ICONS Team-Up by Steve Kenson, Gareth-Michael Skarka and Morgan Davie is a supplement for the ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying game published by Adamant Entertainment. The ICONS system was originally published by Adamant Entertainment, but is now published by Ad Infinitum Adventures. This is the only supplement still published by Adamant. The book is covered by the Open Game License and consequently some of it is considered to be Open Game Content.
The supplement is available as a 101 page PDF from RPGNow for $9.95, although it was purchased at the discounted price of $7.46. There are actually two versions of the PDF, one of them standard and the other high resolution. The two versions otherwise appear to be identical. A printed version was planned, but it may never have been made. Of the PDF, two pages are the Open Game License, one is an page advert, one page the full colour cover, one page is an image and logos, one page is mostly blank apart from some front matter, one page is the Table of Contents, one page the Introduction and ten pages are The Complete ICONS Index, which covers the Core Rulebook (ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying), The Villainomicon and ICONS Team-Up.
The first chapter, Clarifications, is various clarifications of the rules in a questions and answers format by Steve Kenson, the game’s designer.
The next one, Add-Ons & Variants, provides some variant rules, such as playing the game without some of the abilities, dice variants, such as using Fudge dice, and other, including Pyramid Tests which was published in other supplements.
Battlesuits & Military Vehicles is a short chapter on the common armoured suit seen in comic books and the military vehicles that superheroes, or supervillains, may encounter, with some examples.
Environmental Rules has rules for playing in non-standard environments, namely aquatic, astral, outer space and underground.
Sidekicks has rules for creating and handling the old staple of comic books, the sidekick, particularly young ones. Sidekicks are rarely seen in modern comic books, and the reasons why are given, as well as rules on graduating a sidekick to a full hero in their own right.
Super-Vehicles has rules for creating vehicles with their own special powers.
Headquarters and Bases deals with the creation of bases, for single characters, and headquarters, for teams.
Universe-Style Play deals with how to create a universe for an extended campaign, including heroes, villains and the world itself.
ICONS Team-Up in Review
The supplement has a good Table of Contents, a thorough index (although it is not solely for this supplement) and the PDF is pretty well bookmarked. Navigation is therefore above average. The layout is a single column throughout, and it is in full colour, with colour page backgrounds, page fillers and illustrations of heroes and villains up to a full page in size but generally less.
The Assembled Edition of ICONS uses quite a lot of material from this supplement. For example, Example of Play in the Clarifications section is duplicated in the Assembled Edition as Ambushed by Evil in the Taking Action section. Team-Up is mentioned in the Assembled Edition as being a source of material for it and is also in the OGL of the latter.
Other material, such as Ability Variants from the same section in Team-Up also appears in other places; in this case in the “V” is for “Variants” chapter of Icons A to Z. These are not the only places; a substantial portion of the supplement has since made it into other publications.
Some of the material was originally intended for the original ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying, and the system has since changed with the creation of the Assembled Edition, making these rules obsolete for players using the Assembled Edition of the game.
Team-Up is therefore not as useful as it might once have been, when it was supplementing the original game, with much of the material now either obsolete or incorporated into the new version of the system, or the published supplements for that (which does include Great Power as, even though it pre-dated the Assembled Edition, it has been revised since the publication of the latter). The Complete ICONS Index is also not as useful, as it is no longer complete and deals with obsolete books.
The utility of Team-Up is greatly diminished for owners of the Assembled Edition, Great Power (version 1.5) and ICONS: A to Z as whole chapters of this book have made it into those supplements in one form or another, but it does still have a few places where it still has value. However, these are no longer enough to justify the purchase price, even at a discount. ICONS Team-Up is a useful supplement for any groups still playing the original ICONS: Superpowered Roleplaying, but isn’t really worth getting for those using the Assembled Edition.
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