Cortex Prime
Alex does a walk-through of some parts of Cortex Prime and gushes about how it's a great general system.
Okay, I know I've done a bunch of these lately, but Cortex Prime is one of my favorite toolkits when you're looking to play in a setting that doesn't have an established system, and you're looking for a construction kit to put it into. Now, there are a ton of generic systems you could use: GURPS, HERO, Cypher, Genesys, Mythic… Okay you get the idea. I have and will likely talk more about those in other posts, but I'm starting with Cortex because it has a lot of neat things in it, I enjoy more than the other generic systems I've played.
I think part of this comes down to its origins as a licensed-TV-show-ttrpg system, and the freedom to experiment with different ideas over the years. Another part comes down to the group I regularly play with and their ability to tinker with systems and put together the recipes provided into an extensive game.
Background
Cortex Prime has a wild background for how it came about. Well, maybe not "wild" but interesting in that it's changed hands several times and morphed along with it each time. The Wikipedia page covers everything, but in brief: It started as Sovereign Stone for Sovereign Press, Inc who later transferred the rights to Margaret Weis Productions (both companies owned by Margaret Weis at different points). Margaret Weis Productions (MWP) used it for various Television show licensed games after the transfer including the Supernatural Role Playing Game.
Cam Banks, who worked on the Supernatural game was brought on in 2009 to make Cortex Plus which was used in the Smallville and Leverage Role Playing games. This is where I first encountered the system, playing Smallville.
In 2016, Cam licensed the game from MWP after Margaret Weis retired from making tabletop games and set about consolidating the rules from the prior games, with a Kickstarter for Cortex Prime in 2017. In 2020 Fandom Inc. (yes, that Fandom. They run all the ad-filled wiki sites) bought the rights to the game from MWP and hired Cam to work on it.
Fandom later sold its entire tabletop division to Dire Wolf Digital, which included the rights to Cortex. That's where we're at now.
Whew.
Okay, so what is Dire Wolf doing with the game? Near as I can tell, nothing. It's still available for sale in both Digital and Physical formats. The Digital copy comes with a nice searchable website and a PDF copy of the rules. I don't know how long that website will stick around, but it doesn't seem to be costing them much to keep around so I suspect "indefinitely".
Wherein they say they won't be fulfilling the physical product from the original Kickstarter and they plug new projects in the same breath. I dunno if they're going to make a CORTEX PRIME PRIME EDITION or sell it off, but hey let's see where this goes.
The book is gorgeous, I'm a big fan of the presentation and the color scheme. When it calls for dice, the dice are stylized nicely, and it just is easy to read. For example:
The online version of the rule book is actually very handy too, as it includes definitions for terms that expand when you click on them and a lot of other very helpful navigation tools to get around the system.
There are three settings included in the rule book to give you a feel for the various ways you can hack the system together, and I'd classify them as "okay" mostly because none of them fit a genre I usually want to play.
With that out of the way, let's look at the system itself.
A big pile of subsystems that you're supposed to mix and match
The Core(tex)
The core of the system is a simple one. You build a pool of dice (of varying sizes) based on applicable traits, advantages, equipment, powers, etc., roll them and keep the top two. Add those dice together for a total. Your opposition does the same. Whoever's got the higher total wins.
If you roll any ones, you gain a "plot point" which is the primary metacurrency in Cortex. This can be spent later to add more dice to the pool or do a number of other things depending on what "mods" you're using for the campaign.
Play is very similar to other story-based games, you frame "scenes" and inside those scenes the characters will do various things. There's not a lot of mechanical distinction here other than the pacing of certain abilities. The book does spend a lot of words to talk about the various kinds of dramatic scenes you might play out, but overall the concept is very familiar if you're familiar with Powered by the Apocalypse games.
There's also an Advancement system which is based on XP and also eminently hackable, but I'm going to leave that out of this essay as we're already trending towards a lot of words.
Mods
Like many other generic systems, there's an expectation in Cortex that the group / GM will do some work up front to determine which rules are going to work for their campaign and adjust accordingly. This can range from "annoying" (which I felt about GURPS) to "unworkable" depending on the generic system. For Cortex, there's a lot to read about and there are several "overlapping" systems that are designed to work together but can stand on their own, so it takes a bit of thought to determine which ones are going to be effective.
These are what the game refers to as "Mods" and they either add new subsystems or modify the core system (or other subsystems).
There are a lot of these. Dozens. I think I counted 33, but I'm not entirely sure the full number. Helpfully the website offers up a PDF that lists them all out and which example settings use what.
Some of these are a very small change, like "Instead of starting a session with 1 plot point, you start with zero". Some of them are much larger, like the Doom pool or the entire Powers system. There's a lot of opportunity to mix and match.
Trait Sets
These are included in my mod count above, but they're also critical to the system. In order to have a fully fleshed out character, you need to have a Distinction (which every Cortex character has) and at least two trait sets. These are things like "Attributes + Skills", "Powers + Roles", "Affiliations + Relationships", and so on. Choosing which ones to include heavily influence the game you're going to be playing. For example, the book presents "Grim Fantasy" as using Attributes and Skills. Pretty standard for a Fantasy game.
