Icar has been around for a long time. This begs the question, where did come from? What got is started, how did it change? A lot of the my life has been spent playing, writing, modifying and messing about with Icar.

Please note that this history is likely to be incomplete. I have an appalling memory and unless something is written down or drawn for me, I can rarely remember anything. This history tries to be as honest and fair as possible. The reader should remember that I was 14 when Icar was first played and at time of writing, I'm... well, I'm very old.

The Big Bang

The beginning is a very delicate time. Certainly in the case of Icar. The pedantic would argue that Icar began in 1996, but in fact the first incarnation was called Star Fleet and began in 1990. I became friends with three others at school (Mill Hill School, London), Simon 'Fish' Aubury, James 'George' Walker and Gareth 'Baldrick' Jones.

Previously, I had seen roleplaying games played from afar at my local Games Club: the Finchley Games Club (at the Leaside Day Centre, Finchley, North London, England) but was too young to join in. I decided to write my own version (version 1), based in space, a long time into the future and then take it to the new found friends at School. The game was sketchy at best in written form, with notes on squared paper and character sheets with a few lines printed out.

I had a problem: I needed to make the game sound plausible to get the others to play. I'd put a lot of time into it and really wanted to give it a go. So I invented some imaginary players who had actually written the game with me. With this deceit, I hoped that the game would look more attractive. It was unnecessary, a terrible mistake I came clean with a few years later. The first game was played at some point in February 1990 and then continued to run. The game ran in many different places during its time at Mill Hill School, we began in a room in the History department (a kind Mr. Reece allowed us entry) and then moved around into places in the Science Block and at one time in the library Library (.?.).

The original version of the game was very basic, there were two Stats (Agility and .?.) and the character sheet (along with most of the rules) was typed on a Zenith 8080 PC, stored on 5 1/4 inch floppy discs with a dot matrix printer for output. The game consisted of space-led dungeon romps where the players would wander around killing mutant humans and enemy soldiers. Most of the effort involved in the game at this point was very much in the form of guns, of which Icar had many.

I definitely knew that I wanted a game that had huge scope, in fact so large that it could never end. The idea of a benevolent Imperium that oversaw the human race was very much the focus of the early game. Players played Troopers of Star Fleet (part of the Imperium) and spent a large amount of time killing things. My other obsession was in making the game different to any other Sci Fi. There was nothing worse than coming up with a good idea all by oneself and then someone point out that it wasn't new. Having a good idea attributed to someone else is frustrating to say the least. Generally, this battle was largely pointless as there is a general Science Fiction consciousness of generic ideas that came about many years ago. I still work hard to try and make everything individual but I very rarely succeed!

Youth

No doubt experienced by all gamers, the dungeon romp became boring very quickly. Being given Mission after Mission of similar targets and similar situations was very dull indeed. As the game moved on into 1992 and 1993, it changed. The mechanics had an overhaul, attributes increased to 18 Stats, which pointlessly covered a variety of areas (Version 2) that were asked to be rolled ad-hoc. I justified the number of statistics because it looked more professional. Most of them never got used. The number of weapons increased and so did the variety of skills. Also, I began using an Acorn Archimedes computer to produce the character sheets which made them look very much more like character sheets you would get in a commercial game.

The way in which the game was played changed too, instead of missions set by me, it turned into player lead decisions and more freedom. This quite often meant that I would have to either ad-lib or twist the scenarios I had created. This became very complicated, so I created the first timeline. The timeline system at this stage was very rough and only included a number of outline events to aid me in GMing more interesting and coherent stories. I also found that any scenario that I created would soon be destroyed by the players, who would work against the railroading of plot and narrative as much as they could.

This evolved quickly into an open game where free-roaming player characters were left with unrestricted access. I needed less time to prepare for a session but needed to learn how to think on my feet to keep the game going.

Around this time tracking was brought into play. This made up for my appalling memory and allowed a larger, more interesting and persistent cast of NPCs. The group called LTTPOOSF (Let's Take The Piss Out Of Star Fleet) became trapped in an arms race. As they got harder, so did the monster, so did they, etc etc. The game lacked balance until the storylines became ridiculous and the game started to wane. There is only so many scenarios you can make for a team that can blow up planets. Arms races have short term gains in terms of interest but are impossible to maintain. By the time I released this, it was already too late.

