Teen heroes, bold panels, real consequences.
Protean City Comics is a Masks: A New Generation actual-play series staged like a stack of dramatic superhero issues. Its stories move between rooftop crises, haunted Halloween set pieces, high-school suspicion, and vulnerable teen heroes trying to understand what the pressure costs.
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Protean City Comics is a superhero actual-play series built around Masks: A New Generation. It treats every session like an issue pulled from a shared comic universe. The format matters. Episodes begin with cover art described in vivid panel language, then move into action, conversation, mechanics, and cliffhanger momentum. Protean City is a place where school halls, rooftops, woods, arcades, baseball fields, and haunted buildings can all become superhero pages. The cast of heroes shifts across arcs, but the sampled episodes repeatedly center young characters trying to hold themselves together while danger gets bigger. Direct Impact wants to make a difference. Phantasma deals with fear and isolation. Jade Scarab brings training and steadiness, but still admits terror. Highwire turns danger into circus bravado. Dr. Demoniaco Jr. faces the shadow of what made him who he is. Virgo Regulus and Wyatt Wexford carry House of Regulus into vampires, wolves, space-cruiser imagery, and violent arcade horror. The Incidentals bring the scale down to Patricia Arden High School, where lockers, classroom clocks, documents, storms, and graffiti become the first pages of suspicion. The show enjoys genre texture: Dracula, monsters, bats, haunted clocks, robots in pitcher outfits, animatronics, and baseball-card hero poses. It also enjoys process. Listeners hear players negotiate fictional beats, accept mechanical shifts, mark potential, clear conditions, and decide what a vulnerability really means. That table talk gives the drama a handmade quality. Big moments are not polished into distance; they are discovered out loud. The series suits fans who like comic-book spectacle with emotional mechanics visible on the page. Its best scenes balance bold covers with small admissions: guilt, fear, friendship, pressure, and the desire to be useful before anyone is ready. The result is bright, spooky, collaborative superhero melodrama with real teen uncertainty under the mask.
Made for: Best for actual-play listeners who like superhero comics, teen drama, horror-tinged arcs, and visible tabletop mechanics. It also suits fans of collaborative storytelling where character vulnerability matters as much as the fight scene.
What sets it apart: Its comic-issue structure gives each episode a strong visual rhythm, from cover reveals to panel-by-panel scene framing. The show stands apart by letting Masks mechanics shape the emotional stakes in plain view.
Protean City Comics is a weekly actual play podcast in the Masks: A New Generation game. It follows the lives of teenage super heroes in Protean City as they battle villains, seek to establish themselves as heroes, and struggle to find what kind of person they want to be.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Comic-panel narration gives its superhero roleplaying unusual visual clarity, while exposed mechanics connect spectacular fights to vulnerable character choices.
Protean City Comics turns an Actual Play session into the pages of a superhero comic. Each installment is introduced through an imagined cover, then moves panel by panel as the players establish locations, stage fights and decide what their heroes do next.
Comic panels become dice rolls, emotional scars, and one extremely unlucky animatronic weasel.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Halloween superhero brawl built around a tilted clock, monsters, and a city on fire.
The Longest Halloween Issue #04 throws its Halloween brawl onto the side of a skyscraper and commits fully to the spectacle. A haunted grandfather clock hangs off the roof and splits the cover diagonally while Direct Impact, Highwire, Phantasma, and Dr. Demoniaco Jr.
A Halloween superhero issue that descends through Protean City and keeps the tension tight.
The Longest Halloween Issue #03 opens on a glossy black cover with Direct Impact reaching for Phantasma in a dark tunnel, then pushes into a Protean City descent that begins under a jack-o'-lantern moon, crosses Centurion fighting zombies in the streets, and keeps heading…
A Halloween issue that balances superhero pageantry with fear, trust, and teamwork.
The Longest Halloween Issue #2 turns Protean City into a moonlit Halloween stage, with bats over the streets, houses in eternal dusk, and kids moving door to door.
A Halloween arcade ambush turns Wex and Virgo's fight into rusted, rattling body horror.
House of Regulus Issue #22 sends Wex and Virgo into Chester's pizza zone and wastes no time turning it into a Halloween ambush. A blacked-out room, a smashed arcade cabinet, and a wolf in the dark give the issue its first hard jolt, while the cover echoes that mood with a cold…
Dice, divine mysteries, and the trouble with good intentions.
The episode introduces a superhero actual play podcast set in a high school, with character introductions and scene setting.
The episode opens with a dramatic description of a vampire-werewolf standoff in the woods, setting the scene for a superhero roleplaying game session.
A detailed description of a fictional baseball card featuring the superhero Slugger King, introducing a Pride Annual issue.
Teen superheroes in an RPG wait for the school bell to ring, setting up a scene of anticipation.
Protean City Comics' "The Longest Halloween Issue #04" turns a hundred-day Halloween into a mission to break the city's grandfather-clock curse at Kirby Plaza.
Protean City Comics issue #03, "The Longest Halloween," sends Timeline, Calista Fantasma, and Sky Spalding into a black tunnel under Protean City where steam vents, skittering sounds, and a magical pirate hat set the scene.
In this second issue of a 'Longest Halloween' crossover story, the hosts narrate a superhero team-up between Protean City Comics characters and 13th Street Warden Phantasma as they fight off garden gnomes and lizard-costumed trick-or-treaters during a 79-day eclipse-fueled Halloween.
Protean City Comics #22, “I Met The Wolf Alone And Was Devoured In Peace,” drops Wex and Virgo into Chester’s pizza zone, where a smashed arcade, a missing animatronic band, and a Bastion-tech search drive the action.
Protean City Comics' “House of Regulus, Issue #21: Live As If You'll Die Today” follows Virgo Regulus and Wyatt Wexford into an 85th night of Halloween involving Dracula, Lupe Kessler, vampires, and an 18-foot werewolf.
The 13th Street Wardens issue “Not Fun Anymore” traps Phantasma, Poi, Sabria, and Metal Quaddle inside Radcliffe Hotel’s horror maze.
The 13th Street Wardens enter the Radcliffe Hotel after 63 days of Halloween, finding its doors open and blood across the lobby floor.
Protean City Comics' “Brambles” places Benicio Brunel and Ophelia Fairchild at Patricia Arden High during a Halloween that has lasted for weeks.