A one-shot for ICONS

Icons

My wife is out of town for the night, so I was going to run a one-shot of Icons but that fell through. Still, here's the rough outline of what I would have run.

Design goals: It's a one-shot, it's simple, it uses minions for the first fight so that new players have something to try, and it uses only villains from Icons: The Assembled Edition.

Because of that, if you want to run it in another implied universe, you'll have to either create Ultra-Mind, Warbride, and Speed Demon or fill in the roles with an equivalent.

Usual caveat: I've never run this, I haven't tried it, it's never met actual players.

The Copycat Technology

What's the Premise?

Ultra-Mind wants to make his life-support body also wants to include powers so that he might properly subjugate people as part of his plan to make more evolved humans. Superheroes keep stopping him, so he clearly needs more abilities. He needs to get supers in place to copy and then put the copied powers in machines. So he has set up the copying technology in banks and has arranged for bank robberies. Clues lead to a second location, where robots with copied powers are waiting.

1: Bank Shots

For each player, there is a bank robbery. The robberies are simultaneous and are being committed by teams of five: four henchmen in each bank (use the Henchman archetype, pg 191), commanded by a boss (use the Soldier archetype, pg 192), wearing a bomb vest. In each case, the plan is this: two stand guard over hostages, one fetches actual money, and the Boss and a henchman take the manager into the safety deposit room, to get one particular safety deposit box’s contents.

For the henchmen, use the Minion rule (pg 42), but the boss is treated like normal.

If you have an ongoing campaign, each boss can have a personal agenda and can double-cross the mysterious stranger who hired him, but for a one-shot, that just adds time. Let each player have the confrontation with the boss, but for a one-shot, move to the investigation afterwards.

Start with the heroes on the scene. There are a couple of ways they might be there:

• They’re actually hostages.
• They have been monitoring the police.
• They have been asked by the police.
• They were in the area.

As a GM, rotate through each player in turn, but they’re all in different banks. When things go pear-shaped, the henchmen will first threaten the hostages, then the boss will threaten to blow up the place with the vest.

Although the bullets in the guns are real, the bomb in the vest is fake (PCs can’t easily tell; X-Ray vision won’t show it but Super-Smell might). The vest kills whomever is wearing it but probably no one else.

2: Investigation

Players investigating can discover the following:

• The henchmen’s boss was hired by a “mysterious stranger” but convinced of bona fides. Time and date were dictated but so long as they provided the papers in the safety deposit boxes, they could keep everything else. (If a PC uses Telepathy or Postcognition on the boss character, they could learn about the mysterious stranger. A character might recognize Warbride, but the action is out of character for Warbride; perhaps she is working for someone else?)
• The safety deposit boxes each contain papers that reveal shell corporations. (Bonus if someone has the Law or Business specialties.)
• Each bank had just had a new security system installed by JomCross Security Inc, a new company that had convinced various banks to try out their security system for free.
  • Some characters will be aware that Jommy Cross is the main character in the A. E. Van Vogt novel SLAN.
• If someone investigates the “new security system” it clearly scans the interior of the bank and sends the information somewhere. (Pyramid test to figure out where; insert tech doubletalk if needed, but it’s the JomCross Security office.)

The address for the shell corporations and JomCross Security is the same, and it’s in town.

Troubleshooting

If the player characters lose to the henchmen and don’t see the shell corporation papers and don’t discover about the security system, the bank manager reveals to the hero involved that “it was a mistake putting in the new security system! It didn’t neutralize their guns at all!”

3: In The Office

The office of JomCross Security is on the second-highest floor of a skyscraper. It takes up the entire floor.

(If they investigate, the top floor is owned by Evolution Investments, a private company about which little is known. It is also a front for Ultra-Mind.)

The secretary at the front desk is a gum-snapping 1940s stereotype come to life. She answers the phone, types desultorily on her keyboard, and stares at her cellphone. As if she’s waiting for something. A sign on the door behind her says M. O'Graf.

She is polite to the heroes. She knows nothing but is willing to summon Mr. O’Graf from his office. She does want to know the character names, so she can tell Mr. O’Graf who he’s going to see. She tries very hard to get names, but will eventually acquiesce if the players don’t want to give names.

Robots come out of O'Graf's office, one for each PC. The robots are dressed like the PCs, and by the time the players look back at the secretary, they see her standing outside the office, revealed as Warbride. She touches her cellphone, and metal walls slide over the glass office front.

If the players do something that makes it difficult to put her out of the office, either give a Determination point, or have her not leave: she stays in the office. Her job now is to keep the players in the fight: if they leave, they have to deal with her, and dealing with her takes long enough that the robot duplicates will catch up.

Again, the PCs will probably have to fight, but it isn't essential; for example, a power like Teleport (portal) will certainly get them out. If that happens, you'll have to wing it.

The robot duplicates have copies of their powers, including Extras and Limitations. They do not have copies of Qualities, or secret information about the heroes, or copies of specialties.

• If the heroes win, the back office contains an elevator to the upstairs office.
• If the heroes lose, they regain consciousness upstairs so that Ultra-Mind can gloat at them.

4: End-Game

Now that he has proved the viability of his power-copying technology and its ultracells, he plans to move the cells into his life-support body and be physically evolved as well as mentally evolved.

If the PCs defeated or escaped the robot duplicates...

Ultra-Mind monologues about what he was doing. Clearly (he says) the PCs have some other edge he has not taken into account&mdash/he must start again. In the meantime, Warbride will deal with them while he escapes!

Speed Demon appears. “You need to be transported?”

Warbride says, “This activates the clause where you pay me double.”

Big fight.

If the PCs lost to the robot duplicates...

The PCs wake in the offices of “Evolution Investments” without powers. They are wearing “power suckers” that neutralize their powers, rather than copy them. The power suckers are locked; it’s a difficulty 10 task to unlock and remove your own power sucker but only a difficulty 8 task to unlock someone else’s power sucker. (Ultra-Mind doesn’t worry much about locks; All-Star never used locks!)

In this case, Speed Demon probably doesn’t get called, but Ultra-Mind has the powers of one PC because the ultracells have been installed. (Pick a PC or roll randomly.)

Big fight, I presume.