90s which is right around the time that I really started getting into comic books so that was like the original young superhero team for the original non Teen Titans young superhero team from, from DC Comics that had like Tim Drake Robin, Impulse, Superboy, Wonder Girl, and then a bunch of other very strange secondary characters.

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It was a very weird run of comics that ended in a very unsatisfactory dark way.

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Which is a shame, but the book itself was a lot of fun, it didn't take itself nearly as seriously as a lot of other DC Comics did at the time, and I was really trying to sort of embody that spirit with Chase, a little bit of that, like, Sonic the Hedgehog attitude.

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So I love the idea, it's always a really fun thing to explore when somebody from the past comes into the future.

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And their reaction to the future.

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So what do you think Chase's reaction is to entering a world where everyone has a cell phone and, you know, everybody's on TikTok and Instagram?

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Yeah, I think he was not about it.

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He did not.

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He did not like it.

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He was very confused at first about the whole thing and was not into the idea.

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In the sense that he thought that people were wasting a lot of their time doing this.

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Obviously coming from the 90s, it's not coming from ancient history.

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He was more than happy to just sit around, watch TV, all of that.

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But the whole concept of social media, TikTok, just seemed very upsetting to him, I think.

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And also, there was a lot of attention put on him specifically in the context of the timepiece.

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And he was cognizant of the fact that his presence in his future, the present day, had a lot of potential implications for what might happen in the past.

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And what might happen the even farther future.

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Uh, so he was very protective about the events that brought him there and also the time piece itself.

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What kind of implications was he most worried about?

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Most notably, he was very much focused on trying to figure out what might've happened to turn him into the Century Centurion.

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The whole idea of the Century Centurions seemed kind of strange to him, but specifically when he first got to the present day.

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People warned him about the Century Centurion, because being basically a time cop, the Century Centurion's whole thing, in a lot of cases, was stopping crimes, quote unquote, before they were committed, because he had the benefit of being able to see how events were going to play out in the future, so he could address things before they had even taken place.

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A lot of the time that he was stopping these, quote unquote, time crimes, it was preemptive.

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For me, the touchstone is Minority Report.

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Right?

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Exactly.

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Okay.

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Yeah.

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The evil in that is that people obviously are unpredictable.

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They can't preemptively judge people for crimes they have yet to commit.

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The future is mutable.

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Is there anything else going on there with the Century Centurion that you would consider evil?

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Does the Century Centurion think that he's doing the right thing?

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He does think that he's doing the right thing, but the big reveal that we were going to explore throughout the story was that the Century Centurions are even more ultra fascist-y than they seem at first glance.

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At first glance, they kind of seem like a benevolent group of superheroes who are doing their best to protect the time stream across the universe.

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The reality of the situation was that when Chase eventually discovered the long abandoned base of the Centurions, he reactivated an old, ancient, incredibly advanced AI system called Centurion Prime.

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And Centurion Prime would, whenever a new Century Centurion was brought on board, Chase being the first of this sort of new generation, Centurion Prime would kind of pour all of this knowledge and all of the visions of events that would play out through the future of the universe into people's minds.

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It would drive them to feel that Centurion Prime's solution was the only way to avoid all of these things.

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So the only way forward for the universe, as far as the Century Centurions were concerned, was to do exactly what Centurion Prime demanded.

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May not have had the same resonance maybe for Chase coming from the nineties, but I think for contemporary audiences, a world determined and policed by AI is fucking terrifying.

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A hundred percent.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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I could not agree with you more.

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I think Chase would agree too.

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But yeah, I don't think he had as much context, although probably could be said that his.

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Sort of 90s pop culture understanding of what an AI is much closer to the, the fashy future robot.

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I think it's interesting that you talk about time cops and you said earlier about your reservations about more contemporary interpretations of the Green Lantern story.

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Is this kind of a meta reclamation for you of the Green Lantern trope?

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Yeah, I think that's more than fair to say.

00:19:40.140 --> 00:20:08.003
I think what I really wanted to explore with this was the idea of somebody who could potentially be considered a stand in for myself the first time that I read, most notably for me, what really pulled me into Green Lantern is In the first place was Green Lantern Rebirth, the miniseries by Geoff Johns, which reestablished Hal Jordan as one of the Green Lantern Corps after he had been essentially written out in the 90s as a, as a supervillain.

00:20:08.309 --> 00:20:15.539
He had turned evil, he had become a supervillain called Parallax, he had sacrificed himself in the last moment to save the universe, but they did him kind of dirty.

00:20:15.579 --> 00:20:23.210
They were kind of just fed up with him and they wanted to introduce their cool, new, young, 90s hip Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, also one of my favorite characters.

00:20:23.479 --> 00:20:28.288
Unfortunately, also the originator of the women in refrigerators trope, through no fault of his own.

00:20:28.469 --> 00:20:50.490
But, Green Lantern Rebirth was what really introduced me to the world of Green Lantern, I really fell in love with the whole concept of tangible willpower, of this idea that if you are capable of wielding great willpower, that you can actually shape reality to a degree to match what it is that you can see in your mind.

00:20:50.700 --> 00:21:10.578
And Chase is kind of a way for me to take that young kid, that teenager that I was when I started reading Green Lantern, and give him a voice to speak out about the present incarnation of the character and the Green Lantern Corps as a whole, instead of manipulating light into constructs, inflicting your willpower into something tangible.

00:21:10.799 --> 00:21:15.039
With Chase, it was this idea of using your willpower to stop time itself.

00:21:15.559 --> 00:21:24.058
How much do you identify with this idea of wanting to go back to your teenage self and bring that person into the present?

00:21:24.410 --> 00:21:27.628
I think it's really important for all of us to do that to some degree.

00:21:27.890 --> 00:21:36.339
I think that in a lot of ways, ourselves, when we're that age, we're learning so much about the world and we're developing so many core parts of our identity.

00:21:36.490 --> 00:21:40.769
One thing that we haven't covered so far in this interview is that I actually come from a creative writing background.

00:21:40.769 --> 00:21:43.750
I have a degree in creative writing, that's what I went to undergrad for.

00:21:44.210 --> 00:21:52.739
And I remember in a lot of fiction workshops during that time period, people would be transitioning from high school into the college environment.

00:21:52.869 --> 00:21:55.259
They'd be writing a lot of fiction that was based around high school.

00:21:55.378 --> 00:22:03.579
I remember that driving our fiction professors absolutely insane because they perceived it as this kind of fixation on a different time.

00:22:03.974 --> 00:22:07.544
An earlier time in your life that you're done with and you're transitioning into adulthood.

00:22:08.054 --> 00:22:15.314
And basically, if you tried to turn in something that was written about high school or set in high school times, it was written off as being nostalgia.

00:22:15.523 --> 00:22:16.773
And that's, that's all it was.

00:22:17.163 --> 00:22:26.055
Which is, I think like, like so many other parts of that program, I think in some ways they had a point and in some ways they were a little overblown.

00:22:26.404 --> 00:22:30.924
But I think it's really important to hold on to that younger, more idealistic version of ourselves.

00:22:31.013 --> 00:22:39.664
And obviously you have to temper it with the expectations of the world and your own developing understanding of the way that world functions around you and how it can function for you.

00:22:39.814 --> 00:22:41.023
And you have to protect yourself.

00:22:41.294 --> 00:22:41.634
But.

