13th Age-style icons

Keith J Davies

I'm devising an example set of 13th Age-style icons as might be used in a sandbox setting....I tried to put an overview of icons and what they are in this post, along with why I think they fit....13th Age ties a lot to the icons. The bestiary links the monsters to icons, I think all the significant (i.e. bigger than potions of healing) magic items have links to icons, and so on.... I don't know that I'd use them that pervasively, but the idea fits the idea of "shadowy figures with their fingers in the major events of the age". 

I'm looking for twenty campaign elements or themes to combine to create the icons. What are twenty things that you might find to be worth making the foci of a campaign setting?

Matt Miller 

Presuming you want binaries for opposed sides of your jewel...

•  Life death, 
• good evil, 
• order chaos, 
• self group, 
• old young, 
• intuitive logical, 
• mind body, 
• nature civilization, 
• future past, 
• innovative traditional, 
• cold hot, 
• wet dry, 
• earth sky, 
• land sea, 
• dark light,
• night day, 
• fecundity sterility (farm vs desert),
• war peace, 
• farming herding, raiding or trading, 
• foreign local (travel vs domesticity),
•  trickery sincerity, 
• justice-- mercy, 
• Heroic vs villainous, 
• Virtue and vice, 
• self interest vs altruism, 
• honor and desire, 
• equality hierarchy... 
• Freedom slavery, 
• liberty tyranny 

Keith J Davies
I ended up drafting a list and rolling with it, and ended up with...

Keith J Davies.....Draft List

it wants some more work -- flesh out the individual icons, figure out how to interpret the elements and themes (does Nature's Heart fight the Giant King because she wants to stop him from fulfilling a prophecy? Or is she trying to support him, to disrupt the curse he thinks is foretold to doom them both?), identify the relationships between the various icons and the agendas of each -- but it's coming along quite nicely. These would be the shadowy figures behind the scenes that have their fingers in the intrigues and scenarios the PCs get involved in.