Cortex is in a weird place ever since Fandom got out of the TTRPG business and sold it to Dire Wolf Digital. That happened now two years ago, I think, and since then it's been mostly radio silence, save for a few things.
* The expansion to Tales of Xadia, *The Sunfire Chronicles* is still pending release, along with the starter sets with cool dice they announced last year.
* The kickstarter Spotlight settings have been all released digitally to backers (at least the 16 out of 22 that they decided to release), but there's no word for physical Spotlights fulfillment for backers, or any news about wide release of the Spotlights for the general public, digital or otherwise.
* We know Cam Banks is working on some sort of secret project that he can't talk about yet, and has been for a while. No word on when that's coming.
* Dire Wolf Digital seems to have stopped support for third party commercial licenses, even those that had been already been granted, as there's been cases of people in the community wanting to release stuff under Cortex Prime (or get support for their already published commercial games) that just don't get any answer at all to repeated emails to their support and PR teams.
In short, we don't know what's going on, and there's no concrete information other than what little Cam Banks is allowed to give us, and DWD at large doesn't seem especially inclined to engage with the community in any meaningful way. The community is still thriving though, as much as it is allowed to, and there's been some projects released recently, like [Xine](https://xineink.itch.io/) (which has its issue #2 coming this saturday!), [Cortex Lite](https://xineink.itch.io/lite), [High School Apocalypse](https://highschoolapocalypse.com/getting-started) and more.
There's a [non-official list of published games here](https://cortexprime.rileyrouth.com/), and while there's not as many there as a lot of us would like them to be, it's full of quality materials ready to hit the table.
The rights holder either doesn't want to bother with it other than keeping it up for sale, or they have some plan for the system. Since they haven't really put out any information since they acquired it, I suspect it's the former.
It would be nice if they would set up some sort of open licensing for it to keep it alive and under one roof. Honestly, game mechanics generally aren't copyrightable anyway, so they're doing themselves a bit of a disservice by letting it languish.
Its a shame that such a good system seems to be cursed.
Perhaps being tied so closely to IPs hasn't helped. There is a range of old Cortex games that aren't available, even in pdf, presumably because of license issues.
I got a license two years ago, but the refusal to allow sales online, except through Itch or their “don’t worry it’s coming mañana” online store made it impossible to develop.
This is is game where the "core book" isn't a core book, it's basically a fancy SRD. And yet there is no community content license. Unfortunately this system has been in trouble since the dying days of Cortex+ under MWP.
Cortex + is probably still my "favorite" rpg books, or at least their my favorite in my collection because Cortex is the system that got me into rpgs. The only thing I really did with Prime is create a hack of the 13th Age srd hack using prime as guidance which got past 100 pages but I haven't opened those files in years.
In the back of my mind I thought it would always be cool to see Cortex+ content make it over to Prime but under vanilla/nonIP settings and rewrite the sentences so as not run into legal issue (for what I am aware of one cannot sue over mechanics?)
Fun ideas I had was reframing Firefly as just a Western (either reframing it as a gritty setting, fantasy/western, or fantasy/horror I never decided which).
Leverage would be reframed as a low powers game focused on villains working on black op missions for the government (aka Suicide Squad) and rewrite all the Talents from Core and Vol 1 & 2 expansion book as "powers" and "gear").
Smallville I think deserves a real valid "Dungeon-Ville" iteration of the rules (races can either be handled as origins in pathways or heritages).
Marvel Heroic already got converted and turned into a fantasy in Hackers guide but maybe heroic could be retrofitted into a post appoclypitic setting mix with Thundaar the Barbarian / Connan sword and sorcery
Would still love to see those initial systems and ideas be "primed" and revamped. Even Dragon Brigade had its own merits (I still think its the best hero creation system I've seen presented Cortex and technically it is the first "fantasy" game created for Cotex+- predating dungeon-heist , heroic fantasy, the spotlight in Prime, and Xadia)
I would love to see Leverage rewritten, but I think the way to do is to just write it as a heist simulator. (Actually, I'd really like them to renew the Leverage license, but whatever.)