00:22:41.940 --> 00:22:53.660
I think, personally, it's really valuable to hold on to that part of yourself that was so self assured, that believed in things so strongly, that you made it your entire identity.

00:22:54.159 --> 00:22:56.410
Do you think that you're idealistic?

00:22:56.960 --> 00:22:59.048
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's probably safe to say.

00:22:59.349 --> 00:23:00.729
Yeah, to a degree.

00:23:00.849 --> 00:23:02.419
Yes, absolutely.

00:23:02.609 --> 00:23:07.039
I think when you break it down, we're all playing pretend, right?

00:23:07.138 --> 00:23:15.038
Everybody who is making TTRPG content, everybody who is playing TTRPGs, who's part of the hobby, part of the community, whatever, we're all playing pretend.

00:23:15.189 --> 00:23:24.589
And I think one of the reasons why that attracts people so much, and in particular certain types of people to just really make that their whole focus.

00:23:24.825 --> 00:23:32.513
Because you can create these worlds, you can tell these stories, where the good guys win, where the reality of the world matches your ideals.

00:23:32.763 --> 00:23:34.244
That's not always the case in the present day.

00:23:34.244 --> 00:23:46.865
In the present day, if we talk about leftism, if we talk about anarchy, if we talk about communism, any of those topics, it comes with a lot of asterisks and it comes with a lot of caveats because it kind of has to, because that's the reality of the situation.

00:23:46.865 --> 00:23:53.773
If we want to make progress in that way as a society, it's not going to look like an overnight revolution.

00:23:54.019 --> 00:23:59.509
But if you're telling a story, if you're playing pretend, essentially, why not?

00:23:59.609 --> 00:24:00.549
Wouldn't that be nice?

00:24:00.819 --> 00:24:01.079
Yeah.

00:24:03.588 --> 00:24:11.229
Yeah, I feel like there's a few games that have come out recently that are about sometimes quite literally punching Nazis.

00:24:11.920 --> 00:24:24.950
And I see the appeal in that as fascism is on the rise in the United States and elsewhere in the world, there's something cathartic about being able to confront it quickly and definitively.

00:24:26.339 --> 00:24:27.878
Yeah, no, absolutely.

00:24:28.029 --> 00:24:33.190
I mean, I think that's really what all of this is about is catharsis.

00:24:33.594 --> 00:24:47.624
In your real life, catharsis is hard earned, and it's exhausting to get there, and at the very least, if nothing else, when we tell these stories, when we play these games, if nothing else, your catharsis is guaranteed.

00:24:47.984 --> 00:24:48.424
Yeah.

00:24:48.634 --> 00:24:51.874
Masks is a game where you are teenagers, correct?

00:24:52.484 --> 00:24:54.865
Young heroes, it varies a little bit.

00:24:54.884 --> 00:25:01.933
I think you don't want to drop too low in the age groups, generally speaking, just because at that point you're putting children in harm's way.

00:25:01.933 --> 00:25:06.134
Not that you're not doing that anyway, but at a certain point it becomes a little more concerning.

00:25:06.194 --> 00:25:13.164
I think you can really make them as old as you want because the central conflict of masks is, is not necessarily your physical age.

00:25:13.513 --> 00:25:16.263
But it's the fact that you're still learning how to do what you're doing.

00:25:16.273 --> 00:25:18.114
You're still learning how to control your powers.

00:25:18.244 --> 00:25:20.204
You're still losing control from time to time.

00:25:20.204 --> 00:25:21.413
You're still flying off the handle.

00:25:21.493 --> 00:25:26.683
And these are very common traits for teenagers specifically, but you can age that up into twenties.

00:25:26.683 --> 00:25:32.023
You could maybe even go older than that if you want, maybe somebody didn't get their powers until they were, they were even older than that.

00:25:32.023 --> 00:25:41.834
But I think when it really shines is when it's evoking that specific genre of teen superhero story, much like so many different Powered by the Apocalypse systems.

00:25:42.269 --> 00:25:49.779
And it seems like because of the typical age range for this game's characters, you're also telling a little bit of an origin story.

00:25:49.779 --> 00:25:53.638
These are characters who have new powers that they're forced to deal with.

00:25:53.878 --> 00:25:58.109
Your character, specifically, is forced to deal with a new power.

00:25:58.109 --> 00:25:59.720
What is that process like for him?

00:25:59.779 --> 00:26:02.098
What is the learning curve in using his powers?

00:26:02.278 --> 00:26:07.769
Tell me about the scene where Peter Parker learns how to use the webs, right, and falls down a million times.

00:26:07.769 --> 00:26:09.420
Like, what does that look like for Chase?

00:26:09.805 --> 00:26:33.634
For, for Chase, it was specifically pretty classic, kind of similar to the Peter Parker model, but he discovered his powers by accident, running from the cops, and didn't believe it at first, but he did tell his friends about it, he had a close group of friends, he told them about it, one of them was even his, his love interest, a girl, that he had a crush on, and just had never gotten around to expressing, um, those feelings to.

00:26:33.980 --> 00:26:54.739
And later on, he would have discovered, if the game had happened and if it had progressed, that one of the things that set his future self on the path of discovering the Citadel of the Century Centurions and reawakening Centurion Prime would be the death of that woman after they had started a relationship together, built a life together, when she unfortunately passed away.

00:26:54.828 --> 00:27:00.009
Kind of a nod to that women in refrigerators trope from the pages of the Green Lantern comic.

00:27:00.394 --> 00:27:05.224
But the first times he used his powers, it was basically for pranks and like, petty crimes.

00:27:05.355 --> 00:27:08.375
Stealing, you know, a handful of dollars out of a tip jar.

00:27:08.544 --> 00:27:10.605
Not stealing tips.

00:27:10.654 --> 00:27:12.045
Listen, listen.

00:27:12.773 --> 00:27:13.325
Despicable.

00:27:13.325 --> 00:27:16.105
It absolutely is despicable.

00:27:16.164 --> 00:27:16.944
He's young.

00:27:17.183 --> 00:27:17.973
He's misguided.

00:27:18.075 --> 00:27:20.144
That was the beginning of his villain arc.

00:27:21.035 --> 00:27:21.184
Exactly.

00:27:21.305 --> 00:27:23.345
He has not yet started on his hero's journey.

00:27:24.470 --> 00:27:30.690
And I don't think it even occurred to him for a relatively long period of time that he could be a hero with this thing.

00:27:30.930 --> 00:27:36.170
He kind of just thought that it would be something fun that he could mess around with, with his friends.

00:27:36.339 --> 00:27:39.348
And then one day he was at a convenience store.

00:27:39.429 --> 00:27:44.690
He was grabbing like a soda, a Surge, maybe it was the nineties Frutopia.

00:27:44.710 --> 00:27:50.769
I don't remember any other nineties specific brands off the top of my head, but yeah, the store got robbed.

00:27:51.115 --> 00:27:58.944
The clerk got injured in the process, got shot, and he used the power of the timepiece to stop the people who did it.

00:27:59.134 --> 00:28:06.325
All they saw was a green blur because the people who were not on the other side of his time manipulation powers kind of just looked like super speed.

00:28:07.019 --> 00:28:10.099
He is committing petty crime.

00:28:10.109 --> 00:28:14.779
He is running from the cops, which is the whole source of the powers.

00:28:14.880 --> 00:28:17.940
And then of course we have the whole time cop situation going on.

