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ICONS: Gangbusters!
by Christopher H. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 07/02/2012 11:21:55

The term “gangbusters” conjures up thoughts of organized crime, while the term “gang” by itself evokes street-level crime. Bring these two realms together, toss in some super-science weaponry, and you have the ingredients for this ICONS adventure by Chris McGroarty and Dan Houser. The plot unfolds in three straightforward acts, which together offer opportunities for action, interaction, and investigation. It’s a pretty linear adventure, with fairly blatant use of NPCs to keep the PCs on track. This makes the adventure a little “railroady,” but also makes it a good adventure for an inexperienced GM to run, since the plot, though fun, is linear and uncomplicated. It’s also a fairly short adventure; the actual storyline only requires only twelve pages, with the villain’s stat blocks accounting for five more and five presenting the pregenerated characters.

The frequency of grammatical errors (mostly related to punctuation) is embarrassing, as is the inconsistent reference to “magical artifacts” on p. 14 while the rest of the adventure focuses on super-science tech. Dan Houser’s vibrant artwork brings the adventure to life, though I wish more of it depicted the bad guys than the pregenerated heroes (the Storm Agency, who also appear in Hero Pack 3).

In the end, this adventure is good, but not great; I recommend it, but I can’t really “rave” about it.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Gangbusters!
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ICONS: Flight of the Nova-1
by Christopher H. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 06/25/2012 00:10:02

“Flight of the Nova-1” offers a fun scenario for either a new (using the prologue) or existing (skipping straight to chapter 1) superteam. Chapter 1 basically sets up the dramatic situation, and chapters 2–4 resolve the issue (or so the players will hope!) over a series of three combat encounters. The end of the adventure teases a forthcoming product; this will either build anticipation or frustration, depending on your perspective (and your confidence in Adamant’s release schedule) and your interest in running the projected series of adventures in sequence.

Dan Houser’s artwork is, of course, wonderful, although, GMs not familiar with the full range of ICONS character from Adamant might incorrectly think that the illustration on p. 11 depicts Wrack and Sapphire Synapse, the villains involves in the action described there, when the illustration really features Dr. Punch and Electric Judy, heroes from the adventure “No Laughing Matter” who have no connection to the “Nova-1” storyline.

His writing isn’t quite as good, mainly because he occasionally takes too much for granted instead of spelling things out in detail, forcing the prospective GM to “read his mind.” It was also discouraging to find a homonym error in the very first sentence (“baited breath” instead of the proper “bated breath.” Unfortunately, this is the beginning of a trend; grammatical errors, oddities, and inconsistencies (especially related to punctuation and capitalization) crop up repeatedly, marring an otherwise excellent product.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Flight of the Nova-1
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ICONS: Hero Pack 2.5
by Christopher H. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 06/23/2012 18:23:14

Hero Pack 2.5 presents six super-powered individuals, four of them heroes and two of them villains. While some of the heroes interest me, especially the Shepherd, a roster book serves GMs best when it’s full of villains. As in Hero Pack 2, only 1/3 of the characters presented in Hero Pack 2.5 are villains. I’d have added another star to my review if the proportion of villains were higher.

On the other hand, Hero Pack 2.5 offers GMs a couple of features that Hero Pack 2 lacked. For the two villains, Ephemera and her sidekick Sequence, Hero Pack 2.5 provides GM tips and adventure ideas in addition to an origin/personality writeup. These few paragraphs make Ephemera and Sequence significantly easier and quicker to use than the villains in Hero Pack 2.5.

Additionally, almost half of Hero Pack 2.5 consists of a mini-adventure entitled “Enter: Galacticron.” This mini-adventure includes its own supervillain, Lady Omega, along with alien soldiers and a potentially world-altering event. The mini-adventure itself is worth the price of Hero Pack 2.5.

Unfortunately, Hero Pack 2.5 seems to be more poorly composed and proofread than most Adamant Entertainment products. In particular, missing and misplaced punctuation dot the landscape. The frequency of such errors makes me wonder whether anybody actually copy-edited Hero Pack 2.5 at all.

