First Impressions: ICON

This week I played my first session of ICON, Massif Press’s tactical fantasy RPG. It’s my usual group less two players, so that makes one GM and then four of us on the other side of the table. So far we’ve done character creation, introductions, a morsel of narrative play, and a few hours of combat. At this point I can give some early impressions.

The book is still very much in an alpha state (as indicated on the itch page, which describes the game as a “playtest”). Color is used to differentiate elements in the text, which is an accessibility issue^[1]. There are a couple terms we’ve run into with conflicting definitions, such as pierce (does it ignore armor and weak, armor and vigor, or all three?) and regeneration (does it cure you or give you vigor?). No character sheets are provided, though we’re using third-party sheets built into our VTT of choice. I can’t imagine that these sorts of layout or editing issues will make it into the final product, but they are true of the book as it exists today.

ICON is divided into four sections (called “books”): one for narrative play, one for combat, one for adventuring, and one for foes. I can’t speak to the GM-facing portions like the custom rules in the adventure section, or pretty much any of the foes. The player-facing sections are all readable, though the book’s navigability is mixed at best.

Neither the narrative nor adventure rules are much to write home about. The narrative rules are a stripped-down version of Blades in the Dark, with some tweaks to lean away from the gritty and punishing design of the original game towards a lighter or more heroic tone. We haven’t engaged with them too deeply yet, but I’m pretty confident our experience playing Blades will transfer directly. While I’m not too impressed with the Blades clone here, I am glad to see significant improvement over LANCER. The out-of-combat pilot rules in LANCER seem basically superfluous to me, an RPG coat of paint over a wargame core^[2]. ICON provides much more scaffolding for play than its older, mech-ier cousin.

There’s a provided setting, which I don’t feel strongly about. The game doesn’t make any stumbles (boring lore dumps, glaring racism, etc) and does an okay job of setting up a world for adventure and heroics. There’s some stock humans and various animal-folk, and they’re living in a post-post-apocalyptic world dealing with the ruins of an older one. Thus far I would toss everything I’ve been given in favor of Songs for the Dusk, which does “hopeful post-post-apocalyptic Forged in the Dark” in a way I find more interesting.

The combat rules are where ICON distinguishes itself. The game is honest about its abstraction, kind of like a classic JRPG. Combat takes place in a square gridded area. Each grid square has a given height, with no possibility for overhangs (easing the logistical challenge of terrain building). Ranges and speeds are given in squares, not distances, and no euclidian calculations are ever required. All the finer details of reality are sanded away, in favor of a mostly-unambiguous tactics game.

All the combat rules are delightfully non-fiddly. You don’t roll and track initiative; it’s a simple snake draft instead^[3]. Save are a flat d20 against a DC of 10, and attack rolls are a flat d20 against your opponent’s Defense. Neither of these require arithmetic or calculation. Defenses are mercifully low compared to other D&D-derivatives, with only the most agile player characters at a Defense of 10 (others as low as 6), so most attacks land. Even if you do miss, you deal a little damage. These are all little things, but they add up to big wins for clarity of play and quality of life.

A nice set of combat abstractions is just the foundation, of course. Where ICON’s combat shines are its Abilities. Every character gets two action points to spend a turn; they can either spend them on a basic ability or one of dozens of bespoke combat abilities. For example, here’s one I made great use of in our session:

CAVALIERE

1 action, Attack
+1 boon
It is not enough to rudely and plainly strike your foe down. One must make it entertaining.
Effect: Dash 3, then dash 1 space to the side of your movement. This movement ignores all movement penalties and has phasing. However:

• You must move if able
• You must move as far as possible
• You cannot move diagonally during this movement.

Attack: On hit: [D]+fray. Miss: fray.
Effect: Foe is dazed.
Finishing Blow or Slay: Summon a bomb

The upside is that each ability has a clear-but-interesting procedure. There’s no linear fighters and quadratic wizards here^[4]! The glaring downside is the weight of the jargon. Action, attack, boon, effect, dash, phasing, [D], fray, dazed, finishing blow, slay, and bomb are all referring to specific game mechanics^[5]. These keywords aren’t intuitive either: “finishing blow” doesn’t refer to an attack that finishes off an opponent (that would be “slay”). To its credit, book does its best to provide each class with reminders of the relevant rules for its abilities, but this doesn’t help when trying to get the hang of the game. We had more than a few exchanges that went something like

Player: And now the weird slime guy is dazed.
GM: What’s dazed do again?
Player: Uhhh, that sounds like your problem.
Sound of everyone scrolling through the PDF

Time will tell if this is a new-player problem, or a complex-game problem. My guess is that it’s a little bit of both.

I’m also curious how character growth will feel. In the last few games I’ve played, characters have grown painfully unwieldy as they gain advances. Either the characters grow so fictionally and mechanically powerful that nothing interesting can stand in their way (my experience in Fellowship 2e and Armour Astir) or they grow so mechanically complex that keeping track of what everyone can do is impossible (my experience in Starfinder, or any D&D-style game with spellcasters). Complexity growth seems pretty tame in ICON - even at higher levels, players can only have up to six combat abilities available to them in any given adventure. We’ll see about power growth, though!

Currently I’m optimistic for the game and campaign, and eager to play more sessions as my horrible little jester that I’ve created.