Finchley Games Club

It was a brave move to take Star Fleet to the Finchley Games Club (FGC) in 1992. Its first appearance was with a group that contained both the Mill Hill School players as well as some new players from the Finchley Games Club itself. The new players had the experience of many different games (although they mostly played Super Hero games up until this point). The FGC was perhaps the largest shake-up for Star Fleet. Each Thursday night, the rules were put under scrutiny and the campaigns were required to be more complex and interesting to the players. The game slowly evolved in style as my drawing improved. Weapons became more balanced, only introduced to fill a niche and the scenarios moved to being Special Forces. Not only did Special Forces allow more nuanced missions but they also became linked, allowing long campaigns with later events being altered by earlier events. This was always the intention of the timeline system but it took a push from the players to make it reality.

Although unknown to the players, it was at this time that a new version of the game system was thought of. Unfortunately, it was shelved as the amount of work required to implement the new system seemed huge. The campaigns got longer, the Special Forces characters left the Star Fleet and became soldiers of various fortunes and with each new batch of players came new ideas and input to the system. In 1994/1995, while I was in my gap year (learning to fly and do a Maths A level from scratch), the first brave attempt for someone other than I to GM was made by Phil Caller. Running two games concurrently, Phil and I ran Special Forces teams where the missions coincided often and the events had impacts on the other team. The games ran with mixed success. Phil's style of GMing was vastly different to mine and friction was caused between the two teams. These were the last groups to be run at the Finchley Games Club before I went off to University.

University

On arrival at Reading University in October 1995, I had decided not to rush into GMing Star Fleet. For the first time in many years, I gave other games a chance and played under other GMs. The mixed effort made by other GMs to provide interesting and full stories made my resolve even stronger. However, I came across another problem. Whenever I mentioned the name of my roleplaying game (Star Fleet), people automatically pigeon-holed it as a 'Star Trek' clone. This infuriated me as I had strived to make the Star Fleet Universe different from anything out there. So, in the winter of 1996, I changed the name to Icar and set up a fledgling website. I wanted to call it Icarus but there was already an RPG out on the net called that.

The computing resources at Reading University were far superior to my old school and I found that I had a large amount of time between lectures to write a new set of rules. The new version would move away from the Dot Matrix print of the old rules and be reprinted on laser printers. However, 5 pages into the creation of the rules, I found the old design that I had shelved many years before.

Also in 1996, I bought my first computer (Dell P200) and this helped the move onto pastures new. While fiddling with the new system, I continued to run the old until the new system (Version 3) finally burst onto the scene in 1998, where it was only half complete! I met Andrew "Byrn" O'Byrne, who became best friend and a long time Icar player. A new character sheet was created each week with the new deviant wheel, skill trees and close combat system. Also, during this period, I started playing with the 3D software Lightwave, allowing me to create visuals that were vastly superior to my old scribbles.

Along with the new system came a whole range of GM tools that I had been using since 1994 but had failed to write up. The new tools allowed the GM to control and administer the new complex format of games that would otherwise be very difficult. HTML was chosen as the new format for the rules, viewable by all (but as yet difficult to print). The rules pages flew together (full of typos) and were soon checked by a horde of hardcore players. New character sheets were a must and version after version flew out of the printer... almost one every week. I had grown a huge distaste for the typical spreadsheet like character sheet systems and did everything in my power to remove the numbers and straight lines and replace them with circles and pictures.

In 1999, 9 years after the game began, Bullet Systems (run by two old Icar players) granted a web space on their server, allowing me much more room to put the game than on the University server. With this, the game expanded and I set about writing up technology, society and the huge amount of game background that had accumulated over the years. Although more of the game came online, I was still the only person I knew to run the game. I had a few messages from people online (which always power me along) but I was still the only GM.

Millennium

On the turn of the millennium, Icar had finished growing up. A new web-look and more information online meant that the quality of the game increased in line with the web site. I created a new range of weapon sheets. This was another innovation to move away from other RPGs: having physical sheets or cards for each item. All the information for the item became stored on a folded piece of paper and clipped with the character sheet, rather than writing down in a box on a sheet. This kept the tracking and movements of different pieces of equipment obvious. There was a palpable horror to a player physically handing over the sheet for their prized weapon. The game being on hundreds of HTML pages made it very difficult to update. Alterations still came in the form of encumbrance rules and more aid for character generation.

Another noticeable facet of the new millennium was the fact that one group had played since 1999. The group known as the Fear began in October of 1999 and continued until August 2002. The group managed to cement a lot of the problems with the Version 3.2 ruleset but also, in a sense, the game became stale for the group (see Virtual Game Session). For the first time in 3 years, the game took a break. The Fear has also shown me one of the perils of open gaming, without an end, the game came become horribly motionless and can be boring. The best thing to do is engineer a number of endings and then let the players steer towards one of them.

