Tell Me About Cortex Prime

[Haplo781]

Does Cortex have a free license and/or SRD, or plans for them?

I believe so, yes. One of the more open ones on the market as well. At least that was the case for Cortex Plus.

 

[nyvinter]

Thanks for the detailed response. it is too bad there isn't a "Fate Worlds" style book for it to help newcomers grok the system.

Yeah, the five Spotlight books that remains from the kickstarter have sadly not had the highest of priorities but hopefully we'll get at least one soonish (November is the latest for the first volume but I'm not holding my breath).

Content from the kickstarter:

Spotlight Volume One

• Miriam Robern's Citizen Swords against the Ogre King: A fantasy setting of resistance and revolution
• TK Nyarlathotep's Titans vs Leviathans—All Out War for Earth: A near-future setting that features giant robots versus monstrous kaiju
• Kira Magrann's Stranger Towns: A setting & sourcebook for creating weird towns with quirky residents, dangerous secrets, and curious mysteries
• Tara Zuber's Retired No More: Golden Age adventurers come out of retirement to face one last threat to all of humanity

Spotlight Volume Two

• Maggie Carroll's Terraverse: Agents cross back and forth between multiple worlds ranging from the slightly similar to the radically different
• Leonard Balsera's To the Pain—Grim and Gritty Cortex: From his personal collection of deep cuts and DIY hacks comes Lenny's expanded rules for horror and perilous adventure at the bleeding edge of sanity
• Jacob DC Ross' Bone Raiders: A sword and planet setting featuring extraordinary mecha and weird and wonderful aliens
• Brie Sheldon's Solarpunk: A post-scarcity setting where powerful corporate interests seek to destabilize the fruits of progress and the heroes try to stop them

Spotlight Volume Three

• Richard August's Necromancer: Modern-day London faces the machinations of a cruel embodiment of Death, with only desperate wizards and sorcerers to stop it.
• Monte Lin's Alien, Us: 1950's picket fence paranoia where the players are aliens hiding among a suspicious humanity.
• Filamena Young's Earth is the Nest: Social science fiction featuring a crew of discovery to the stars, challenged not only by the unknown but by their own conflicting goals.
• Jahmal "Mad Jay" Brown's PRIME Supers: Government-created super heroes are Earth's last stand against a wave of alien invaders.

Prime Spotlight Volume Four

• June Shores' Heroic World Creation Kit: Collaboratively build the super hero setting you want to play in as you play.
• Joseph Blomquist's Cosa Nostra: The Italian immigrant experience of prohibition era New York: Crime, guns, family, and food.
• Nicolas Hornyak's Snowfall Initiative: A science fantasy setting where the PCs are elite special forces teams trying to repair rifts that open between our world and an icy, war-torn fantasy realm.
• Jack Norris' Inheritors: A neo-pulp setting featuring multiple generations of adventurers, heroes, and villains.
• Shawn C. Harris' Monsters Among Us: Modern horror with monstrous protagonists struggling to survive in a world that hates and fears them!

Prime Spotlight Volume Five

• Rob Justice's Safe Zone: A post-apocalyptic setting featuring community and settlement-building. Establish and defend your haven from the encroaching rot outside the walls, while you can.
• Vivian Paul's Camp Bewilderwood: Play as young heirs to mythic bloodlines and power while forging radical friendships against cosmic evil.
• Dacar Arunsone's Shards: In the near future, Earth has been conquered by body-snatching aliens. You play as near-invulnerable ex-cons, beneficiaries of unlicensed medical experiments and, unfortunately, humanity's last hope.
• Rev. Becky N. Elfprincess' Bleed: A many-worlds sandbox setting where a select few heroic individuals exhibit extraordinary gifts as a result of the bleeding over of other realms, including the ability to slide between them.
• Christopher Stone-Bush's Spellcaught: When you're a young witch in love, high school is the last thing on your mind. But despite evil magicians, rogue creatures, and double-crossing teachers, you still have to graduate.... and survive prom.

