Earlier this month, fellow blogger soopersmert (Random Ape Encounter) proposed a mini-collab to investigate the style of play implicit in generic roleplaying games. Soopersmert has already tackled their experience with GURPS, followed by dadstep (To Be Resolved) writing about his perspective on Cypher. Generic game systems used to be one of my major interests, so I volunteered to talk about Cortex Prime.
history & context
Before I begin, I want to recommend this post by POCGamer where he unpacks the convoluted history of the Cortex game system. Understanding the history surrounding Cortex is important because the primary reason that people don’t play this game is because of its licensing, marketing, and management rather than issues with its design. With that said, I will try to summarize the basics and my personal timeline engaging with the game.
Cortex Prime is roughly understood to be the third edition of Cortex, which originally began as the roleplaying system for the Sovereign Stone novels. That system, often referred to as “Classic Cortex”, was used as the basis for TV show tie-in games like Battlestar Galactica and Supernatural before formalizing as the Cortex System in 2008. One year later in 2009, Cam Banks takes over development to produce the next edition of the game beginning with the Smallville Roleplaying Game in 2010. This new edition, called Cortex Plus, was used for several games including Marvel Heroic before a compilation of the rules was published under the name Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide in 2013.
Jump forward to 2017. The latest iteration, Cortex Prime, is funded via Kickstarter, and this is where the patterns start to break. Both previous editions were used to create customized media tie-in games before eventually being published as a generic system. This time, the game is built from the ground up as a universal toolkit and it isn’t until 2020 that a licensed game setting was published.
I started getting into Cortex Prime during November 2021, which coincidentally was the same time that they were experiencing the initial community backlash to their third party license. I vaguely remember some discussion of the license issues but to be honest, I wasn’t paying attention to it because I wasn’t interested in ttrpg publishing at the time. During June of 2022 I finally managed to organize a one-shot to play the game, but by that time the licensing issues had killed any public momentum of the game, and I haven’t heard anyone talk about Cortex since then.
modular mechanics
The fundamental premise of Cortex Prime is that it’s not a game: it’s a set of tools you can use to make a game. I like to think of it as the equivalent of a video game engine like Unreal or Unity, something that provides a framework for you to build off of.
There are four fundamental mechanics in Cortex Prime:
- Traits
Every character is described by … characteristics … which range from Distinctions (broad descriptions) to more specific things like stats or skills. - Die Ratings
Each trait is given a die rating from d4 to d12. - Plot Points
Players and the GM use a meta currency to affect dice rolls or activate character abilities. - Assets & Complications
These are positive and negative temporary traits which also get die ratings.
Everything else in the book is optional or an alternative to the above four pillars. In particular, the rules for conflict resolution have a default procedure, but the book also includes mechanics for completely replacing that default. You’ll also note that the text doesn’t define what traits characters should have, leaving that legwork up to the GM. I have a distinct memory of spending days trying to figure out what collection of stats my game should have.
Anyway, with the disclaimer about alternatives out of the way, the basic method of conflict resolution involves making a dice pool based on a collection of relevant traits. You roll everything together and pick two dice to add together forming a total, and you pick one die to be your effect. The power of an effect die is its size (like d6 vs. d8), not its value. As an example, you might roll d4(4), d8(1), and d6(5) for a total of 9 and an effect of d8. If the conflict is unopposed, the GM rolls a dice pool based on the difficulty of the challenge, or based on the opposing character’s traits if it is. Whichever pool has the higher total succeeds, and the effect die is used to determine the consequences.
getting to the (plot) point
Dadstep mentioned it briefly in his Cypher post, and Valeria wrote about it in her Fabula Ultima analysis. It seems to be a recurring problem that rpg metacurrencies can be used to influence dice rolls, which acts as a negative incentive for using them in more creative ways. Interestingly, that is not the case with Cortex Prime.
Unlike the aforementioned systems, plot points are a very crunchy mechanical resource, with the book providing rules for several ability systems where you must spend them to activate character powers. By default, plot points can be used to:
- Activate certain abilities
- Add more dice to your pool
- Get an opportunity when the GM rolls a 1
- Create a temporary relationship trait
- Create a temporary asset trait
- Include more results in your dice total
- Interfere in a contest already underway
- Keep an extra effect die
- Roll a hero die (an optional meta currency system)
- Share a temporary asset trait with other characters
- Stay in the fight when you would be taken out
If you compare this to something like Fabula Ultima where you can invent people and places whole cloth, it’s clear that despite the name, the system mainly uses plot points to pace player power.
new reinventor, same wheel
It’s a good wheel — a great wheel even. But reflecting on Cortex Prime in 2025 has given me a lot of perspective just from having tried so many more games. Many of them echo sentiments of what Cortex is doing but from a more focused angle because they’re not trying to be generic.
Breaking a single roll into a total and an effect is obviously something also done by Total//Effect, except the latter cuts down cognitive load by making everything a d6, which allows Binary to predict reasonable number ranges and write ability outcomes in advance.
