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Iconicsolo
Iconicsolo
Credits
Written By Peter Rudin-Burgess
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 3
How Does This Work? ......................................................................... 3
BASIC CONCEPTS .................................................................................... 4
ASKING QUESTIONS ................................................................................. 5
Possibly ..................................................................................................7
Negative Attitudes ............................................................................... 9
Neutral Attitudes ................................................................................. 9
Positive Attitudes ................................................................................ 9
Open-Ended Questions ...................................................................... 10
ACTIVATING QUALITIES ............................................................................ 11
Skills, Powers, Qualities, and Questions ........................................ 11
DETERMINATION TOKENS .........................................................................12
RANDOM SUPERVILLAINS ........................................................................ 13
SUPER MYSTERIES ................................................................................. 16
RECORD KEEPING ................................................................................... 17
Advanced Heroics ............................................................................... 17
Starting Big .......................................................................................... 17
Tag Team................................................................................................ 18
Assistant Editor Month ....................................................................... 18
What If..?............................................................................................... 19
OPEN GAME LICENSE VERSION 1.0A ...................................................... 20
3
Introduction
For most roleplayers, the idea of solo
roleplaying is a little unusual. However, the idea of
roleplaying is embedded in the social elements of
gaming around a table with friends.
Roleplaying grew out of wargaming, and solo
gaming is a long-standing part of wargaming. In
wargaming, players start thinking about entire
armies, but when they get down to small actions
with a single officer, it is common practice to write
up the individual action as the officer’s dispatch.
This turns the dice rolls on the map into imagined
scenes, with named individuals and characters
living and dying to save the day.
These moments of individual heroes on the
battlefield sparked the creation of the biggest
roleplaying game.
Solo playing rules for games like Icons take
things full circle.
How Does This Work?
Solo play uses a couple of simple dice
mechanics and tables to provide the answers the
Game Master [GM] would normally give you when
you play.
No table can possibly know your hero’s
situation. You must take the answer and apply it
to the panel or page. Solo play is a great workout
for your improvisation skills. It will also improve
your roleplaying in every style of game.
4
Basic Concepts
A lot of rolls in Iconic Hero will ask you to roll
2d6. Mostly, these are rarely 2-12.
If you had a GM running the game, they would
be rolling 1d6, and you would be rolling 1d6, and
the difference between them is the modifier to
find your Effort.
With no GM, you will have to roll both these
dice yourself. I like to think of this as a Red-Blue
roll. Take a Red d6 and a Blue d6. Because they
are different colors, you can easily tell them apart.
Claim one for yourself, and one is the rest of the
universe. The other dice is their roll if you are
rolling to grapple a villain. If you are rolling to stop
a runaway locomotive, it uses the second die.
Another kind of roll is the Oracle Roll. The ‘Red’
d6 is used as a 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, and the second or
‘Blue’ die is then used to find the specific answer.
Many tables used for random Powers in the
ICONS rulebook use this format.
One of the cornerstones of solo play is the
question. Of course, different questions are
handled differently, but they all come down to the
same dice roll.
Inspiration prompts. All roleplaying is about
improvising and using the last action to inspire
your imagination to create the next opportunity.
This book’s questions and answer rules are
designed to give you that prompt for your
creativity.
5
Asking Questions
Having a simple way of answering questions is
an incredibly powerful tool. My Hero is The Last
Centurion, a cast-off super soldier from the Cold
War era.
When Centurion is out on patrol, looking for
trouble, you could easily flip a coin and call heads
for yes. If you asked can I hear any sirens that
indicate trouble? Toss a coin. I got Tails, or No. So
it is a quiet night. I head down to the harbor. Is
there much going on? Toss a coin. Heads, Yes.
This could be interesting. I move in and try and
get a look at what is going on. This could be some
kind of drug shipment. Is there a load of armed
thugs around? Toss a coin. Heads, Yes.
Can you see how, as long as you are prepared
to accept the answer and apply it to your
character’s situation, you can build an issue or
chapter quite easily.
Having only yes and no answers gets a bit
limiting rather quickly, so the rules here give you
more to work with.
The first refinement is to add likelihood to the
yes-no question. A coin is no longer adequate, so
we go to 1d6.
1-2 or less Yes
3-4 Possibly
5-6 or more No
Negative Attitudes
Aggressive characters may attack if they are
thugs or villains, and threats may be real or bluffs.
