In general, I’m just a player of RPGs and wouldn’t classify myself as a designer. Sure I GM a lot of games and have thrown together magic items for players or written a whole campaign only to see it immediately spin into a different direction than I’d planned.
I say this mainly to talk about the different itch I got when I read through Cortex Prime.
Cortex Prime
You see, Cortex Prime’s Core Book is laid out a little different from a lot of other RPGs. Those other games lay out a single game, a single way to play. You might add your own setting but all the game making and designing has already been down for you.
Cortex Prime is more like a buffet of options. You could do ablative hit points like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder. Or you could do something totally different and use narrative conditions on a player which get worse and worse until they are removed from the scene, or the game. Both are still Cortex. So you have to first go through the options to pick what you want.
The Cortex Prime Handbook is the sort of document that just makes you want to slap the different pieces together and see what happens.
My Game’s Concept
My Cortex Hack started off as an idea I had a few years back for a Savage Worlds game. That concept was a “Ghostbusters meets Supernatural” where the players would be employed for a group that tracked and dealt with paranormal threats that evaded normal law enforcement.
I talked the idea over with a buddy of mine, the other forever-GM of our group, and he mentioned a thought that there’s enough fiction out there about hunting the paranormal and why not do something more like learning to coexist.
And so my supernatural hunters game morphed into a supernatural social workers game. I have this image of the game playing out sort of like the TV workplace dramas we’ve all seen where the characters have to deal with the problem of the week while also handling their problems with the workplace and each other.
And with the focus shifted more toward the relationships between characters and the drama of staying true to the character’s purpose to help, even if the paranormal entity becomes a threat, I just thought that Savage Worlds might be a little too fast and furious for the job. Cortex seemed a little better of a match for the game I was thinking of.
Core Traits
Cortex Prime has an idea that each game should have “Core Traits”, pieces of your character sheet which will provide dice to the pool for every single situation your character could find themselves in.
For my game, the first core trait I chose was “Distinctions” which are statements about what makes your character different from every other character around them. That can be a background, a hobby, something that provides them a unique outlook. Distinctions always add a d8 to the dice pool.
Second, since I’m doing a game based on social workers, I made a small skill list as my second trait list, which I named “Methods”. These methods are things like counseling or researching which provide the tools the characters would need to deal with the paranormal. The players rank their characters’ Methods from a d4 up to a d10 at creation.
Lastly, I chose to have a list of “Motivations” as my final core trait. These are things like Love or Justice or Duty that inform why these characters are out here doing the things they do. These receive the same mix of dice from d4 to d10.
Current Status
Right now, I have a google doc of the game which pretty much has all the rules set. I’m working now on figuring out some exact setting information for getting a test game put together for friends, stuff like how the office works and whether different kinds of paranormal stuff has like a “bestiary” of constant values attached for use by the Game Moderator. This is one I’m hoping to get onto the table sometime in 2023, once the current arc of my Pathfinder campaign ends.
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