'Tales from Xadia' Dragon Prince RPG Announced

Tales of Xadia is an upcoming RPG powered by the Cortex system, based on the Netflix series The Dragon Prince. It will be published by Fandom, the company which owns D&D Beyond.

The RPG was announced during a Comic Con panel this weekend which announced four more seasons of the TV show. Tales of Xadia will "bridge" seasons 3 and 4 of the show. The game is slated for a 2021 release, with a pubic playtest preceding it.

There's an official website, with a trailer.

The Cortex system is a universal modular tabletop gaming engine. It was originally crated by Margaret Weis Productions for the Serenity roleplaying game, and has been used for various games since. Fandom, the owners of D&D Beyond, acquired the system last year.

 PRESS RELEASE

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Players can explore the ruins of Lux Aurea, try to restore the corrupt sunforge, and fight to stop the evil monstrosities they emanate from spreading. This off-screen story comes alive in both game additions and organized game events prior to the release of Season 4.

“Stories from Xadia is being prepared by Cortex, a rule system previously used in award-winning games in the Universes of wonder, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, and more. Cortex Prime was developed by Cam Banks and is the latest version of the system. While waiting for the public game test from Stories from Xadiayou can try out the Cortex Prime rules for free with Hammerheads Spotlight game, available now at cortexrpg.com.

‘The Dragon Prince’ Tabletop RPG ‘Tales Of Xadia’ Announced

Wonderstorm and Fandom have teamed up to create a tabletop roleplaying game set in The Dragon Prince universe called 'Tales of Xadia' powered by the Cortex Prime system.

www.forbes.com

 

[Umbran]

Cortex emphasizes a design principle that forces players to engage the core themes of the settings.

A well-done implementation does, yes. Mind you, you can do a Cortex-style game with "stat + skill" to make a dice pool, too.

 

[Stone Dog]

D&D emulates one thing well and one thing only. D&D. While that is a very broad and pretty flexible situation, it cannot be expected to be all things for all settings.

Cortex feels like a good fit. It is modular enough to be re-built for a number of setting styles without losing the core mechanics.

 

[polyhedral man]

A well-done implementation does, yes. Mind you, you can do a Cortex-style game with "stat + skill" to make a dice pool, too.

Could you expand on how that would work?

 

[Umbran]

Could you expand on how that would work?

Sure. Let us take the Leverage game as the example, as it already does this:

A character has six attributes with a die rating in each: Agility, Alertness, Intelligence, Strength, Vitality, and Willpower.

The character as a die rating in each of five roles: Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Mastermind, Thief. These are basically skill sets.

So, you want to hack the Pentagon? Take your die in Intelligence, and your die in Hacker, roll them, and add them together.
You want to punch the bad guy? Strength+Hitter.
You want to demonstrate in the ballroom to your mark that you're a competition-level dancer? Agility + Grifter.

The character may have assets or specializations that add dice to the pool - then you roll them all, take the best two results and add them.

Some Cortex games have other types of attributes - in the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game, a character has Affiliations - a rating in being Solo (working alone) Buddy (working as part of a pair) or Team. Captain America works really well in a Team - he has a d10 in that. Wolverine prefers to work Solo, so he has a d10 there, if I recall correctly.

So, emulating a theme means having stats appropriate - like the Values example @BadEye gave above.

 

[polyhedral man]

Sure. Let us take the Leverage game as the example, as it already does this:

A character has six attributes with a die rating in each: Agility, Alertness, Intelligence, Strength, Vitality, and Willpower.

The character as a die rating in each of five roles: Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Mastermind, Thief. These are basically skill sets.

So, you want to hack the Pentagon? Take your die in Intelligence, and your die in Hacker, roll them, and add them together.
You want to punch the bad guy? Strength+Hitter.
You want to demonstrate in the ballroom to your mark that you're a competition-level dancer? Agility + Grifter.

The character may have assets or specializations that add dice to the pool - then you roll them all, take the best two results and add them.

Some Cortex games have other types of attributes - in the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game, a character has Affiliations - a rating in being Solo (working alone) Buddy (working as part of a pair) or Team. Captain America works really well in a Team - he has a d10 in that. Wolverine prefers to work Solo, so he has a d10 there, if I recall correctly.

So, emulating a theme means having stats appropriate - like the Values example @BadEye gave above.

Many thanks for the extensive example, appreciated. I got the hacker's toolkit a while ago but never invested the time to go through it. I think i'll revisit it in anticipation of the Xadia iteration.

 

[Cam Banks]

D&D emulates one thing well and one thing only. D&D. While that is a very broad and pretty flexible situation, it cannot be expected to be all things for all settings.

Cortex feels like a good fit. It is modular enough to be re-built for a number of setting styles without losing the core mechanics.

I'm a huge fan of D&D, especially this latest edition. I play a lot of it, I've run multiple campaigns with it, all of them different. However, I think anyone who plays or runs D&D is fairly aware that, as a game, it is heavily centred around combat—every class is defined in terms of how it handles itself in a battle with monsters, in addition to exploring dungeons and all of the other stuff that seems to connect fights together. That's true of any game that occupies the same niche as D&D, from Pathfinder to 13th Age. For Tales of Xadia, we felt that the show truly depicted something else entirely, with much less focus on combat and battle, and more focus as @BadEye says on what matters to the characters, why they do what they do, and how they can deal with the situations they find themselves in.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Ravenbrook]

Human magic in Xadia has a cost that D&D doesn't currently have a mechanic for.

The effects of dark magic in Dragon Prince seem to be somewhat similar to the corruption rules that used to exist for Ravenloft (I don't know if they still do).

 

[Umbran]

The effects of dark magic in Dragon Prince seem to be somewhat similar to the corruption rules that used to exist for Ravenloft (I don't know if they still do).

They havent' gone too deeply into the actual effects in the series. However, graphically it looks less like "corruption" and more like, "loss of life force". It looks to me like humans lack a connection to a source of magic, so they use the life energy of those things that do have a connection, but some of their own life does go with the stolen energy. With very large workings, the impact is notable, but with smaller workings, maybe it is only noticeable in aggregate.

 

[Sunsword]

Perhaps. Maybe it can be done, but several elements of it (the rather Wuxia level of action, and the magic system, f'rex) would be fairly "square peg in round hole". You could do something like it, but it wouldn't be a great fit.

Time will tell, but I'm not a fan of Marvel Heroic or Smallville so I'll be looking for another system to run it and 5E is pretty popular around my hometown.

 

[Stone Dog]

I think humans don't have a default connection to a magic source, but they can all forge their own connection.

The problem is that this is very hard and dark magic was discovered first, so everyone went for that route and assumed there was no other.


I haven't seen the whole series though, so I don't know if that has been addressed.