Demanding payment implies that the GMC is not
included to help; if they do, they have a ‘what’s in
it for me attitude’. Playing tricks could mean
abandoning your hero at a crucial point or simply
lying instead of helping. Working against you can
be as obvious or subtle as the situation requires.
Neutral Attitudes
There is a lot of crossover with negative
attitudes. A GMC not interested in interacting may
become more negative if forced to interact;
someone prepared to trade may not be looking to
trade but could be persuaded. If they want
paying, that could be with money or in a quid pro
quo way. A GMC with their own goal may work
with your hero while their goals align but turn
away when it suits them.
Positive Attitudes
GMCs with positive attitudes are the most likely
to actively help or interact with your hero. This is
not always a good thing. They become a liability
if you get a really talkative GMC while trying to
sneak around unobserved. The key concept with
positive reactions is how they can add to your
fiction. Negative and even neutral reactions often
come in the form of confrontation. The positive
responses can be too helpful or a chance to gain
clues or information. They are most frequently
roleplaying challenges. You should play them as
such. Suppose an overly helpful retired sheriff
decides to join in your battle with the
supervillains. In that case, you may end up with
another innocent to try and protect.
10
Open-Ended Questions
An open-ended question cannot be answered
with a simple yes or no. Last Centurion is sneaking
into the harbor. One of the shipping containers is
open. I want to know what is inside.
We use the film strips at the bottom of every
page to answer questions like this. Each frame, or
ICON, should be used as an inspiration prompt
from which you can improvise an answer.
Each icon is intentionally vague, so you can
apply them to almost any situation. You do not
need to think of them literally. Start on the first
page and roll a d6. Count this many images in on
the film strip. Then roll the second d6 and count
on that many icons. You now have a pair of
images. I happened to roll 2 and 2. My result is:
Activating Qualities
Your hero will have Qualities that you can
choose to activate. With villains, when you
normally ask your GM if you can activate a specific
quality, use the yes-no roll, with the likelihood at
+1 in your favor.
The +1 reflects how the GM should always try
and say yes. Positive answers move your story
forward. It is generally accepted good practice for
the GM to try and say yes, whenever they can.
Suppose you roll a ‘possibly’ result. In that case,
you could activate the Quality for advantage, but
you have to justify it in the fiction. How are you
going to activate that Quality? How are you going
to learn about the villain’s Quality? Be critical of
your plan. If your justification for activating the
Quality is a bit weak, increase the difficulty by +1;
if your reason is positively weak, increase the
difficulty by +2.
Determination Tokens
Determination Tokens are a key element to any
great game of ICONS. Hoarding tokens adds
nothing to the game. Things work best when
there is a natural ebb and flow of tokens between
your hero and the GMCs.
I suggest you take a “Sorry, I don’t think so…”
stance. Then, whenever something comes up that
you think is not the best result for the game, use
a token.
I suggest having an economy of 1
determination token for each villain in a chapter;
count a group of thugs as a villain in this case.
When you force a villain to spend a token, it
passes to you. Every time you spend one, it passes
to the villains.
In this situation, all the villains draw from a
common pool of tokens.
The more often you spend tokens on either
side, the wilder and more comic book your game
will be. Conversely, the fewer tokens used, the
more mundane the game will be.
When Last Centurion confronted the evil
genius behind his adventure “The Collector”, the
dice rolls said that Centurion delivered a Massive
Success with Stun and would have rendered The
Collector unconscious in the first panel. That is an
example of “Sorry, I don’t think so…” Taking out
the major villain so easily would not have been the
best possible final scene. The Collector spent the
Determination Token, and it passed to Centurion.
13
Random Supervillains
These rules do not recommend trying to create
random villains ‘on the fly’. However, you can use
many free villains and collections starting from
only $1 from publishers such as Misfit Studios and
Ad Infinitum Adventures.
Throughout your adventuring, you can create
clues as to the identity of a new villain. These
could be clues inspired by the graphic icons or
when roleplaying GMCs in the game.
The time to create this new villain is between
solo sessions. Then, you can take the facts you
have pinned down and build the rest of the villains
around those fixed points.
Use what you have learned of the villain and
their schemes to create interesting Qualities. This
is where human creativity is vastly greater than
any random table could be.
It is unfair to just tell you to make up a great
villain. To help you out, below are some tables to
fill in some more blanks.
14
Roll Archetype
1 Elder Being A survivor of an ancient
race and now wants to
ruin your hero’s world.