00:28:17.950 --> 00:28:19.650
How does Chase feel about cops?

00:28:19.920 --> 00:28:27.044
I mean, he doesn't love them, especially, you know, in that time period, but growing up in skate culture.

00:28:27.305 --> 00:28:33.734
Which, I did a little bit, mostly like, punk culture, which is very adjacent to skate culture.

00:28:33.825 --> 00:28:37.285
I was never much for skating, but I did for a little while.

00:28:37.484 --> 00:28:38.305
It was not my thing.

00:28:38.644 --> 00:28:42.585
Those two adjacent to each other, you're getting chased out of parking lots a lot.

00:28:42.644 --> 00:28:44.673
You're getting asked to leave the premises.

00:28:45.029 --> 00:28:50.309
You're getting looked at suspiciously, you're getting asked to leave your bag at the front of the store, that sort of thing.

00:28:50.309 --> 00:29:00.549
So Chase's already had a long history of being hassled by the cops, of having not great interactions, despite living in relative privilege and not really experiencing active oppression, maybe.

00:29:00.930 --> 00:29:03.189
So tell me about this friend group.

00:29:03.210 --> 00:29:06.449
You said that they left him in this hole.

00:29:06.659 --> 00:29:09.088
How did he feel about that, about being left behind?

00:29:09.609 --> 00:29:10.128
They did.

00:29:10.138 --> 00:29:11.019
They panicked.

00:29:11.269 --> 00:29:13.529
He had very strong feelings about it in the moment.

00:29:13.710 --> 00:29:17.500
After the fact, he was pretty quick to understand and forgive.

00:29:17.670 --> 00:29:21.909
He would have done probably exactly the same thing if their places were reversed.

00:29:22.069 --> 00:29:25.159
Gosh, I don't really remember if I fleshed them out.

00:29:25.159 --> 00:29:27.628
I remember he had the love interest.

00:29:27.859 --> 00:29:31.279
And then I think he had two or three other guy friends.

00:29:31.279 --> 00:29:36.960
Again, this was, this whole part of his background was very inspired by the Disney Channel original movie Brink.

00:29:38.619 --> 00:29:42.880
So his friend group was basically like a one to one parallel of that friend group.

00:29:43.038 --> 00:29:46.599
Probably two other close male friends and then the love interest.

00:29:47.055 --> 00:29:51.595
Getting to that love interest, you mentioned the women in refrigerators trope.

00:29:51.644 --> 00:29:53.964
Can you tell my audience what that is?

00:29:54.204 --> 00:29:54.575
Sure.

00:29:54.575 --> 00:29:55.275
Yeah, absolutely.

00:29:55.275 --> 00:30:10.434
So the women in refrigerators trope is one that refers to basically any time that a female character in a comic book or a piece of media who is not given any real agency or development of her own, Is sacrificed as a way to motivate the hero.

00:30:10.615 --> 00:30:17.244
So basically killing off a character for no other reason than because it's going to make the hero mad and force them into action.

00:30:17.515 --> 00:30:23.545
You talked about it in a negative way, but you're bringing in part of that story.

00:30:24.065 --> 00:30:25.825
Are you twisting on the trope?

00:30:25.875 --> 00:30:28.914
Are you changing it in Chase's story?

00:30:29.335 --> 00:30:30.424
That was definitely the plan.

00:30:30.424 --> 00:30:33.535
We never really got to explore, well, any part of the character's story.

00:30:33.535 --> 00:30:42.894
It was going to be gradually revealed over the course of this game that the love interest, who's, I think her name was Ellie, but I don't 100 percent remember.

00:30:42.894 --> 00:30:44.775
I'm not sure I ever wrote it down anywhere.

00:30:45.164 --> 00:30:52.914
But it was going to be revealed that Ellie was the primary motivation for him to continue on the hero's journey.

00:30:52.934 --> 00:31:03.924
And not, not in the sense that something happened to Ellie or that he felt like he needed to protect Ellie, but, but she was actually going to be the one to convince him that he should use these powers that he's been given for good.

00:31:04.214 --> 00:31:07.244
That he should do heroic things, that he should protect people.

00:31:07.355 --> 00:31:20.349
And at certain times over the course of his hero's journey, He would abandon the timepiece much like the way that the classic example here is Spider Man giving up the suit and that Ellie would have taken it up in his place.

00:31:20.609 --> 00:31:33.289
So they would have kind of traded off and on a few times that way over the course of their life together before eventually marrying each other, starting a life together, and then unfortunately eventually her demise.

00:31:33.734 --> 00:31:41.704
Which was, uh, something that I had, I believe, handed over to the storyteller as, like, you can decide what happened in this situation.

00:31:41.974 --> 00:31:43.704
And I would like to discover that.

00:31:45.220 --> 00:31:53.180
I guess the question often comes up when having these conversations about women's representation in comics and kind of avoiding this trope.

00:31:53.700 --> 00:32:02.539
What makes the difference, do you think, between a woman in a refrigerator and a character that's just part of the story that dies?

00:32:03.210 --> 00:32:08.140
Well, I will fully acknowledge that I'm probably not the most qualified person to speak on the topic.

00:32:09.609 --> 00:32:19.900
But from my perspective, from the perspective of this character, and with the acknowledgement that the storyteller that I was creating this background with, that we were crafting the story with, was a woman.

00:32:20.154 --> 00:32:34.115
I think what makes the difference is that agency, that being an active participant in their life, and not just somebody who was introduced a few pages ago with very little backstory, very little substance to them, only to then be killed off.

00:32:34.464 --> 00:32:45.174
Ellie was an integral part of future Chase's life, very much the, the Lois Lane of his life, very much the Mary Jane Watson or the Gwen Stacy, take your pick.

00:32:46.855 --> 00:32:55.265
Honestly, Gwen Stacy is probably the example because the reason why it's called the women in refrigerators trope is because people read that Green Lantern comic.

00:32:55.480 --> 00:32:58.269
And went, oh, okay, that came out of nowhere.

00:32:58.390 --> 00:33:06.279
All right, I guess, which is so different from the death of Gwen Stacy in the pages of Spider Man, which still comes back around.

00:33:06.529 --> 00:33:13.669
They've made entire Spider Verse realities based around the tragedy and the impact of that death, even as many years later as it is.

00:33:39.980 --> 00:33:42.099
Hello everyone and welcome to 5 GMs in a Trench Coat.

00:33:42.170 --> 00:33:42.819
Excuse me?

00:33:43.319 --> 00:33:43.789
Yeah?

00:33:44.019 --> 00:33:44.319
What's that?

00:33:44.990 --> 00:33:46.369
You want to know what 5 Gems and a Trench Coat is?

00:33:46.950 --> 00:33:48.213
Let us tell you.

00:33:48.484 --> 00:33:52.805
It's the adhesive that keeps the fragile pieces of my sanity together.

00:33:53.115 --> 00:34:01.615
Well, okay, Jesse, what it actually is, is a narrative driven TTRPG actual play where five friends take turns weaving stories through the tabletop game of their choice.

00:34:01.825 --> 00:34:02.845
Of their choice?

00:34:02.904 --> 00:34:03.404
Each season?

00:34:03.984 --> 00:34:05.125
Each season.

00:34:05.134 --> 00:34:06.085
That's pretty cool.

00:34:06.394 --> 00:34:07.105
I disagree.

