Superhero media is diverse, at least tonally. There are so many kinds of stories to tell and so many ways to tell them, folks can easily come to the table with some deeply divergent ideas. I’ve seen this at my table, and for a one-shot, it’s usually easy to incorporate a Legacy of Lilith and an Outsider whose culture’s names all come from terms in audiology pretty OK—as long as everyone agrees on some core tonal points, like life has value and this isn’t some grimdark Image Comics superhero game. Though maybe it’s not fair of me to single out Image as though they only did *Spawn*—they also published *Flaming Carrot*, and I think that those two actually define a really useful spectrum, or dial. On one end is *Flaming Carrot* and *The Tick*, and on the other is *Spawn* and *The Punisher*. I think, for me, *Masks* lives somewhere in-between, with *Young Justice*, *Strong Female Protagonist*, *Cleverman*, *Hellboy*, and *Runaways*. Stories that are not absurdist, but can be funny; not grimdark, but can be serious; and that centre young (or at least, immature) people trying to deal with the expectations the world has for them. But you can move things more towards one end or the other, if you and everyone you’re playing with agree. Those are my media touchstones. What are yours? [Corley](https://jdcspot.blogspot.com/) adds: > *Yeah, you should explicitly be addressing tone as you go through the backstory questions. If someone says “my parents were killed by a supervillain” then say, out loud, explicitly: “Whoa, intense. Is everyone OK with this? Is this something supervillains routinely do or do they do more capers/spectacles/“making a point” stuff? If we don’t want supervillains to routinely do this, but you still want it to happen, maybe something was special about this situation?” Note that all these answers will cause adults to tell the team how the world works, eventually.*