Some of these ideas were less useful to me personally because of the way I tend to run games. I usually have most plot points laid out well in advance to help lay down foreshadowing and structure in the world; 13th Age's storytelling lends itself more toward an episodic sort of adventure, where the "super meta plot" may be in stone, but whatever you're doing each session has an extremely high degree of variability. PCs are headed to the Archmage's outpost this session? *icon roll* Ok, actually it's the High Druid's outpost we're going to today, and that means instead of mages and magical wards there are druids and dire bears. This sort of highly improvisational re-skinning on the fly is great for some GMs, because it naturally fills in all the details while they're painting the plot with a broad brush. If you plan by saying, "I want the PCs to encounter a villain on top of a tower," this this is great - you just got your villain and tower and everything laid out for you! However, if you're the type that already planned which villain and what tower based on the story structure you've long-since created and foreshadowed and planned around, that type of improvisation is more disruptive than helpful. Obviously there are multiple depths of improvisation I'm talking about here, and the minute-by-minute stuff is absolutely still fun and useful to me. I just rarely run a game that's "just show up and kick down some doors," which makes some of the mid-level icon relationship rules less useful to me.