TheRPGSite

I play Icons, but I'm interested in stuff from just about any game; so if you think a book it might be useful or inspirational or just fun, tell me about it regardless of system- or  really even genre (I have Kingsport from CoC as one of the small towns in my setting).

Go!

I'm currently running an Icons campaign based on the Savage World Necessary Evil book. It took a bit of tweaking and I don't care for suggested setup which puts an NPC in charge of the player characters, but otherwise it's really rich source of ideas. And the basic concept of playing villains turned resistance fighters is a lot of fun.

Another good resource is Hero Games's Villainy Amok. It's basically a supers adventures toolkit.

The best resource of all though is the Icons Character Folio, the character generator application. It's just awesome.

The Rifts Gamemaster's Guide has 100 interesting and involved game-starting point ideas. Albeit they are for the Palladium Megaverse setting, but they could be easily adapted to any game system.

Quote from: Soylent Green;492668I'm currently running an Icons campaign based on the Savage World Necessary Evil book. It took a bit of tweaking and I don't care for suggested setup which puts an NPC in charge of the player characters, but otherwise it's really rich source of ideas. And the basic concept of playing villains turned resistance fighters is a lot of fun.

Another good resource is Hero Games's Villainy Amok. It's basically a supers adventures toolkit.

The best resource of all though is the Icons Character Folio, the character generator application. It's just awesome.

I'll have to get the Villainy Amok book, and I've already got  the folio (for 1$) and I agree that everyone should have a copy.  I picked up the Villanomicon for $1.99 last night and although I wont use most of the villains, I really thought "Monster Mastermid" was quite cool.

The Lejentia series is a extremely well-written setting with a colorful and complex storyline. It doesn't have any rules; it's designed to be adapted to whatever existing game system you use. The characters and world it uses are very interesting and complex.

Essentially, the world of Lejentia is at war with two main factions: the Elven Compact vs. the Tarin Tor, the former being allied with enormous bug-shaped demon-worshiping aliens & Bazaroth, a demon lord who is leading his army on a quest to conquer the Hells of every world he comes to.

It's out of print, but you can still find it on Amazon. I highly reccomend this series.

Quote from: Aos;492673I'll have to get the Villany Amok book, and I've already got a copy of the folio (for 1$) and I agree that everyone should have a copy.  I piked up the Villanomicon for $1.99 last night and although I want use most of the villains, I really thought "Monster Mastermid" was quite cool.

Monster Mastermind appears in the Icons adventure "The Mastermind Affair" as he pits his wits against Mister Mastermind with the player characters caught in the middle. It's deliberately confusing but highly enjoyable and flexible adventure and well worth checking out.

Normals Unbound
Dark Champions
Alien Wars

IME great stuff to draw from for a Supers campaign.

Regards,
David R

Sorry for the shit spelling in post # 4.

Necessary evil is a solid plot point adventure. Although I think our fun has been acting like not quite mad supervillains with our own goals.

Good supplements:

Settings:
Nocturnals (for Mastermind1E) its a low powered world based on Dan Breretons Nocturnals comics. Which are an interesting Supers with pulphorror vibes.

Century City: (For Palladium Heroes Unlimited) A nice made up super city, well done. I seem to have found some typoes and wordswitches that needed to be fixed) but its dense text and a decently fun looking place to play.

Providence World Book (OOP, for its own game.) Want superheroes in a very strange fantasy setting? That's  a default for the game. However, the rules are hoary and obtuse, and overly complex. I love the game, but yeah, its all that. It made a decidedly wonderful ICONS worldbook. The Worldbook has almost no rules, just world stuff. Although some of the world details you might like to have are in the rule book, its possible to run without it.

Cemtauri Knights: Semi-realistic Sci Fi by David Pulver for BESM2E of all things? It has "magic" (Nanotech manipulation by a very few lucky people who took insane risks.) Bioroids, sentient tanks and so on.


Essential Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe (or the original trades): These things aren't game supplements but they're a wealth of resources for how to do a bio, and inspiration for superheroes, villains, and more.


Adventures:
White Out
Skeletron Key

both of those seem fairly interesting and a bit more serious.

You may want to look at the AWESOME Vigilance Press stuff (I own none of it, because I'm poor, but just excerpts and general reviews have been very interesting and solid--notably their WWII supers stuff.)