Despite the “2.5” in the title, the duplication of Hero Pack 2’s cover, and the brief errata for Hero Pack 2 on the first page, Hero Pack 2.5 is really an independent product. You don’t need Hero Pack 2 to use Hero Pack 2.5, and you don’t need Hero Pack 2.5 to complete Hero Pack 2.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Hero Pack 2.5
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ICONS: Hero Pack 2
by Christopher H. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 06/23/2012 18:22:49

A product like this pulls me in two directions. On the one hand, I love seeing what my fellow ICONS fans have created in their own worlds. On the other hand, a book full of superheroes—emphasis on “heroes”—doesn’t actually add much to my ICONS games. A typical ICONS GM already has plenty of heroes in his or her world, namely, the player characters. Most GMs would be better served by a villain pack instead of a hero pack. Hero Pack 2 does, in fact, include eleven villains, but that’s barely a third of the 30 characters featured.

Unlike the original Hero Pack, where villains were grouped together after heroes and called out with different background artwork, Hero Pack 2 sorts heroes and villains together, just placing all the characters in alphabetical order. No graphic cue differentiates villains from heroes, nor are villains marked as such in the table of contents. The only way to tell the difference is by the villains’ lack of Determination values (they have asterisks instead).

In terms of the quality of content, Hero Pack 2 is a bit like a roller coaster. Dan Houser’s artwork is, as always, every good and evocative. In my opinion, he did particularly good jobs on Alien Mastermind, Necrovore, Scarlet Sabre, and Shadowform. On the other hand, Kumbhakarna and Technomage need to give Wonder Man’s and Dr. Doom’s costumes back, and the artwork for Hekate comes off oddly, making it a little hard to tell at first which way she’s facing. Since the various heroes and villains were all designed by different people, some are naturally better than others. A few stand out from the pack. Mechanically, Blueshift comes off as basically a super-smart Flash, but his origin and backstory are rich for the space allotted. Cancer is a compelling villain in a very, very creepy way. Gravedigger is pretty funny. The Mook is eminently useful and will very likely find his (their) way into adventures that I run. Maybe it’s just his resemblance to Carnage, but I found Necrovore an intriguing villain, rife with possibilities.

Unfortunately, the Grammar Gremlin started working his impish mischief right from the beginning, inserting a comma splice into the very first page and scattering punctuation errors and inconsistencies (such as American marks used in British positions) throughout the book. He also apparently rampaged through the book, snatching the quotation marks away from some catchphrases (but not others) and peppering quotations with inconsistent capitalization. He planted tense-change bombs in several characters’ origins, resulting in inexplicable shifts from past to present. He even replaced the Arabic numeral 2, used in the product’s title on the front cover, with a Roman numeral II in the interior page headers.

If you want to see some other ICONS players’ superheroes and perhaps use them as NPCs in your own world, by all means buy Hero Pack 2. If you’re mainly looking for supervillains, you’ll only get eleven of them from this product, and not all eleven are equally interesting. On balance, I’d consider Hero Pack 2 a worthwhile purchase, as long as you know the hero-villain ratio going in.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Hero Pack 2
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ICONS: Hero Pack 3
by Christopher H. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 06/13/2012 21:43:05

Hero Pack 3 presents 19 new super-beings for your ICONS game. This pack will activate the nostalgia factor for long-time comics fans, since the tone of the characters and their origin stories, as well as the artistic style, pay tribute to Jack “King” Kirby—himself a true icon of the comics industry. Setting sentimentality aside, the results are mixed.

The artwork clearly evokes Kirby, but Dan Houser doing Kirby isn’t as good as Houser doing Houser (which, if I can utter such blasphemy, I actually prefer over Kirby doing Kirby).

The Tomorrow Squad is a fun team, and holds together well, even if Astral Girl is a warmed-over Marvel Girl, and Astro-Man is a warmed-over Green Lantern.

The heroes who make up the Storm Agents should’ve hired a consultant to help them distinguish their superhero names better from their secret identities. Dr. Seifer is Cypher? Enrique Feeley, Jr. is Dr. Feelgood II? Dr. Shade by day, Dr. Tenebrous by night? How long will take the intrepid local media to figure those three out?

