Firing up ICONS again

 

So I was going to be short some players this week for a variety of reasons - thus thwarting myself once again from wrapping up the Perdition Elections arc in my Deadlands campaign as I want everyone present for the finale. The bonus complication here was that the mix of players this week did not match the mix of players I have had for Warhammer, Sentinels, Marvel, or either of the Star Wars games I've run in the past year - inset appropriate emoji here. With the chance to continue an existing game game out the window I dropped back into the Hall of Gaming, took a look around, and contemplated my gaming life thus far. 

I needed something that was easy to drop players in and out of, that could be run as an episodic campaign - self contained from game to game, and something that would not take a great deal of time to prepare as this gear-switching tends to come with only a few days notice. I do not want to keep crash-course-re-learning games for one-shot runs like I've been doing so I want to pick something as the "Plan B" game and stick with it. 

Superhero games are the easiest type of RPG to manage variable player attendance issues in my experience so that's where I started. Simpler rules ... simpler character generation ... lots of support ... this was really going in one direction from pretty early on. 

So ICONS it was! I haven't run ICONS in 5 years but I ran a bunch of it from 2011 up to about 2018 and wrote about it a lot here so it's not unfamiliar territory. I mostly ran it with my kids though so my regular players have not spent much time with it. The other bonus with ICONS is that I have a bunch of short adventures for it - and I like them, which is a rarity with superhero games as most of them are not good. For some reason though this game brought out good things in people and resulted in some really fun scenarios with classic comic book themes front and center. Fainting Goat Games in particular has had a nice run.

So I spent two days re-reading the rulebook and choosing an adventure, then we got together and rolled up some characters. I ended up with only two players but that's fine for a supers game. 

• Variable Dave ended up with "Phantom Justice", an interesting mix of Phasing, Density Control, Fast Attack, and ... Spinning ... of all things. He made it work.
• Shootist Will put together "The Amazing Sub-Zero" - an Ice Controller that ended up pretty cohesive.

For this run I chose "Primal Power" from Fainting Goat. I don't want to spoil much so I'll stay general but it's a great situation involving gorillas, a zoo, mind control, a secret lab, and some other heroes, a police force, and an agency to interact with during a crisis. There are character stats and some maps to give the GM an idea of where things are happening and of course it could lead into more. 

My players being veteran superhero fans didn't even blink at a hostage situation involving armed gorillas and dealt with the initial situation quickly and efficiently. One reason for this involves one character having a high degree of proficiency with the Reflection power and the large number of tranquilizer rifles in play. Lots of mechanical interaction there but it does make people drop quite quickly when they can  be knocked out on their own turn!

I freely admit I came out of it happy that they had fun but feeling like I had a lot of homework before the next session based on the number of questions I wrote down. Combine a few new powers with not having played in a while and uh, yeah, I felt like I was behind on and off all night - it still went well though.

This weekend will probably be another session as I already know we will be missing a few players. More on that next week! 

Aaron Allston's Strike Force

 

This is an updated version of the original Strike Force from 1988 and is the product of a Kickstarter drive in 2016. I made a post about the original over ten years ago and thought very highly of it. With a newer version out there I figured it was high time I looked it over too.

Some straight-up comparisons:

• The original was a 96 page softcover while this one is a 256 page hardcover. Both are available in PDF.
• The original was black and white while the newer book has some use of color in layout and illustrations. It's not a Mutants and Masterminds book but it's not B&W either.  
• The Strike Force campaign kept running so while the original covers the first 6-7 years of the campaign this one includes information on what happened after that from AA's own notes.

So right there if you're interested in how an original superhero campaign progressed, well, there's a lot to explore. For one there was an alien invasion and then a third world war which had the heroes helping to rebuild the war  - here was a man who was not afraid to shake things up! I've preached for a long time that you have to be willing to let your PC's leave a mark on the world and here is a strong example of where that can go. Throughout this campaign there is dimension-hopping, space exploration, alien invasions, alternate earths causing trouble ... a bunch of comic book tropes used and explored and making permanent impacts on the world. This new edition covers another two decades of play so it is definitely worth a look for that. 

"Bolo"

There is a big section on the heroes and villains of the campaign. It took up roughly 50 pages in the original and it's around 100 in this one. In many ways this is the least valuable chapter in the book for me as the value in this book is less about Hero System stats and more about how the campaign as a whole worked over time. That said this also includes bios for most of the characters and those can help one make sense of the interplay between characters and the changes over time. For example, one of the early Dr. Doom-ish villains slowly moves away from world domination and by the end is more of a scientific benefactor aiding the heroes and the world in general - not something we see in a lot of superhero stories where some things need to be constant but totally applicable to an ongoing RPG campaign. For the major heroes it shows their Champions character sheet at the beginning of the campaign and then their updated sheet at the end of the campaign which could be interesting for Champions players and GMs.