This type of villain is often
imprisoned and uses your
hero to escape.
2 Snubbed Sibling The villain is the brother
or sister of your hero.
Their evil actions come
from feelings of
inadequacy, entitlement,
or envy of your hero.
3 Evil Clown Comedic, caustic, killer.
Don’t let the makeup
smile fool you. This villain
plays for keeps, and his
main goal is to inspire
fear.
4 Femme/Homme Uses sexuality and
1-3 Fatale seduction to get their
way. Their motives come
from abuse, hunger for
power, or revenge against
your Hero.
5 Mad Scientist This super-smart villain
has dire your hero must
counter.
6 Psychotic The villain has two minds.
The first lets them
brilliantly plan and plot
against the world with a
good chance their clever
plans will succeed. The
second is tainted by
madness and broken with
reality, meaning motives
and behaviors are
unpredictable and
irrational.
15
Super Mysteries
Superhero stories are investigative stories at
their heart. The villain has a plan. The hero must
discover that plan, defeat it, unmask the villain,
throw them in jail, or banish them to another
dimension.
Solo games based on mysteries pose the
problem of how you cannot know the solution if
you are the person who created the mystery. If
you don’t see the mystery’s resolution, how do
you know if you have solved it?
The solution to this conundrum is the clue,
theory, and test method.
When you think you have discovered a
potential clue, you can ask a simple question, “Is
this a clue?” If you get a yes answer, you add it to
a list of clues. Each time you add a clue to your
list, you formulate a theory that makes sense of
the clues.
Once you have a theory, you use it to shape
your adventure.
This is normally subconscious on your part. For
example, suppose you think the supervillain will
hold everyone in Grand Central Station hostage.
In that case, you are going to go to Grand Central
Station. Because the story is driven by the
questions and answers you ask, and you are in the
station, that is likely to be where the action
happens.
17
Record Keeping
In a regular game, the GM would have a plan
and keep notes for each issue and chapter. The
story isn’t written, but the GM will have an idea,
the villain’s scheme, who is involved, and so on.
In a solo game, you don’t have that. To help you
get back into your character and story, it is a good
idea to keep a journal of your solo adventure. How
much or little you write is down to you. I prefer
something very brief.
• the questions I asked
• the rolls
• answers and interpretations
• the action of each page and panel.
On a separate page, I keep a list of GMCs in the
chapter and the clues I have found.
This short format is quick to skim over before
each game session to bring you up to speed. You
can write as much as you like, right down to
dialogue and descriptions of scenes if that is your
style.
I also recommend using Highlighter pens to
pick out interesting or important events.
Advanced Heroics
Solo play gives you options that, at worst, are
either unavailable or, at best, not common in most
traditional games. These break the traditionally
linear progression from plot hook to adventure to
the showdown that makes up most issues,
chapters, and pages.
Starting Big
In this scenario, you have an idea for an
awesome villain you would love to throw your
hero against. Create your villain, and the opening
panel has you roll for initiative and start the big
showdown battle. Set up everything as you
imagined it, like those show-stopping scenes at
the end of a classic James Bond movie with secret
18
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Open Game License v 1.0 Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
Fudge System Reference Document Copyright 2005, Grey Ghost Press, Inc.; Authors
Steffan O’Sullivan and Ann Dupuis, with additional material by Peter Bonney,
Deird’Re Brooks, Reimer Behrends, Shawn Garbett, Steven Hammond, Ed Heil,
Barnard Hsiung, Sedge Lewis, Gordon McCormick, Kent Matthewson, Peter
Mikelsons, Anthony Roberson, Andy Skinner, Stephan Szabo, John Ughrin, Dmitri
Zagiduin.
FATE (Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment), Copyright 2003 by Evil Hat
Productions, LCC; Authors Robert Donoghue and Fred Hicks.
22
Spirit of the Century, Copyright 2006, Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Authors Robert
Donoghue, Fred Hicks, and Leonard Balsera.
Icons, Copyright 2010, Steve Kenson, published by Adamant Entertainment in
partnership with Cubicle Seven Entertainment, Ltd.
Icons Team-Up, Copyright 2013, Adamant Entertainment, Authors Steve Kenson,
G.M. Skarka, and Morgan Davie.
Icons: The Assembled Edition, Copyright 2014, Ad Infinitum Adventures; Author:
Steve Kenson.
Iconic Hero, Copyright 2020, Parts Per Million Limited; Author: Peter Rudin-Burgess