Icon Success!

[TFVanguard]

Well, finally tried out Icon with the pulp genre, using a very old 'classic' Indiana Jones adventure, the Ikons of Ikkammen. I'm really pleased and how well it turned out and how smoothly Icon's skill system worked for it.

Obviously, I'm not going to put up the exact conversion... but I'm curious if there's interest in this sort of thing around these parts. There doesn't seem to be a 'generic' Icon site out there anywhere.

[Phoenix]

I think your at the closest thing to a 'generic' Icon site that there is.

Congrats on the game.

[Diamond]

I have also done a long Pulp campaign using the ICON ruleset. I had to do only the tiniest of changes to make it more pulpy. First, I slightly adjusted the skill list. Almost all of that was cosmetic, applying period names but I did make a few real changes. Second, I dropped advantages/disadvantages. This was to speed things up. Pulp characters needed to be iconic in addition to ICONic, so I wanted to go with broad strokes of the pen and not get bogged down in details. Finally, I used the existing ICON psychic powers to model suprenatural stuff, which was low-key and subtle at first, growing very gradually more noticable.

I finally ended the campaign because I was having trouble running out of ideas. Here's some highlights of adventure summaries from the campaign, but it is not exhaustive:

Heros cross africa to retrieve a lost artifact, racing rival treasure-hunters and a Nazi airship.

Heros uncover the secrets of a strange crystal, leading them to capture at the hands of Antlanean warriors and travel to the last surviving Atlantis dome beneath the Atlantic.

Heros follow clues of superweapon field testing in Spanish Revolution, leading them to Bavarian castle where they extract a scientist who tells them about a secret base in Brazil where chemicals are being used to create a secret undead army.

Heros quest to learn Borneo animialism to stop a plague of rats swarming out of New York's sewer system.

Heros investegate a mob gathering, when they discover an occult voodoo attempt to take over all the mobs by an Italian facist.

Heros blow up a german superweapon, a fixed-place supercannon dug into a mountainside with the range to send shells to New York.

Intrigue at Monte Carlo involving a car chase in the cliffside roads, high-stakes gambling and a fierce beach battle while one of their comrades is buried up to their neck in the incoming tide.

A quest develops to find the lost works of Sun Tszu. Starting at a mansion in New York state, continuing on to thwart an attempt to destroy the Empire State Building (which would change the Feng Shui of the entire New York area), and climaxes in a archological dig in China which is a race against time because of oncoming Japanese forces invading from Manchuria.

Heroes must deal with a Chinese demon while escaping the fall of Nanking before the Japanese advance. Martial artists, gun-runners, and reporters complicate things.

The Heroes quest to find the fabled Shangri-La in order to better understand the power they glimpesed in Borneo. Their himilean quest is complicated by mercenaries out for revenge, a Japanese pulp hero team, and the mysterious Yeti.

Dispatched to find the rumored German base of "Newshwabenland" in Antartica, the adventurers discover a lost land filled with dinosaurs in a valley heated by geothermal springs.

Heros thwart a villain from affixing a mass mind-control device to the top of the Eiffel tower. French bordellos, the self-proclaimed daughter of Mata Hari, and communism complicates matters.

Heros meet with Polish intelligence agents to bring the "Bomba" machine, the secret to breaking the German "Enigma" encoder, out of the country ahead of the German invasion.

Working with French spies, the heroes sneak across the German border to investegate a German digging machine designed to breach or dig a tunnel under the Maginot line. A pitched battle aboard the machine sends it into an unconstrolled dive which leads all aboard to a huge underground cavern....

...in this land hollowed out miles beneath Europe, the heros battle over the fate of this world and release a group of prehistoric humanoid reptiles from their eons-old slumber.

[Owen E Oulton]

I have also done a long Pulp campaign using the ICON ruleset. I had to do only the tiniest of changes to make it more pulpy. First, I slightly adjusted the skill list. Almost all of that was cosmetic, applying period names but I did make a few real changes. Second, I dropped advantages/disadvantages. This was to speed things up. Pulp characters needed to be iconic in addition to ICONic, so I wanted to go with broad strokes of the pen and not get bogged down in details.

Hmmmm... I think if I were running a pulp ICON game, I might abbreviate the Ads/Disads list, but I'd definitely keep some specifically to give the pulp flavour. F'rinstance, Doc Savage would have the advantages Scientific Genius (Multidisiplanary) and Wealth and the disadvantages Code of Honour (Defender) and (Oath of Celibacy). Monk Mayfair would have the advantage Scientific Genius (Chemistry) and the disadvantages Rival (Ham Brooks) and Bloodlust. I would restrict the number of Traits available, but I'd definitely keep them.

I agree, however, that ICON's version of Psionics does well to simulate some of the more esoteric powers displayed by some pulp heroes, like Kent Allard/Lamont Cranston/The Shadow's ability to cloud men's minds.