Rules:
Icon's up and coming Team Up book--very necessary. I'd suggest the Villainomicon only for the (few) rules and ideas therein. The villains are kinda lame IMHO. Icon's seems to want to take the "sillier" side of supers to M&M's more serious side. I prefer seeing a bit of both.

Quote from: Silverlion;492732Necessary evil is a solid plot point adventure. Although I think our fun has been acting like not quite mad supervillains with our own goals.

Good supplements:

Settings:
Nocturnals (for Mastermind1E) its a low powered world based on Dan Breretons Nocturnals comics. Which are an interesting Supers with pulphorror vibes.

Century City: (For Palladium Heroes Unlimited) A nice made up super city, well done. I seem to have found some typoes and wordswitches that needed to be fixed) but its dense text and a decently fun looking place to play.

Providence World Book (OOP, for its own game.) Want superheroes in a very strange fantasy setting? That's  a default for the game. However, the rules are hoary and obtuse, and overly complex. I love the game, but yeah, its all that. It made a decidedly wonderful ICONS worldbook. The Worldbook has almost no rules, just world stuff. Although some of the world details you might like to have are in the rule book, its possible to run without it.

Cemtauri Knights: Semi-realistic Sci Fi by David Pulver for BESM2E of all things? It has "magic" (Nanotech manipulation by a very few lucky people who took insane risks.) Bioroids, sentient tanks and so on.


Essential Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe (or the original trades): These things aren't game supplements but they're a wealth of resources for how to do a bio, and inspiration for superheroes, villains, and more.


Adventures:
White Out
Skeletron Key

both of those seem fairly interesting and a bit more serious.

You may want to look at the AWESOME Vigilance Press stuff (I own none of it, because I'm poor, but just excerpts and general reviews have been very interesting and solid--notably their WWII supers stuff.)

Rules:
Icon's up and coming Team Up book--very necessary. I'd suggest the Villainomicon only for the (few) rules and ideas therein. The villains are kinda lame IMHO. Icon's seems to want to take the "sillier" side of supers to M&M's more serious side. I prefer seeing a bit of both.

I like the sound of Centauri Knights. I've got the villainomicon; it's on sale in pdf for $1.99 right now, btw.

As we are talking ICONS adventures, might as well cover the lot.

The Skeletron Key
The theft of a military battlesuit prototype leads the heroes into an adventure involving mercenaries, missing scientists and top-secret neural network research project.

This adventure has some pretty good ideas but I found it a bit linear and it left  too many things left unexplained. Also adventure tends to assume the heroes will fail in the initial encounter which is never a good idea in my book, even if sweetened with Determination Points.

That said, after fixing a few plot holes and changing the sequence of things a bit I found it runs rather well.
 
One thing that does make this adventure very useful is that it explains the Success Pyramid which is a very versatile way of handling complex tasks in ICONS. But that's covered now in the Villainonicon too now.

Sins of the Past
In this adventure the Silver Age meets the Golden Age as the player characters are called to deal with legacy of secrets and grudges from the heroes from a previous generation.

This isn't just the best of the ICONS adventures, it's actually one of the best adventures I've ever read full-stop. Sins of the Past offers action (pitting the heores against a large number of supervillains), investigation and roleplaying opportunities in equal measure. The structure is very flexible and doesn't force the players down any specific path. But above this is an adventure that has heart.

A nice touch is the "In play" sections in which writer describes what actually happened in a playtest session. These often vary significantly from how the adventure is written and provides the GM a good insight into how things might go.


A Murder of Crowes
Spooky Halloween adventure in a small, rural town. Unlike the other adventures this one best suited for a smaller group of more street-level heroes.

The adventure is quite good on the wholeand suitable creepy, but like Skeletron Key (also by Kenson) I found a number of plot holes especially in the backstory that required fixing before I could actually run it.

In play the fixed adventure was worked very, very well. One curious fact is that this is the only adventure the player characters solved entirely using their civilian identities.

The Mastermind Affair
The heroes get caught up in a contest between evil masterminds.

This adventure is even more flexible than Sins of The Past. It sets up the situation, describes the goals of the NPCs and provides a lot of ideas about what the NPCs can do to further their goals without undue making assumptions on how the players will react. It also provides a lot of good GMing advice about running investigations and making scenes interesting and features an interesting set of supervillains.

Just be aware the adventure is total chaos once it get's going so make sure you get a good night's rest  before running it.

Adventures I've not yet run.


Jailbreak -  The heroes are invited to test the security of a new prison for super villains. Easily my least favourite ICONs adventure by far.

