Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game (TOX) is a hidden gem that deserves more attention. This tabletop game comes with a robust digital toolkit, similar to D&D Beyond, and it’s built on the Cortex system found in Cortex Prime Game Handbook. Despite being tied to a popular TV show, TOX offers a lot to players who aren’t fans. In fact, I believe it’s the perfect system for running Curse of Strahd (COS), even better than D&D itself. Let’s dive in and see why.
Category: RPG Resources (Page 1 of 11)
Tim Bannock writes useful articles filled with tips, tricks, advice, house rules, and compilations of links from all over the web to help you improve your roleplaying game sessions.
One of the things I realized a long time ago, but Sly Flourish article “How to Survive a Digital D&D Future” really cements, is that Wizards of the Coast will never release the Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) that DMs need. No, I’m not talking about one that will “teach them how to DM,” which the current one does, and which the next one is arguably going to do better. Teaching how to DM is great, but you also need to provide tools for a DM to identify and create good content for their game. People crave exciting games, filled with fun content.
I’m talking about having a DMG that’s packed with the tools necessary to generate a campaign and a dungeon top to bottom in a format that goes beyond vague advice and stylistic choices. I’m talking about procedural dungeon and campaign creation. Procedural NPC creation. Procedural adventure and encounter table generation. One with tons of evocative ideas that show DMs how to turn that content into good, fun content for the players to engage with.
What I’m really talking about is all the nifty tools that Shadowdark just won multiple ENNIE Awards for doing. Let’s take look.
The ALIEN Roleplaying Game Cheat Sheet
Updated 7/25/2024: I’ve significantly updated the cheat sheet while prepping for an upcoming cinematic scenario. If you have the previous version, definitely check out this new one as it is a huge improvement: page references, full Stealth Mode rules, quick references for Synthetic and Xenomorph rules, and more!
I don’t know what Fria Ligan has done to me, but they sunk their claws in deep when they announced the ALIEN Roleplaying Game coming later this year. I quickly pre-ordered, have been preparing to run the included starter scenario, and have devoured the content people are creating on the ALIEN RPG Forum.
Since I’m picky about what I want on my GM screen, I made the following cheat sheet. This combines a lot of what you’ll find on the forums, but lays it out slightly differently to suit my tastes. Check it out!
Download the PDF Cheat Sheet for the ALIEN Roleplaying Game from Google Drive.
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Turn Any Adventure Into the Best One-Shot to Run Easily
Beleaguered GMs everywhere suffer burn out, and even well established, well prepared GMs might have habits that make running a game difficult. Maybe it’s in choosing which adventure to run. Maybe you overprepare, juggling more information than the players will ever see, and you feel like you’re wasting valuable time. Maybe you just get caught up in the excitement of it all and dream of long campaigns, while in reality you’re lucky if enough players show up to the first session.
I’ve got a process that will help you out! Using cutting edge learning techniques, we’re going to tackle these problems. This process will give you the ability to design and develop a one-shot or mini-adventure quickly, and by using this method, you’ll have an easier time recalling all the information during the game session when you run it.
Organize Your Cortex Prime Sessions with This Session Tracker
The Cortex RPG has a bunch of really fantastic tools already available for it in terms of character sheet creators, dice rollers that account for various SFX, and even official tools for Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game. As I’ve been running many Marvel Heroic Roleplaying campaigns over the years, I’ve found I needed something a little more customized for managing my game sessions.
When running games virtually, I relied on Cortexatron for most of the dice aspects, as well as a shared Google Drawing where my players and I could quickly copy-paste in character images or make little “tiles” for tracking stress, complications, scene distinctions, and other things. But when I played in-person, this setup translated to a lot of whiteboard use, and/or writing things on post-it notes or index cards and throwing them in the center of the table.
Over time, I was able to develop something that works equally as well online (in the form of a Google Sheet) or in-person, in the form of a printed out page of the Google Sheet. Although heavily geared towards running Marvel Heroic-style games, I’ve incorporated some updated rules references from the Cortex Prime Game Handbook, and optimized it to be easily editable for different trait sets or the use of other mods.
Cortex Prime Superheroic Event Tracker (PDF)
Cortex Prime Superheroic Event Tracker (Google Sheet)
– Make sure to select “make a copy” to save your own version to Google Drive and start editing!
Some basic assumptions that go into it, in case you want to understand what to change based on Cortex mods you plan to use:
- It uses action order hand-off initiative, so you simply check the box in the “Init” column next to a PC or GMC when they act, and erase those boxes at the top of a new round.
- Scenes and Acts are defined in Marvel Heroic, but are pretty much the same as Scenes and Sessions in Cortex Prime.
- It assumes stress and milestone XP are used, but those could easily be replaced by complications and slightly different notes on growth, respectively.
- The plot points section is correct for Cortex Prime.
- The doom pool section is correct for Cortex Prime, but also includes a couple Marvel Heroic-specific mods.
- Both the PC and GMC areas allow you to track stress, complications, and assets. There are also sections for scene-wide distinctions, complications, and assets or SFX.
- Both the PC and GMC areas have a “Random” column, with light shading to denote different die sizes, d4 through d12. If you ever need to randomly determine the target or recipient of something, use this!
What do you think? Need any help modding the sheet for your game? Drop a comment below or contact me!