The remaining characters in Hero Pack 3 aren’t connected in a team, but only the Table of Contents and the team picture on p. 13 serve to indicate that the Storm Agents writeup ends with Warden. Another “divider page” would have been nice right before Bella Trix. Elder Brotha is an interesting character, though the spelling of his name smacks of “Blaxploitation” (perhaps that’s intentional, as another ’70s tribute, like Dr. Feelgood?). Illegal Alien and the Immigrant make a “cute couple” (of enemies), but the alphabetization in the third section puts several characters in between them. If Professor Q’s aspects hadn’t specified “evil boy genius,” I would have thought—based on the artwork—that Professor Q was female. For some reason, Professor Q doesn’t have a “secret origin” page like the other characters. Unstoppable Girl provides a great dose of comic relief, though she, too, is separated from her nemesis by several entries due to the alphabetical arrangement.

Unfortunately, Hero Pack 3 is marred by the same sorts of grammatical and stylistic errors and inconsistencies that seem to plague so many small-press products, and that should have been caught and fixed in the copy-editing phase. Sometimes true (“curly”) apostrophes (inverted commas) appear where they should; sometimes, (straight) foot marks appear instead. Often, when true apostrophes are used to indicate missing characters (as in “let’s light ’em up” or in references to the ’70s), they’re printed backwards—indicating reliance on software rather than a knowledgeable human editor. The document varies between British-style and American-style use of quotation marks (i.e., “single” vs. “double”). Poor capitalization crops up occasionally, especially in catchphrases. Where dashes should appear, we get double hyphens instead. Some entries lack the final punctuation mark. The biggest proofreading fail, though, is the document’s indecision about whether Warden’s secret identity is “John Warren” (p. 23) or “John Hill” (pp. 24–25). It’s really a bit heartbreaking to see such sloppiness in an otherwise enjoyable product.

Finally, the fact that only three of the characters (Bella Trix, Illegal Immigrant, and Professor Q) are straight-up super-villains raises the question of usefulness. Indeed, the very name Hero Pack implies that the product is essentially a roster book full of superheroes. While roster books of this kind make good sense for games based in the Marvel or DC universes, they’re less useful for ICONS, where most players will want to play their own heroes, not someone else’s heroes. Sure, the heroes presented in Hero Pack 3 could be interesting NPCs—especially Señor Misterioso, who has built-in alien-related plot hooks—but GMs will want to be careful not to create a “Mary Sue” situation or to make the PCs “bystanders” in a fight between longtime enemies (such as Professor Q vs. Unstoppable Girl or Illegal Alien vs. the Immigrant). If you’re an ICONS GM looking for villains you can drop into your home game, Hero Pack 3 won’t do much for you. If you’re looking for superheroes you can include in your world as NPCs, or just as examples to fire your own imagination, Hero Pack 3 gives you several interesting choices.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Hero Pack 3
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ICONS: Gangbusters!
by David F. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/25/2012 12:20:41

This looks like a great adventure to run for beginning players of ICONS. The setup is simple and throws the players into the action. I can't wait to run this for my group!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Gangbusters!
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ICONS Character Folio
by Sean A. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/05/2012 17:06:23

Hope for some updates to the product. I would like to see the progress made to create this as an Ipad App. I wish the formus worked and were not a place for spam advertising.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS Character Folio
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ICONS Character Folio
by Jan S. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 04/18/2012 09:04:42

At first I wrote a review with 1 star, then I found what the issue was and now I give it 3 stars, because of bad documentation. Everything was working fine until I tried to save a character. The save failed. The reason for the failure is not obvious. The reason for the failure is that I did not specify a character name. The program uses the character name as the save file name. This is not stated in the documentation and there is no obvious way to know that this is a required field for your character. If this "feature" is fixed, I will give the program a higher rating.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
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ICONS: Hero Pack 3
by Christopher T. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/19/2012 13:53:53

A great selection of characters. While there are no stats for the Galactus-like dude on the cover that I could see, that doesn't detract from the usefulness at all. I thought all the characters had great write-ups - just enough to give a good feel for how to play, without so much detail that we can't make them our own.