00:34:07.335 --> 00:34:07.585
Oh.

00:34:07.605 --> 00:34:08.614
I feel it's the adhesive.

00:34:10.434 --> 00:34:13.005
So, like, you guys aren't all in a trench coat?

00:34:13.804 --> 00:34:15.114
No, we're definitely in a trench coat.

00:34:15.114 --> 00:34:17.715
How does that work?

00:34:18.755 --> 00:34:18.914
Get it.

00:34:19.474 --> 00:34:26.324
Before I'm caught, you can check out 5 GMs in a Trench Coat just about anywhere you get your podcasts, or you can check out our website at 5gmsinatrenchcoat.com.

00:34:27.275 --> 00:34:29.804
Oh my god, they really are all under trench coat.

00:34:42.684 --> 00:34:48.875
When Chase is popped into the future, he's essentially lost, right?

00:34:48.875 --> 00:34:50.505
He doesn't have his friend group.

00:34:50.505 --> 00:34:52.085
He doesn't have his love interest.

00:34:52.085 --> 00:34:54.324
All of them are older.

00:34:54.505 --> 00:34:55.965
They may not even recognize him.

00:34:55.965 --> 00:34:57.275
How does he find his way?

00:34:57.585 --> 00:35:04.985
So when Chase arrived in the present day, the fact that he had traveled through time registered on the Century Centurion's radar.

00:35:05.300 --> 00:35:08.320
There was a time anomaly, something that was completely unexpected.

00:35:08.329 --> 00:35:13.590
He obviously came to investigate, probably with the intention of setting the timeline, right?

00:35:13.619 --> 00:35:15.380
If it was something that needed to be fixed.

00:35:15.420 --> 00:35:17.840
And in fact, it was something that needed to be fixed.

00:35:17.920 --> 00:35:25.829
It just turned out not to be that simple, because again, if he sent Chase back in time, with the knowledge that he met his future self, he didn't know what that could disrupt.

00:35:26.304 --> 00:35:27.974
Maybe Chase never seeks out the Citadel.

00:35:28.085 --> 00:35:33.844
Maybe Chase never brings back the Century Centurions, reactivates Centurion Prime, could throw all of his plans out.

00:35:34.324 --> 00:35:40.514
Back at the same time, while he is absolutely a man who is willing to make sacrifices, he can't kill his younger self, like we talked about.

00:35:40.855 --> 00:35:58.175
So with little other choice, the Century Centurion kind of conscripts Chase into joining a team of young heroes who are in training basically for lack of anything else to do, with the assurance that he's working on the problem that he's trying to find a way to send Chase back to his own timeline.

00:35:58.264 --> 00:36:00.215
He just needs a little time to figure that out.

00:36:00.255 --> 00:36:02.864
And in the meantime, Hey, maybe you'll learn something.

00:36:03.434 --> 00:36:15.494
So in a way, the Century Centurion, his older self in the future has some good influence on him teaching him how to use his abilities, but then he's also an antagonist.

00:36:15.494 --> 00:36:17.215
Is there a push pull there?

00:36:17.715 --> 00:36:22.485
Is it just that Chase doesn't understand his motives in the future, or?

00:36:22.764 --> 00:36:24.434
Well, there's definitely a push pull.

00:36:24.614 --> 00:36:26.954
The timepiece that Chase has is broken.

00:36:27.014 --> 00:36:28.425
It can really only do one thing.

00:36:28.425 --> 00:36:36.335
It can only stop time with these very short bursts that allow Chase to move around uninhibited, and kind of just look like super speed to anybody else.

00:36:36.385 --> 00:36:42.545
But, the timepieces are actually these very advanced artifacts called chronomials.

00:36:42.764 --> 00:36:44.875
which are the equivalent of the Green Lantern ring, essentially.

00:36:44.875 --> 00:36:51.224
There's a lot more that they can do when they're fully functional, Chase just isn't at this point in this timeline.

00:36:51.445 --> 00:36:55.574
So, on the one hand, he definitely looks up to the Century Centurion.

00:36:55.894 --> 00:37:06.114
He never saw himself becoming someone that powerful, someone that influential, someone who had the potential to do that much good for the universe.

00:37:06.494 --> 00:37:27.605
On the other hand, he is terrifying, and angry, and bitter, and grim, and sad, and Chase doesn't understand the events that would have brought him to that point, and the Century Centurion does not want to share those with Chase, because Chase knowing about those things would mean that he would react differently when they happened to him.

00:37:27.815 --> 00:37:29.454
Once again, throw off his plans.

00:37:29.835 --> 00:37:31.625
So there's definitely a push pull.

00:37:31.804 --> 00:37:33.864
I don't think he trusts the Century Centurion.

00:37:34.385 --> 00:37:36.755
I definitely don't think he likes the Century Centurion.

00:37:36.755 --> 00:37:42.164
But I do think that he recognizes that he could potentially learn a lot from the Century Centurion.

00:37:42.514 --> 00:37:48.864
A question comes to mind is when playing this at the table, you're playing the young version of Chase.

00:37:49.260 --> 00:37:57.670
The GM, or the person running the game, is playing the older version of your character, is that kind of how it would work in this situation?

00:37:58.139 --> 00:37:59.940
Yeah, no, that's exactly how it would work.

00:37:59.989 --> 00:38:04.480
And so it was kind of a carte blanche of like, make this guy as much of a dick as you want.

00:38:04.789 --> 00:38:05.269
Yeah.

00:38:05.460 --> 00:38:09.329
His personality was a little bit like if you mix Batman with the Punisher.

00:38:09.724 --> 00:38:22.954
It sounds like a lot of fun for both the player and the person running the game to build two different sides of the same coin in relationship to each other, in collaboration with each other.

00:38:22.954 --> 00:38:24.385
That just sounds like so much fun to me.

00:38:24.385 --> 00:38:24.954
I love that.

00:38:25.349 --> 00:38:26.489
I agree 100%.

00:38:26.500 --> 00:38:29.230
The Innocent is one of my favorite playbooks from Masks.

00:38:29.230 --> 00:38:47.250
It has a very interesting, speaking of push pull, it has a very interesting push pull mechanic to it, which is that when you create the character, you are defining a few key events in that character's life that brought them to the point where they are when you reenter the picture, when you come to their present day, your future.

00:38:47.519 --> 00:39:06.719
And as you unlock more and more of those through play, The mechanics of the playbook actually change, the way some of your moves function, you unlock different movesets, you add different things to your rolls depending on what it is that you're rolling, and those tend to fall in line with the kind of dark things that you're learning.

00:39:07.000 --> 00:39:16.760
So it's kind of like your character is growing darker, whether or not you want to, as you are uncovering more and more of the darkness that lives inside of your present day self.

00:39:17.170 --> 00:39:24.260
Is that dynamic addition to your movesets unique to the Innocent playbook?

00:39:24.420 --> 00:39:25.139
It is, yeah.

00:39:25.150 --> 00:39:28.320
A lot of the playbooks can change their moveset.

00:39:28.320 --> 00:39:33.820
A lot of the playbooks have mechanics like that, where your character changes and evolves over the course of play.

00:39:34.019 --> 00:39:39.599
That relationship between you and an NPC is pretty specific to the Innocent.

00:39:40.090 --> 00:39:42.500
Getting into the mechanics a little bit.