Other interesting campaign material includes the expected timeline, discussion of major events, how magic works, how technology fits in and has changed over time, secret lands, major organizations, some secret societies, other dimensions, other earths, and alien races and empires. This all fleshes out the big picture side of the campaign with about 50 pages of totally steal-able ideas. The breakdown of magic in particular is a great example of laying the ground work for things by setting some boundaries and some common language while still staying fairly flexible. 

Kestrel

The last big chunk of the book is how Aaron set up a campaign, how he kept it going and kept people happy, and his advice on solving problems that can arise in a campaign. This is where much of the blue-booking discussion and the player archetypes discussion happen which are two of the things Strike Force is most known for. As an example of the contributions of others involved Steve Kenson gives some excellent advice on blue-booking in the age of smart phones and tablets. There is a lot of good, useful information here and the best thing about it is that it comes from actual play experience - not theory!

The only disappointment here is that a) it is a summary in many places of the campaign, not an actual-play recounting of the games and b) many known superheroes and things from other IP universes - like Battlestar Galactica - were used in the campaign, especially early on, and those have to be renamed when mentioned here so it's not always totally clear who was interacting with who (the real who) at times. The good thing is that the raw package of Aaron's notes is available apparently though I have not gone that far myself yet.

So yes, I would recommend this 100% if you've never read the original. While some of these concepts have leaked into RPG guidance in general it's still great to see them all in one place and there are undoubtedly at least a few concepts you will want to take home.

If you have the original it's a little more complicated. Did you like that book? If you didn't like it then this may not change your opinion. If you did, well, this book is a lot of what was in there, plus more. I have the original and I still bought it in hard copy and I have no regrets.

Skyrocket

I see a lot of "GM Advice" products out there now, since PDFs and DTRPG have made it where anyone can run 15 sessions of D&D 5E and call themselves an Expert Gamemaster. This is the opposite of those products - decades of running games distilled into one book. At this point in my gaming career I don't rate most of the advice I see out there as I've been playing longer than many of the advice-givers have been alive. I need a track record to pay any attention to this kind of thing. Take it from me, this guy had one hell of a track record.

If you're actually running a game, or planning to, and would like to see how someone else actually ran a game, this is probably the best written example there is.

Some links:
(these are not affiliate links, I don't do that. They are just here for informational purposes)

• Original Strike Force PDF
• New Strike Force PDF
• The Strike Force Archives (original campaign material)
• M&M character files for Hero lab
• Champions character files for Hero Designer

There are supposed to be character files for Icons and Savage Worlds as well but I am not sure where to find those.

Superhero RPG Roundup Part 2 - The Multiverse of Superhero RPGs

 

Given the opportunity to start a new superhero campaign I dove into the deep end and ran through a bunch of games I own and checked into a few I did not. Part 1 of this covered the Marvel Superhero options as I do love the old warhorse and there are a lot of options out there built around that chassis. 

Beyond that though there are many other games in this genre. I hit most of the big ones in my exploration so I thought I would share some thoughts on each in this post.

• First up, Mutants and Masterminds: In my mind this is the current standard for superhero RPGs and has been for more than a decade. Third edition is thorough and expansive game system with a unified mechanic that is fairly simple to run in play, options for point-build and random character generation, and supplement books to assist with deeper options in almost any area you can think of - powers, gadgets, locations, running a super team, cosmic campaigns, supernatural campaigns, adventures ... pretty much any area of running a game has extra material available if you want it. It's a great game and one I have run multiple times previously.
  
  For this campaign it was a strong contender but I decided to try something new. I will run this again, maybe later this year, but for now I chose "new" over familiar.

• Second, Champions - my first superhero RPG and one that still lives in my head whenever we get to discussing them even 40 years later. It works and works well if you want to have all the details. People fuss about math in this game but once you build your character the math is mostly "do I have enough dice to throw for this attack?" rather than anything particularly complicated. I love it and I have players with some experience with it and the current Champions Complete is the best version of it to be released in years.
  
  Despite this we will only be playing this game once a month and introducing some new players to Hero system when playing on that schedule is just not the best idea in my opinion. I'd love to run it and I will make an effort to do so but it's not the best choice for this campaign

• Next up - ICONS - lord knows I have talked about ICONS enough on this blog over the years. It's a great game with a ton of support that plays fast and is very good at letting your players focus on what they are doing in the game rather than how the rules work. Bits of MSH, bits of FATE, elements of M&M ... all combine to make for a really good game that can handle a wide range.
  
  For this campaign I was very tempted to use ICONS but in the end as mentioned above I decided to try something new. ICONS will be back in the rotation at some point as I have a couple of players that have never tried it but for this one I decided to go in a different direction.
  