By contrast, if you're doing a drama like Smallville, you'd have Values (what your character believes) and Relationships (how you relate to PCs and NPCs).
Within each of these trait sets, you're going to have to define what the traits are. Cortex provides some examples (and in the case of the earlier games, tells you exactly what they are), but when using it as a toolkit, you'll want to define them yourself.
Now, you can have more than 2 additional trait sets (and many systems do), but you don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole otherwise you're going to bog the game down every time there's a roll, because you'll be checking when your traits are applicable.
Example Campaign: Cyberpunk Bio-pharmaceutical Company Intrigue
Now that you understand the basics of the customization, I'll explain the choices we made for a campaign I was a player in several years ago.
Trait Sets
Values
For this campaign, since we were wanting to explore what it'd be like to be the people "running" a near-future evil corporation and how that would influence those characters, we chose values for our first trait set.
For the traits themselves, we picked the following list:
- Duty — Conviction and perseverance towards goals
- Free-Will — Self awareness and the ability to choose your own path
- Loyalty — A connection or bond with friends, co-workers, or company
- Morals — Ethics, honor, and general value of human life
- Power — Supremacy, influence, and control
These represent the various "poles" of the character's core beliefs and the elements we wanted to emphasize. Questions like "is free-will more important than your ethics? Can you wield power justly?"
Training
There were a long, long list of these, but I'll rattle off the ones from my character who was the head of "Human Resources":
- Espionage
- Public Relations
- Vehicle Operations
- Intel
- Science
Overall, the training traits were pretty close to the list of skills for Shadowrun but a bit more streamlined. The one major call out is we decided to separate Intel and Espionage as separate skills since we figured we'd have a lot of opportunity to spy and figured it would be more interesting if the infiltration and information gathering portions were separate.
Power Sets
What's a near-future cyberpunk dystopia without cyberware? We decided the "power sets" mod was the right way to model these (we could have also used powers, but we almost always reach for sets over straight powers). Power sets typically have a die rating for a particular "thing", some element you can activate with plot points, and finally a limit on the entire power set. For one of mine, I chose "must be in the same scene as Ambrosia" who was another PC. With a limit, the GM can cause the power to stop working in exchange for a plot point, under those conditions.
These were completely free-form with negotiation with the GM, so I'll reproduce mine in their entirety.
Gene Therapy
In Vitro Gene therepy has given Jeff an unnatural ability to gain the trust of others
10 — Unnatural Charisma
Convincing: Spend a PP to re-roll one die in the pool when trying to convince someone that your suggestion is the right one.
Limit: Must be physically present to take effect (doesn't work over cell, matrix, etc.)
Brain Boosting Nanites
At a young age Jeff was injected with brain boosting nanites (the alpha version of Ambrosia's implants)
8 — Eidetic Memory / 8 — Enhanced Vision
I know this!: Add a 6 and step up effect when using Eidetic Memory to create assets.
Limit: Must be in the same scene as Ambrosia (another PC)
What works really well about all of this
Really, it's all about the building blocks coming together with the core system to make something hyper-tailored to the game you want to play. There's a fair amount of work in learning which mods are the right ones (but Cortex does provide you ample examples), but once you do, it just sings.
From the example above, you might have picked up that we were wanting a high-drama action game approximately in the same vein as "what if Shadowrun, but as executives in the evil corp?". The Values and Training sets supported that kind of story really well, and let us explore the kind of story starting with cross-corporate espionage all the way down to "well what if we want to 'do good' but we disagree on what 'good' is?"
If we wanted to play a high action supers game, we could do that (and they did do that in Marvel Heroic Role playing). Mystery? Horror? Monster Dating Sim? Cortex can do it.
Honorable mention: One of my favorite things from Smallville was the map you draw collaboratively for character relationships. It involves taking turns, adding things to the map, and then drawing lines to things on that map. So you can create an NPC, and give yourself a relationship to them like "My dad". Another player can come behind that and give themselves a relationship to your dad like "second husband" or something and boom the other player is now your step-mom. It's wonderfully chaotic. That survives in Cortex Prime as "pathways".
My Downsides
I really don't have a lot of downsides to Cortex other than the need to get a feel for the various system options and do a lot of collaborative discussion with your group ahead of time.
That's really it. The mechanics are generally simple when they're self-contained. The dice mechanic doesn't change no matter how many mods you throw at it, so the complexity curve remains linear as you add systems rather than getting exponentially more complicated.
That said (and this is true of many other generic systems) is that it's not going to be a great system for a one-shot. For those, I'd find a 24XX hack that you like and run that instead.
Wrap Up
I sure hope that made sense — there's a lot to love in this system, and it'd take another 2000 words to do it, so I'm going to cut my losses and stop here. 😅
