Gamemaster’s Log, Stardate 57252.7. It has been several months since the launch of the New Orleans-class starship U.S.S. Verrazzano, NCC-07302, from the Foggy Peak system. Since that time, I have seen her crew serve with distinction in accordance with the finest traditions of Starfleet. I have also seen them called before a board of Admirals to review their actions and directive violations, and while impressive the fact that no fewer than three starbases have had to be commissioned to deal with the discoveries from their missions is beginning to put a notable dent in the power requirements for the local sector’s industrial replicators. As the Verrazzano is currently away, responding to a distress call from a Vulcan Expeditionary Group, I have decided that this is a fine opportunity to review their so-called ‘Star Trek Adventures’ in-depth, to better understand how they have and will continue to boldly go where no one, not even the rest of Starfleet, has gone before.
Characters and Core Mechanics
The most basic mechanic for Star Trek Adventures is this: you’re rolling 2d20, and you’re trying to get results on the individual die that are equal to or lower than a target number. The more results that are equal or lower, the more successes you get, and different actions will require a different number of successes. A task requiring 1 or 2 successes is quite possible, but obviously if you need any more than that you’ll need something special. Enter the crew of your Starfleet vessel. Characters have six Disciplines that represent their specialties in Starfleet (Command, Engineering, Science, etc.) and six Attributes (Fitness, Daring, Insight, etc.) which represent their personal abilities. When you’re facing a task, your target number is determined by a combination of a Discipline and an Attribute: Security+Control to fire a phaser, Conn+Daring to fly a runabout through exploding asteroids, Medicine+Reason to diagnose an alien virus.
Characters are built through a series of stages that gradually build these stats up: species, background (plus whether you accept or reject your upbringing), what branch of Starfleet you go into, and a series of career events like being forced to call out a superior, making scientific breakthroughs, or a conflict with a hostile culture. Along the way they’ll pick up Talents that enhance or grant extra abilities, and Focuses that can (if they can roll underneath their Discipline rank as well as the target number) grant a second success on a check. Characters also define Values, things that they care about and believe. All of the other stuff is about what your character can do; Values are about who your character is. All of this leads to characters that just . . . they just click very easily. Values provide a challenge, as while there is advice on how to create some, they are entirely unique to every character, not picked from a list. But overall creation is simple, and you immediately have a lot to work with mechanically and narratively.
Aboard the Verrazzano, that gets us the Vulcan Captain Salok, forced to take command, who focuses on Diplomacy with a firm belief that Diversity Is Strength. His first officer, the Gnalish Commander Korg, strives to Defend and Aid Those In Danger or Need and is a known friend to the Klingons. Lt. Commander Flint Northrock’s file is mostly redacted, but he is a particularly Bold helmsman: “My answer to any distress call is “’I’m Coming’”. Lt. Commander Be’zur is the ship’s Chief Engineer, a Liberated Caitian Borg with a knack for Improvised Technology, a talent for pushing things Past the Redline, and a conviction that There’s No Such Thing as The Unknown, Only the Temporarily Hidden. Lieutenant, later Lt. Commander, Ava is a sliver of an extra-dimensional being; naturally, he serves as the Science Officer with A Mind for Design and Insatiable Curiosity about the universe he finds himself in. The Bajoran Lieutenant (j.g.) Edon Reil might be a relatively young officer but he has Untapped Potential, and serves as a fine Chief of Security: “Beware invaders calling themselves ‘friend’”.
Here’s something to consider, especially if you’ve been playing games that are more hardscrabble: STA characters can be extremely competent in their particular area of expertise. It’s certainly possible to build something akin to a generalist, but given that characters are naturally going to gravitate towards certain roles (the Captain, the Chief Engineer, the Science Officer) it’s very easy for them to have a target of 17 or so for their primary focus (5 in Science and 12 in Reason for the Science Officer, for example). Speaking of Focuses, if chosen well there are plenty of opportunities for them to come into play, offering multiple successes on a die. As I’ll address shortly, there are multiple ways to roll 3 or even 4d20 just on your own, as well as a way to automatically get at least two successes. Other characters can assist you, and if you’re on your starship it usually contributes another d20 to the pile as well.