  
  

• Savage Worlds - I am running a Deadlands game now and there is a shiny new Super Powers Companion that just came out so it would make some sense to run a Savage Supers campaign now. The new book is solid  - these things have really evolved since they were basically the powers chapter of Necessary Evil with some additional material added in. They have gotten further and further away from the standard SW approach of "powers cost ongoing power points" which is fine for wizards and mad scientists but does not work well for superheroes with permanent abilities so it's a welcome change - it's basically a point buy system for powers now. It is not as comprehensive as some of the other games but a lot of that is because it's a supplement to a game system and not a self-contained game in itself. I'll have a separate review of this one soon.
  
  As much as it would make sense to use this option - especially since I was considering a WW2 supers game and I have the Weird War 2 book as well making this really easy to run - I ended up deciding to hold off. My main concern is running two games in Savage Worlds in parallel at different power levels and possibly making one feel "less" than the other. There's also the danger of making them feel too "samey" using the same rules for two different games. I will need something to run after Deadlands and I'd say Savage Supers would be a good fit when that day comes so that's probably where it will come into play.
  
  

• Finally I looked at the Sentinel Comics RPG. I had run one of the starter kit adventures a few years ago and it was cool though some of the concepts were tricky coming in cold. I did the Kickstarter and had the rulebook and the GM kit but had not really dived in with an eye towards running it until now. There's a lot of Marvel Heroic (Cortex) in there but it's not just a clone.
  
  For example you're only going to be rolling 3 dice in your pool - a power, a quality, and your status dice which is a new concept that sort of replaces the solo/buddy/team element in MHR.  This status is determined by a Green/Yellow/Red system which has two tracks. One is your health - as your character takes damage they begin "Green" then move into Yellow at a certain point and then finally into Red as they take more and more damage. There is also the Scene Tracker which replaces the Doom Pool from MHR with a fixed countdown by round that moves through a G/Y/R sequence to show things escalating automatically - no die manipulation necessary. So your status die is determined by the current "color" (some may progress upward d6-d8-d10, some downward, and some may be steady) and also some of your powers are gated by this as well - the biggest bangs are only available when things turn red, for example. 
  
  This is a great concept that really anchors certain tropes into the mechanics. There are a lot of changes like this where things that were somewhat abstract in MHR become more defined and set and I would say more intuitively playable. I'll do a longer review later but there is so much clever stuff in here that I had to give it a go so it will be our system for this next campaign.
  
  

So, more to come on all of this. More in-depth reviews of some of these books and some session summaries as well. So far 2023 is a pretty good year here. 

ICONS A to Z

 

This one is a little trickier to explain/judge than Adversaries or Menagerie. It's less a big book of stuff and more of a wide-ranging general supplement for the game. I know it was a set of individual supplements presented over time, one letter at a time, which helps explain the ... diversity ... of the book. But what is it? I'm going to take the obvious way out here:

