Ok, so now that you’ve got the idea of icons, what can you do?

First and foremost, you can use them.  The 13 in the rules are rock solid, and the text provides lots of interesting guidelines on customizing them.  As is the nature of iconic characters, you have a lot of leeway around the core concept that can let you do a whole hell of a lot with the tools on the table.

But for many of us, the urge to create is too strong, and the first and most straightforward thing to do is to roll your own.  This may be because you want to translate the ideas to a familiar setting, and there are existing NPCs who seem like they could fill the Icon’s roles, or it may be just because you want to create something new from scratch.

If you’re doing this for a setting you already know and love, I don’t have a lot of advice.  You presumably are already invested enough in the setting that you have a good sense of what you want to see out of your icons. My only piece of advice is to really buy into the Icon model (or at least into Anchors). A lot of settings have very well fleshed out factions, and your job as a GM is to replace the faction with its Icon.  This can sometimes require doing a little bit of violence to the concept of the faction, since most are usually written up with the idea first and the leader second, but so long as you really buy into it, you can do it.

Similarly, don’t hesitate to prune a bit. Many really interesting setting have more factions and potential icons than you really want to have in play all at once.  13 is a good number, and I’d be careful going too far afield from it.[1] Not every faction necessarily needs to have an icon, especially if the factions themselves are major subgroups.  For example, I’m very fond of Fading Suns, a wonderful dark sci-fi game. By memory, it has an emperor, 5 noble houses, 5 merchant guilds, 5 church factions, 2 major friendly alien races, 1 major unfriendly alien race, 1 not friend/not enemy alien race, plus diabolists and two flavors of barbarian. That would be over twenty icons, which would just be crazy.

In that situation, figure out how to aggregate a few of them, and take advantage of the multiple factions to underscore the politics of things – if you have 2 Icons who are nobles, then you have implicitly created the lines along which the nobles have lined up.  If you have one Icon for The Church, that encompasses all the sub-factions, but if you pop out one sub-faction (say, the Inquisition) then you’e just highlighted what will be important in your game.  Don’t intend Barbarians to come up much in your game? Don’t bother giving them an Icon at all.  As you make these choices, you are answering questions of what your game is going to be about.


If you’re doing it from scratch consider a few of the subtleties that went into the existing icons.

First, each one has a concrete, pursuable agenda (or, barring that, a very active modus operandi).  This means that while it’s important what Icons are, what they do is even more important. Why is this important to designing a new Icon?  Because it means you don’t need to sit down and calculate some kind of sophisticated relationship map to make sure all your Icons interact properly.  If they are driven, then the points of overlap and conflict will make themselves apparent, and that dynamism will evolve organically.

Second, and perhaps most obviously, no Icons exist in a vacuum. They have agents, followers, servants or the like – they are the faces of the most important factions of the world.  When you think about an Icon, think about the people that surrounds it (and by extension, why the icon would want to interact with adventurer types).

Last (and this is a great trick) notice that Icons built the map in 13th Age.  Most of the Icons are tied into one or more locations, and when you introduce an Icon, you’re going to want to think about the impact on geography.  At the very least, most Icons have a seat of power, but many Icons also imply locations by their existence. The Dwarf King, for example, implies the existence of the lost dwarven kingdoms as well as his current city.   Sometimes the locations aren’t locations s much as features – the Archmage is tied to the system of geomantic wards, for example, but the idea holds.

Note that the locations are not all unique.  Both the Emperor and the Lich King suggest an empire. The Elf Queen (via dark elves) and the Dwarf King both suggest an underdark.  The Diabolist and the Great Gold Wyrm both suggest the Abyss.  Bear this in mind when you remove or add an Icon – what locations are you removing ties to, what new locations are you introducing, and what existing locations are you changing the dynamic on?  Consider, for example, how the Abyss changes if you keep the Diabolist but remove the Great Golden Wyrm.

Anyway, those are things to keep in mind if you just want to hack the existing 13th age model.  Tomorrow, we’re going to hack it a little further with the idea of Anchors.

1 – I say to you right now, the one concept I will cheerfully accept 16 Icons for is this: Plansecape. One for each faction, plus the Lady of Pain herself.  I have no words for how well that could work.

So, please take it as a given that 13th Age is going to be a great game.  It’s got some great minds behind it, and it really feels like it takes d20, combines a few of the good lessons from 4e, and makes a “good parts version” of d20.  The last d20 game that made me stand up and take notice to this extent was Blue Rose (the precursor to the excellent True20 line from Green Ronin).[1]

So, given that, it’s still curious that the most powerful idea in it has very little to do with the rules, and that is Icons.   You can read more about them at Pelgrane’s site (and in other place – it’s a popular topic) and I want to draw a circle around it as an important idea that’s going to see a lot of emulation down the line.

The Icon model is a logical extension of the idea of NPCs as setting.  This is not a new idea, but it’s a very clever implementation of it which presents the idea so clearly that I suspect it will become the common parlance for the concept.  In short, there are 13 powerful, iconic being in the setting and each PC is connected to at least two of them (for good or ill).   These icons are tightly tied to the setting – so much so that the setting itself can be sketched rather thinly around them.  They are not remote beings or gods – they are tightly tied to the day to day world, and the tie to the PCs means that PCs are similarly close to the centers of power.

At first glance, this is interesting, but maybe not compelling. However, there are some subtleties baked into this that really flesh it out.

The first, and probably most subtle, is the fact that the connection does not always manifest directly.  This is backed by the mechanics (you can call upon a connection in situations where the icon would never just show up) but the concept is straightforward – that connection implicitly includes a connection to the entirety of that Icon’s “faction” – whatever organization, allies or otherwise they may have. And note, those factions are loosely sketched at best – they’re an avenue for GM and player creativity, which is a nice bonus.

Now, in the hands of a lame GM, this could be an excuse to undercut the whole connection mechanic, by perpetually keeping PCs at arms length from the Icon in the worst traditions of clan-based play, but the risk of misuse is the price you pay for any good tool.  As presented, it is a means to flesh out the setting in line with player needs AND to draw the player into the world.

The second thing is that it drives a very interesting choice: the game does not guarantee that PCs will be powerful, but it does guarantee that they will be prominent. Not to say they can’t also be powerful, but by necessity, they will be drawn into matters of grave import, as absolutely suits the particular flavor of fiction that 13th Age embraces.  This is an upshot of the icon-centric setting design, and it’s pretty powerful mojo.

Now, I mean no sleight to the specific Icons of the 13th Age setting, but I know that my very first instinct is to build my own setting around a different set of Icons, and I suspect that impulse is far from uncommon.  In addition to building an interesting, playable world, 13th Age is presenting a tool for setting design which – to my mind – pushes setting technology forward dramatically.  Other games (Dresden Files, Burning Empires) have made similar pushes, but 13th Age has managed to do it in a way that is easy to illustrate, explain and (most importantly), re-use.  That is a big deal, and I am duly impressed.

Which is, of course, no reason not to hack it some more. But that’s another post.

1 – D20 evolution has an interesting cycle which I will grossly generalize as follows: A small number of games push the boundaries of what the game is, and a larger number of them expand and refine on the model.  Games like Blue Rose and 13th Age push things, and things like Pathfinder refine them.  This does not make the “push” games better – refinement and expansion is also essential – but it does make for a difference in what to expect from the game.  It also invites debate regarding which games push and which ones refine, and there’s a good chance that the ones that a given player think push are the ones the like best, but that’s neither here nor there.  The bottom line is that I feel that 13th Age pushes d20 forward, and (assuming they feed back into the OGL) improves the technology for everyone.