Some actions are going to be impossible, and you’ll need to create an advantage to make them something you can actually achieve. I’ve read the number of successes called out as being impossible as five, though, and that’s . . . not really the case. Seeing six, seven, and even eight successes hit the table isn’t common, but it’s not all that rare either. So, a minor but important point, while needing 4 successes is probably still a good high-water mark, I would keep the reason for a task being impossible as purely narrative.
So, in short, this is not a game with an awful lot of failure, further reinforced by the fact that you can Succeed At A Cost, with ‘failing forward’ actually being built into the mechanics outright. STA is more about characters figuring out what needs to be done and how they want to do it than whether or not they’re going to succeed, followed by the consequences of their actions (even if they succeed) as further enabled by the aforementioned costs and Complications. On the one hand, GMs shouldn’t be too concerned if things seem ‘too easy’ for their players at first blush. On the other, well, a few things: don’t be afraid to ask for three or four successes on really difficult and important stuff, you can get a little extra challenge by throwing things slightly out of a character’s area of expertise at them, and when failures do come up they need to matter. When Northrock (who includes among his Values ‘The Best Way to Defeat An Enemy Is To Make A Friend”’) failed to resist the impassioned plea of an oppressed species convincing him that patience and diplomacy would not work, that he would have to violate the Prime Directive, that needed to have an impact. It actually kicked off a small not-mutiny, actually, along with a few other consequences that I’ll get to use as examples later.
Meta Latinum
There are three types of metacurrencies in Star Trek Adventures: Momentum, Threat, and Determination.
Momentum is a player resource, gained via extra successes – 3 successes on a Difficulty 2 check, you get 1 Momentum. Momentum has a lot of uses. When used immediately it can be used to boost attacks by doing more damage, ignoring Resistance, or activating weapon traits. It can be used to create Advantages that can make future tasks easier or impossible tasks possible. In my experience it is most commonly used immediately to Gain More Information, a key use that often sees characters diving past their basic observations to really discover what’s going on or what they’re dealing with. If not spent immediately, however, points of Momentum go into a pool; they can be used in several ways once there, but by far their most common use is buying more dice to roll for a check. A 3rd d20 costs one Momentum, a 4th one costs two.
Threat is primarily a GM resource, and in several ways it mirrors Momentum. It can be used for adversaries rolling extra dice, it can make attacks lethal (by default they are not), it can make tasks more difficult or increase the chance of a Complication (something Bad that usually only happens if a character rolls a 20 on a die). With enough Threat in their pool GMs can even end scenes entirely and take narrative control, which strongly reminds me of the Doom Pool from Cortex games.
GMs begin every mission with twice as many points of threat as there are players, which is good, because in my experience you’re not likely going to get too many more. There are a couple ways to add more Threat, but the only one that doesn’t require a specific circumstance is that player characters can also use Threat by choosing to give it to the GM instead of spending Momentum at the same rates. That’s great, because it gives the GM more to play with and gives the players options if they run out of Momentum. Honestly, though, it doesn’t seem to happen very often. A large part of this is certainly biased in this specific campaign by the luck of the dice and the characters themselves. The Verrazzano crew have often been able to generate more than enough Momentum for their needs, rarely running completely out. Also, the entire line of Bold Talents, which let you re-roll dice if you have used Threat to enhance the roll, are designed to be a big motivator for Threat use – but only Northrock and Reil have any of them, and they both have only the Conn variety. So, you might find yourself with players giving you oodles of Threat . . . just be prepared to use what you get at the start of a mission carefully, if you don’t.
The final metacurrency is Determination, and it’s the big one. Every character starts a mission with at least one, and it is deeply tied to the character’s Values: if they are acting in accordance with a Value, a character can spend a point of Determination to add a die to their roll that is automatically set to a result of 1, meaning an automatic two successes towards the roll. Note that this still counts as adding a die a la Momentum/Threat, in that if you want a 4th die you’ll need two points of those other resources, but still! Alternate uses of Determination still require you to be acting in accordance with a Value, but include: re-rolling all your dice, immediately taking another action on the same turn, and automatically creating an advantage.
You can get more points of Determination if you challenge a Value, meaning your character is having a big think about whether or not they actually believe that any more. You can also be offered Determination by the GM to compel you to act in line with a Value when it would make things more difficult for you, which reads an awful lot like Fate points. Determination isn’t just a big deal because of the mechanical impact, although that can’t be undervalued either. But since Determination, whether spending it or gaining it, plugs into your Values it is often a very important factor in your characters ‘leveling up’.