00:39:42.500 --> 00:39:46.219
Can you tell me what Chase looks like on a character sheet?

00:39:46.369 --> 00:39:48.969
What choices you had to make to build Chase?

00:39:49.519 --> 00:39:49.909
Again?

00:39:49.909 --> 00:39:50.960
Yeah, absolutely.

00:39:51.159 --> 00:39:59.769
Masks is a system where you have stats that are called labels and labels kind of define how you perceive yourself and also how the rest of the world perceives you.

00:40:00.139 --> 00:40:03.130
So there is also a push and pull within those.

00:40:03.150 --> 00:40:11.230
Your labels are shifting constantly depending on the influence of other older heroes, the adults in your life, the general public.

00:40:11.730 --> 00:40:23.039
Chase's highest label is Mundane, which actually tends to deal with roles that pertain to reading people, empathizing with them, comforting them, understanding them, that sort of thing.

00:40:23.460 --> 00:40:32.909
Chase is, at the time that he is sent to the future, still very much kind of an ordinary kid who just happens to also be able to freeze time for brief bursts.

00:40:33.369 --> 00:40:37.889
The other labels are Danger, which is kind of a mid level for him.

00:40:38.139 --> 00:40:45.139
That represents how dangerous you are to your surroundings, your teammates, the architecture of your city.

00:40:45.190 --> 00:40:53.030
For an example, the classic example for Danger is like somebody with super strength accidentally punching the support struts out of a building and it starts to come down.

00:40:53.304 --> 00:40:55.965
And then Freak is at a flat zero for Chase.

00:40:56.144 --> 00:40:57.755
Freak, pretty self explanatory.

00:40:57.804 --> 00:41:03.114
How strange you appear, how strange you are perceived to be, not very relevant to Chase.

00:41:03.585 --> 00:41:08.815
Savior deals with saving people, obviously protecting them, keeping them out of harm's way.

00:41:09.155 --> 00:41:12.985
He's very good at that, and then Superior is kind of your intelligence stat.

00:41:13.144 --> 00:41:22.074
It represents your opinion of your own cognitive abilities and how that relates to other people around you, and in particular, people you might find yourself in conflict with.

00:41:22.385 --> 00:41:24.804
And that is a minus one for Chase, that is his lowest stat.

00:41:25.244 --> 00:41:30.000
Chase is many things, but smart, not necessarily one of them.

00:41:30.199 --> 00:41:39.469
What's really one of my favorite aspects of Masks and what makes it such a great system for telling superhero stories is that there is no health track for Masks.

00:41:39.885 --> 00:41:51.324
You don't track harm in any significant way, instead you have five conditions that you take, and those conditions come into play as you get more and more injured.

00:41:51.735 --> 00:42:03.494
So as you try to protect yourself, as you try to weather a powerful blow, as you are hit by a ray blast or whatever it might be, you take these conditions which are angry, afraid, guilty, hopeless, and insecure.

00:42:03.829 --> 00:42:10.300
Because in comic books and superhero stories, as we well know, it doesn't actually matter how much Batman gets beaten up.

00:42:10.300 --> 00:42:12.920
It doesn't actually matter how much Superman gets punched.

00:42:13.190 --> 00:42:18.840
The only way they lose a fight is if they give up, is if they are emotionally overcome.

00:42:19.110 --> 00:42:20.460
And that's what those conditions represent.

00:42:20.849 --> 00:42:26.360
When you have all of those conditions, you are taken out of the fight because you don't have the will to carry on.

00:42:27.050 --> 00:42:27.980
Doesn't mean you're dead.

00:42:28.429 --> 00:42:30.019
Doesn't even necessarily mean you're injured.

00:42:30.280 --> 00:42:31.840
It's a great aspect of the system.

00:42:31.840 --> 00:42:33.159
It's one of the things that makes it so good.

00:42:33.730 --> 00:42:43.710
When talking about these conditions, do you have to have them in a specific order or is it just, you're like, oh, I got really angry and now I'm feeling insecure and you know what I mean?

00:42:43.710 --> 00:42:45.929
Like, how is all of this happening at the same time?

00:42:46.659 --> 00:42:47.400
That's up to you.

00:42:47.679 --> 00:42:51.610
So there is a move in the game called take a powerful blow, which is kind of your defensive move.

00:42:51.610 --> 00:42:55.760
When somebody hits you, you roll that to see how injured you are.

00:42:56.030 --> 00:42:59.739
So, the options that you can pick from, some of them are like mark two conditions.

00:43:00.239 --> 00:43:01.059
That's up to you.

00:43:01.389 --> 00:43:22.619
If, for example, Chase were to get hit by some kind of blast from the Century Centurion from his present day self, then one of them that I would certainly mark would be afraid because Chase would be terrified of this idea of facing himself, this older, more experienced, more powerful version of himself, this much darker version of himself.

00:43:23.085 --> 00:43:27.565
And the other one I would probably take for that would be Insecure, because he can't do that.

00:43:28.135 --> 00:43:33.885
So you said that he is empathetic, he's able to read people, able to comfort people.

00:43:34.184 --> 00:43:43.320
I think a lot of times you have in a party like this, an adventuring party, any kind of game, You have different roles that get taken up by the different players.

00:43:43.329 --> 00:43:53.210
So would you say that Chase's role on the team is kind of the glue that keeps the team together, that kind of person that handles the emotional ties that bind?

00:43:53.579 --> 00:43:55.340
That was certainly supposed to be the intent.

00:43:55.340 --> 00:43:57.199
The playbook is called the Innocent.

00:43:58.099 --> 00:43:59.670
He's from a simpler time.

00:44:00.050 --> 00:44:07.659
He's from a more innocent period of his own life, a more innocent time of the world that we were playing in, to be sure.

00:44:08.005 --> 00:44:12.974
And he has a much more simplistic view of the world, much more black and white than the other characters did.

00:44:13.264 --> 00:44:25.875
And a lot of the other playbooks in Masks, as you can probably imagine when you're telling teen stories, are coded very much to be angsty, or angry, or very emotional, very unstable, dealing with a lot of hardship and things like that.

00:44:25.875 --> 00:44:36.885
But Chase's main problem is that he's not in his own time, and something happens to him that makes him turn very dark, which he still maybe has the chance to avoid, so he still has that hope to hang on to.

00:44:37.184 --> 00:44:41.355
I think he has a unique perspective amongst the team that he ended up with.

00:44:41.784 --> 00:44:51.335
Why are you drawn to playing a character who is that caring, compassionate, innocent teenager?

00:44:51.775 --> 00:44:53.914
Oh man, that's, what a question.

00:44:54.284 --> 00:44:56.764
That appeals to me for a lot of different reasons.

00:44:56.775 --> 00:44:59.625
I always love playing the heart of a team.

00:44:59.744 --> 00:45:07.074
It's something that I always find myself being drawn to even if that's not necessarily how the character that I'm playing starts out, kind of tends to be where they end up.

00:45:07.394 --> 00:45:14.695
I think especially with stories like this, stories about people with powers that kind of make them gods in any other world.

00:45:14.835 --> 00:45:25.300
It's really so important to the narrative to have that strong human element and to give it a voice that's present that everybody can hear.

00:45:25.440 --> 00:45:30.880
And I mean, that is not a unique or original thought in the context of comic books.