• A is Aliens - definitely a topic worthy of some attention in a superhero game
• B is for Battles - in this case large-scale battles with some mechanics and which addresses how superheroes can affect those big battles. not something you see in a lot of superhero rpg rules. 
• C is for Cosmic - scaling, considerations for being in space a lot, and some campaign notes
• D is for Demons - another topic worthy of consideration for a supers campaign. Maybe a notch down from Aliens but they do show up fairly often.
• E is for Environments - underwater, underground, etc. It's nice to have a bit more detail here.
• F is for Fear - fear in a superhero game, intimidation, fear-related powers ... it's an interesting examination of things because you don't see it mechanically addressed all that much in these RPGs.
• G is for Golden Age - good campaign notes for running this type of game. 
• H is for Headquarters - a decent look at the options in ICONS - Qualities, Devices, or Installations
• I is for Interaction - Ok this one is a little more abstract but it is a more detailed look at social skills, effectively. This is nice stuff to have and would be worth including in the main book a long ways down the road in a theoretical and currently unnecessary new edition.
• J is for Justice - investigations, trials, prison - you know, the fun stuff! That said it could easily come up in a campaign.
• K is for Knacks - this is a new concept for the game and involves sort of a permanent stunt arrangement. One example is the ability to use Strength instead of Willpower for intimidation. I'm not as sure about this one as this is the kind of thing I might let a player do for free given sufficient justification. yes, I run ICONS loose enough that this is kind of past my threshold for needed mechanics. I can see the point, but it costs a permanent point of Determination, which I think is a really high cost for this option. Regardless this is not a bad option and some of the examples speak to me more than others - I expect most players would feel the same.
• L is for  Lost Worlds - well yes! A discussion of origins, types, and some random tables for encounters ... this is a nice thing to have if you're going to include one in your game - and you are aren't you?
• M is for Magic - magic is covered quite a bit in other ICONS books but the material included here adds some nice structure. General power levels, schools of magic, magic devices, the astral plane, some creature profiles - this does add to a game where magic plays a significant role and is useful even if it's just the focus for an adventure or three. 
• N is for Narrative Abilities - another more abstract entry. This is basically an alternate rules option where the numbers come out of the game. There's a way to do it just for stats, a way to do it just for damage, or for the whole system. it looks a lot like FATE to me at that point but it's nice to have an official version within the game system if you're interested in the option. 
• O is for Organizations - they are likely to come up in every campaign so the utility is obvious: agents, qualities, stats. This covers ways to rate organizations and their personnel in different ways and it is 100% useful. 
• P is for Pets - If someone in your campaign has an animal companion (it's not just for Rangers!) then this chapter will come into play. it covers different way to handle pets in the game - qualities, characters, sidekicks ... there are options. Useful if it comes up.
• Q is for Qualities - This is a solid discussion of qualities in the game and if anyone is fuzzy about how they work or the role they play in the system this chapter is damn handy. This is another one that  I think would be a strong candidate to include in the rulebook.
• R is for Rescue - This is an examination of core superhero stuff right here: disasters! innocent bystanders! building collapses! medical emergencies! if you ever wonder what heroes are supposed to do besides punch bad guys this is an excellent start. Plus it's not just abstract - it covers what heroes need to do mechanically to stop bad things from happening for a variety of situations. Solid solid solid.
• S is for Support - HQ staff, other specialists (No Capes!), the law, the media, villain options - its useful campaign support.
• T is for Teams - a more detailed treatment of teams from typical roles in and around a team to mechanical options for team members like qualities and shared Determination. Likely useful in every campaign. 
• U is for Universe - an expanded discussion of creating a superhero universe for your campaign. The main book covers this pretty well but this material does give a GM more to consider when working on one. 
• V is for Variants - this is a small set of rules options - different ways to handle stats, damage, and alternate die-rolling methods. There's nothing terrible here but it's different from a lot of the other chapters. It "replaces" rather than "adds to" the existing rules. 
• W is for Wealth - some expanded mechanics for handling resources. I mean there's always at least one billionaire playboy character right?
• X is for X-Factors - Random tables! Events, people ... this is certainly useful for a lot of campaigns and really any "you're on patrol when ..." type sessions. Solid.
• Y is for Youth -  Ah my personal nemesis but undoubtedly useful to some this is the "teen heroes" chapter and it is solid. From alternate origins to how to handle school this covers what you need to run this type of game.
• Z is for Zombies - of course! The closer of the Aliens/Demons/Zombies trilogy of "things that can invade your campaign world"! Different types of zombies, different powers, and how they propagate are all covered here, plus more. 

Whew that is a lot of material! Each section is 5-6 pages long which for ICONS is generally enough depending on the type of article here. 

• If I was going to run a long term Golden Age or Teen campaign I would still go read through the sourcebooks for those available for M&M or Champions to really get into the feel and mood and background on those. 
• Some of these chapters are straight-up optional or variant rules modules and are inherently sufficient for what they do. 
• Some of it is just generally useful campaign material - Bases, Rescues, Support options, Teams, the universe ... it goes on. 
• A lot of these chapters really are expansions/examinations of specialized elements of a supers campaign that will come up on a now and then or per-adventure basis.
• Aliens are invading! Look over the Aliens chapter! And maybe the Battles chapter!
• We're going to Atlantis! Look over Environments!
• Captain Calamity is going on trial - let's look at the Justice Chapter!
• The spirit world is in turmoil as demons from the outer dark are trying to break in to this world - let's look at Magic, Demons, and possibly Battles!

I actually like this approach as these say multi-adventure story arc complications get a 5-6 page discussion with some rules notes. Not an entire book. Not some pre-written adventure. Just concepts and rules considerations that cover a well-known comic book superhero trope or event. The Quality and Team chapters will be useful in every campaign but you don't really need to worry about underwater stuff until someone goes underwater.

So where does this fall in the hierarchy of ICONS resources? Well I'd say get the main book and get a campaign going .. .and then, well Origins (to be reviewed) is damn handy and Great Power is good if your players really want to dig into their powers. I'd probably put it after those two as I think it's more useful once your campaign is going and insert "monster book" wherever you feel it's needed.

ICONS Adversaries

 

Every superhero RPG needs bad guys. Given that they typically come with character creation rules as a core feature though, I'm not sure anyone really "needs" a book full of them. Yet every superhero game line that goes anywhere has at least one, going back to Champions and Villains & Vigilantes.  I still have my original "Enemies I" and "Enemies II" and villains from those books still show up in my games from time to time so they can definitely make an impression and help define your personal setting. They are the traditional Monster Manual of Supers RPG's, a pillar of the genre. 

Side note: Given that it's not difficult to rewrite motivations - generally easier than writing up a coherent set of new powers in a  lot of games - they can also serve as a handy resource for NPC & allied superheroes as well. It's a book of superpowered people - adjust alignments to your taste!

