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Cortex Prime Game Handbook
Orc revolutionaries in love! Giant-sized mythic mecha! Swashbuckling cats in the far future! Hard-boiled and haunted police detectives! Whether you’re a fan of genres and genre mash-ups covering the full spectrum of RPG worlds and settings, or you’re just looking for a tabletop game system you can customize to your own specifications, Cortex Prime is primed for you.
Cortex is an award-winning tabletop roleplaying game system that has existed in one form or another for over twenty years, powering multiple licensed roleplaying games. Cortex Prime is the newest version of this much-loved set of game rules, refined and redesigned for a new, digitally-supported generation.
This Game Handbook includes:
Multiple character creation options, modular elements, and approaches
Full rules for exciting conflicts and entertaining challenges at the game table
Completely hackable and customizable mods to suit your players, your worlds, your stories
Guidance for Game Moderators—run scenes, sessions, and entire settings
Backwards compatibility with all previous Cortex-powered games and supplements
Cortex is an award-winning tabletop roleplaying game system that has existed in one form or another for over twenty years, powering multiple licensed roleplaying games. Cortex Prime is the newest version of this much-loved set of game rules, refined and redesigned for a new, digitally-supported generation.
This Game Handbook includes:
Multiple character creation options, modular elements, and approaches
Full rules for exciting conflicts and entertaining challenges at the game table
Completely hackable and customizable mods to suit your players, your worlds, your stories
Guidance for Game Moderators—run scenes, sessions, and entire settings
Backwards compatibility with all previous Cortex-powered games and supplements
- GenresRole Playing Games
250 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2020
2 people are currently reading
15 people want to read
About the author
Cam Banks
40 books48 followersI am an expatriate New Zealander who fell in love with an American and moved to the USA in 1996. We are now married and have two boys. I've fulfilled my lifelong dream to become a game designer and writer and after 22 years I've moved back to New Zealand with my family. I work for Fandom Tabletop as a creative director, leading the charge on new projects powered by the Cortex system that I have spent much of my career developing as a tabletop roleplaying game toolkit.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 24, 2021
Man, a great RPG like this exists and here I am stuck running DND 5e like an absolute buffoon.
January 10, 2021
The Cortex system was developed over a long series of licensed games: Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroes, and
Firefly
. Licenses expire, and many of these books are basically impossible to obtain. Cortex Prime is the unified, license-free, generic Cortex system.
Generic systems are tricky beasts, because there really isn't such a thing. Roleplaying games are about fiction, and mechanics help us support that fiction by providing accessible questions and answers detailing "what happens next." Cortex's DNA is heavily inflected by its TV license history. What should happen next is what would make for a good episode, which most broadly means a face of successes and complications until our heroes win the day, or suffer a painful lesson.
Where this gets complex is that Cortex Prime isn't a game book, so much as a game toolkit. Characters are built around mandatory Distinctions, and then at least two of the Prime Sets: Affiliations, Attributes, Powers, Relationships, Reputations, Roles, Skills, or Values. Resources and Assets round out the stuff that a character will be able to draw on. Each trait is rated from d4 to d12, rolled in a dice pool, and then the highest two are kept, with the biggest die not totaled counting for effect. Plot Points enable you to add more dice to your total, trigger cool SFX, or increase the impact of your action. By page count, Powers get the most space, covering the gamut of comics inspired superhero abilities. This makes sense, we know how drive or fight work as skills, while elemental control or flight might need some more explicit rules. And Powers serve as a decent framework for thematic high-concept scifi gizmos, fantasy magic, or TV treatment of forensic science or computers.
Cortex falls in an odd place where it's not a simulationist or gamist game, but it's also fairly divorced from narrativist RPG design styles. And while the mechanics are not hard, the dice pool manipulation is fiddly. I've had to explain how Resistance rolls work in BitD literally every session. I have no idea how my groups would ever master the intricacies of calculating effect size, dice doubling, stepping up, or any of the other dice tricks Cortex relies on (and on a side note, calculating probabilities in this system is a nightmare. Working on some Python to do it via Monte Carlo simulations, but ugh!).