Advancement
‘Milestones’ are the method of advancement in STA, and there are only three ways to get them: suffering (and surviving, obviously) a lethal injury, challenging a Value (thus getting a point of Determination), and using a Value either positively or negatively (meaning you either spent or received a point of Determination while acting upon it). You get a ‘Normal’ Milestone for just doing one of the above during a mission. The GM can award a ‘Spotlight’ milestone if a character or characters would earn a Normal Milestone and also made a particularly big impact in a mission, and the players decide who among them receive it. Eventually, you acquire enough Spotlight Milestones that your next one is an ‘Arc’ Milestone instead (or, if the GM feels it appropriate given the character’s actual narrative arc, they can award one out of hand). Here’s the thing, though: the Arc Milestone is the only one that actually adds anything to a character.
With a Normal Milestone, first of all, if a Value was challenged it gets rewritten or replaced to reflect how the character’s perspective was changed. After being forced to realize that “The Best Way to Defeat An Enemy Is To Make A Friend” would not always be the case, and subsequently getting in a fair bit of trouble for acting as such, Northrock reaffirmed his commitment to the crew and to following Salok’s lead instead of going off on his own: “When The Way Is Unclear, I Follow My Captain.” Aside from that very cool and dramatic and character-growth-driven aspect, though, Normal Milestones are very light: you can move a point from one Discipline to another, or replace one Focus with another. Spotlight Milestones let you pick one of the options from the short list of the Normal Milestone’s, as well as one of several others: moving points between Attributes, replacing a Talent, moving points between the ship’s Departments or Systems (Discipline and Attribute counterparts, really), or replacing the ship’s Talents. Arc Milestones grant the benefits of a Normal and a Spotlight Milestone, but are the advancement that finally lets you increase a Discipline or Attribute, gain an additional Talent, Focus, or Value, increase one of the ship’s Departments/Systems, or add another Talent to the ship.
As mentioned above, STA player characters are probably starting off as very competent just based on stats, never mind what their Talents can bring to the table, so they don’t really need to be growing mechanically all that much. What’s really important to this system is how their Values, what they care about and who they really are, are highlighted, are challenged, are grown and changed. Changing up Attributes, Disciplines, Talents, and Focuses also reflects this choice of priority – a Captain who starts to take more of an interest in what’s going on down in the warp core while leaving the navigation of the ship up to their hot-shot helmsman might shift a point from Conn to Engineering.
So far, they seem to be working just fine. Captain Salok and Lt. Commanders Northrock and Ava are both on the cusp of their first Arc Milestone as of this writing, and given how competent the characters are nobody seems to be minding that they haven’t been ‘gaining’ anything, and there have been comments that they like the idea of switching things around to better match the character – it’s true that you’ll certainly never have a dead-end Talent or Focus for very long.
I’ll admit that awarding the Spotlights has felt . . . a little anemic on the GM’s side of things. The book recommends giving out a single one every two or three sessions, but these are players and characters who have really taken the ‘Go Boldly’ thing to heart. Salok ‘crushed’ a mutiny with little more than an iron will and by convincing the mutineers that a starship takes many to succeed but only one to fail. Northrock took command of an absolute disaster involving a wormhole, a shapeshifter, friendly fire, and a dying ship and somehow got everyone out alive. Ava solved an astrogation and physics problem that had confounded Starfleet for decades, and then went on to help establish a stable wormhole to another universe. Be’zur’s technological monstrosities have caused me to throw out more notes and plans than any two other characters combined. Korg and Reil have both been responsible for saving the lives of their crewmates from certain death or worse, whether it was a rampaging tentacular plant unleashed from the Verrazzano’s labs, Orion raiders trying to steal an artifact powered by time, or a desperate and murderous Starfleet doctor gone rogue.
So, in short, I’m probably awarding Spotlights a little more frequently than the book would like me to, every other session at least, and I’m often throwing two out at once. Since Normal and Spotlight Milestone benefits can be banked for later, the system certainly doesn’t seem to be breaking as a result. If it were a longer, slower-burn campaign I might stick closer to the book’s recommendations but to be honest I think that, as with determining if a task is impossible, you’re best served by ignoring hard numbers and focusing on the narrative.
