Icons is a rule-lite-ish superhero RPG published by Adamant Entertainment. I’ve been tossing about a co-GMed supers campaign to take some of the gamemaster heat off of me, once the baby comes next month. We’ve looked at a couple of the systems — the old Mayfair DC Heroes, the DC Advnetures (aka Mutants and Masterminds), and the old TSR Marvel Superheroes games. Icons manages to borrow some of the best elements from these and very little of the bad.

First, the physical stuff. Icons is a nice book — brightly-colored, good paper quality, and this also shows in the .pdf version. It used Helvetica as the font for the main text, so it’s easy to read. The headers for chapters and sections are in various comics fonts and lend character to the book. The art is so-so, cartoonish, rather than comic bookish, but it’s not a deal breaker. Overall, the style is solidly average.

The meat: characters have ratings from 1-10 in their abilities (Prowess, Coordination, Strength, Intellect, Awareness, and Willpower) and their powers. The scale is very roughly exponential, like DC Heroes was, with each level being about twice the strength/power/whatever of the number below. Powers are fairly generic, and borken down by types (alteration of things, control, mental, movement, etc.) Icons has a real throwback character creation — it’s random. For most experienced gamers, I think they’ll find this annoying; for the newbie or the D&D gamer, it’s probably no big deal. There are variant rules to point-build. It’s easy and quick to build a character and I was able to build pretty much what I wanted, although this game is designed to limit your supers to levels that aren’t earth-shattering or galactic proportions. If you want to pit Galactus against whomever…this isn’t the system for you.

The basic mechanics are very easy and are reminiscent of the old The Babylon Project die mechanic: you roll 2d6 — one is a negative, one a positive — and then apply the outcome to the appropriate ability or power. (The Mighty Mongoose is letting fly on a couple of Captain Sinister’s mook. He rolls a blue d6 (positive) and a red (negative) for a 3 and 4 respectively: a -1. He has a Prowess of 5, giving him a 4 for the attack. The mooks are average folks and defend with a 3 — he’s hit and done 1 stamina point to the baddie.) It’s simple once you’ve done it a few times. The other element of Icons that’s intriguing — only the player rolls in tasks. The players are the heroes; their abilities are the important ones — they either beat the basic ability or power of the bad guys or they don’t. When attacked, it’s the same — you either succeed in your defense or you don’t. It should make for quick play.

In the Taking Action! chapter, the rules are broken out over about 30 pages. Time is measured in a novel way. There’s the usual split between action sequences and narrative time. Action time in the game is broken into panels — as per a comic book and represent an action that could be portrayed in a drawn panel. All of the character’s actions make a page — what would normally be considered a round of action. Narrative time is broken into chapters, with the chapters coming together into a issue (a complete story.) Distances, speeds, and other issues, much like TSR’s Marvel Superheroes are fairly abstracted int0 ranges like Personal (touch range), Close (melee distances), Extended (most ranged attacks), Visual, and Beyond. Materials you might break have a Strength rating (paper is 1, brick is 4) and are roughly twice as strong as the level preceding. An adult person weighs 4, a car 6 and so on… As I said, very abstract.

If you like crunch, Icons will probably not work well for you. If you like a bit of wiggle room in things, it’s a good lightweight engine for playing supers.

Overall, I’d give it a 3 out of 5 for style, a 3-4 out of 5 for substance depending on your need for solidity in your rules. It’s worth the buy and right now the Adamant .pdfs are $2 on Drive Thru RPG (they’re taking the iBooks/Kindle publishing paradigm to heart and I hope it’s working for them.)

(Disclosure: I’ve written for Adamant’s The Imperial Age line.)

Half the book — as with most supers games — describe the powers and their particular effects.