At the end of the day, Cortex Prime has a lot of options, and both players and GMs will need to do a lot of work to get the game they want. GMs have to select which suite of mods will form their version of Cortex. And players need to absolutely nail their Distinctions. Good Distinctions mean characters interacting with the PP economy and driving the story. Bad ones mean the game is poorly designed.
I still really like Cortex, though I've yet to play a session, and it's good to have a live version of the rules not tied to either Leverage (though I could go for a Leverage rewatch about now) or the incredibly idiosyncratic organization of Firefly. But Cortex has to beat several options, such as other generic systems like FATE and GURPS, a specific system for the game you want to play, or the baseline energy of just doing it poorly in D&D. And I'm not sure Cortex Prime is elegant or compelling enough to clear those barriers.
Generic systems are tricky beasts, because there really isn't such a thing. Roleplaying games are about fiction, and mechanics help us support that fiction by providing accessible questions and answers detailing "what happens next." Cortex's DNA is heavily inflected by its TV license history. What should happen next is what would make for a good episode, which most broadly means a face of successes and complications until our heroes win the day, or suffer a painful lesson.
Where this gets complex is that Cortex Prime isn't a game book, so much as a game toolkit. Characters are built around mandatory Distinctions, and then at least two of the Prime Sets: Affiliations, Attributes, Powers, Relationships, Reputations, Roles, Skills, or Values. Resources and Assets round out the stuff that a character will be able to draw on. Each trait is rated from d4 to d12, rolled in a dice pool, and then the highest two are kept, with the biggest die not totaled counting for effect. Plot Points enable you to add more dice to your total, trigger cool SFX, or increase the impact of your action. By page count, Powers get the most space, covering the gamut of comics inspired superhero abilities. This makes sense, we know how drive or fight work as skills, while elemental control or flight might need some more explicit rules. And Powers serve as a decent framework for thematic high-concept scifi gizmos, fantasy magic, or TV treatment of forensic science or computers.
Cortex falls in an odd place where it's not a simulationist or gamist game, but it's also fairly divorced from narrativist RPG design styles. And while the mechanics are not hard, the dice pool manipulation is fiddly. I've had to explain how Resistance rolls work in BitD literally every session. I have no idea how my groups would ever master the intricacies of calculating effect size, dice doubling, stepping up, or any of the other dice tricks Cortex relies on (and on a side note, calculating probabilities in this system is a nightmare. Working on some Python to do it via Monte Carlo simulations, but ugh!).
At the end of the day, Cortex Prime has a lot of options, and both players and GMs will need to do a lot of work to get the game they want. GMs have to select which suite of mods will form their version of Cortex. And players need to absolutely nail their Distinctions. Good Distinctions mean characters interacting with the PP economy and driving the story. Bad ones mean the game is poorly designed.
I still really like Cortex, though I've yet to play a session, and it's good to have a live version of the rules not tied to either Leverage (though I could go for a Leverage rewatch about now) or the incredibly idiosyncratic organization of Firefly. But Cortex has to beat several options, such as other generic systems like FATE and GURPS, a specific system for the game you want to play, or the baseline energy of just doing it poorly in D&D. And I'm not sure Cortex Prime is elegant or compelling enough to clear those barriers.
February 25, 2021
Taken on it’s own, this book is not a great introduction to the Cortex system. This book is a toolkit with a basic set of rules that you add things to until you’re happy with your game. The problem is all of the options are thrown at you pretty early on. You do get an example of how dice are rolled and the basics, but then you’re thrown in the deep end.
