I have been blogging free RPGs for a year now. 63 posts scribed and 38 games 'reviewed'*. I ran a 24 hour competition, completing my own - Cloudship Atlantis. I've offered advice, started a Dictionary that will one day rival John Kim's and made some great friends.
So, how do I celebrate a year of enthusing and celebrating other people's work? By picking to death my own free game. Think of it as a mix of healthy self critique and an inevitable backlash of being nice for a whole year.
Icar - a dreadful vat of excrement
Icar by Rob Lang is a free science fiction roleplaying game set in a bland, plagiarised future. The fat of other genres has been scraped off and boiled in a stinking vat to produce a stock kitchen sink Sci Fi. Unintelligible rules, disparate formatting and penis inspired space craft are wrapped in a deceptively colourful cover. As we will discover, if you paint a turd then what you end up with is a painted turd.
Character Creation
Icar goes as far to provide a torturously long character creation mechanism that relies upon character classes called 'Skeletons' but fails to provide any. Every familiar term you have become accustomed to in roleplaying has been changed. Classes are 'Skeletons', Attributes are 'Stats' and Skills are... well, Skills but that's purely by accident.
You begin your journey into Icar with defining a character concept. How you are supposed to create a character concept without any idea of how the universe is put together is beyond me. After that, you define your Deviant. A Deviant is a representation of your characters personality. Are you Selfish or Generous? Foolhardy or Prudent? By how much? TELL US NOW! This must all be set from the start - a constricting fascistic approach to character creation. There is no room for exploring the character as you play in the Icar Third Reich.
Statistics can be rolled randomly or point applied (a good example of Rob's indecision - including both systems to bloat an already bursting tome), roll some skills (of which there are hundreds). It goes on. A never ending ocean of options, tables, detail, location based hit points, height, weight, age, hat size and underpant colour and texture. Still with me? Still awake? I forfeited my front teeth when I collapsed against my insufficiently padded keyboard.
Finally, you have the option for rolling randomly for Advantages and Disadvantages (confusingly named Psychotheatrics). Random selection will ruin the character concept you loving crafted at the start. It seems like a cruel final blow in the long struggle to create a character.
All of this is written down on a decimated copse load of paper, the first character sheet looking like the product of teenage nightmare.
Mechanics
Rob is not averse to packing a huge number of different mechanics into a single game. There's one for skills checks. One for close combat. One for firefighting, one for vehicle combat, one for hacking and one for space combat. There might as well be one for doing the dishes and breeding alpacas. Complexity is piled onto complexity, leaving your head spinning and eyes bleeding with the strain.
The close combat system is barely damaging and the weapons make firefighting lethal to the extreme. With no healing rules and no armour in the equipment section, your character can be vaporised in an instant. A horror that sends to back down the snake to square one, character creation. Hacking is so utterly complex that attempting it should be a MENSA entrance exam. It isn't fun. It isn't like hacking. As they say in flying circles: see and avoid.
Robert Lang shuns numbers
The most maddening part of the mechanics is that Rob has arithmophobia. Instead of plainly writing numbers into a nice plain box, you are forced into learning a system of triangles, circles and squares placed in a disc. It's the most senseless waste of game design I've ever had the misfortune to come across. I can write numbers perfectly well, Rob, don't force me to draw little glyphs. This
isn't 2000 BC.
Setting
Icar is set so far into the future that most Sci Fi fan will lose interest. Although there are no vestiges of the real world, there is enough plagiarism from other Sci Fi it spawned to make you feel uncomfortably at home. Warrior monks with light swords, power armoured military types who are only mentioned in passing, a race of human-created robots hell bent on killing everyone, big nasty corporations, bland criminal organisations and a virtual world. A cornucopia of cliche. An Empire, which pretends to be benevolent but seems to be so all encompassing to be truly so, rules every minutiae of life. Just about every aspect of Icar is recognisable in a jarring, embarrassing sort of way - as if Rob has not realised that he is ripping off decades of Science Fiction.
It gets worse
The artwork is plain and the simply enormous number of unaffordable weapons, vehicles and space craft is mind boggling. One can only imagine that Rob feels inadequate about his genitalia as penis shaped space craft thrust from every page - pages that pleed to be printed. You can't write down a weapon's statistics in Icar, you must deforest the Amazon. Images scythe through the centre of pages, breaking the flow of text and are unlabelled. And a mystery to the reader. There are inexplicable areas of white space and he has clearly never read my guide to
organising an RPG. Only the first of three character sheets is provided in the book, so you have to dig around on the website for the others. I have wasted enough time and bandwidth downloading this drivel, I don't want to be forced to return to the drab website to hunt for more things. The author claims that Icar has been playtested, making me want to set up a fund for those forced to endure years of this nonsense.
Where to go from here
The best thing Rob can do is copy the source files onto a hard drive and fire it into the sun. Then, with funding I will happily supply, chase down every printed copy and toss them into the heart of a nuclear reactor.
Conclusions
I can say without any doubt that Icar is definitely one of the most mind bogglingly dreadful roleplaying games I've read. A disparate, disjointed and disappointing mess. Mechanic heavy with no good reason, childishly decorated with penis space craft and teenage wet dream guns. If you have had the misfortune of laying your eyes on this pustule then I can heartily recommend scouring your eyes with bleach and undergoing a double lobotomy to rid yourself of the memory.
* It could be said that I don't really review the games I write about as I only read them. A fair comment. Ironically, the only game I have played is this one - the one I'm pouring scorn onto!
The French Invade Texas is an alternative-history (sort of) roleplaying game by Jaap de Goede. Play the role of La Salle, a French explorer and use the King of France's extensive resources to colonise and fight the Spanish. I became a fan of Jaap with Dark Dungeon and I'm proud to say I still am.
Crafting your avatar is a point based affair. Characteristics are your attributes - Strength, Constitution, Agility, Perception, Willpower and Charm. They do what they say on the tin. Zero is an average, with positive and negative values placing you either side of it. The skill list is brief but exceptionally useful. One of the characters really should be the French explorer La Salle, who the game is about. Think of it as the team leader, which in our gaming group is code for "The first person in trouble". Jaap suggests that the most capable player plays La Salle. In our group, this would mean the player would was out of the room when the choice is made. You can play one of his compatriots (example PCs straight from the history books) or use them as a starting point.
Ignore the corduroy clad bearded buffoon with the chalk and the dates. History is fun. The bad chaps are really very bad indeed. Genocidally bad. The good guys are mostly bad too. That would appeal to my players, who don't do good and evil. They varying shades of evil. Jaap has included some superb hooks and adventure plots - which are absolutely ideal as there is a lot of background to get your head around.
