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: Cortex RPG (Page 1 of 3)
Improve and expand your sessions of the various Cortex RPGs such as Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroic, and others with these helpful articles.
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!
Coinciding with the (new-to-me!) release of the Cortex Directory which features official and pro/semi-pro published Cortex games, I’ve turned the amazing Cortex Hack Database by Kamala Arroyo into a website where you can sort, find, and submit your own hacks!
Check it out here.
Another Simple Cortex Prime Hack – Minimum Dice, Maximum Fun
The Core of Cortex posits a really simple version of the Cortex Prime system, one that’s great for off-the-cuff sessions. It’s also simple enough for fairly young players to understand, which is an added benefit. Gaming with little kids is always a fun exercise in game design: how do you make it simple and fun, with enough “meat” to teach the little tikes some basic game play strategy?
I’ve been toying around with a simple game system spawned from a specific circumstance: I’ve got a single die of each size – d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12 (and also a d20; more on that later!) – for myself (the GM) and another set for my player(s), and that’s it. I think it may work really well and leans into some Cortex-isms that The Core of Cortex actually avoids: different die sizes, and effect dice.
You be the judge! Here’s what I’ve got:
The Super Simple Superhero Hack for Cortex Prime
In this post I’ll briefly outline a hack for Cortex Prime. This one’s best described as:
A streamlined take on four color comic book action in Cortex Prime that remains largely compatible with Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.
These hacks are prone to change, so you’ll want to check out the Google Doc for the latest version. That said, it’s kind of neat to see how these hacks develop, so what you’ll get here is a very brief overview; only the bits needed to play, and none of the commentary. Compare and see what changed!
Without further ado, let’s check out the Super Simple Superhero Hack.