The Viilainomicon, the original bad guys book for ICONS, had around 50 villains.  Adversaries has over half again as many and brings a lot of the old ones up to date with the newer edition and looks to be the "core" supervillain resource for the Assembled edition. 

I really like the layout - each character is covered in two pages:

• Front page has game stats and an illustration
  (fine work by Dan Houser here again ... or maybe that's "still")
• Back page has background, including personality and motivations and possibly relationships with other characters in the ICONS universe

This works really well for a resource like this. If you like the concept but want to change the background it's easily done. The Qualities - an ICONS thing, somewhat similar to FATE - do tie them together for many characters but those can be tweaked easily enough. Every character has the ICONS-standard 3 Qualities but you could always add more as well. 

As I read through the book I would pause after reading the game stat material and on some would feel that inspirational burst of what my version of this character would be. Then reading the background material it was usually a completely different take from what I was thinking - and this is awesome! I now have potential for two rival villains ... or a rival hero and villain pair ... or a great setup for one that has been mind-controlled or overlaid with a different personality or any of those incredibly dramatic "he's acting funny" situations that come up in comic books regularly. 

Tone-wise many of these characters have very Silver Age, "punny" type names and many of the backgrounds are similar. This sits just fine with me because I like my superhero games to be light and fantastic rather than grim and gritty. ICONS is perfectly set up for this mechanically by both being lighter than a lot of comic book RPGs as far as rules crunch and with the Qualities element being perfect for highlighting important facets of a character without bogging down in math & modifiers. A few favorites:

• Enemy Mime - yes the name is a terrible pun but it made me crack up so here it is. He is sort of a green lantern-ish type in a  way because he taps into the "mime force" which can do almost anything but with the limitation that he must physically perform something which then manifests in the real world ... invisibly. So his "mime in a box" generates a physical barrier, climbing an invisible rope actually lets him climb, throwing an invisible ting actually throws a ... thing ... you get the implications. There is a -lot- of potential for fun with this villain and the implications of a "mime force" on your comic book universe are ridiculous with potential.
• Tarpit is a great example of an Animated Series Clayface type character
• Zero is the classic Mister Freeze guy-in-a-cold-suit character
• The Troll has been in ICONS for a long time and is a great example of a serious Brick in ICONS
• The Shadow Guild is a shadowy evil organization and agian it's a nice example of how to do that kind of thing in this game
• Skeletron and the Spartan battlesuit go all the way back to the first ICONS adventure and I was happy to see them here

Looking for flaws the only thing I see is that this is strictly a catalog of villains. I mean, it says that up front, but The Villainomicon had 20+ pages of rules material - new powers, new specialties, running disaster scenarios ... it was useful stuff at the time but most of that material has been integrated in the newer rulebook or other supplements. It doesn't need to be in this book and Adversaries does not feel lacking without it. 

So yes, I like this book a lot. If you're just getting started with ICONS there is enough in the main book to run multiple sessions, but once you get going this is a strong addition. From villains and backgrounds and organizations to help build your setting, to examples of how to make strong themed characters, it's a great resource. 

ICONS Menagerie

 

I admit I haven't run ICONS in a while but I still follow the game and figure I will probably run it in the not too distant future. A while back I decided to catch up on the steady stream of supplements that Ad Infinitum has been releasing and now I have a stack of books for ICONS sitting on the desk. As I work my way through them I will share my thoughts here. 

From the beginning ICONS was a nicely complete system. The original book managed to pack in some stock characters, animals, and supervillains on top of a complete superhero RPG. This made it easy to run right out of that first book. The Assembled Edition had even more of this kind of support built in. Additionally the game has never lacked hero and villain options with multiple books of those - a supers RPG staple - showing up in the first year ... which was 2010?! How has it been more than ten years since this game came out?  

Menagerie is dated 2020 so strong support continues into the now. If books of supervillains are the monster manual of superhero games then this is ... a lot like a monster manual for -other- games. A strong point - this is not just a bunch of statblocks. 

• The first ten pages discuss how animals were designed for ICONS and their role in a superhero campaign
• Then we get twenty pages of regular, real-world animals grouped by type. stats, powers, qualities, and a general description for each animal entry.
• After this we have 5 pages of animal powers, including specific coverage of Animal Mimicry where a character's powers are based on directly duplicating the powers of an animal. This is a common enough thing that it's worth covering here especially. It's sort of a power framework or array (to steal terms form other supers games) that lets you turn that first part of the book into your own personal power catalog. Handy!
• Next we have about ten pages of Prehistoric Creatures that hits all the expected notes and briefly discusses ways these things could end up in your modern day superhero game ... because with any decent GM you know they will.