00:45:30.969 --> 00:45:47.139
One of the things that stuck with me recently is I heard somebody describe the difference between Marvel and DC Comics as "Marvel tells stories about men trying to be gods, and DC tells stories about gods trying to be men." I think you really need the two sides of those coins.

00:45:47.400 --> 00:45:51.519
Chase, I think, in particular, is the part about gods trying to be men.

00:45:51.849 --> 00:45:59.880
That need to stay grounded, remember where you come from, remember that at the end of the day, no matter how powerful you are, you're just another person.

00:46:00.255 --> 00:46:02.175
Well, I could see it both ways.

00:46:02.344 --> 00:46:12.094
To me, it seems like Chase in the future is that god that Chase from the past wants to become a man, essentially.

00:46:12.295 --> 00:46:20.414
It seems to me like the only way out here is not to kill older Chase, but instead to convince him away from the path that he's on.

00:46:20.684 --> 00:46:21.264
Absolutely.

00:46:21.284 --> 00:46:27.425
I think in the back of Chase's mind, his plan is exactly what the Century Centurion doesn't want to have happen.

00:46:27.715 --> 00:46:34.304
And obviously he's not going to share that plan with the Century Centurion, but in the back of his mind, his thought is, okay, I have seen what happens to me.

00:46:34.485 --> 00:46:39.284
I don't know exactly why it happened, but when I go back to my time, I'll be more careful.

00:46:39.454 --> 00:46:40.994
I won't let things happen.

00:46:40.994 --> 00:46:42.284
I won't let myself become that.

00:46:43.144 --> 00:46:48.965
So in a way, he would be killing the Century Centurion, but I don't think he sees it that way in his own mind.

00:46:48.965 --> 00:46:54.125
I think he sees that as making a better and a happier future for himself and for the world.

00:46:54.474 --> 00:46:58.505
Right, he's killing one version, but not the whole being.

00:46:59.724 --> 00:47:13.594
But also I would say that young Chase in learning how to use his powers to help other people is also going from just a kid learning to become that god, that powerful being.

00:47:13.775 --> 00:47:16.375
You have both going on in this story, I think.

00:47:16.880 --> 00:47:27.309
You said that Chase struggled a little bit with not really thinking about his powers as a way to help people or save people and that over time, there have been times where he's kind of dropped that mantle.

00:47:27.679 --> 00:47:35.980
I know that this is a very common superhero story trope, but what is it that appeals to you about that particular kind of story?

00:47:36.670 --> 00:47:42.019
Masks, just by virtue of it being what it is, is not just a story about being a teen superhero.

00:47:42.019 --> 00:47:51.610
It's also a story about growing up, and I think an integral part of being young, being a teenager and growing up is understanding that your actions have consequences.

00:47:51.894 --> 00:47:52.945
We learn empathy.

00:47:53.034 --> 00:47:57.494
Whether or not we're born with it, that's a debate that could be had, I guess.

00:47:57.824 --> 00:48:03.505
But I don't think anyone can refute the fact that as we get older, we come to have a better understanding of empathy.

00:48:03.914 --> 00:48:07.275
Some people, for whatever reason, choose to reject it.

00:48:07.545 --> 00:48:09.864
They might, you know, have an understanding of it.

00:48:09.864 --> 00:48:12.465
They might choose to put that away somewhere.

00:48:12.625 --> 00:48:14.594
Maybe they don't feel like they have a need for it.

00:48:15.094 --> 00:48:16.405
That's very sad to me.

00:48:16.630 --> 00:48:20.389
But, Chase, in particular, I think is the other side of that equation.

00:48:20.389 --> 00:48:36.670
Chase is someone who, as he uses his powers, as he is getting older, as he is starting to understand the world for what it is, and not just as a big playground for him and his friends to run around, starts to understand that he could make people's lives better.

00:48:37.150 --> 00:48:45.769
He can improve conditions for the town where he lives, for the people who he shares that town with, for his neighbors, for his friends, for his family.

00:48:46.050 --> 00:48:48.969
And I think that is an important part of his development.

00:48:49.079 --> 00:48:52.400
And I think that is an important part of any young hero story.

00:48:52.969 --> 00:48:56.000
What is his relationship like with his family?

00:48:56.539 --> 00:49:00.739
I think in my mind, Chase comes from a home with just a single mom.

00:49:00.750 --> 00:49:02.519
I think his father is out of the picture.

00:49:02.829 --> 00:49:07.400
You and me, Star, we're kind of creating this in real time through this conversation.

00:49:07.800 --> 00:49:11.409
But my gut is that his mom is, uh, his only parent.

00:49:11.480 --> 00:49:14.730
I think his father left when he was very young.

00:49:14.730 --> 00:49:17.449
I don't even know that he has much of a memory of his father.

00:49:17.809 --> 00:49:26.469
He's an only child, and I think he and his mom are close, but I think she works very hard to support him.

00:49:26.579 --> 00:49:45.135
And I think over the course of his superheroics, the early part of his superheroics career, I think that she is distressed by the fact that she's finding crumpled money in the pockets of his jeans, that he's never home, that he's coming home with strange bruises, classic young superhero stuff.

00:49:45.434 --> 00:49:49.815
I think she's worried that he is going down a far worse path than he is actually.

00:49:50.195 --> 00:49:55.925
Honestly, I don't see Chase as being somebody who sees much of a point in a secret identity.

00:49:56.295 --> 00:50:01.929
I think that he establishes one when he first starts being a superhero, because it's what you do.

00:50:02.230 --> 00:50:09.690
When you're a superhero, it's just kind of what he understands to be common practice, but like his costume doesn't include a mask or anything like that.

00:50:09.780 --> 00:50:11.119
He's not trying very hard.

00:50:11.989 --> 00:50:16.619
And I think he was probably prepared to tell his mom what he was actually doing.

00:50:17.155 --> 00:50:23.534
When he suffered the accident when he was catapulted forward in time, which just leads more motivation for him to get back.

00:50:24.094 --> 00:50:28.434
I think a lot of times the mask is a way of protecting the people you love.

00:50:28.625 --> 00:50:32.335
Does he not realize that there might be a threat to his mother?

00:50:32.684 --> 00:50:33.755
At least not at first.

00:50:33.755 --> 00:50:43.144
I don't think he could conceive of a scenario where his particular power of being able to stop time would allow a villain to get away and do something like that.

00:50:43.215 --> 00:50:48.855
I think he sees himself as somebody who always finishes the job in the sense that he always gets the bad guy.

00:50:49.244 --> 00:50:55.155
So when he encounters this shadow being, is that really his first encounter with a supervillain?

00:50:55.494 --> 00:50:55.945
Yes.

00:50:56.094 --> 00:50:56.744
Very much so.

00:50:57.005 --> 00:50:59.644
How do you think his mom reacts when he disappears?

00:51:00.105 --> 00:51:07.135
I think that is a question that haunts chase, and I think it's a question that he hopes he never has to know the answer to.

00:51:07.195 --> 00:51:12.335
I think his hope is that when he goes back in time, it'll basically be like he never left.

00:51:12.735 --> 00:51:20.925
So in that sense, his mom is just kind of existing in stasis, where he's going to go back to the exact same instance that he left, and they're never going to realize that he was gone.

00:51:21.489 --> 00:51:33.079
Tell me a little bit more about your inspiration for this kind of fascist time cop secret organization, Centurion Prime, and this terrifying AI.