However, at roughly the same time, the publishers of Cortex came out with the play test material for Tales of Xadia and that is a much more focused “book” (something like 50 pages) and a better example of how Cortex can be run. Instead of presenting itself as a ton of options, Tales of Xadia is a specified set of mods that make a cohesive whole. Having that as an example of how a Cortex game can be run really helped things for me. That being said, I think there’s some benefit to reading the main book for a little bit, getting confused, and then reading one of the current settings to clarify things (either Hammerheads or Tales of Xadia).
As for the system itself, it’s clever. Everything is a die pool of d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s, and d12s. Typically your pool will consist of 3 or more dice. You’ll roll them and add two together to get your result. From the remaining dice you can pick one as the effect die where the face doesn’t matter, only the size of the die. The bigger the die the greater the result (e.g. a d6 is a middling success, but a d10 is pretty fantastic). From there things expand outwards quickly, but once you’ve picked your mods, it seems simple enough.
One thing to note for GMs out there is that there is no bestiary, but you don’t really need one. By default there’s no hit points (there’s a mod for that) and since traits are all represented by dice it’s easy to make something up or just add dice to the dice pool (in the case of mooks).
I’m looking forward to trying this one out, though it’ll likely be with my sons. That being said, I think it’ll be easy to adapt for kids and look forward to seeing how they handle it.
However, at roughly the same time, the publishers of Cortex came out with the play test material for Tales of Xadia and that is a much more focused “book” (something like 50 pages) and a better example of how Cortex can be run. Instead of presenting itself as a ton of options, Tales of Xadia is a specified set of mods that make a cohesive whole. Having that as an example of how a Cortex game can be run really helped things for me. That being said, I think there’s some benefit to reading the main book for a little bit, getting confused, and then reading one of the current settings to clarify things (either Hammerheads or Tales of Xadia).
As for the system itself, it’s clever. Everything is a die pool of d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s, and d12s. Typically your pool will consist of 3 or more dice. You’ll roll them and add two together to get your result. From the remaining dice you can pick one as the effect die where the face doesn’t matter, only the size of the die. The bigger the die the greater the result (e.g. a d6 is a middling success, but a d10 is pretty fantastic). From there things expand outwards quickly, but once you’ve picked your mods, it seems simple enough.
One thing to note for GMs out there is that there is no bestiary, but you don’t really need one. By default there’s no hit points (there’s a mod for that) and since traits are all represented by dice it’s easy to make something up or just add dice to the dice pool (in the case of mooks).
I’m looking forward to trying this one out, though it’ll likely be with my sons. That being said, I think it’ll be easy to adapt for kids and look forward to seeing how they handle it.
December 13, 2024
This book is a great set of rules to make and run Cortex games. Having played many different systems, I feel I have finally found the one that meets all my needs and more. This is one of the most flexible narrative-style roleplaying systems around. It is also fairly simple at its core; roll a bunch of dice and keep some of the results.
The book also includes three games using the Cortex Prime system, which highlight the system's flexibility and how it can be used to play different types of game. The physical copy (gorgeous hardback) comes with access to the digital handbook, currently hosted by Direwolf.
The book itself is a toolkit with many options for game creators to construct their own game. With a bit of a learning curve, a new Cortex Prime game can be made quickly, by mixing and matching the different mechanics available. This means the system will suit both players who want to run a long campaign and those who like to run shorter games and one-shots.
Furthermore, the pathways character creation system is a highly satisfying way to construct the game's background story collaboratively, but this will require some planning and the game's ruleset needs to be set in advance by the GM.
The hardback book itself is a piece of art, with rich full colour images throughout. Real care and attention has been put into the layout.
If I had any criticism, I might dock 0.25 stars for lack of supporting material (it would be great to see some videos on example combat or character creation using different mechanics). But this is hardly the failing of the book itself.
There is really very little to say in a negative fashion about this book or this system. I hope to bring Cortex Prime to many more players.
The book also includes three games using the Cortex Prime system, which highlight the system's flexibility and how it can be used to play different types of game. The physical copy (gorgeous hardback) comes with access to the digital handbook, currently hosted by Direwolf.