• Getting towards the back of the book we have Fantastic Creatures - this is your actual D&D Monster Manual section. Angels, Demons, Dragons, Elementals, Fairies, Undead - this is a solid representation of "normal" fantasy monsters and there are multiple entries for most of those categories. Much like dinosaurs a GM worth his salt is going to drop these in at some point. 
• The last section, about 5 pages, is pretty much your typical sci-fi movie monster set - androids, robots, giant bugs, blobs ... all reasonable things to drop into a superhero campaign.

So it's a solid book and I think it's an excellent purchase for anyone running an ICONS game or thinking about running an ICONS game - because it will help spawn some new ideas. As always Dan Houser's art is perfect for this game and has only gotten better over the (ten!) years. 

The RPG Catch-Up post

Despite the silence this month I have managed to get in some games - here's what's been going on at the beginning of the new year:

• I'm actually playing in two games! At the same time! Not literally!
• Paladin Steve's Pathfinder campaign is about to make it's 5th anniversary. We're 10th level now and even playing once a month, roughly, it does feel like a nice long continuous campaign. It's clearly going to outlive the system that spawned it ... and I don't care at all.  
• Variable Dave has been running his 50 Fathoms campaign weekly for around 10 sessions now and it's going really well. I have not played in an extended Savage Worlds game in a very long time - actually never this long - and it's cool to see the intended progression at work. Playing a squid-faced water mage and ace swordsman has been a ton of fun. People always know when I'm speaking in character because I put my hand in front of my face and wiggle my fingers like tentacles and it cracks us up every time.
• In general it's really nice to be playing in some games regularly for a change. I've been a constant DM for so long it's good to have that perspective from the other side of the table and it helps remind me of the way the fun works on that side of things too.
• The main campaign which has run mostly consistently every two weeks is the "Classic Cormyr" 5th Edition D&D game. 
• I really liked running Storm King's Thunder but I felt like I needed to focus on just running one D&D game for a while -not the 3 I was attempting- to keep on some kind of regular schedule. The players liked playing through Keep on the Borderlands and when I explained my thinking on what other old classic modules we could play through as this campaign the immediately voted to make it "the game". Most of them have not played through these old adventures because they are too young or if they did it was back in 1st or 2nd edition and it's pretty fuzzy. 
• It's fun for me because it gives me a framework to build around but the process of updating to 5th gives me some space to flex my creative muscles in tweaking the encounters and working up some hopefully memorable characters to encounter, both good and bad.
• They are now finished with the Keep and next on the agenda is The Isle of Dread which starts later this week! Down the road we will probably encounter some Giants and then likely Descend into the Depths of the Earth.
• As a holiday one-off I ran Day of the Swarm for ICONS - yes, a Supers game again! It went pretty well so I expect ICONS will show up again as an ad-hoc game.
• I also managed to run another session of our extremely intermittent Marvel Heroic game! I will write it up in the future but the start of a new Event saw the return of Hercules, new writers for Colossus and Iron Man, and the first appearance of Wolverine. It took some time to shake off the rust but we had fun and this may turn into a once-a-month game to try and keep the rust off.

For the rest of the year I would like to keep these things stable and work in more as much as I can. Hopefully SKT will drop back into the rotation at some point, Savage Rifts is still being asked for regularly, and I'd love to run another fixed-run Star Wars game. We will see but it all looks pretty promising at this point. 

Day 24: Share a PWYW publisher who should be charging more

I do not consistently pick up anything from any PWYW publisher so I do not have a perfect answer for this question. There is one small publisher that I have consistently purchased from so I'm going to talk about them: Fainting Goat Games

Mostly I know them as publishers of a lot of interesting little adventures for ICONS. Now they do work for other systems as well but ICONS is the one I use them for the most. The "Improbable Tales" series is almost completely great - an interesting scenario, stats for everyone and everything in the adventure, ideas for leading into the run, and ideas for follow-ups. They're roughly 20-30 pages long and cover some classic comic book situations.

They did a series of individual characters in a couple of different lines - Space Supers for cosmic style games and Justice Wheels for more typical four color games but with each one featuring  character who uses a vehicle.

They also did a city and cosmic setting supplement for ICONS under the Stark City line. If you're hunting for a setting or just want something to steal stuff from they are quite useful.

Anyway, that's my nomination!

Day 8: What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2 hours or less?

This is an easy one for me: ICONS. I've written a ton about it, I've played quite a bit of it, and it is still hands-down my champion for quick and easy play.

Runners-Up:

• If I couldn't play ICONS and had a short window I'd probably go with one of its parent games - Marvel Super Heroes, the 80's TSR RPG. Hand out some character cards and get to fighting evil!
• Another surprisingly quick option is another Marvel game: Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Again, hand out sheets for Iron Man or Spider Man and go!
• Outside of this I'll go with "Savage Worlds" - characters are fairly quick to create and gameplay moves right along, especially with a session or two of experience and it feels like you're getting a lot done. 

Superhero Settings and Me

I've been digging through the superhero RPG shelves quite a bit the last couple of weeks and I spent some time thinking about settings - specifically campaign settings for superhero games.

