Masks and Capes Dramatis Personae

Woo woo character/location list and simple details coming together soonish. Stuff will get added as we add stories.


BELL CITY (Location)

An industrial city in America. It's not a beautiful place but people born and raised there see something in it--an astounding number of people come there and plant roots for the rest of their lives.

It got big when pharmaceutical/everything company BellCorp boomed and bought out a variety of other local businesses. It ended up becoming a very corporate city, with a statistically significant portion of the locals working for, at, or together with some chunk of BellCorp. More people could name the board of directors than could name the local politicians.

A lot of citizens are bothered by BellCorp's obvious influence in county politics that favor it immensely and allow the company to get away with all kinds of zoning violations and probably plenty of other things.


BELLCORP (Business)

Young and dangerous. Need a thing? They probably make it cheaper and better than anyone else. Don't even think about making a rival business. It is utterly impossible to talk about Bell City without someone bringing up BellCorp

The owner and CEO is a man who was seriously deformed in his teen years and came into a significant amount of money that way. He's balls deep in criminal shit but no one has done anything about it yet. Has been given the nickname "Quasimodo" by the public, who probably never read the book and figured out that the character was trying not to be an asshat.

Quasimodo's team of bodyguards are unironically called Gargoyles. Their abject lack of good reputation is made clear by the fact that all four of them wear masks on the job, possibly as intimidation tactics.


THE DECK (Villain Organization)

A group of two, occasionally a group of four. Hearts and Spades are the core members, and occasionally they are seen with a Diamonds or a Clubs. Their super powers are a mystery.

They are business-savvy and their consistent presence and the fact that Hearts and Spades haven't appeared to be older than 40 in the last hundred years raises a lot of questions about what the nature of their powers are. The most common and popular theory is that Diamonds and Clubs assume the identities of their superiors when the latter retire and the cycle continues.

For almost fifty years before BellCorp ran the city with business, The Deck ran the city's underworld. They started as rumrunners during prohibition and continued various illegal and high risk activities afterwards. Until BellCorp, they kept the city gang-free and hero-free. They vanished from public view a few years after BellCorp got big, and word has it they work for hire these days.


THE HOUND (Hero)

Possessing super-smell. He cared about hope, goodness, and human kindness. He was killed in the middle of the day by The Deck, and no one tried to save him. Had a comic book about him in his prime that covered his more public exploits until the time of his death that had a cult following.


BLOODHOUND (Anti-Hero?)

An apparent reincarnation of The Hound with a very similar mask. Works in secret executing the people that The Hound used to arrest. Extremely bitter, perhaps for good reasons.


GEORGIA PIERCE (Fine Artist, Internet Stalker, Comic Artist)

A professional artist who paid off her student loans by being a lab rat for BellCorp. She is an idealist who made it through some of the worst times in her life reading and re-reading comics about The Hound. She spends almost all of her waking time on the internet and only very rarely leaves her house.


THE FOX (Hero)

An aspiring hero looking to fill the gap that The Hound left behind. Charismatic. Fucked up by the steep learning curve of being a hero, has been shot at least once.


JOSHUA TODD (Comic Artist/Writer)

An employee at a comic shop who boosts his income by being the first and only person to publish comics about The Fox.


JAWS / JULIAN RIMES (Thug)

A man whose mask looks like a gaping maw. He is rather unintelligent and does his best work when someone smarter than him is calling the shots. Has an affinity for butterfly knives and is easily distracted by women, they don't even have to be pretty. He used to work on his own, but later got a full-time job as a Gargoyle for BellCorp protecting their crooked CEO.


THE GUN (Villain)

A handgun themed villain. It's a dumb theme, but most superheroes aren't immune to bullets so the joke's on them. Was the enemy in The Fox Issue #1.


TUMBLEWEED (Villain)

Not much is known about the enigmatic Tumbleweed, except that the name itself is better than any character concept Mask and Monster could actually come up with. This permanently ensured that Tumbleweed would forever be stuck as someone for more fleshed out characters to talk and gossip about. Tumbleweed likely has a wild west theme and perhaps plant-related powers. He may wear a poncho like The Man with No Name.


Unnamed City (city)

About two hours north of Bell City is the considerably less popular Placeholder name here. Despite its lower population it has the highest villain density in the United States of America because its most famous villain, The Afterdark, is notable for having killed or scared off every hero there. Despite this, its street crime levels are extremely low and it is one of the safest cities for non-super people to live in.


NELL CONRAD (mechanic, inventor)

A for-hire genius. Nell is an itinerant prodigy with the apparent ability to either inherently understand or master rapidly any hard science, but only when she can apply it to an invention. Nell's main clientele are heroes and villains--you didn't think they actually built those cool gadgets and doomsday devices themselves, did you? That's Nell's job! Best of all, she works for barely more than the cost of parts.

Nell is dedicated to the neutral lifestyle, and considers herself to not be part of any fights between heroes and villains. Both sides see her as too valuable to ever lose and there are no shortage of people who would give everything they had to protect her genius. This has made Nell absolutely unafraid in life, even around all kinds of metaphorical monsters. She is best friends with The Afterdark.

Her other powers include being able to tell how much power is left in a battery by touching it and having a perfect sense of time.


THE AFTERDARK (villain)

Inspired by an attempt to build something disgustingly OP in Mutants and Masterminds, The Afterdark is phenomenally powerful and entirely lacking in motivation. He can read and control the minds of all neurotypical humans whose native languages he speaks, he can control and create shadows, he has teeth like a bear trap, and he is nine feet tall and to scale with a man six feet tall.

The Afterdark rarely leaves his home, which is furnished with custom furniture scaled up to match with his extreme size. He used to kill people out of a curiosity to learn what happened to souls when people die, but grew out of that edgy phase and now mostly just watches TV and keeps annoying superheroes out of his city.