Icarus: How Great Civilizations Fall

Icarus is a collaborative storytelling game about how great civilizations fall, written and designed by first-time designer Spenser Starke 

This GM-less macroscopic RPG begins with Icarus: A city-nation of your design. 

At the height of its power, your city of Icarus has decided to erect a massive, ever-growing monument in the center of town to display its sophistication and prestige to the world. 

Those who have played “The Quiet Year” or “Tales of the Arabian Nights” may be familiar with the format of this game; rather than individual stories of adventurers going on dungeon crawling adventures, players will take on the roles of Diplomats, Scientists, Marshalls, Actors, Politicians, and Business Moguls as they describe events taking place over months, and sometimes years, that will help shape the fall of a powerful civilization.

Icarus is played using the rulebook, a deck of 52 cards, some notecards, and a set of dice, all of which we’d love to offer you as a boxed set as a part of this Kickstarter.

Over the course of the game, players will be stacking dice to represent the growing hubris of the great city, and the failures that characters generate will contribute to the tower as their nation falters and decays. Once the dice tower itself tumbles, the city goes with it.

Icarus invites you to build your own utopia, but also comes with a handful of setting suggestions to get your game up and running quickly. With fascinating and evocative civilizations like:

•  The cradle of early mankind
•  A fantasy city imbued with magic 
• A booming western town along the ever-expanding railroad 
• A mystical jungle city full of divine secrets 
• The first major city on Mars 
• A burgeoning space colony of alien life-forms 

and more, you'll have all the details you need to get a game off the ground within minutes.

Though the range of settings for Icarus are endless, it is important that Icarus features a tower that shall rise and a city that will fall.