Making Magical Characters More “Other” in the ICONS: Assembled Edition RPG
Many superhero tabletop role-playing games (“TTRPGs”) — and especially my go-to supers TTRPG, ICONS: The Assembled Edition — will allow you to build superpowers with limitations or effects that model comic book magic. A sense of magical otherness, however, can remain elusive.
Can we modify ICONS’s game mechanics so playing magical heroes feel vastly different from other kinds of supers?
Why Are We Doing This?
ICONS is a rules-lite TTRPG (meaning there isn’t a ton of point-counting or math to build your characters and play the game). Before diving in, it’s worthwhile to pause and ask, why bother tinkering with a great game system?
Its author, Steve Kenson, in subsequent sourcebooks has offered many fun suggestions of ways to modify the core ICONS game. In the Assembled Edition’s intro, he specifically rejected the concept of “the one true game”. ICONS then would seem to welcome, and maybe was even built for, experimentation. This sense of experimentation in mind, anything we can do to heighten the game’s comic book feel is worth exploring.
To that end, how a heroic sorcerer’s powers are deployed and especially where they come from — be it from powers divine, demonic, nature, or cosmic sources—imbue them with different meanings than your science or training-based superheroes. This makes magical supers a unique in the superhero pantheon.
True, a heroic sorcerer may shoot blasts of energy or create force-field equivalents that have effects similar to certain armor-wearing or shield-wielding avengers. But it seems to me that anything we do to heighten that sense of otherness—those different meanings, sources, methods of power-wielding—only makes magical superheroes, and so our superhero TTRPGs, even better.
How ICONS Handles Magical Heroes
To recap quickly, in ICONS magical heroes cast spells that duplicate the effects of other powers. Magic has a Performance Limit, meaning you take a page (ICONS’s comic book-twist on a “turn”) to prepare, and your hands have to be free so you can gesture to make the spell. Thus, if your hands are bound by a supervillain, your character can’t utilize his or her magic. (See “Magic” in the Great Power! sourcebook—there are some additional helpful details on magic in ICONS: A to Z, but nothing that much changes the core mechanic discussed above.)
Magic can also be handled by Qualities, ICONS’s narrative handling of distinctive character traits that can’t be covered by numerically-rated abilities. A magical super, for instance, might have the Quality of “Studied at the University of the Haunted”, allowing him to narratively have something like contacts among the undead, or to have special knowledge of necromancy.
But then every super, regardless of their origin, has unique, narrative Qualities. In order to give us that otherness for magic-wielders as a class, we’ll have to experiment with the game’s mechanics.
Muscle & Mind Attributes
Characters in ICONS have six basic Attributes, drawn from inborn talent, training, and experience. These Attributes — and superpowers as well — are measured on a power scale of 1 (Weak) to 10 (Supreme).
Unlike superpowers, Attributes are things anyone can do to varying degrees. For instance, only someone with a Flight power can fly without an airplane, but anyone can throw a punch (Prowess), try to dodge that punch (Coordination), or try lifting something heavy (Strength).
In addition to these three physical attributes, there are three mental ones: Intellect (an attribute you might use to build a gadget or repair your superteam’s Blackbird-equivalent), Awareness (with which you might notice a clue or sense an ambush), and Willpower (defined as “personality, confidence, discipline, and courage” with which you might try intimidating a henchman).
One’s Strength and Willpower levels combine to form a character’s Stamina—basically, the ablative level of physical and mental damage a character can take before succumbing to their wounds (typically by being knocked unconscious). So a superhero with Strength (5) and Willpower (5) would have 10 Stamina.
Physical, Mental… and Transcendental?
All ICONS characters operate like this, including sorcerer heroes. A good-guy wizard wanting to hit some henchmen with a magical blast uses Coordination to aim, much like a gun-centric, street-level vigilante would use Coordination to fire on gang members.
What if we made it so our supernatural characters always operate differently from our more traditional superheroes? What if we added a means to make deployment of supernatural power automatically more other? One way to do this would be to add three “Transcendental” Attributes:
- Channeling: one’s ability to utilize or manipulate magical energies.
- Sight: the ability to perceive or communicate with mystical forces.
- Soul: spiritual resolve; the ability to remain separate from the mystical forces one is channeling or perceiving.
So a magician superhero might have middling Prowess or lack the Coordination to throw a baseball, yet could Channel magical power to blast an opponent, or shield themselves from a magical assault.
They may lack a caped vigilante’s detective skills as represented by Awareness, but they can see the cosmic threads undergirding reality with their Sight. Knowing that those cosmic or supernatural entities are present, perhaps our mage character could even speak to them.
With Soul, we come to some overlap with Willpower, both having to do with grit, and resisting one’s self being subverted. But while Willpower might focus on the psychic or psychological attacks of others, Soul would be about resisting both magical attacks on the mind (rather than the body) and also the temptations to abuse their own powers, and so be controlled by their powers’ source.
A player could accept Trouble (and earn Determination) in the form of the occasional GM test of their Soul against the magic at the player’s own Channeling level. Losses may result in outcomes like the character’s magic causing collateral damage to friends and foes alike as their power begins slipping the control of their Soul.
In this way, magic becomes not just another superpower, but something unique and potentially monstrous that can slip its leash unless carefully contained. It attains otherness.
A Measure of Spiritual or Psychic Damage
I love how ICONS combines Strength and Willpower to form the Stamina damage measurement. It models how someone can reach into both their physical selves and also call upon their mental toughness to keep going in the face of adversity.
Perhaps Willpower and Soul could operate the same way, together forming a measurement of how much psychic damage someone can take, both magical and in the more “vanilla" form of mutants with mental blasts. In the absence of a better name at the moment, we could call this Spirit (as in “fighting spirit"). Spirit then would become the non-physical counterpart to Stamina. Stamina then would become exclusively about things like physical damage and exhaustion.
While adding some complexity to ICONS’s wonderful simplicity, this approach has the benefit of giving players unique weaknesses to exploit against different types of opponents. For example, per the ICONS: Menagerie, a tyrannosaur has Strength (8) and Willpower (3) (representing its survival instinct) giving it Stamina 11. It can take a lot of damage. Given its Intellect (0), however, doesn’t it make sense even an Average psychic blast would disable such a creature? This could be modeled by Spirit where a tyrannosaur would only be able to take 3 non-physical damage (Willpower (3) + Soul (0)).
Work in Progress
To be sure, this is a work-in-progress. (I hasten to restate this isn’t a “fix” since nothing about the game is broken—this is more of an experiment.) Our Transcendental Attributes raise questions that need more game-testing.
Chief among these is how best to stat non-magical superheroes (and supporting cast and villains) for Channeling, Vision, and Soul?
Channeling and Vision could be set at (0) for any non-magical hero (and villain). Or perhaps a higher potential number that could only be unlocked with GM approval in certain stories like ones where the player characters come into contact with magical objects that can awaken their latest magical talent. The player may not even know their character’s Channeling or Vision as the GM sets it, and only reveals it during those specific circumstances that awaken it. After the magical adventure is over, their Channeling and Vision could again fall dormant.
Soul is more difficult since presumably all sentient beings have it whether they deal with magic or not, though how much Soul (or what shape it’s in, to think in traditional terms) may vary. Presumably, all superheroes could have theirs set with at least an Average rank of (3). Interestingly, a NPC with a Willpower (3) and a Soul (3) gets a Spirit 6, and so can take a respectable amount of psychic damage.
One the one hand, this isn’t a big change from Stamina where an unremarkable NPC with Strength (3) and Willpower (3) could take a 6 for combined physical and psychic damage. The main difference would be now they could separately take 6 physical damage (Stamina) and 6 psychic/spiritual damage (Spirit).
End Notes
First, thanks for reading this, my first Medium post. Readers of a certain age may notice a resemblance between my Transcendental stats and the Mystical stats from Mayfair’s ’80s and ’90s-era DC Heroes (a.k.a. Mayfair Exponential Game System, or “MEGS”, which still has a devoted following). The resemblance is largely superficial, however, since there’s none of the Action, Effect, and Resistance mechanics at work, much less anything like MEGS’s Attribute Points system.
Still, ICONS has been favorably referred to as the lovechild of the ‘80s Marvel Super Heroes game (which also still has an active community) and Fate, a more recent TTRPG system. Injecting a bit of competitor comic book company/TTRPG DNA seems kind of fun.
Sourcebooks referenced in this article (no affiliate links—I’m just a fan):
