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!
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