Support Characters
If there is any one mechanic that has been a runaway hit during the campaign, this has been the one. Supporting characters are the ‘extras’ on set, the people in the background of the show that only get speaking roles every few episodes, if ever. Star Trek Adventures lets you bring those characters into the spotlight by spending points of Crew Support – every ship gets an amount that is determined by how big the ship is, and then player characters can each take a talent to get more, which two Verrazzano crew members did. Broadly speaking there are two reasons to play a Supporting character. First, because they cover a skillset that the main player characters lack. This was the case of Lt. Gunther von Doomstone, the Chief Medical Officer, and Lt. Khumail Jaosh, the transport chief. The second is when it doesn’t make sense for a player character to be present, such as on away missions, but the player still wants to be a part of the scene. This was the case for Lt. Joran Mal, a Joined Trill diplomat, when Captain Salok had to remain behind on the ship. Sometimes it’s both. Cadet Groorin, part of the second wave of Ferengi following in Nog’s footsteps, appeared when the players decided Joran needed an assistant to deal with an upcoming legal tribunal, but really got played when Lt. Commander Northrock was stuck at the helm and there was a Ferengi away team to negotiate with.
I suppose there’s also a third reason, which is because you have a cool character idea you wanted to include. Lt. Jurling, Klingon Ship’s Counselor (“It is a good day for conflict resolution!”), was added to the crew to cover that role, yes, but mostly because I wanted him to be there. Consider it my payment for running the game.
Supporting characters start off comparatively light – their highest Attribute will be a 10, their best Discipline a 4, with three Focuses but no Talents or Values. Supporting characters don’t gain milestones themselves, although a player character can choose to use the benefit of one of their own milestones to switch things around for a supporting character. Instead, Supporting characters improve by the number of missions they appear in through the use of Crew Support – every time they show up they gain something, and while they still have lower caps (they can only ever improve a Discipline once, for example), they can still end up fleshed out quite a bit. Funnily enough, Supporting characters are thus going to ‘advance’ at a much faster rate than player characters will, which can help scratch the itch a little for those players who enjoy getting mechanical rewards.
Supporting characters are . . . kind of strange, in terms of gameplay and narrative. First of all, for groups with a lot of players they’ll end up taking up most of the NPC slots left on the ship – that hasn’t stopped me from making more NPCs, but it has felt a little odd to jump into a Supporting Character now and then as the GM.
They’re also supposed to be supporting characters but in many cases they’ve been in the spotlight just as much, if not more than, the ‘main’ characters, and some of them are quite beloved. Like any character, you end up wanting to make them interesting, and together we have. Doctor von Doomstone is from a planet that would have featured in a TOS Planet of Hats episode, a Frankenstein setting, and he’s trying to avoid going down the mad science path of his ancestors. Jurling has a reputation for unconventional ‘team building exercises’, a love of Klingon opera that’s shared with Commander Korg, and a genuine care for his patients. Joran quickly gained a reputation for being in over his head and soldiering on anyway, surrounded by literal piles of PADDS and joining the Captain in his coffee habit while reviewing First Contact protocols.
I wonder at what point you might just give up the charade and make them main characters in their own right with storylines of their own, capable of gaining milestones for themselves and surpassing the limitations of a supporting character. Perhaps a player could have multiple full characters (while many are shared, I’ve noticed some support characters functionally ‘belonging’ to a single player), or perhaps the ‘upgraded’ characters could remain in a pool for troupe play, which would keep the pool of Crew Support fully functional.
Supporting characters as a concept have also highlighted for me the need to have time spent back on the ship and in the ready room, for the simple reason that the Captain just doesn’t leave the ship very often. In terms of ‘screen time’, Aaron has spent more time portraying Lieutenants Joran and Jurling than he has Captain Salok, and yet the Captain has still managed to net himself some Spotlight Milestones, primarily on the bridge and in the aforementioned ready room.
Material to Work With
Star Trek Adventures is extremely well-supported. Since release there has been a unique book for all of the galaxy’s quadrants, another one each for Command, Operations, and Science, two full mission anthologies, character profiles for a bunch of the shows so you can play as/interact with them, and a whole bunch of standalone missions. This is on top of the free Quickstart, the free character sheets, and the free character builder (which incorporates player character creation, supporting character creation, and starship creation material from pretty much everything I’ve already mentioned, it’s a fantastic resource). There’s also a Klingon core book which I haven’t even touched yet. You’re not exactly going to run out of reading material very quickly, is what I’m saying.
