I ran this adventure on the weekend with four players. We`ve been running ICONS for a while and I thought it would be a good break from the campaign we were running.

Reading through I remembered the old movie "1984" and "Brazil". So without telling my players anything I told them they just got off work and as usual it was raining. Footsteps echoeing against brick houses etc. They really enjoyed the mystery and all the NPCs doing what they normally wouldnt.

All in all it was simple scenario and it was up to GM to fluff it up. I like these simple suppliment over more detailed ones, there more room for individual groups to fit their form.

With Steve Kenson providing the storyline and Dan Houser providing the artwork, The RetConQuest is probably the closest thing ICONS has right now to an "instant classic." The premise is clever and the structure of the book, mirroring the structure of the adventure, reinforces the central plot by starting with Chapter 2 (you’ll find Chapter 1 at the end). Kenson suggests that this could be a good adventure for beginning an ICONS campaign, because many details of the campaign world are “up for grabs” and need not be learned before playing through this scenario. Longtime Avengers fans will perceive Master Tulku’s true identity immediately, but that doesn’t really lessen the fun. Aside from Houser’s artwork, the formatting is quite spare, even more minimalist than the norm than Adamant’s ICONS materials have set. There are a few little grammatical annoyances, and a few really noticeable errors that should have been caught in proofreading, such as the reference to "p. @@" of the ICONS rulebook on p. 7 of the adventure, and the fact that the word “page” is capitalized in the footers of even-numbered pages but not in the footers of the odd-numbered pages. Those kinds of things hold me back from giving the product a full five stars, but they shouldn’t hold you back from getting an evening or two of superheroic role-playing from this adventure.

In a nutshell, The RetConQuest is a solid adventure that seems -- structurally -- more appropriate as an introductory adventure rather than as a stand-alone adventure in an ongoing campaign.

The core conceit of 'normal humans' remembering their superpowered selves and slowly/instantaneously regaining their identities and abilities in an alternate timeline is a good one, allowing new players (and characters) to slowly be introduced to the character creation and task resolution rules of Icons without necessarily abandoning the game narrative completely. The plot twists seeded in the "initial" and "final" confrontations with Tempus Khan are also useful in terms of helping fine tune characters created in the course of play, in addition to being a clever, limited-novelty nod to the nature of battling time-conquering villains.

For an ongoing campaign, however, I have a preference for more scenes and encounters that would allow the GM to present a series of encounters with heroes, villains, and normals from the regular campaign and how their lives are different from what is remembered. There was only one opportunity for this in the published adventure, though a clever GM could arguably extend or spread out such scenes.

Finally, there were a small number of typos that could have been fixed (and still can be through the magic of updated PDFs): like the "page @@" incident and a missing apostrophe.

All in all, a solid, clever adventure and a potentially great beginning for a great campaign!