Review – Comicworld Germany

Visit Germany and get involved in a superbattle?  If that is what you want to do Comicworld Germany will provide useful ground work.  So, if your superheroic campaign is thinking of heading to Germany, this product will prove to be a useful resource.

Comicworld Germany for the ICONS Super Role-Playing Game is a 24-page PDF (19 pages less cover, credits and OGL) written by Jakub “Erpegis” Osiejewski and published by GRAmel.

The layout is a standard, dual column design and eminently readable.  The cover art is full color, while all of the interior art is black and white and perfectly suitable to the superheroic genre.

This product begins with an introduction, setting out the author’s aims of providing a bit more nuance for non-American characters in Superheroic games.  Then some ‘Focus Points’, things to think about for German characters including national traits, and suggestions for aspects tied to them, and views of their neighbors.  A short discussion of the historical background to modern Germany, with the exception of World War II (which the author feels 1- is always covered in source material and 2- the author feels that Germany and German villains should not be defined solely by one war and those who started it), each era getting an adventure seed tied to it.  Lastly, there are places to go including one fictional one for flavor.  Overall, it provides a useful, if general, overview of Germany for supers.

Next there are seven German supers, one hero and six villains, ranging from technology to ancient magic, steam powered ghost to philosophical thieves.  A good selection of characters for use with a variety of potential plots tied to them. While the characters included are designed for ICONS converting them to other systems would be easy enough.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThruRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.