I purchased this adventure to use as a basis for the kickoff session of a Champions campaign using the HERO system. The scenes progressed very nicely to the final climax. The players were (pleasantly) surprised by the various complications thrown in to the otherwise straightforward path to the bad guy.

I particularly liked the emphasis on Roleplay Opportunities outlined in the Investigation scenes. The author did a great job with realistic NPC motivations and presenting situations without simple, binary solutions. For example, the players can easily go along with one NPC or the other, or take the time to find a compromise... but there isn't always time for compromise!

My only negative comment is that the premade characters are far too silly. I'm sure most people will think they are great :) It just isn't my style.

The term “gangbusters” conjures up thoughts of organized crime, while the term “gang” by itself evokes street-level crime. Bring these two realms together, toss in some super-science weaponry, and you have the ingredients for this ICONS adventure by Chris McGroarty and Dan Houser. The plot unfolds in three straightforward acts, which together offer opportunities for action, interaction, and investigation. It’s a pretty linear adventure, with fairly blatant use of NPCs to keep the PCs on track. This makes the adventure a little “railroady,” but also makes it a good adventure for an inexperienced GM to run, since the plot, though fun, is linear and uncomplicated. It’s also a fairly short adventure; the actual storyline only requires only twelve pages, with the villain’s stat blocks accounting for five more and five presenting the pregenerated characters.

The frequency of grammatical errors (mostly related to punctuation) is embarrassing, as is the inconsistent reference to “magical artifacts” on p. 14 while the rest of the adventure focuses on super-science tech. Dan Houser’s vibrant artwork brings the adventure to life, though I wish more of it depicted the bad guys than the pregenerated heroes (the Storm Agency, who also appear in Hero Pack 3).

In the end, this adventure is good, but not great; I recommend it, but I can’t really “rave” about it.

This looks like a great adventure to run for beginning players of ICONS. The setup is simple and throws the players into the action. I can't wait to run this for my group!

I ran this for a group of six players and it ran really well. The story is easy to set up and follow through, the villains are pretty good though one of them badly screwed up when we ran it making the bank scene easier. I used this as the pilot episode to my ongoing game and was very pleased.