Help Revamp the ‘Cortex Prime’ RPG Through Kickstarter

A well regarded roleplaying system, which once powered quite a few licensed settings, is looking to make a big comeback. While Firefly and the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game may be familiar with plenty of gamers, the core Cortex system at the heart of these Margaret Weis Productions titles might not jump immediately to mind. Now lead designer Cam Banks is launching his own company, Magic Vacuum Design Studio, with the all new Cortex Prime aiming to take the sandbox system to the next level. The project is currently past the 150% funding level on Kickstarter and you can reserve a copy of both the game handbook and system reference, starting at $10 for PDFs, through May 29th.

From Magic Vacuum:

Cortex is an award-winning tabletop roleplaying game system that traces its origins back to the Sovereign Stone System in 1999, and the Serenity RPG in 2005, from which it takes its name. Over the next five years it appeared as the engine powering a series of other licensed RPGs, at which point it was rewritten from the ground up as Cortex Plus. Various iterations of this newer system were used in RPGs based on Leverage, Smallville, Firefly, and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.

Cortex Prime is the newest version of this much-loved set of game rules, refined and redesigned by Cam Banks under license from Margaret Weis Productions. It embraces its roots as a means of adapting your favorite movies, television shows, and comic books, while emerging finally as a truly multi-genre modular roleplaying game in its own right.

Orc revolutionaries! Giant mecha! Swashbucklers of the far future! Hard-boiled police detectives! Whether you’re a fan of genres and genre mash-ups, any of the older Cortex-powered games, or you’re just looking for a tabletop game system you can customize to your own specifications, Cortex Prime is primed for you.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...

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