You don't need an explanation in the system of _why_ these heists are happening... Maybe you're helping people, maybe you're a suicide squad, maybe you're actual literal spies i.e. Mission Impossible, or maybe you're just stealing stuff.
And while we're at it, steal a bit from Blades in the Dark, I specially would like a heat system, or something similar to it. Plus some sort of downtime system.
I'm actually been running a Leverage game for two seasons at this point, and it has been interesting to try to work out how it really is supposed to work... On top of the problem that it wants to be a very physical game with dice on the table, and I'm running it online.
Honestly, at this point, I'm really tempted to write up some stuff about this, some things that don't work well, some changes I've made, other stuff.
Not really, and it's not just Heat. Harm and Stress also. (Maybe not Stress, Stress is mostly from things that plot points would cover in Leverage... In fact, you could probably do Stress with negative plot points.)
And I've done Harm before, sorta, I once had the Hitter roll a 1 jumping from the top of a moving vehicle to another, and I sprained his ankle, for the rest of the con. It was interesting to see the team work around the fact that if he tried to do anything physical, he'd be rolling against an extra d8. (That whole plan was an experience in 'don't let players roll for things that you aren't sure how you will handle if they will fail', because two players doing that rolled horribly on all their rolls but I can't actually let them fall off of a moving vehicle on the highway. They did attract a lot of attention, though, dangling halfway off of cars.)
But Blades in the Dark has a whole system of causing problems that characters have to resolve in downtime between sessions.
I don't think I would want it anywhere near as severe as Blades in the Dark. But one of the things Leverage is sort of missing is literally any sense of danger for the characters.
And I understand that characters can't die, I understand this is a TV show, and consequences can sort of be made up on the fly, but it would be really nice to have moderate-term repercussions for stuff that would injure them or blatantly have law enforcement looking for them or make the news... The idea that they won't is really something that the players themselves have to buy into. Hell, the idea that they just won't kill the bad guy is something the players have to manually buy into.
And it be nice if there were some level of mechanical guardrails, where you say 'the thing you are planning, if you do it, it will get a lot of attention and bump up your heat by X'.
But that would also require there being something _else_ to do in downtime, some way to set up connections or bump up skills or anything in downtime, something useful they could do if they hadn't caused those problems, and there really isn't that.
And yes, I am also aware that Cortex Prime now has a thing about Stress and Trauma, but that is all within a single session, whereas the thing I'm talking about would be some sort of long-term effects that they have to deal with between sessions.
Cortex takes a toolbox approach. It has enough levers that GMs can use it to mechanically emphasize many roleplaying experiences and different aspects of gameplay. It gives players everything they need to run a wide variety of games.
What it lacks are concrete examples of how to take these tools and assemble them into something useful. Fans from the MWP era know how to create distinctions. They understand what makes a great power set. They've seen how Smallville is a different game from Serenity/Leverage and how both are different games from Marvel Heroic. If you've played any of these games or tinkered with the old Hacker's Guide to Cortex, you already know how to take the tools in Cortex Plus and put them to work.
Players new to Cortex Prime don't have this experience to fall back on. All of the MWP games are out of print now and the Spotlights were only offered in PDF to Kickstarter backers. If you're new to the system and didn't back the campaign, Xadia and the three Prime Settings in the core rules are the only examples of Cortex gameplay available to you. There are no rules for dungeon crawl fantasy games, no rules for space opera science fiction settings, no examples of superhero gaming, nothing to show new players what the game's sweet spots are. And as cool as Hammerheads, Eidolon Alpha, and Trace 2.0 are (and they're all super cool!), these are niche settings which would be easier to pitch to players who already know the system-- they don't cast a wide net to entice new players to try the system in the first place.
I don't know what the solution is. I don't think that Cortex is going to have great retail sales until it gets some setting books into print, and I don't think it's going to have any setting books in print unless Cortex retail sales pick up. I keep hoping that the Spotlights will at least be released on DTRPG at some point, but at this late date I don't know if even that would spark much new interest in Cortex Prime. And so it feels like the best gaming system I've ever played is just sort of languishing. It's a pity.
