Monday, April 11, 2011

I is for ION Guard

ION Guard is a supplement for both ICONS and BASH detailing an intergalactic group of peace keepers and policemen who gain power from super science glove. This glove, powered by a central battery created by an ancient race at the center of the universe, can be used only by the purest and bravest among sentients.

Yeah, it's what you think.

I bought the ICONS version and nearly bought the BASH version. I'm glad 15 chapters plus an additional chapter of sketches. Topics cover the history, organization, and selection of the guards. Overall they provide a workable Green Lantern Corps type organization for your supers game to play on the interstellar/intergalactic scale. It also provides individual villians as well as a group. One of the villains is an evil god and his followers in a working Darkseid clone.

Character creation is where both the strength and weakness of this background shows. The normal random character creation of ICONS (I purchased the ICON version) is substituted by straight info for the first four of seven character creation steps. The result is a campaign of ION Guards will have very similar characters. This is a plus in creating a comic but not great for an RPG group. Although the rules detail a few adventure seeds what they don't discuss is integrating an ION Guard in a larger space campaign nor the details of such a campaign.

What it does tell us is Radioactive Ape Designs has an upcoming supplement called Alien Empires. The ad has the ION Guard symbol as the background implying it is in the same universe. I'm looking forward to this supplement because it is a prominent area of comics not well covered in RPGs.

In retrospect I've not disappointed I only bought the ICONS version. While the material is good it is too narrow for easy usage. I would recommend fans of either system purchase it if they are interested in a Green Lantern type organization. If you are more interested in general space faring supers I'd hold off for Alien Empires.

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