In the ancient times of the early 80's there was Champions. Lots of Champions - and occasional episodes of Villains and Vigilantes. We didn't really have a specified setting - we just ran some games and assumed everybody's characters were available and local to "super city USA". There were suggestions in various books about setting it in your home town but I never cared for that idea. Partly because it seems limiting to me to set it in a real world city as-is. Partly because DFW isn't on a coast so you lose all of those ocean hooks from sinking ships to invasions from Atlantis to random sea monster attacks. Champions had an implied setting with organizations like VIPER and various heroes and villains but never went into detail on cities and nations.  We treated it kind of like we treated most of our D&D games - assumed/implied setting without getting too detailed on the larger picture.

Mid 80's we got a Marvel game and a DC game. We played them in-universe. Why wouldn't you?

In the 90's Champions finally put out a dedicated setting book with "Champions Universe". It was kind of cool but it was also a jumbled conglomeration of notes about characters, organizations, and world information that was way more than any of us were looking for at the time. I also wonder how much of it came from someone's campaign as opposed to being written up specifically for this book. I never worried about ti too much as anything other than a back up reference in case I needed to throw in a random organization for something.

My Champions games in the 90's ended up set in what I called "Miami 2000". It's a little dated now, but I love Florida as a superhero setting: Ocean access, home of the space program, the Everglades, the occasional hurricane threat, plus proximity to Communist Cuba, the historical pirate waters of the Caribbean, and the Bermuda Triangle. This is all great stuff for running a superhero campaign and it's all built right in. I have lived in Florida multiple times and also watched a lot of Miami Vice, so it was easy for me to envision the whole thing in my head. It represented a softening of my attitude towards real-world cities but only to a degree as my version of Miami roughly ten years in the then-future was altered in many ways. I started with a simple fold-up map of the city circa 1990 and had so many notes and changes by the end I'm not sure anyone could have deciphered it but me. A lot of it never saw table-time as I didn't run nearly as much as I had hoped but it was there, waiting. I still have most of the notes but I lost the main map somewhere along the way. I'm sure at some point Miami will return in one of my games - it's too good to ignore.

The biggest change of the 2000's has been my own personal drift from Champions to Mutants and Masterminds as my supers game of choice. M&M comes with Freedom City as its own setting and it's a great one. A nod to all kinds of comics, particularly the silver age, it's the reason M&M exists as Steve Kenson actually wrote it first for a different game. When that game folded part of the deal to publish the setting was to come up with a new system for superhero play - a d20 game.  As much as I like Freedom City and M&M I have probably run fewer than 25 sessions of the game. Most of those were scattered one-offs with the occasional two-parter or three-session run here and there. So we've never really spent time digging in to the setting, making it our own. I'm hoping that will change soon.

The second biggest emergence of the last ten years for me is ICONS. Lighter than M&M it's a great game, a nod to Marvel Super Heroes, and it's amazingly playable. For a more casual style of play it's just the best thing I have found. There are a ton of PDF adventures out there for it along with hero and villain supplements if you want them. Spurred by the revelation that was this game I started coming up with a new setting for my own games and ended up with "Atomic City". It's somewhat detailed in some areas and very loose in others, mainly because it's developing as we play rather than via me writing up 1000 pages of history. Sketch out the big picture, worry about the details when they come up. I went west coast instead of east this time but it's still a coastal American city with a growing population of super-types. I was happy enough with it that I've used it for some  M&M games too.

Finally we also had a new round of Marvel and DC games. I've written quite a bit about the Marvel Heroic game here and it ended up being a third style of game (with Champs and M&M being more detailed and ICONS being more fast and loose), one that I liked way more than I expected. Of course we've played it in the Marvel Universe and enjoyed it every single time. DC was the initial release of M&M third edition and I didn't really care about playing it as "DC" until last year when Apprentice Red asked about doing that. I still wanted room to do our own thing within that universe so I used Emerald City, the M&M 3E west coast counterpart to Freedom City, with some tweaks to add it to the DC universe. After all, it's not like the "X City" naming convention is unknown in DC anyway. This turned out to be easier than I thought and I was pretty happy with it during our brief run.

Emerald City makes even more DC sense now since there is a set of adventures for M&M tied to EC that begin with a "precipitating event"  which grants a bunch of people superpowers. It looks a lot like the beginning of the CW's The Flash with the particle accelerator explosion and plays into a nice campaign from there. I plan to emphasize this even more the next time we play.

So M&M and ICONS have taken over as our main games and I have tied them to particular settings. Marvel and DC are occasional side trips and I expect to continue with their own built-in settings whenever they come up. I still like Champions and I do want to give it a chance with my current group of friends and Apprentices but it will probably be sometime next year. I'm not sure what I would do there - go with Millenium City from 5th edition and the MMO? Resurrect Miami 2000? Roll it in to Atomic City since I use a lot of Champions villains there anyway? Not sure - we will cross that bridge when we get there.