00:51:33.079 --> 00:51:38.000
I mean, I can see a lot of parallels, but if you want to illuminate exactly what you were thinking.

00:51:38.534 --> 00:51:48.144
Yeah, I think that the entire concept of the Century Centurions is both flawed and terrifying because it assumes a certain amount of predestination.

00:51:48.335 --> 00:51:57.085
This idea of time crimes, which is not a term that the Century Centurions would ever use, but is something that Chase says frequently, probably because it bothers his future self.

00:51:57.324 --> 00:52:05.775
The entire concept is kind of insane when you think about it because it assumes that everybody who is ever going to do anything is only going to do those things.

00:52:06.815 --> 00:52:08.054
There is no other path.

00:52:08.085 --> 00:52:09.625
There is no chance for variance.

00:52:10.159 --> 00:52:16.840
That's what's gonna happen, and that's why it's okay for them to go and stop that before it happens, whatever that might look like.

00:52:17.309 --> 00:52:22.409
And so, that hubris, I want it to be somewhat obvious.

00:52:22.639 --> 00:52:29.849
I don't think there's any evidence that that's what it is, that it is hubris, that it is flawed in its logic, that it's a fallacy, essentially.

00:52:30.034 --> 00:52:55.355
But I wanted it to be obvious so that it would be easy for people to start asking questions for the cracks to eventually start to show when Chase started probing and really looking into things because at the end of the day, this Centurion Prime's agenda, the agenda of the of the Century Centurions as an organization is not to protect the timeline, it's to control the timeline, it's to create the outcome that they want to create.

00:52:55.355 --> 00:52:57.284
So they're the decisions that they're making.

00:52:57.605 --> 00:53:05.835
The knowledge that they're operating off of, and not all of the Centurions know this, that Chase's present day self, the Century Centurion that Chase becomes.

00:53:06.260 --> 00:53:27.885
Is aware that this narrative of protecting the prime timeline is false, that they are creating the timeline that Centurion Prime wants, because it is the one that has the most order, because it is the one that he can control, or that it can control, and that Chase believes in the long run will make the universe a better, safer place.

00:53:28.204 --> 00:53:35.565
The narrative that is being fed to a lot of the rest of the Century Centurions is that there is only one prime timeline.

00:53:36.005 --> 00:53:41.164
There is destination and that it's their job to protect it and stop points of deviation.

00:53:41.599 --> 00:53:42.289
Interesting.

00:53:42.980 --> 00:53:46.570
For you, why are you interested in telling this kind of story?

00:53:46.889 --> 00:53:49.369
I think it's kind of a fascinating dichotomy, right?

00:53:49.800 --> 00:54:01.570
I mean, some of it goes back to, to religion, which I wouldn't say, I wouldn't call myself like a, like a biblical scholar or anything like that, but the, the sort of like the Presbyterian idea of predestination.

00:54:01.880 --> 00:54:08.800
You are born a sinner, or you are born good, and all of the sins that you are going to commit in your lifetime are already written.

00:54:09.059 --> 00:54:16.170
God already knows what you're going to do that's bad in your life, and it's already been decided whether you're going to go to heaven or hell, and there's nothing you can do about it.

00:54:16.300 --> 00:54:17.570
It's just what's going to happen.

00:54:18.030 --> 00:54:19.829
And that's an overly simplistic view.

00:54:20.324 --> 00:54:24.105
So hopefully, nobody who's Presbyterian or was raised Presbyterian is going to take issue with that.

00:54:24.275 --> 00:54:30.074
But, I've always been kind of fascinated with that idea, and that was definitely one side of this.

00:54:30.275 --> 00:54:34.675
The idea that there is no room for redemption.

00:54:34.864 --> 00:54:42.594
That there is no room for free will, or for individual action, or for deviation, or anything like that.

00:54:42.914 --> 00:54:54.719
And I really wanted the balance between Chase, Chase from the past, the Showtime Chase, Century Centurion Chase to be one of chaos versus order.

00:54:55.389 --> 00:55:00.219
I think what Showtime Chase represents is chaos, unlimited potential.

00:55:00.340 --> 00:55:01.239
Anything could happen.

00:55:01.239 --> 00:55:03.730
He could go any way he could do anything.

00:55:04.059 --> 00:55:08.170
He has the ability to affect so many different outcomes with his actions.

00:55:08.170 --> 00:55:18.610
He has the ability to become whoever he wants, whether he wants to become a Century Centurion, whether he doesn't, whether he wants to stop being here altogether, whether he wants to make a third different path.

00:55:19.070 --> 00:55:22.420
Meanwhile, the Century Centurion is obsessed with control.

00:55:22.690 --> 00:55:24.170
That's his entire reason for being.

00:55:24.179 --> 00:55:25.869
That's basically all he has left.

00:55:25.989 --> 00:55:30.860
And I think in Chase, when he looks at Chase, what he sees is all of that unraveling.

00:55:31.110 --> 00:55:33.230
And that's very satisfying to me, personally.

00:55:33.630 --> 00:55:34.679
Well, why is that?

00:55:35.039 --> 00:55:36.360
I like that idea.

00:55:36.360 --> 00:55:42.449
I like the idea that any one person could be the unraveling of really anything.

00:55:42.480 --> 00:56:04.739
I like the idea that any time you build something on this concept of pure, undisputed law and order, Any one person has the potential, the ability to tear it down, maybe not quite so literally as with Chase and the Century Centurion, but I think it's still there.

00:56:04.949 --> 00:56:13.590
And I think that, once again, to borrow on a theme from this conversation, that push and pull of order and chaos exists within each of us.

00:56:14.070 --> 00:56:16.139
Tell me, what does Chase look like?

00:56:16.750 --> 00:56:19.760
Visually speaking, because there was going to be art for this game.

00:56:20.114 --> 00:56:50.474
So we had to include some pretty descriptive descriptions was, if you've ever seen the film Empire Records, Chase's face claim, I guess, for that was AJ, that very, like, thick, always wet looking 90s hair with the middle part, kind of dark, he's very tan, he's lean, his costume, quote unquote, such as it is, It was just like a pretty loose, white, gym tank top that was dominated by like a stylized hourglass.

00:56:50.880 --> 00:56:56.530
And, like, like green superhero tights, but, but kind of in the model of, like, 90s Superboy.

00:56:56.690 --> 00:57:01.730
Probably closer to, like, part of a singlet, like a wrestling singlet, than anything else like that.

00:57:01.829 --> 00:57:12.289
I wanted him to have, like, belts and pouches and stuff like that across them, again, to evoke that very 90s, kind of, Liefeld imagery, and, like, very beat up black biker boots.

00:57:12.875 --> 00:57:23.264
And over all of that, kind of like hanging off of one shoulder, he has like a very shitty line art tattoo on his arm that I think was gonna be like a scorpion or a heart or something, I don't remember.

00:57:23.945 --> 00:57:26.934
But he has like a, a loose like green flannel shirt.

00:57:27.045 --> 00:57:36.065
It's rolled up high enough to reveal the timepiece, which is again just kind of a bulky wristwatch looking future thing with a clock face that's cracked.

00:57:36.184 --> 00:57:39.969
The closest thing he had to a mask was I think I had him wearing like aviator sunglasses or something.

00:57:39.969 --> 00:57:40.699
I don't know.

00:57:40.980 --> 00:57:43.710
Have you decided on a voice that you would have played for him?