 

[innerdude]

At first glance, the general rundown of action sounds somewhat similar to Genesys / FFG Star Wars, which I'm pretty familiar with.

Comparing effect dice in Cortex sounds a lot like reading the Genesys dice pool.

I'm most interested in hearing more about chargen. What does Cortex+/Prime do differently at that level to make characters distinct? What does character progression look like?

 

[ruemere]

Let me point you in the direction of the resources:
1. Welcome to the world of Cortex: Cortex Tabletop Roleplaying Game | Fandom Tabletop
Note the Hammerheads Spotlight. In the Explore the Rules section there is a walkthru through basic concepts.

2. A fan made miniguide to create a setting specific ruleset: http://www.neomens.net/spip/IMG/pdf/cortex_prime_rules_menu_v3.3.1.pdf
Read to learn how to assemble a hack for your setting.

3. The official fantasy setting, Tales of Xadia. Beautiful. Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game | Fandom Tabletop

If you want more, let me know. Personally, I hacked two games, Cavaliers of Mars and Miserable Secrets and they worked pretty good.

 

[Umbran]

When people ask about magic in Cortex, there is the inevitable, incredibly unhelpful "it depends on what you want magic to do" answer. It's not wrong...

What other answer are you supposed to give for a toolkit, though?

 

[Aldarc]

What other answer are you supposed to give for a toolkit, though?

That's the point. They're not wrong, but that can also be what makes it difficult if you are trying to figure out where to start if you want to grok the system for magic.

Admittedly, IME, not every toolkit system shares this issue: e.g., True20, Savage Worlds, etc.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's because there's little ability to customize the magic systems in those; any system where you can custom build them has that (Hero, EABA...)

 

[ruemere]

I'm most interested in hearing more about chargen. What does Cortex+/Prime do differently at that level to make characters distinct? What does character progression look like?

The process of generating characters depends on a particulars of a setting:

1. Establish list of trait sets applicable to characters in your setting. For example, if I were to run an investigative horror campaign Call of Cortex, I could pick the following:

attributes: Physical, Mental, Social, Otherness (Otherness is a measure of psychological stability and one's ability to relate to alien agendas: 0 means you've got nerves of steel, and alien influences cannot affect you, at d12 you are one step from becoming a part of a problem)
skills: (let's use the list from the rules)
distinctions: (four in-character statements that describe character's specialties, use Plot Points to activate benefits)
relationships and assets: (important people, important organizations, important resources - some of these relations may be antagonistic)

2. A character has "milestones" or "sessions".

2.1 "Sessions" - complete a session, record its name, then spend a session or sessions to improve a character.

2.2 "Milestones" is a list of thematically grouped actions and goals that give you XP. For example, a doctor in Call of Cortex could have the following:
1 XP: successfully diagnosing and treating a patient
3 XP: making a discovery that defies your medical knowledge
10 XP: encountering, researching and making use of otherness

2.3 In general, you need to survive three sessions to step up (improve by one step) an important character feature.

 

[Aldarc]

That's because there's little ability to customize the magic systems in those; any system where you can custom build them has that (Hero, EABA...)

I know, but the point is that it's not a universal issue among toolkits and the issue remains with games like Cortex and Fate. There may be lots of different ways to do magic, but where and how do you start? Especially when the game doesn't have much in terms of concrete examples. (Thankfully there is ToX out now.)

 

[Umbran]

That's because there's little ability to customize the magic systems in those; any system where you can custom build them has that (Hero, EABA...)

Yeah. In the past, the Cortex system itself was useful for mechanics of fairly mundane actions, and SFX covered anything weird. But in Cortex Prime, you can build magic into the fundamentals of stats and play.

Tales of Xadia, a Cortex Prime game all about a magical world, needs all of three pages on how to do magic. Because "doing magic" is mechanically pretty much the same as other ways of doing stuff. Which makes sense, because in that world, about half the planet's population can do magic in some form or other. It has to flow naturally in the system.