I have to give props to Dan Houser here on the art - he said he was going for Kirby, and he did it. The art is recognizable as the ICONS style, but the Kirby "inspiration" comes through loud and clear, in the character costume design, the features (particularly the faces, Dan got the Kirby face perfectly) and the various character poses. Great work!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Hero Pack 3
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ICONS: The RetConQuest
by Christopher H. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 02/12/2012 23:49:56

With Steve Kenson providing the storyline and Dan Houser providing the artwork, The RetConQuest is probably the closest thing ICONS has right now to an "instant classic." The premise is clever and the structure of the book, mirroring the structure of the adventure, reinforces the central plot by starting with Chapter 2 (you’ll find Chapter 1 at the end). Kenson suggests that this could be a good adventure for beginning an ICONS campaign, because many details of the campaign world are “up for grabs” and need not be learned before playing through this scenario. Longtime Avengers fans will perceive Master Tulku’s true identity immediately, but that doesn’t really lessen the fun. Aside from Houser’s artwork, the formatting is quite spare, even more minimalist than the norm than Adamant’s ICONS materials have set. There are a few little grammatical annoyances, and a few really noticeable errors that should have been caught in proofreading, such as the reference to "p. @@" of the ICONS rulebook on p. 7 of the adventure, and the fact that the word “page” is capitalized in the footers of even-numbered pages but not in the footers of the odd-numbered pages. Those kinds of things hold me back from giving the product a full five stars, but they shouldn’t hold you back from getting an evening or two of superheroic role-playing from this adventure.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: The RetConQuest
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ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying
by Aaron H. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 01/20/2012 15:03:42

ICONS is a rules-light superhero system based off the FUDGE and FATE systems. It is a success ranking system where the dice become modifiers to a character’s Abilities instead of the character’s Abilities being a modifier to the dice roll. These modifiers are determined by using 2d6 where one dice is a positive modifier and the other is a negative modifier. By adding the two dice together, you receive the first modifier for the action being taken with the second modifier being that action’s difficulty level. What you get is a character who is destined to succeed more often than not with that success gauging the actions effect. The net value of the character’s Abilities including both modifiers produces a number that is compared to the never-changing success ranking system that starts at 0. The better the result, the more incredible the character’s success producing increasingly improved outcomes. Pretty simple if you think about it.

The system is quite fitting for a superhero game as it improves one’s chances for success and adding a measurement of how well they succeed. However, only player’s get to use these mechanics as Game Masters do not roll any dice. Actions from a super-villain are gauged by how well the superhero defends. The higher the success on the defensive maneuver, the further reduced that super-villains action becomes. It is definitely a superhero-centric game, designed to reproduce comic books from the Golden and Silver ages.

OVERALL

ICONS is an excellent system that harkens back to the old school design of comic books from the Golden and Silver ages. Storylines are short and more often than not the superhero overcomes the villain within the pages of a single issue. Additionally, the superhero always seems to make it look easy and no matter what, succeeds in his or her efforts. This is what ICONS is recreating and its mechanics are designed around that feeling. Instead of slapping a theme onto the mechanics, the theme was designed into the mechanics. Even the terminology matches the theme! While it may be limited in an adventure’s look and feel, it definitely does what it aims to do. If you’re a fan of old school Spider Man, Avengers, or Justice League of America, this is the game that will allow you to recreate your favorite comics.

RATINGS

Publication Quality: 10 out of 10 ICONS is a beautiful book. All superheros and villains are designed in this very traditional coloring manner found in four-color, Golden Age, and early Silver Age comics. While this may seem cheesy, it’s a perfect fit for the theme and design of the system’s mechanics. ICONS is designed to recreate those old comic books and the illustrations only support that theme. In addition, the book’s layout and formatting is easy to read and very pleasing to the eyes. It is a perfectly designed book and really utilizes the digest format to the best of its ability.

Mechanics: 8 out of 10 There is one slight drawback to ICONS‘ mechanics to fans of superhero role-playing games: the system centers around the superheroes. How is this different? The superheroes are essentially over-the-top characters who rarely fail and the mechanics are designed around their action and superior abilities instead of spending more time considering the overall setting and a lengthy storyline. Yes it’s designed to recreate comic books where storylines rarely lasted longer than two issues, but some of the tools are taken away from the Game Master to create full campaigns. Simple things like villains don’t roll dice for their own abilities nor do they get a reaction to the superheroes action. They are destined to fail sooner rather than later.

With that in mind, the mechanics are a beautiful blend of quick action, limited dice rolling, and lots of superhero options to keep the game moving quickly and provide players with a variety of options to create their ideal superhero. The rules-light system is obvious in every facet and superheroes are definitely superheroes. Why, powers cover 26 pages of the 127 page book! One of ICONS‘ strongest points is that its theme is designed directly into the mechanics producing a very fluid game system that meshes perfectly with the created characters.