The book itself is a toolkit with many options for game creators to construct their own game. With a bit of a learning curve, a new Cortex Prime game can be made quickly, by mixing and matching the different mechanics available. This means the system will suit both players who want to run a long campaign and those who like to run shorter games and one-shots.
Furthermore, the pathways character creation system is a highly satisfying way to construct the game's background story collaboratively, but this will require some planning and the game's ruleset needs to be set in advance by the GM.
The hardback book itself is a piece of art, with rich full colour images throughout. Real care and attention has been put into the layout.
If I had any criticism, I might dock 0.25 stars for lack of supporting material (it would be great to see some videos on example combat or character creation using different mechanics). But this is hardly the failing of the book itself.
There is really very little to say in a negative fashion about this book or this system. I hope to bring Cortex Prime to many more players.
November 4, 2021
This game system seems to have a lot to recommend it and I'm looking forward to trying it out, but this book is terrible. It's extremely hard to understand: partly because of how non-specific they've tried to be about everything but mainly because of how it's organised.
Reading through the book from start to finish, you find yourself wondering what the terms they're using mean, because they frequently refer to things that haven't been explained yet in their explanations of other things. It all does make sense eventually, but you will have to flip back and forward and probably reread entire chapters.
The system is actually pretty easy to get to grips with once you know what all the jargon means, so it certainly could have been explained in a simpler way, and there's a lot to like about it. But if you're trying to learn it from the book, you're going to have a hard time - at least to start with.
Reading through the book from start to finish, you find yourself wondering what the terms they're using mean, because they frequently refer to things that haven't been explained yet in their explanations of other things. It all does make sense eventually, but you will have to flip back and forward and probably reread entire chapters.
The system is actually pretty easy to get to grips with once you know what all the jargon means, so it certainly could have been explained in a simpler way, and there's a lot to like about it. But if you're trying to learn it from the book, you're going to have a hard time - at least to start with.
September 27, 2021
When I design a game setting based on my fantasy novel series (and I will), I will almost certainly use Cortex. I was a huge fan of Marvel Heroic, which used the same game engine. Cortex Prime provides even more flexibility to create the kind of setting you want. The book is extremely well organized, well illustrated, and is a work of art in and of itself.
Even better than the book itself is the extra-book support for the game. Purchasing the book grants you access to an online copy on the Cortex website as well as a PDF version. You can also join the Cortex Discord channel and chat with knowledgeable creators, including the game's author, Cam Banks!
If you are looking for a new game system for your role-playing games, this is the one to check out!
Even better than the book itself is the extra-book support for the game. Purchasing the book grants you access to an online copy on the Cortex website as well as a PDF version. You can also join the Cortex Discord channel and chat with knowledgeable creators, including the game's author, Cam Banks!
If you are looking for a new game system for your role-playing games, this is the one to check out!
May 30, 2021
Excellent system which finds a perfect middle ground between streamlined narrative play and enough mechanics to still feel like a game. The toolkit approach is ideal for me as a serial homebrewer, I could mess around with new settings and genres all day (i say, while making 4 different fantasy settings)
The organisation of this handbook can be a little confusing and it could be very overwhelming to someone less experienced in RPGs, but the overall quality of rules, explanations, art, depth, variety, and visual layout keeps it at a strong 5 star from me.
The organisation of this handbook can be a little confusing and it could be very overwhelming to someone less experienced in RPGs, but the overall quality of rules, explanations, art, depth, variety, and visual layout keeps it at a strong 5 star from me.
January 24, 2024
Based on the rulebook, this is an interesting system that is a strong departure from Dungeons & Dragons and other systems. It is more of a “system for creating a system” than a system unto itself, and thus the rules are sometimes a bit complex and unclear. There were numerous times when I had to go online to clarify a confusing part of the rulebook, and sometimes the rules reference another rule or concept that isn’t explained until later in the book. Nonetheless, I can’t wait to give this system a try, and my mind is already brimming with stories.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews