Great little adventure. I ran it as a Muntants and Masterminds game online and it took us about 3.5 hours to get through. Its a pretty straight forward investigation with a clear objective. The characters are interesting and there is plenty of room for a GM to modify the story to personalize it to your needs. My players were all quite pleased with the result of the game.

A lot of useful things for Icons. For me it was mainly C, G, H, K, O, T and W but I thinnk every GM will find something of use in it :).

Great Power apporte plus de pouvoirs et surtout de précision sur ces pouvoirs mais aussi pas mal de précision sur les gadgets et véhicule, un must !. Great powers gives you more powers but moreover more precision to their functionning and more morever, gadget and vehicles, a must have book.

I was looking for a better clarification on "qualities" in terms of how they are applied during combat, or for specific examples on how they could be applied. Instead, this document is just another generalization about what "qualities" are in ICONS, with few specifics. It's simply not worth the money -- even if you just pay a dollar. Don't bother -- just look under the "Trouble" subsection of the main book and make your best guess.

I've been on the lookout for a new supers RPG for a couple years now and have often seen this title. After much consideration I went for the plunge and purchased it along with the other helpful titles of Origins, Great Power, and A-Z. I've run a couple sessions with my gaming group and here's what I found I think is worthing mentioning.

1) The gaming system is simple and fast. I've read that ICONS has its roots in FATE (which I've never played). Its resolution of attacks is simple, can be done in a single roll (using some options) and each round can go very quickly. If you like to focus on the story more than the numbers, you might like the way ICONS plays out. Because the system is fairly easy to understand, even a new player can join in readily. 2) Character Creation is very fast an intuitive. I found I could already "see" my character as I'm creating him/her and within about 10-15 minutes I was ready to go. Once you understand the range of 1-10, the GM can create villains and challengers withing moments. Some people enjoy the number crunching within a game vs the story within it. You might be a bit disappointed here, but this fits right within my expectations and hopes. 3) Qualities and Determination. Many games try to provide rules and options for running everything. ICONS likes to use Qualities and Determination points to accomplish many complex tasks. When I first started working with these, I struggled for a bit. But once I started realizing that Determination is basically Bennies in Savage Worlds and Qualities are ways to come up with quantifiable story elements to bonus or negative your results, it was pretty fun. Its also a great way to give those Determination points to a character that you always seem to "pick on" as the GM.

I have been very impressed by this game. I'm a veteran of Champions, Classic Marvel, M&M, Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion, Heroes Unlimited, and have found ICONS to be a great way to play a supers game. Too many times supers end up being so big for some systems that it overwhelms the rules or creates awkward mechanics. ICONS take it all in very well. We are able to have a meaningful adventure and get so much done in a short amount of time.

Its a great book for clarifications of the existing rules and to offer suggestions on how to play the game. There isn't anything "New" per say, but rather pulling together alot of bits from the other books so now they make alot more sense. Also the Archtypes are exteamly useful as either bases for characters or stock characters for pick up games. Got a new player, not sure if they are going to remain in your group or for reasons didn't have time to make a character? Just ask them what superhero they like and give them that archtype. Well worth the price.

A great book if you are running ICONS. While nothing in here is essential, the 13 archetypes and variations will save me hours of character building.

A great add on for ICONS.

Well, Icons is not my main superhero game, this honor goes to another game of the same game designer, Steve Kenson.

But Steve Kenson is a genius and he likes to tinker with different game engines for his superheros games and it gave me the need to read Icons, then Icons Assembled Edition and now Origins.

Origins is I think an interesting book for those who want to have more options for creating characters for Icons, from the archetypes who are more or less the same of M&M revamped quite intelligently for Icons :), from the point based creation which is a bit refined from the core book to the modeling character creation to the knacks. Everything in this book will be useful one way or the other for any Icons GM but also players :).

This is a great book, and an excellent resource for Icons. The PDF is reasonably priced, but $30 for the Premium Hardcover seems a bit steep, now that I have the book in hand. It's a nice little book, for sure, but it does seem a bit...slim for Thirty Smackeroos. That said, the content is great, the art keeps getting better, and it's a fun, useful, interesting read. The Archetypes are super handy, and the Background generator is fun to take for a spin.

Exselsior! Astounding! Amazing!

I love ICONS. It's by far my favorite still-in-print superhero game. It reminds me so much of the classic DC Heroes and Marvel Superhero RPG (T$R d100, not Saga) that I grew up playing. Origins adds another dimension to the game without getting too technical. And as always, the art in this book is phenomenal. Keep up the good work, Dan Hauser.