The dream setup: A regular M&M campaign with a group based in Freedom City, another group running in Emerald City, and an occasional Cosmic game with members of both groups taking part. Additionally a M&M game running in Atomic City in its own universe with its own mix of players and the occasional crossover with the Freedomverse campaign. ICONS would still be "The Animated Series" for Atomic City run as one-off adventures when the option presented itself. Marvel and DC sprinkled in as completely separate games here and there. At some point: an ultimate finale crossover event where everyone picks their favorite character between all of the games, adjusted to make sure we have each one represented as a one-time, translated into one system, and run through a weekend-long epic adventure.

Could it happen? Sure. Will it happen? Probably not, as I'm not sure how I would find the time to run all of these games often enough to call them a "campaign". Maybe of one of the Apprentices started up his own game ... Anyway there's the backstory and the dream. More to come - a lot more - the rest of this month.

ICONS Kickstarter - Against the Axis

Another Kickstarter and this time it's World War II Superheroes! The setting is Stark City, an ICONS setting which was Kickstarted a while back and delivered on all of its promises. It's written by Steve Perrin whose main fame is tied to Runequest and other BRP games but he's done some interesting work with superhero games as well. There will also be Supers and Savage Worlds conversions as fairly easily reached stretch goals too. I like ICONS, I like WW2 superheroics, and I like the people working on this one, so I backed it and I thought I would share.

RPGaDay - Day 4 - Most Surprising Game

Multiple answers here:

ICONS

Who would have thought that a lightweight supers RPG would a) be good and b) come from the guy behind Mutants and Masterminds?! There's an amazing balance of just enough substance to sketch out a character yet light enough mechanics to keep it fast and easy. It's a great game, especially with kids. I've written about it a lot over the last 5 years so here's a link to my posts. I thought for decades that a "decent" superhero game just inherently needed 300 pages of rules and this is the game that proved me wrong - to myself.

Pathfinder

I ran 3rd edition D&D with only short breaks for almost ten years. By the end I was burned out and tired of the system and never expected to run it for any length of time again. I spent roughly 3 years running 4th edition and then took a look at Pathfinder and felt the spark once again. A lot of it has to do with Paizo and the great job they do managing the whole thing. Their willingness to experiment with things is a lot of fun too from Iron Gods to Mythic to Unchained. Some has to do with the community of players and people who post up session summaries, reviews, and aids for the busy GM. A lot of it has to do with the solidity of a system that's been out in the public in some form for 15 years now. I don't know the exact ratios - all I know is that I am having fun running D&D type games again and have been for the last couple of years. Link to ridiculous number of posts about it here.

Weekly Update: Post-Cowboy Monday, TV, D&D, and ICONS

• The Cowboys lost in Green Bay - regardless of calls etc. this was a much  better season than anyone expected at the beginning of the season so I can't complain too much. My personal antidote to the playoff-loss blues was to immediately jump into our monthly Pathfinder game. It's good to have something else to focus on, like managing our kingdom and chasing down a marauding werewolf. 

• Agent Carter - I liked it. I'm hoping they do more with it than a short mini series as I think a 40's-50's spy show has a ton of potential. Also, as Apprentice Who pointed out, "60 seconds in and this show has 100% more Avenger than the first episodes of "Agents of Shield".

Nothing wrong with this disguise at all

• Galavant - The whole family liked it, from the musical theater college kid to Lady Blacksteel to even me. I had low expectations and I was very pleasantly surprised. It's like a clever web series with a real budget. 

• The D&D Basic Rules for 5th Edition have an online site  now. It's not quite the PFSRD but it's not bad after skimming through it.

• ICONS seemed quiet to me last year after the release of the new edition but there is some new activity to report. 
• ICONS A to Z is a new biweekly series of supplements on various super-topics from Ad Infinitum
• The Metaskulk Invasion is a new adventure from Ad Infinitum
• Fainting Goat put out Lair of the Wrathmaster for ICONS
• FG also released Villians Accelerated, a collection of bad guys for ICONS

Now I haven't tried any of these yet but I've liked just about everything Fainting Goat has released and Dan Houser's adventures for AI have been a lot of fun too. I see no reason to think that has changed for either company.

Thrifty Gamer Alert: ICONS on sale

A note to thrifty gamers out there: Icons is on sale at DTRPG as a pay-what-you-want special.

I assume this is because of the announcement of the Assembled Edition coming this summer.

EDIT: Update from the man himself here.

Regardless, if you're interested, it's a good opportunity to take a look at the game for a low price. Also, the Villainomicon is set at the same price as well:

I don;t know that I would call it "essential" to the game but it does have some Q&A, introduces the "pyramid test" concept, and has lots of pre-made bad-guys ready to drop in as needed.