Cortex Prime

No Longer Available

After a long partnership with us, Fandom Tabletop's titles are no longer available via Atlas Games. You can now find their offerings at cortexrpg.com.

Cortex Prime at a Glance

• An exhaustive, award-winning tabletop roleplaying game system refined and redesigned for a new, digitally supported generation.
  
• Entirely modular and packed with advice, examples, and options. Build your own roleplaying game primed by Cortex using hundreds of mods, traits, and mechanics, using themes and genres you already know and love.
  
• Designed by Cam Banks, lead designer of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Smallville, and Leverage; lead developer of more than fifty RPG sourcebooks and supplements; and winner of multiple ENnie and Origins awards.

The World of Cortex Prime

Orc revolutionaries in love! Giant-sized mythic mecha! Swashbuckling cats in the far future! Hard-boiled and haunted police detectives! Whether you’re a fan of genres and genre mash-ups covering the full spectrum of RPG worlds and settings, or you’re just looking for a tabletop game system you can customize to your own specifications, Cortex Prime is primed for you. Includes three sample Spotlight settings ready to go: Eidolon Alpha, Hammerheads, and TRACE 2.0.

Gameplay Basics

• Narrative-focused traits and abilities that quickly bring your character and stories to life in ways that make sense for the genres you prefer.
• A simple dice-pool-based mechanic in which you add two of your dice results together and compare against an opposing roll. Uses polyhedral gaming dice of four, six, eight, ten, and twelve sides.
  
• Player-centered choices allow for flaws and limits to manifest when the player feels they’re most effective. “Hitches” (dice results of 1) generate interesting immediate complications and long-term player benefits.
  
• Session-based play recognizes that both one-shot stories and extended campaigns are made richer by focusing on the
  immediacy of what happens at the table—either in person or online.

Vital Stats