I want to particularly focus on the pre-made missions, however, for the simple reason that – with a single exception – my campaign has consisted entirely of them. This is a symptom of the fact that the U.S.S. Verrazzano was sort of rushed into service, as it were – I put Star Trek Adventures up as an option to run for a short campaign because I owned it and thought it might be interesting, but I didn’t picture it as a front runner and I didn’t expect it to catch quite as well as it has. It’s still going to be short, as campaigns in this group are reckoned lately, but still: suddenly I was running a game and had exactly zero material prepped or even ideas solidifying. So, I turned to the mission files.
So far I’ve run Nest In The Dark, Stolen Liberty, The Prize, and A World With A Bluer Sun. I’ve got two more queued up at the moment, but I won’t say which because there are players lurking about. Through these missions the crew of the Verrazzano have struggled through time dilation, radiation bursts, disruptor fire, crushing gravity, and interdimensional phenomena. They’ve been forced to face intelligences vastly superior to their own, weigh the oppression of an entire species against the Prime Directive, race against archeological poachers, and navigate the factions of a Starfleet crew turned on itself. So there’s the first thing I’ll say about the pre-made missions Modiphius has put out: oh my goodness there is a lot of variety. Not every mission will fit every crew, but many will, and aside from a certain predilection towards First Contact scenarios (come on, it’s Trek, duh) the Verrazzano has never really faced the same problem twice.
One additional good thing is that many of these missions could be used as a launching point for further adventures. Every one ends with a ‘Continuing Voyages’ section that highlights how a crew could follow up on the events of the mission or how said events could otherwise impact the campaign. I haven’t been able to take advantage of many of these yet, but there have been a few new crewmembers of a sort added to the ship’s roster as a result. More dramatically the events of Stolen Liberty saw Salok, Korg, Northrock, and Be’zur having a chat with some Admirals about the Prime Directive and their viability as a command team while Ava took command of the ship to chart a cataclysmic nebula (and blow some Jem’Hadar holdouts out of space, although they didn’t know that going in), the only non-pre-made mission so far.
A nebulous thing is that the missions are always written with a specific era (ENT, TOS, or TNG) in mind. They also always have advice for running the mission in a different era, which usually involves switching out who the bad guy is – if the Borg are the threat for a TNG mission then it’s probably the Klingons for a TOS crew or the Andorians for the ENT crowd. I’ve been able to put that advice to good use for several of the missions, but . . . there are also a few that don’t quite fit right, for me. A TOS mission that’s a little too Those Old Scientists, a little over the top with giant rock monsters for a TNG feel, or the TNG tech is just too necessary to solve the problems facing an ENT crew. In the anthologies, that’s not so big a deal since there’s something for everyone, but you might want to read up on a one-off mission carefully before purchase to see if it’ll work for you.
Some of that actually falls to layout – there are some TOS missions that are done up in a completely different style from the core book and the other missions, and maybe it’s silly but that just makes it harder for me to think about transplanting those specific missions over for the Verrazzano. That leads into another thing: sometimes there are some editing flubs. Missions are sometimes written out with a very specific series of events in mind, or don’t quite explain why certain events happen the way they do, and neither is the kind of thing that can survive contact with players. This is old advice, but if you’re running one of these pre-made adventures, you’re going to want to have read the whole thing, and you’ll want to be ready to throw the rails out the torpedo tubes.
One final thing about the actual material: thank the stars for whoever created the index in the core rulebook. It’s comprehensive and well-organized, making it easy to find whatever you need . . . and without it the book may have just been unreadable. It is crowded in there, there is practically no negative space of any kind, every spare inch has been packed with art or console designs or words and words and more words. There is a lot here, and reading it straight cover to cover would take forever. Remember that this campaign went from an option in a poll to an active game very, very quickly, we’ve all been learning the system as we go (partially why I think writing about it has some value, to be honest), and without the index allowing us to flip to where we need to I know I at least would’ve been completely lost.