The campaign setting began again in October 2002, this time I wanted to test a new setting. Rather than having gun-toting vigilantes or Special Forces, the new setting was based on Deep Space Scavengers. In this setting, the players would have to wait a long time to get hold of any firearms - if at all. This scenario was also a test run for a campaign setting for the web. Icar never had a campaign setting created for it before and thus this 'Scavenger' trial was very useful.

In early 2003, I realised that the HTML format of the rules was far from ideal. Having each page of the game as a separate HTML made it almost impossible to print. Each page much be printed separately. A process of conversion to PDF began and the Core Rules, called the Elements were first uploaded in February 2003. The Strings, Society and Bionics soon followed. PDF was definitely the way forward and the number of downloads increased because of this. Another problem occurred with the Equipment index. For those people on slow connections, downloading all the JPGs was tiresome and costly. There was not enough information in the old HTML to ascertain what was needed to be downloaded and what was superfluous (given a certain campaign). The new Equipment Index (Version 5) solved that, by condensing the information into one PDF file. Still huge but easier to maintain.

A steady churn

As the noughties wore on, I kept up a good pace of updates to the Version 3 rules. Society (game background was updated to Version 2), spacecraft sheets were released and I created a Wiki.

In 2005, inspired by the Order of the Stick, I produced a Cartoon set in the Icar universe. Based on the Scavenger setting, the Icar toon gave I a chance to explain Icar ideas without the need for fully rendered graphics. I enjoyed making the cartoons but they took an enormous amount of time to complete.

Byrn, a friend and player since 1998, began his own weapons manufacturer Burntek, producing weapons that fitted niches and ideas that soon became canon. The web site kept iterating into PHP, gained a forum and wiki but both of those got hacked and were shut down. I briefly set up a Google Group until I found a home on 1KM1KT.

Version 3.55 became what ended up being the last release of Version 3. It took a gargantuan effort that, even now I can't believe I achieved.

Blogosphere Bloom

As RPG blogging took off, Icar gained more attention from forums and blogs. This was fresh air that blew me along. Including reviews and a feature on the All Games Considered podcast!

In 2008, powered by hubris, I took Icar to Gen Con to run demo games. Fish kindly helped by setting up a very professional stand and I printed up some graphics. It all looked very cool. I wasn't sure what I wanted to achieve at GenCon, I definitely wanted to get the game out there but with nothing to sell, I think people felt confused.

I began The Free RPG Blog as a vehicle to help other free RPG authors. This did take some time away from Icar but gave support to other writers; I also ran competitions on 1KM1KT, making new friends that I still treasure now. Blogging was hugely valuable as it helped me see Icar through new eyes. It was through that that I realised that I couldn't rest on my laurels and I decided to start version 4.

Version 4

By 11th October 2009, I knew what was good and bad about Icar. I was burning through changes, updating and rejigging. Rather than separate books, there would be one core rule and I changed the renaming of everything to v4 to reduce confusion. Seven days later, my son was born and with a snap, all my free time disappeared. I stopped my weekly game and diving into Icar was a guilty pleasure I did when sleep deprived. By June 2010, I had something approaching a Version 4 Alpha for people to read. Progress ground down until hitting the Beta in February of 2012 with a new website in 2012.

I struggled out a few copies of Icar version 4 through Lulu but it was filled with typos and I was still not 100% happy with the rules. I kept one for myself and gave the others to friends.

As my son settled in on planet earth, I began running a new campaign, which would later become the Fleet setting book. I stopped updating the core rule books and and threw myself into the Fleet setting, blogging as I went. I released it in January 2016 and got a lot of great - sometimes tear inducing - feedback. Then, in December, my daughter was born and everything ground to a halt. Again!

Reignition

Just when you thought that the game had settled down, I decided that the rules were to disparate and complex and needed a huge amount of simplification. I found the simplest questions meant a lengthy answer such as "When do I use an attribute and when do I use a skill". It wasn't obvious and the fuzziness around it made me realise that the system wasn't helping the game.

With a lot of help from Byrn, I decided to start version 5, with a core mechanic to underpin all the same systems for close combat and space combat and so on. We recalibrated all of the weapons, armour, spacecraft and used Google Sheets to balance all the numbers; ensuring that every weapon had a niche and every spacecraft has a purpose.

Onto Open Source in 2016

I won't always be able to work on Icar but then after that, what then? I have a huge amount of pictures, files, archive, notes and all of that could be easily lost. Must better then to share. At time of writing, Version 5 will be open source and hosted on GitHub. 3D models, books, website, everything.

Rob Lang May, 2019