*Masks* works best when it draws on comics. Yeah, superheroes and superheroics exist in a lot of media these days, with the Big Two pushing out a lot of things for the screen right now especially. But superheroes’ roots are forever in comics, and comics have a distinct character that is worth drawing (heh) on. So go read Scott McCloud’s *Understanding Comics*. I’ll wait. Read it? OK. Obviously, RPGs are a verbal, unedited medium while comics are a visual, edited medium, so you can’t just take techniques one-for-one. But you can adapt! It’s not uncommon in RPG play to borrow terminology and concepts from film: we’ll talk about “there’s a close up” or “smash cut to” or “and the camera’s doing that thing where it spins around me but like I’m spinning at a slower rate”. Try this with comics: “There’s a panel of us just rushing down the street in extreme hyper-stylized perspective, like distorting the distance” or “full page spread of you just socking the villain in the face with the letters K-O! big behind the two of you” or (one of my favourites) “You reach out and your arm goes past the frame of the panel into the gutter, and you step through and you’re just *in the space between panels* now.” That’s the language, the way of envisioning what’s going on. You can also do this for things like lettering: instead of imitating the voice of the universal embodiment of dreams, you can say something like “they speak in white lettering in jagged black speech bubbles.” Of course you don’t have to do this 100% of the time. But doing it more than none is really good. What about pacing? Superhero comics have a pacing entirely unlike a lot of other media we consume. There’s a rhythm imposed by the physical format and frequency of publishing, and the serialized format. It’s not the same as for a tabletop game, again, so don’t copy one-to-one. But it’s similar, and it’s kinda cool to use it: it often dives in without a lot of exposition (you don’t have the page count! Put what you can into the background art!) and has a pretty quick rising action. But then you can have a whole issue that focuses on the emotional dynamic between two characters, even just one really meaty conversation. But regardless, it still might not spend a lot of time showing how the characters get to the situation, rather trusting the reader to accept it. There are other comics styles, of course, and variation coming from comics intended for trade paperback or graphic novel publication, but what I really want to do here is give you permission to be clear, quick, and concise in your setting up of a situation, and know that it’ll work for *Masks*.