Everything Else, And Final Thoughts
So what are all those words about? We’ve covered the basic mechanics, advancement, supporting characters, none of which are particularly thorny, what else is there? Well, of course there’s a fair bit of space spent on listing individual talents and such, ships the crew can serve on, planets they could visit, GMing advice . . . but there are also a lot of other actual mechanics that are way more situational. There’s an entire reputation system, tied to rank, privilege, and responsibility. There are mechanics for extended tasks that might be the focus of an entire mission, and slightly different ones for when a crew is applying the scientific method (which is how Ava solved the nebula charting problem). Then there’s the ship, with its many different stations, it’s Power resource that needs to be managed, the various systems and the myriad, unique, and advancing things that happen to each and every single one of them if they happen to be the one hit when the shields get breached.
The core mechanics? Pretty straightforward! All these other bits? A fair degree more fiddly, and they might not show up every session. Every other mechanic adds more complexity, triggers more page-flipping (there’s the index saving the day, again). By no means does it jam up the works like, say, Shadowrun’s many many subsystems. But we got the knack of the basics very very quickly; going into our eighth session, there’s still a fair bit of rust on the others. Given more time that would probably go away, but only if we spend the time to focus on those systems, and in some cases I don’t see it happening.
In checking in with the players about how they felt about the system, Aaron managed to sum it up the best way, which I’ll use here. The group has dealt with games where the system got in the way for us, like Exalted Second Edition. When we tapped into the Powered by the Apocalypse ruleset, we found that the system actively helped us. Star Trek Adventures is in the middle.
It handed us the basic toolset and then has mostly stayed out of our way, piping up from the back of the crowd when it’s needed. It demands very little in terms of mechanical understanding on a task to task basis, but wants you to pay more attention when certain situations crop up. What it really wants is for you to have good, strong Values that your characters can believe in and challenge and change; everything else (you might note that the Gnalish species isn’t RPG-official, and Ava’s existence as an extra-dimensional avatar is original to us as well) can be tweaked, but that one is non-negotiable. That being the case, it’s really the players who are going to bring what’s truly necessary for Star Trek Adventures to function the way it wants to.
Star Trek is, primarily, a television series. It can do novels and comics, it can do big movies and long-running arcs, but it’s always eventually returned to a weekly format, and the heaping majority of that is episodic in nature. Look, I’ve tried the episodic thing in a bunch of different games, every time it gets a bare handful of ‘episodes’ in before one plot or another gets too complex and grabs the controls and takes off. Star Trek Adventures, like Star Trek at large, certainly could manage a blockbuster event, or a Dominion or Burn-style long arc, but it sings as an episodic game, and I think that’s because the game trusts its players to bring what they know and love of Trek to the table and fly “second star to the right — and straight on ’til morning.”
Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can tell your friends about us! You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!
Check out the Cannibal Halfling Gaming community on Discord - hang out with 58 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
Discord
Cortex Prime Review
Imagine for a moment that you’re back in May of 2017. Cannibal Halfling is six months old, and I’m still tagging all of my articles “Level One Wonk” because I felt more like a guest writer than a co-founder. I hadn’t started doing regular coverage of Kickstarter campaigns yet, so one week I decided to write an article about one that excited me: Cortex Prime. The campaign was about halfway over when the article was published, and I said some enthusiastic and somewhat hyperbolic things, like how Cortex Prime would be the next big thing after PbtA. What I’m trying to say is that I jinxed it. Cam, I’m so, so sorry.
Joking aside, this week is a special week for all of us who backed the Cortex Prime Kickstarter back in May of 2017: As of yesterday (October 20, 2020), Cortex Prime is done, it’s released, the campaign is actually over. After a number of roadblocks and obstacles, we have books in our hands and the game is actually on sale. And you know what? It was worth it. Like many other backers, I was already familiar with the Cortex system and its potential; in my case it was from Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. What Cortex Prime does is take that system and turn it into an immensely powerful toolbox, laying all the switches and dials bare in a way that GMs can actually use.