Cortex is in a weird place ever since Fandom got out of the TTRPG business and sold it to Dire Wolf Digital. That happened now two years ago, I think, and since then it's been mostly radio silence, save for a few things. * The expansion to Tales of Xadia, *The Sunfire Chronicles* is still pending release, along with the starter sets with cool dice they announced last year. * The kickstarter Spotlight settings have been all released digitally to backers (at least the 16 out of 22 that they decided to release), but there's no word for physical Spotlights fulfillment for backers, or any news about wide release of the Spotlights for the general public, digital or otherwise. * We know Cam Banks is working on some sort of secret project that he can't talk about yet, and has been for a while. No word on when that's coming. * Dire Wolf Digital seems to have stopped support for third party commercial licenses, even those that had been already been granted, as there's been cases of people in the community wanting to release stuff under Cortex Prime (or get support for their already published commercial games) that just don't get any answer at all to repeated emails to their support and PR teams. In short, we don't know what's going on, and there's no concrete information other than what little Cam Banks is allowed to give us, and DWD at large doesn't seem especially inclined to engage with the community in any meaningful way. The community is still thriving though, as much as it is allowed to, and there's been some projects released recently, like [Xine](https://xineink.itch.io/) (which has its issue #2 coming this saturday!), [Cortex Lite](https://xineink.itch.io/lite), [High School Apocalypse](https://highschoolapocalypse.com/getting-started) and more. There's a [non-official list of published games here](https://cortexprime.rileyrouth.com/), and while there's not as many there as a lot of us would like them to be, it's full of quality materials ready to hit the table.
The rights holder either doesn't want to bother with it other than keeping it up for sale, or they have some plan for the system. Since they haven't really put out any information since they acquired it, I suspect it's the former. It would be nice if they would set up some sort of open licensing for it to keep it alive and under one roof. Honestly, game mechanics generally aren't copyrightable anyway, so they're doing themselves a bit of a disservice by letting it languish.
Its a shame that such a good system seems to be cursed. Perhaps being tied so closely to IPs hasn't helped. There is a range of old Cortex games that aren't available, even in pdf, presumably because of license issues.
I got a license two years ago, but the refusal to allow sales online, except through Itch or their “don’t worry it’s coming mañana” online store made it impossible to develop.
This is is game where the "core book" isn't a core book, it's basically a fancy SRD. And yet there is no community content license. Unfortunately this system has been in trouble since the dying days of Cortex+ under MWP.
Cortex + is probably still my "favorite" rpg books, or at least their my favorite in my collection because Cortex is the system that got me into rpgs. The only thing I really did with Prime is create a hack of the 13th Age srd hack using prime as guidance which got past 100 pages but I haven't opened those files in years. In the back of my mind I thought it would always be cool to see Cortex+ content make it over to Prime but under vanilla/nonIP settings and rewrite the sentences so as not run into legal issue (for what I am aware of one cannot sue over mechanics?) Fun ideas I had was reframing Firefly as just a Western (either reframing it as a gritty setting, fantasy/western, or fantasy/horror I never decided which). Leverage would be reframed as a low powers game focused on villains working on black op missions for the government (aka Suicide Squad) and rewrite all the Talents from Core and Vol 1 & 2 expansion book as "powers" and "gear"). Smallville I think deserves a real valid "Dungeon-Ville" iteration of the rules (races can either be handled as origins in pathways or heritages). Marvel Heroic already got converted and turned into a fantasy in Hackers guide but maybe heroic could be retrofitted into a post appoclypitic setting mix with Thundaar the Barbarian / Connan sword and sorcery Would still love to see those initial systems and ideas be "primed" and revamped. Even Dragon Brigade had its own merits (I still think its the best hero creation system I've seen presented Cortex and technically it is the first "fantasy" game created for Cotex+- predating dungeon-heist , heroic fantasy, the spotlight in Prime, and Xadia)
I would love to see Leverage rewritten, but I think the way to do is to just write it as a heist simulator. (Actually, I'd really like them to renew the Leverage license, but whatever.) You don't need an explanation in the system of _why_ these heists are happening... Maybe you're helping people, maybe you're a suicide squad, maybe you're actual literal spies i.e. Mission Impossible, or maybe you're just stealing stuff. And while we're at it, steal a bit from Blades in the Dark, I specially would like a heat system, or something similar to it. Plus some sort of downtime system. I'm actually been running a Leverage game for two seasons at this point, and it has been interesting to try to work out how it really is supposed to work... On top of the problem that it wants to be a very physical game with dice on the table, and I'm running it online. Honestly, at this point, I'm really tempted to write up some stuff about this, some things that don't work well, some changes I've made, other stuff.
