This past year, Dread Unicorn Games released Gods and Icons, which expands the Icons in the game, giving them names, organizations, relationships with over icons, and even variations to make them more unique for your game. Each Icon also has a list of gods associated with them, which I love because 13th Age doesn’t have any named gods. I reviewed this excellent supplement earlier this year, and now Dread Unicorn has released cards to make game play even easier.

The Icons and Conditions deck is available on DriveThruRPG as either a PDF you can print to make your own cards, or professionally printed as a deck. They include cards with details on the nine conditions your character might be in, including Stunned, Dazed, and Helpless. The text on the cards lets you know how the condition is effecting you. I really like using cards to track conditions. As a GM, I can forget that I’ve stunned a character when tracking so many other things, so a physical representation to remind both of us is helpful. It’s also really beneficial to have the text on the card, instead of a GM screen or in the book, so that focus can stay on combat and not looking up rules. For each of the nine conditions you receive three cards in this deck, allowing you to track what’s happening to members of your party individually.

I think the Icon cards are a clever addition to 13th Age game play as well. The cards resemble the face cards in your standard deck of cards, with the upper body of each icon looking up, no matter which way you hold the cards. However, in one orientation you have a 5, and in the other you have a 6. This simplifies tracking who you have succeeded on an Icon relationship roll with and what that roll was. I tend to write down my rolls on my character sheet, and in the middle of combat I can forget that they’re there to use. These cards make it easy to track who you have a relationship with and what the roll was with a glance. The deck includes two of each Icon card, so it’s easy to have overlap between your players. The Icons displayed on the cards are the ones that show up in Icons and Gods, with the really great art they used in that book. However, even if you don’t use the Icons from that supplement I think these cards would be useful.

I’ve been a big fan of the products Dread Unicorn has come out with for 13th Age and Numenera and I think this deck is something that will improve your 13th Age experience when playing at the table. The printed deck is really good quality and makes tracking simple things much easier. You can get the Icon and Conditions deck on DriveThruRPG for $1.95 as a PDF, or $14.95 as a printed deck in a tuckbox.

*The Redacted Files received a free copy of the printed deck for review purposes.