Desire to Play: 8 out of 10 Players looking to recreate Golden or Silver Age comics will find almost everything they’re looking for in ICONS. Those looking for the opportunity to a darker, grittier game will not find it within ICONS. In addition, if you want your superhero to have a high success rate, then ICONS‘ mechanics are a great fit. ICONS produces characters that are super in every regard.

Overall: 9 out of 10 If you’re looking for the ultimate “super” experience where your superhero is all but guaranteed success when using his or her powers and is a driving factor of the entire storyline, then ICONS is most likely the game you’re looking for. While it doesn’t actually contain superheroes from the comic books, it contains a huge variety of powers that can be mixed and matched to recreate those superheroes. Just remember, superheroes here are the ultimate heroes and villains are the people who are always defeated by the good guys.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying
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ICONS: The RetConQuest
by Alexander O. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 12/21/2011 18:28:42

In a nutshell, The RetConQuest is a solid adventure that seems -- structurally -- more appropriate as an introductory adventure rather than as a stand-alone adventure in an ongoing campaign.

The core conceit of 'normal humans' remembering their superpowered selves and slowly/instantaneously regaining their identities and abilities in an alternate timeline is a good one, allowing new players (and characters) to slowly be introduced to the character creation and task resolution rules of Icons without necessarily abandoning the game narrative completely. The plot twists seeded in the "initial" and "final" confrontations with Tempus Khan are also useful in terms of helping fine tune characters created in the course of play, in addition to being a clever, limited-novelty nod to the nature of battling time-conquering villains.

For an ongoing campaign, however, I have a preference for more scenes and encounters that would allow the GM to present a series of encounters with heroes, villains, and normals from the regular campaign and how their lives are different from what is remembered. There was only one opportunity for this in the published adventure, though a clever GM could arguably extend or spread out such scenes.

Finally, there were a small number of typos that could have been fixed (and still can be through the magic of updated PDFs): like the "page @@" incident and a missing apostrophe.

All in all, a solid, clever adventure and a potentially great beginning for a great campaign!



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: The RetConQuest
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ICONS: Gangbusters!
by James H. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/16/2011 19:40:29

I ran this for a group of six players and it ran really well. The story is easy to set up and follow through, the villains are pretty good though one of them badly screwed up when we ran it making the bank scene easier. I used this as the pilot episode to my ongoing game and was very pleased.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Gangbusters!
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ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying
by Uriah O. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 11/14/2011 11:48:45

ICONS is a fast and easy superhero RPG. The creation of characters is straight-forward and the challenge of coming up with a background for the sometimes oddly paired powers is fun. In most cases, you could have characters roll up a character and be playing within half an hour. One of the things that I most like is that these characters are "take me as I am." You don't level them, they are already super heroes for goodness sake.

Because of the simplicity, I find that running an ICONS campaign by email is very doable and maintains a lot of the fun.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying
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ICONS: Hero Pack 2.5
by Thomas B. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 08/06/2011 13:03:49

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: For $5, you get six new characters as well as an adventure with map and standees. In addition, Galacticron (who was lurking in Hero Pack 1) is present here, along with a couple of other villainous types specific to the adventure. The adventure itself is a pretty basic affair, with Lady Omega ripped Galacticron across space and into the New Mexico desert, in hopes that he will destroy Earth. The kicker, of course, is that the PCs can't really harm him directly.

WHAT WORKS: I really dig a couple of the new villains, like the tech-stealing Ephemera and Sequence - a villainous powerhouse who has received a serious upgrade. I actually wrote a comic script with villains similar to the "space locusts" that are presented here (although mine were more like cockroaches), so that's rather cool.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK: The adventure could have used some editing, and while Lady Omega is TECHNICALLY a fully useable character...she comes across like the barest stereotype of a supervillain. Also, the "useable map" sure looks like it would be DRAMATICALLY off scale for the standees (and that's being generous with the definition of "scale"). I would have liked, say, a page of Lakmar Shock Trooper standees, myself...I mean, if you're going to use them, you're going to want a bunch of them.

CONCLUSION: A good product, with a great example of an adventure where the heroes HAVE to think outside the box, at least with the Galacticron problem. Despite the paper-thin characterization of Lady Omega, she does at least have a cool look and power set, so an enterprising GM can build from there.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
ICONS: Hero Pack 2.5
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