1KM1KT Free RPG Community

just found Icar earlier this week, and downloaded the three books last night. looks slick and i'm looking forward
to giving it a try. if the test runs work well i 'm considering running it at our local gameing convention N.E.G.A Con. the seting does remind me a great deal of the old Traveller system. now i did have a question about aliens, you mention in Society " many diferent lower inteligance species exist localy to planets but don't have any particular status."
ok that can mean several things, for example it could mean that the aliens are Critters, animal inteligance with some
such as pack hunters approaching sentience in specifec areas.
OR it could be interperted to mean that the aboriganl races are the second and third class citizens of the Imperium
restricted to their homeworlds and obataing higher technology "for their own good".
so which is closer to what you had in mind?

Welcome to icar. I agree with the traveller analogy, Its a HUGE space opera.
I would say run the universe as you prefer.

but then it's Rob's universe not mine.

Hi Randolph!

As misterecho said welcome to Icar and thank you for offering to give the game a try! It is indeed your universe to play with as you like, modifying and changing to make your campaign more enjoyable but here is my take on the subject of aliens.

Icar was designed to be different from the majority of Sci Fi that I was watching/reading at the time. I think most Sci Fi Space Operas that your players will be familiar with have intelligent alien species. To be different, Icar does not have intelligent species, only critter type creatures - critter is a good word, I might use that in the next version. I definitely have to reword it, you're right - it's really not clear.

If you do include more intelligent species, you should be careful how the rest of the system interacts with them. The Imperium is benevolent but ONLY to humanity. It is fighting to keep the human race alive, if any species gets in the way, it normally feels the painful end of a chain gun, pulse laser or orbital cannon.

In the new version (releasing next year), I have included one of the sample adventures to go on a critter hunt. I recommend this because it gives you a chance to have a go at the weapon combat rules (as easy as they are) without villains being potentially lethal by weilding firearms themselves. If the character don't shoot the creature fast enough (or there are too many of them), then they can be mauled in close combat with comedy affect. Weapons in Icar is lethal, especially to other meaty-creatures:



If you have any other questions or good (like the great feedback you've just provided) then please do speak out, I'm not precious. Years of having Icar online have made me thick skinned and I am preparing the next version, so am keen to get as much feedback as I can.

i like that, i might go with the Critter aproach and use the Traveller comparison for my players only if any one asks. any aliens would have stats identical to humans and off of their home world a social standing on par or even slightly worse than a Borg. ("it's 1865, we're in Georgia and you still want to play a slave?!")
on their home world that might be different especialy if the evironment is hostile eneough that the colony
is self contained. on the others India or China in the 1800's might be a good model. if they ask why there havent there
been encounters with any spacefaering races, the Droid have been puling a David webber, of course now that i'm trying to remeber it i cant, but he had a book built around the concept of an alien race so zenophobic it sought out and destroyed other races before they could achive space flight. theyed pop in, put a drive and posibly a set of shields on an a good sized asteroid and set on a colision course with the offending planet, repeat as needed. the Yucatan impact...yeah not an accident. this provides a nice simple explanation that should satisfy most players.

When they ask where the other space faring races are, just say there aren't any. Humanity is alone amongst the stars and they've gone and ruined it with robots! As for Droids and planet destruction - the Droids are different from usual machines in that they were programmed with the specific tasks of taking out life without damaging infrastructure. That was their original purpose: kill off the genus 2 (zombie) humans without damaging the buildings and so on. I'm noting all this to add into the rules. For the next version.

gottchya, and as for the Bug Hunt it does add a nice layer of threat to the entrance of the wreks alla Alien.
"you mean not only are there pirates, booby traps, and unsafe structeres but we might get eaten?"
all in a days work, heheheh.

especially if you only have one weapon to share amongst the whole party ala "Scavanger"

well i notced that all of the skeltons included "personal effects" amoung the equipment and i will be seriously
suprised if no one try's to slip in some sort of wepon under that heading even if were only a convient prybar or hammer!

If it was within the characters "scope" ie a tech with a servo-wrench, i would allow. but a hacker with a spiked cudgel i would balk at, lol

The aim of only one gun was to help introduce the players to the system in pieces. All the characters can do close combat, so you do a lot of that early on. Blunt weapons are sodding lethal too. If you character has a Meat of 5, they do 5 damage a turn! Not a lot compared to guns but that will seriously beat a human down. Then after a few sessions, the characters can discover weapons on the things they are scavenging. They'll be rubbish at shooting at first but they will learn.

On another note, I recently ran a 2 year Icar campaign where there were no guns. None. One character kept picking them up but the number of shots fired by the team was remarkably low. There was a fair amount of close combat and running away but the group were excellent at approaching trouble at angles. I also made the bad guys a bit crap at shooting and being villains, so the players often got the jump on the bad guys because they had gotten used to working around not having guns.