Conceptually, separating a single roll’s result into both success/failure and effectiveness also reminds me of the One-Roll Engine, which is technically a generic rpg system now that I think about it. ORE uses a dice pool of only d10’s and determines results based on magnitude (value) and width (number of successes).
I would also be remiss if I failed to point out the similarities to Son of Oak’s Mist Engine, which I recently reviewed while playing Legend in the Mist. Similar to traits in Cortex, characters in Mist games are made up of tags, except they add a static +/- 1 instead of a die rating.
It’s interesting that each of these games have placed restrictions on their dice math, allowing them to set reasonable static DC’s. Cortex Prime technically has a static difficulty optional rule, but I am frankly unconvinced of its usefulness given the wide spectrum of potential dice pools.
The last comparison I want to make is actually with Daggerheart: Cortex Prime has a core optional rule where the GM gets a unique meta currency instead of using plot points with the rest of the players. They call it the doom pool. Mirroring the way Daggerheart’s fear may be spent, the doom pool can create complications or interrupt the turn order or allow villains to escape. Fabula Ultima also does this with Ultima points, but similar to Daggerheart, the GM gains dice to the doom pool based on player rolls.
multi-genre, not universal
In the introduction to Cortex Prime, the very first point specifies that the game is “Multi-Genre”. I think there’s an interesting distinction to be made between it and something like GURPS’ claim to “universal”. The history of Cortex is based in emulation of novels and TV shows, from the beginning with the Sovereign Stone novels to The Dragon Prince most recently. Most of the discussion surrounding Cortex in 2021 was about how well it covered the spectrum between Smallville and Marvel Heroic. Both of these are superhero genres, but the former is much more based on interpersonal drama, while the latter is about flashy spectacles.
The thing is that all of these genres are still pretty similar when it comes to a gameplay perspective. At the end of the day, Cortex Prime is here to tell stories — not simulations or engage players with toys. On the other hand, we are a far cry from being powered by the apocalypse. Somewhere in-between then: Cortex Prime is a pretty good half-step between storygames and neo-trad / post-trad / what have you.
what it can’t do
A few things.
It’s really bad at any gameplay involving having stuff. The only way characters have things is if they’re made into assets which are given narrative weight. Some games might have “Resources” as a trait type, allowing them to broadly have things that can be spent and recovered later. Neither of these options are great if you want to play the type of game where you find a bunch of random junk and do inventory management about it.
There is also no tactical combat to be found here. Everything is framed in terms of narrative like how it would be in a TV show, with the default suggestion for combat being a series of tests that need to be completed within a limited amount of beats. “Can the heroes neutralize all the killers before the bomb goes off?” — those are the sorts of questions we’re asking. Obviously players can approach this tactically, but nobody is taking 5-foot steps to cast a perfectly aimed cone of cold.
The last thing I’ll reiterate here is that it’s just not built around simulation of any kind. I want to stress this mostly because it contrasts with soopersmert’s conclusions about GURPS. There are no tables letting you know how many pounds of force you can apply with telekinesis. Instead, there’s a list of suggested special effects where you could maybe spend a plot point to knock a character out of a scene or “push, pull, or lift something really heavy”.
reflections in 2025
As I’ve been re-reading the game handbook, it strikes me how I had a very narrow understanding of rules in general. To be more specific, I interpreted many things the book said as being “exclusive permissions” aka “you can do XYZ but anything not listed is forbidden”. This was mostly a perspective built from playing trad games for years in low trust environments.
In 2025 I think Cortex Prime actually has a lot more gas than I gave it credit for. In many ways, it feels open and free in the same way that I feel about my experience with Legend in the Mist. If I were to run a Cortex game, I would feel much less stress about putting together the perfect set of traits and optional rules with the experiences I’ve had since 2021.
It’s not all sunshine though. Reading POCGamer’s 2023 retrospective reveals that the license situation was much more dire than I thought. I remembered that Fandom had some vague terminology and that was certainly worthy of condemnation, but with their sale to Direwolf, even those initial licensing plans have vanished. There is currently no third party license for Cortex Prime — a system explicitly built as a toolkit for making and selling games.
why i stopped caring about cortex prime
I used to have two Cortex games in development. Sometime around 2022 I figured it out.
If I’m going to put that much effort into making a game, I might as well just build my own game from the ground up. Cortex is interesting because it’s 256 pages of Baby’s First Game Design — and I say that in the best way possible. It’s like training wheels: the book gives you a core resolution framework and a guide for establishing characters and mechanics. You get to name all of the stats and decide what superpowers the players can choose from and as long as you stick to the book’s modules, you’re going to get something game-shaped in the end. Everything is basically guaranteed to work together.
The problem is that I think that’s the easy part. It’s easy to change from a 1d20 roll over system to a 2d6 partial success procedure. Deciding that all characters have stats is easy. Figuring out what attributes are important enough that every character is measured by them? That’s hard. That’s legwork.
Cortex Prime was made to sell to designers who would use it to plug in pre-existing settings (perhaps from licensed TV shows) and then sell those games on the official Cortex marketplace. That marketplace was never brought into existence, and we’re left with a game engine that has no license. It’s interesting and it’s certainly generic, but until something changes on the business side, there is no value here.