00:57:44.340 --> 00:57:51.809
I honestly think that I would have done a, it's kind of my best attempt at sort of a stereotypical kind of like 90s Southern California.

00:57:52.460 --> 00:57:57.820
It would have sounded probably very sort of stereotypical surfer, stoner, or whatever you want to call it.

00:57:58.300 --> 00:58:00.940
Yeah, like, Oh my God.

00:58:01.619 --> 00:58:02.019
Yeah.

00:58:02.079 --> 00:58:11.510
I mean, just like a slight inflection, I think, probably ended a lot of his sentences with question marks, but like he's just doing his best.

00:58:36.039 --> 00:58:38.469
So Chase, you're a teenager.

00:58:38.869 --> 00:58:40.980
Are you susceptible to peer pressure?

00:58:42.030 --> 00:58:48.000
Am I susceptible to pressure from my peers?

00:58:49.380 --> 00:58:51.460
I mean, I guess so.

00:58:52.360 --> 00:59:00.250
I guess, I guess we all are, but I don't think that that means what you think it means.

00:59:01.840 --> 00:59:15.320
Like, I think people have this perception that like, if we're, if we're young, if we're teenagers or kids or whatever, that if we get pressured by our peers, That we'll do anything, right?

00:59:15.329 --> 00:59:19.599
Like if, if, if somebody jumped, somebody jumped off of a bridge, would you jump off of a bridge?

00:59:20.940 --> 00:59:30.500
I wouldn't jump off of a bridge, but if someone was hurt or someone needed help, I could help them by jumping off the bridge.

00:59:31.619 --> 00:59:33.449
Then I would think about it a lot harder.

00:59:34.429 --> 00:59:35.840
I guess I would probably do it.

00:59:36.789 --> 00:59:46.230
So like, I don't think that being pressured means you're always going to do the bad thing, you're always going to do the right thing.

00:59:47.360 --> 00:59:50.353
I think at the end of the day, you just got to trust your gut.

00:59:50.804 --> 00:59:56.295
Thank you so much Will for coming on the show and for sharing Chase with me and my listeners.

00:59:56.625 --> 00:59:57.375
Thank you for having me.

00:59:57.375 --> 00:59:58.394
This was so much fun.

00:59:58.695 --> 01:00:00.255
Is there anything that you wanna share?

01:00:00.664 --> 01:00:12.335
You can find everything related to live From the Apocalypse at livefromtheapocalypse.com, twitch.tv/livefromtheapocalypse or on Twitter at livefromtheapoc because there are character limits.

01:00:13.000 --> 01:00:15.320
Everywhere else, Live from the Apocalypse.

01:00:15.710 --> 01:00:16.869
We stream a lot of stuff.

01:00:16.920 --> 01:00:18.670
There's a lot of things out there if you want to check it out.

01:00:18.670 --> 01:00:19.599
I won't list all of them.

01:00:19.599 --> 01:00:21.480
We do like six ongoing games.

01:00:21.489 --> 01:00:22.119
It's crazy.

01:00:22.389 --> 01:00:32.329
But you can find Academy H, The Masks actual play podcast that we record live on Twitch and that I edit and I am the storyteller for wherever you get your podcasts.

01:00:32.619 --> 01:00:44.269
You can also find one of our other shows, Cryptic Community College, which is a Monster of the Week game set in West Virginia, wherever you get your podcasts, and you can hear me do a bad Scottish accent instead of a bad Southern California accent.

01:00:44.659 --> 01:00:50.730
I should mention that I was very fortunate to be able to co-produce an upcoming project that I'm very excited about.

01:00:50.760 --> 01:00:52.398
It's called Voices in the Wood.

01:00:52.510 --> 01:00:56.199
It is an extension of the Tales Yet Told podcast.

01:00:56.219 --> 01:01:03.699
Um, I had the honor to work with Kendo, who is the storyteller and one of the main people behind Tales Yet Told on the story.

01:01:03.710 --> 01:01:09.050
It's a really, really fascinating, really cool melding of public radio.

01:01:09.269 --> 01:01:12.340
and TTRPGs, and independent music.

01:01:12.389 --> 01:01:23.360
My main role as an ex music journalist, as we mentioned at the top of the show, was finding bands and musicians who are unsigned and who are willing to contribute music to the project.

01:01:23.440 --> 01:01:28.099
Um, it uses the The Void[1680] AM solo TTRPG.

01:01:28.139 --> 01:01:28.780
Oh yeah.

01:01:28.820 --> 01:01:38.239
Yeah, but we uh, we adapted it, I shouldn't take credit, Kendo adapted it, and uh, all of the guests that come on board have the chance to call into the radio show and tell us a little bit about their characters.

01:01:38.260 --> 01:01:40.900
I was also fortunate enough to be one of those guests.

01:01:41.429 --> 01:01:47.900
For my recommendation this episode, I'd like to introduce you to a podcast called Pink Fohawk.

01:01:47.920 --> 01:01:53.760
It's a Shadowrun 2e podcast with great sound design that comes in bite sized hour long pieces.

01:01:54.199 --> 01:01:57.710
You get to learn about the system along with the players, which is fun.

01:01:58.039 --> 01:01:58.880
Give it a listen.

01:01:59.659 --> 01:02:11.090
I also featured Five GMs in a Trench Coat, an award winning actual play where five friends take turns weaving stories through the tabletop system of their choice each season.

01:02:11.829 --> 01:02:16.204
One of the things that any creator wants to know is what people think of their work.

01:02:16.625 --> 01:02:20.074
For podcasters, it can be especially difficult to get feedback.

01:02:20.684 --> 01:02:24.664
Did you know that you can now leave comments on individual episodes on Spotify?

01:02:25.094 --> 01:02:29.835
If you're listening there, I encourage you to leave a comment and let me know what you think about an episode.

01:02:30.594 --> 01:02:35.304
You may have also noticed a link in my show notes that says, send us a text message.

01:02:35.704 --> 01:02:41.655
If you have a question you'd like me to answer on a future episode, or just want to leave a comment, send me a message.

01:02:42.199 --> 01:02:56.244
I started a newsletter! If you'd like to get a behind the scenes peek at the podcast, follow my other projects, like my current all woman actual play, and be notified when a new episode drops, You can find the signup form in the show notes or on my website.

01:02:57.014 --> 01:02:59.405
Please share the podcast with a friend.

01:02:59.824 --> 01:03:02.855
Word of mouth is the best way to find new listeners.

01:03:03.135 --> 01:03:05.715
Your recommendations help me immensely.

01:03:06.284 --> 01:03:08.744
Thank you to all my listeners spreading the word.

01:03:09.074 --> 01:03:09.985
I'm so grateful.

01:03:10.925 --> 01:03:17.684
You can find me on TikTok at StarMamaC or on threads, BlueSky, as Characters Without Stories.

01:03:18.070 --> 01:03:23.119
You can also listen on YouTube at Characters Without Stories, or follow the link in the description.

01:03:23.590 --> 01:03:31.260
I'm currently accepting submissions, particularly for non D&D characters and for creators from marginalized communities.

01:03:31.550 --> 01:03:38.309
So if you'd like to share your character, you can go to the submission form at characterswithoutstories.com.

01:03:38.860 --> 01:03:40.650
Click submit in the navigation.

01:03:41.530 --> 01:03:45.780
Thanks for listening, and may all your characters find their stories.