What gets me more excited about Cortex Prime than other contemporary generic RPGs is that Cortex Prime stands head and shoulders above them in terms of being a useful technical document. There are two broad shortcomings that almost every generic RPG falls into: Some, like Savage Worlds and Genesys, are not particularly more hackable than any other RPG and end up feeling like games that the setting was cut out of (which, in both of those cases, is technically true). Others, like Fate and GURPS, provide such an overwhelming amount of flexibility that entire supplements are written just about how to set them up. Cortex Prime almost falls into the latter category, but escapes it by virtue of clear writing, excellent layout, and more, better worked examples than are available in the core rulebooks of any of the above four games. What should be made clear, though, is that Cortex Prime is a toolkit, more the spiritual successor to the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide than any of the Cortex-based games. As much as I’m enthusiastic about this game and this book, if you’re looking specifically for a fully realized setting or consider that integral to your enjoyment of RPGs you’re probably going to be a bit disappointed.
The Basics
Cortex is at its core a ‘roll and keep’ dice mechanic. For any challenge the player assembles a dice pool of around three dice, rolls them, and keeps the highest two results. Depending on which of your character’s traits are relevant to the roll, you could be rolling d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s, or d12s, with d6 being average, larger dice being better, and d4 being much less good, especially considering the high probability of rolling a 1. All dice rolls are opposed rolls; the base dice pool that the GM rolls is two dice whose size vary depending on the difficulty of the task.
There are two other mechanics which depend on the die results. First is the Effect Die. Once a player chooses the two dice they wish to keep, they choose the largest remaining die to be an Effect Die. The Effect Die determines the impact of certain dice rolls, and is dependent on the size (rather than result) of the chosen die. This does mean that it might sometimes be advantageous to choose a lower absolute result (provided it still meets the threshold for success) if it produces a larger Effect Die. Second result-based mechanic is the Hitch. A Hitch occurs when a player rolls a 1 on one of their dice. A die showing a one cannot be chosen for results or for the Effect Die. While there are no direct consequences beyond that for rolling a one (only rolling all 1s is considered a critical failure and is called a Botch), the GM may choose to spend that 1 on the roll to create a Complication. Complications, and their positive counterparts Assets, represent circumstances or items that exist in a scene, much like Aspects in Fate. A GM can add the die value of a relevant Complication to the dice pool that opposes a character’s roll, while the player can do the opposite with a relevant Asset. When a character creates an Asset, they may use the Effect Die to determine its die size and therefore its impact on the scene. The other core mechanic of note is the Plot Point System. Each player starts play with a Plot Point, and when the GM activates a Complication from a player rolling a 1, they also give that player a Plot Point. Plot Points can be spent on activating abilities, counting more dice in rolls, and preventing a character from being Taken Out of a Conflict. As more options are defined, so too are more ways to earn and spend Plot Points.
That is, to say the least, a whirlwind tour around the Cortex mechanics. I haven’t gone deep, and haven’t even begun to get into how these dice pools are actually generated, save the basics of Assets and Complications. The issue with trying to explain many basic parts of Cortex Prime, like character creation, is that they are dependent on the options that are available and will look a bit different, at least at a summary level, depending on what you’re trying to play.
The Options
The Cortex Prime book is intended towards those who will be running games, and for that reason it’s laid out a bit like a menu. Although the first 45 pages are about the ‘core rules’, after the initial 8 page primer those core rules are already full of rules mods, reducing the linearity of the chapter. There are five mods for tests/contests, eight mods for Plot Points, and five mods for Assets and Complications. That’s eighteen mods for the ‘core rules’, and it goes without saying that the mods and options for character definition and scene management are even more expansive.
Characters are defined by Traits, and the Traits that are chosen at character creation are divided into Prime Sets. These range from Attributes and Skills, which should be familiar to any gamer, to Affiliations, Powers, and Reputations, which assign die values to the size group your character works best in, chosen superhuman powers, and how well your character gets on in certain social circles, respectively. These choices are somewhat akin to choosing between Fate Core and Fate Accelerated, between Skills and Approaches, but there is significantly more granularity here. Beyond which Prime Sets you choose, the nature of the Prime Sets is incredibly customizable. If you were to use Attributes in your game, there’s a default list of three (Physical, Mental, Social), but you could easily expand that to D&D-standard six. While there’s a default skill list, you can change it as much as you want, and there’s guidance in the book on how to write skill lists with different intents as well as how to use a number of mods around skill specializations, rank structures, and role-defined skills.