The Archetypes are perhaps long overdue. It's something I treasured in Mutants & Masterminds (Thanks Steve Kenson...) As a GM. I enjoy having them handy as villains or even rivals that can be thrown together on the fly.The math is even explained for each one, which some games don't do. They're balanced and very well thought out.

A lot of veteran ICONS fans were probably already generating characters in the system described in By the Numbers, but it was nice to see it officially outlined in a book. There were a few things some of us may have been guessing at.

I really enjoyed the Character Modeling section. I've attempted to approximate iconic characters from DC and Marvel before, often with staggering point totals and stats completely unbalanced with regular ICONS characters. Most random or 45 point ICONS pc's are like Peter Parker, any of the Teen Titans, or most of the New Mutants in their earliest fledgling days, which is good for an rpg setting. Lots of room to grow. However, if a full, experienced version of any of the named characters shows up in a regular ICONS game? The pc's may as well put in for vacation. Unless of course, the whole group is built and approved this way!

Thanks again for the benchmarks!

The background generator rocks, especially for players who don't have an extensive background in comics or gaming. It's also a nice idea generator for veteran gamers and GM tool.

It was great having the Specialties and knacks expanded upon. If you don't have ICONS A-Z, this was a great introduction to knacks.

The roles section was proprobably a little old hat for veteran supers gamers and life long comic fans, but again very well written an super useful for demonstrating the concepts to beginners. Good refresher course for the rest of us. I think every game needs new blood, and any way to bring more players in and make them feel at home is awesome.

Last, but worthy of mention and much praise, is the expanded list of supporting characters. I can't thank the authors enough for this time-saving treasure. Anything that makes ICONS, which is already a joy to GM, go any faster or easier, is very welcome.

A+ All around. I can't wait to see what comes next.

The original Sins of the Past adventure, published back in 2010, is one of the best scenarios ever written for the superhero game ICONS. Since its release, however, the system has undergone a revision and expansion published as the Assembled Edition in 2014.

Sins of the Past, Revisited is a 52-page adventure written by Theron Bretz, illustrated by Dan Houser—the same team that created the original edition—and published by Ad Infinitum Adventures for ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying: The Assembled Edition.

It does not only update the mechanical bits to reflect the most recent version of the game; it offers new material, game-master advice, and notes on the playtest games. There is more art and new maps, everything a GM needs to run exciting scenes of superheroic action.

To top it off, if you prefer to run ICONS using the original rules, this comes with the 2010 version of the adventure for free. This means you can enjoy the new materials without major system adjustments.

The adventure connects modern-day superheroes (and villains) with those of the Golden Age. I think the adventure might have the most impact if its chapters were introduced one at a time over the course of a long-running campaign, when some of the GM characters have become familiar figures of the game setting. This could create fantastic buy-in for the players, inviting their characters to shoulder a legacy.

So far so good, have run a few short games with it. The random generation characters didn't have enough scaling for me. Had to do a bit of house rule work. I like that it lets you be pretty free in combat though not as rules heavy. I use the optional rolling of having the players make most of the rolls.

I had previously read the 1st editon of Icons, the french translation since we were lucky in France to have one.

This "1.5" Assembled Edition is a very refined version of the first Icons, the mechanics has changed a little because the GM is now also throwing dice for the opposition but this is still the same mechanic overall.

What you can do with qualities have been delimited and unified and you have now possibilities to create your character with points but, the random method is still the best if you want to keep the Icons flavour :).

There is now rules for experience, world building, villains building and Icons can now more easily be played in campaign, but I think that there are more adapted games for that ;).

Overall, I never regretted to buy this and this is a much more Iconic Icons than the first :).

I purchased this adventure to use as a basis for the kickoff session of a Champions campaign using the HERO system. The scenes progressed very nicely to the final climax. The players were (pleasantly) surprised by the various complications thrown in to the otherwise straightforward path to the bad guy.

I particularly liked the emphasis on Roleplay Opportunities outlined in the Investigation scenes. The author did a great job with realistic NPC motivations and presenting situations without simple, binary solutions. For example, the players can easily go along with one NPC or the other, or take the time to find a compromise... but there isn't always time for compromise!

My only negative comment is that the premade characters are far too silly. I'm sure most people will think they are great :) It just isn't my style.

Not really a review - more a bit of observation. I've been playing with this for about a week now, and I've begun to form a base opinion. For creating a single character I still prefer a paper character sheet and pencil; but, when creating a bunch of characters (such as the batch I'm building for convention game) Icons Assembler makes things a lot easier - and faster. It also has the added benefit of producing an attractive - and readable - printed sheet (something that my handwriting does not do).

While playing with app I have found a few bugs - nothing major, just nuisance type stuff - but the developer has been pretty responsive when I've reached out to him.