The Mask

You are not a licensed hero. There is no licence. Everything you do is on somebody's footage, and this chapter is the machine that turns that footage into consequences.

Heat, 0 to 10

Heat rises when you are seen, when you leave evidence, when you cause collateral, and when you use a signature power in public. Powers and gear each carry a Heat On Public Use value; districts carry a modifier of their own. Add them up.

Downtime actions reduce Heat. Heat never resets on its own. Nothing you do in a fight makes it go down.

Where you work matters enormously. @Missing file has a Heat Modifier of −2, because nobody in the Stack talks to the Authority and the Authority takes fifty-one minutes to arrive. @Missing file is +3, because everything there is glass, sightlines and logged access. The same act in two districts costs you five points of difference.

Ties, and the free Push

Your three Ties each give you one free Push per session — a full +3 dice, no Strain — when you act to protect or honour them. Take them. They are the system paying you to care about somebody.

The other edge of that: the GM is entitled to use your Ties. Leverage, hostage, the reason you cannot simply leave the city. That is not the GM being unfair; that is the deal you signed when you wrote three names down. A campaign where nobody ever reaches for your Ties is a campaign where physical threats have to carry all the weight, and physical threats stop working around Scale 4.

The Identity Clock — six segments

It fills as Heat and Ties collide: when a file gets opened and somebody in it recognises your jaw, when you save the wrong person in front of the wrong camera, when you Break somewhere with a lobby.

When it fills, your identity is compromised. Somebody with resources knows the name behind the mask, and every Tie you have is now reachable.

This does not end the campaign. It changes it. Plenty of tables find the second half — the half where you cannot go home and everybody you love is a lever — is the better game. Do not play scared of the clock. Play knowing it is there.

The city climbs with you

One line from the GM's rules is worth knowing as a player, because you can plan around it:

The city's response Scale equals the hero's Scale, arriving one arc late.

The corporation that could not touch you at Scale 2 goes shopping for a Scale 4 answer, and it arrives about an arc after you would have found it frightening. @Missing file is what an ordinary contractor wears to be Scale 2. @Missing file is what money buys at Scale 5, with no metahuman involved anywhere in the process.

You will never outgrow the setting. That is not a threat, it is a guarantee that the game keeps working.