All these Traits can be modified further, most notably with SFX. SFX detail specific pairs of costs and benefits which bring more granularity to traits; though they’re essential for certain Traits like Powers they can go with any Prime Set if that Prime Set is centrally important to defining characters in your game. While there are a number of costs and benefits from which SFX can be written, the central purpose of SFX in a game is to flesh out how Plot Points are spent and earned. The default SFX, Hinder, provides another way of earning plot points (the benefit) by allowing a character to bring the die for the associated trait down to a d4 (the cost). While the SFX attached to Attributes or Skills may be character-focused or situational, the SFX attached to Powers and Abilities are core to how they work; as such the book has more detailed lists of Powers, Abilities, and their attendant SFX in an appendix.
The options expand again when you get into running scenes and campaigns. While there doesn’t need to be a lot distinguishing combat from other contests, there are a number of mods encompassing initiative, hit points, Fate-like stress tracks, and anything else you can imagine to gamify your conflict experience. Similarly, the base advancement mechanic measures only sessions that have passed, but mods can get you Technoir-like stress-based advancement or Burning Wheel-like Belief mechanics if that’s the way you want to go.
One other interesting thing hidden in the various and sundry options is that it’s made clear that Cortex has been a game of evolution. Options from Cortex Classic are highlighted in certain places, likely because they’re a bit different from the way either Cortex Plus or Cortex Prime is structured. What these options are is enlightening: Cortex Classic was built around more classic hit point and initiative structures, and the game system as a whole moved away from these structures as it became clearer that they were neither complementary nor necessary. While there might be a hidden lesson in this, what we the readers benefit from is the choice to either go more modern or D&D-adjacent, losing nothing in the choice thanks to the game’s adaptability.
The Implications
So we have another generic RPG on the scene. It’s good, but why do I love it so much? The reason I’m such a fan of Cortex Prime, the reason I feel like it was written for me and how I run games, is that it’s written like a toolkit and with the intent of being used like a toolkit. All the core mechanics are there, all the optional rules are there, and they’re all clearly marked. Everything is explained and there are examples. There are either rules of thumb or meta-rules around how to build your chosen game. If you have a question about how to do something or why something came out the way it did, there’s likely an answer. I was at one point asked what Genesys could do to be a better generic RPG and the answer is, simply, this. Genesys didn’t come close to the utility in Cortex Prime until the Expanded Player’s Guide came out, and still it’s painfully clear that the intent of Genesys is just to make you use the published settings. With Cortex Prime, everything’s there to help you. It’s better technical guidance than Fate (which did get a lot better with supplements, the System Toolkits) and it’s a lot more concise than GURPS (which needed a supplement to explain all the supplements). There are drawbacks to this, especially if you’re just looking for a game to pick up. The organization of Cortex Prime is aimed at players for 8 pages and GMs for the rest, because the book is not a playable game out of the box…it’s even less of a playable game out of the box than Fate or GURPS. This is not a flaw, mind you…but it needs to be understood, because it should structure how GMs use the rules in the book to construct their games. The three settings in the book, in addition to being excellent worked examples of how to set up the game, are excellent examples of how the GM should present the game to their players. If you want to see what I mean, the Hammerheads setting is complete and playable right now, and is available to check out for free.
What makes Cortex Prime so good to me is that it is one of the few examples of a product which has learned from how people actually play and buy RPGs, especially setting-agnostic RPGs. The GM is the book’s audience, the GM wants to know how to run what they want and how to present it to their players. The GM may be the only person in the group who will buy the book. The players will read as little as possible to understand how to play the game, so it is more useful to equip the GM to write their own summary than it is to have an expansive player-facing section. Certain Agendas and Principles work as well for the game document as they do the GM. Structure any discussion of rules variants in such a way that you “Tell the Consequences and Ask”. Provide enough examples and discussion of how mechanics and variants work, but “Draw Maps, Leave Blanks” when it comes to the full breadth of possibility. And finally, “Be a Fan of the Characters” and make it clear that there’s no one right way to play with such a large palette. Cortex Prime may be the culmination of over 20 years of game development, but it’s clear that some big lessons have been picked up along the way.
Cortex Prime has been sent to distributors, and will be available at a game store near you soon. Cortex Prime is available to purchase online at cortexrpg.com.
Header image by Natalia Bacetti, from the Cortex Prime gamebook.
Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can follow me @LevelOneWonk on Twitter for RPG commentary, relevant retweets, and maybe some rambling. You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!
Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.
Discord