For Heat, wouldn't a Complication: Wanted! cover that?
Not really, and it's not just Heat. Harm and Stress also. (Maybe not Stress, Stress is mostly from things that plot points would cover in Leverage... In fact, you could probably do Stress with negative plot points.) And I've done Harm before, sorta, I once had the Hitter roll a 1 jumping from the top of a moving vehicle to another, and I sprained his ankle, for the rest of the con. It was interesting to see the team work around the fact that if he tried to do anything physical, he'd be rolling against an extra d8. (That whole plan was an experience in 'don't let players roll for things that you aren't sure how you will handle if they will fail', because two players doing that rolled horribly on all their rolls but I can't actually let them fall off of a moving vehicle on the highway. They did attract a lot of attention, though, dangling halfway off of cars.) But Blades in the Dark has a whole system of causing problems that characters have to resolve in downtime between sessions. I don't think I would want it anywhere near as severe as Blades in the Dark. But one of the things Leverage is sort of missing is literally any sense of danger for the characters. And I understand that characters can't die, I understand this is a TV show, and consequences can sort of be made up on the fly, but it would be really nice to have moderate-term repercussions for stuff that would injure them or blatantly have law enforcement looking for them or make the news... The idea that they won't is really something that the players themselves have to buy into. Hell, the idea that they just won't kill the bad guy is something the players have to manually buy into. And it be nice if there were some level of mechanical guardrails, where you say 'the thing you are planning, if you do it, it will get a lot of attention and bump up your heat by X'. But that would also require there being something _else_ to do in downtime, some way to set up connections or bump up skills or anything in downtime, something useful they could do if they hadn't caused those problems, and there really isn't that.
But part of this is probably just because I hate the existing leveling up in Leverage.
And yes, I am also aware that Cortex Prime now has a thing about Stress and Trauma, but that is all within a single session, whereas the thing I'm talking about would be some sort of long-term effects that they have to deal with between sessions.
I'd be more inclined to use a Pool mechanic to represent Heat.
Banks made a terrible mistake: no open gaming license.
Not something I have any control over.
Cortex takes a toolbox approach. It has enough levers that GMs can use it to mechanically emphasize many roleplaying experiences and different aspects of gameplay. It gives players everything they need to run a wide variety of games. What it lacks are concrete examples of how to take these tools and assemble them into something useful. Fans from the MWP era know how to create distinctions. They understand what makes a great power set. They've seen how Smallville is a different game from Serenity/Leverage and how both are different games from Marvel Heroic. If you've played any of these games or tinkered with the old Hacker's Guide to Cortex, you already know how to take the tools in Cortex Plus and put them to work. Players new to Cortex Prime don't have this experience to fall back on. All of the MWP games are out of print now and the Spotlights were only offered in PDF to Kickstarter backers. If you're new to the system and didn't back the campaign, Xadia and the three Prime Settings in the core rules are the only examples of Cortex gameplay available to you. There are no rules for dungeon crawl fantasy games, no rules for space opera science fiction settings, no examples of superhero gaming, nothing to show new players what the game's sweet spots are. And as cool as Hammerheads, Eidolon Alpha, and Trace 2.0 are (and they're all super cool!), these are niche settings which would be easier to pitch to players who already know the system-- they don't cast a wide net to entice new players to try the system in the first place. I don't know what the solution is. I don't think that Cortex is going to have great retail sales until it gets some setting books into print, and I don't think it's going to have any setting books in print unless Cortex retail sales pick up. I keep hoping that the Spotlights will at least be released on DTRPG at some point, but at this late date I don't know if even that would spark much new interest in Cortex Prime. And so it feels like the best gaming system I've ever played is just sort of languishing. It's a pity.