The Aotearoa Gambit - Short but epic set in New Zealand with an awesome set piece scene. It was released to raise money for the NZ earthquake relief - hence the rather heavy handed NZ themes.

Danger In Dunsmouth - Another occult based adventure but more action orientated than creepy.

White Out - A really solid global scale adventure with tons of opportunities to do cool stuff.

Gangbusters - Classic crime-fighting style adventure. On first read it seemed a bit linear as it's very much like an old MSH adventure.

Anything by Chris McGlothlin is generally amazing.

The Coriolis Effect for Champions 3rd ed.  Sparse, and kind of has the whole playing-in-someone-else's campaign problem, but a great adventure for playing up the soap opera side of comic books.

The Blood and Strike Force by Aaron Allston.  More of the Marvel-esque everyone-is-related-to-everyone-else feel.

The old Mayfair DC Heroes adventure Countdown to Armageddon is probably the only adventure I've ever seen that really does the whole Silver Age superheroes-as-demigods thing right.  It comes with a warning label: you should not try to play in this adventure unless your character is as powerful as Superman.

The pre-Crisis Superman.

I quite liked Crooks for M&M, although i was thrown a bit by reference to an atrocity by a super-villain at a Duran-Duran concert...

Anyone have an opinion on the Champions books, Hidden Lands and/or  Monster Island?

FWIW, my campaign is similar  in feel to Kirby's Fourth World books, post Jane Foster Thor and Morrision's JLA- so its more about 4 color cosmic action and less about Spider-Man/X-men style interpersonal drama. Not that there is anything wrong with the latter play style, mind you; it's just not my bag.

Seconding the recommendations on Century Station (for Heroes Unlimited; great, sandboxy setting for a supers game).

I love the idea of Necessary Evil. The plot campaign is so-so but the core ideas are totally worth stealing for your favorite supers system and/or universe (e.g. substitute Doctor Destruction for Doctor Doom, and his actual identity for the obvious Marvel analogue, and you're good to go). I imagine the campaign should feel a lot like the early run of Thunderbolts, with PCs essentially as villains who get a shot at being heroes, and who knows, might even grow to like it.

Quote from: The Butcher;492983I love the idea of Necessary Evil. The plot campaign is so-so but the core ideas are totally worth stealing for your favorite supers system and/or universe (e.g. substitute Doctor Destruction for Doctor Doom, and his actual identity for the obvious Marvel analogue, and you're good to go). I imagine the campaign should feel a lot like the early run of Thunderbolts, with PCs essentially as villains who get a shot at being heroes, and who knows, might even grow to like it.

In my ICONS/NE campaign I simply got rid of the whole Dr Destruction role. I just don't like the idea of having an NPC in charge of the player characters and telling them what to do. It does mean I need to be more creative with the scenario hooks but overall I think it works better if the players get to choose which leads to follow up on and which targets to strike. But I still get to use most of the plot points and savage tales contained in the book.

Quote from: Aos;492972Anyone have an opinion on the Champions books, Hidden Lands and/or  Monster Island?

FWIW, my campaign is similar  in feel to Kirby's Fourth World books, post Jane Foster Thor and Morrision's JLA- so its more about 4 color cosmic action and less about Spider-Man/X-men style interpersonal drama. Not that there is anything wrong with the latter play style, mind you; it's just not my bag.

If this ever come out there should be plenty of Kirby-esque ICONS material. http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?571263-Hero-Pack-3-Hero-Pack-2-Bonus-Pack/page5

(http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e238/supervillain75/drtenebrouscolorsample.png)

Yeah, that does look pretty cool. I definitely like Houser's pseudo Kirby style better than the style he tends to use in other ICONS stuff.

Anyway, here are two NPC's from my game they are Universals (space gods or something like that) and the artifact is the Seer Sphere.

(http://i1139.photobucket.com/albums/n552/Junkyinthethrunky/Ord.jpg)

That's just awesome!

One of my notes for future campaign to run is  "combine Transhuman Space, Blue Planet, and Centauri Knights into a single setting".

The Day After Ragnarok.
Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog.
The Quintessential Monk.
The Ultimate Alien Anthology (Star Wars D20).
Uresia.
Dark Tech (ICE Spacemaster).

Blacksand.  Alternately, Vornheim.

RPGPundit

I've recently acquired a physical copy of Villainy Amok, and a .pdf copy of Vornheim. I don't buy many supplements, but these two are both awesome.