Cortex Plus

[Treebore]

I had a lot of fun with Cortex. Not via Smallville, Leverage, Supernatural, or Marvel Superheroes, but through the "generic" book simple called CORTEX. We played a wide variety of sci fi variants, from using Star Trek tropes to Battlestar Galactica, to Firefly and then moved on to Post Apocalyptic game sessions. It has a lot of similarities to Savage Worlds too.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/111 ... ckers-guid

[Piperdog]

Thanks Tree! I have been waiting for Cortex Plus Hacker's Guide to come out for a while now. It looks like there will be a ton of options in it.

[Treebore]

The bummer for me on this is, I don't own Leverage or Smallville, only CORTEX and Supernatural. So it reads like this will be largely useless to me unless I buy either Leverage or Smallville, or both. Not something I am likely to do since I am not interested in either one.

[alcyone]

One of our group ended up running a few games of Cortex. We ended up sort of souring on all of the scene editing stuff, it was more like the players were running the game. But it was sort of fun. I wonder how much of that was due to Jamie Chambers' part in it. It doesn't look like he is involved in Plus, but is working on the new Metamorphosis Alpha.

[Treebore]

Scene editing? I don't recall that being such a big deal in just CORTEX. Sure that wasn't something taken out of Smalllville or Leverage?

[alcyone]

Scene editing? I don't recall that being such a big deal in just CORTEX. Sure that wasn't something taken out of Smalllville or Leverage?

Never played those, but in our Cortex game we had poker chips and could spend them to boost rolls and things, but you could also do gonzo things like assert something like "there's a swordfish mounted on the wall near me, I use it to stab that guy." All subject to referee approval, but it seems like a lot of the options were along those lines. I had a gimmick like a sonic screwdriver that really with enough chips could solve about any technical problem I came across.

Some people really like games like that, but it feels too "magic tea party" for me. Could just be our group though.

[Treebore]

Oh, yeah. We did things like, "I find a crowbar in the alley way with which to pry that locked door open.", or "I have a snub pistol in an ankle holster, I draw it and defend myself." Of course in that kind of instance we had to have had our character buy the snub pistol before hand, so it was more of an after thought of, ""Hmmmm... I should have put that snub pistol in an ankle holster and wore it." being turned into what they actually did with the scene changers. We liked it, but we also didn't use the hell out of it. We might have used one or two scene changers in a 3 hour game session.

[kreider204]

Zombie thread!
Anyone gotten into Cortex Plus, esp. the Hacker's Guide? I have the Leverage RPG materials (being a big fan of the show), and might finally run it sometime soon, and I'm also curious about the HG.

[moriarty777]

Just noticed this. I finally got my copies of the Hackers Guide. Seem like you can set up your favorite genre of game with it without the need of the other Cortex game books. When I first backed it, I assumed it was complementary to existing books but looking through it, it is pretty self sufficient.

I haven't played it but I liked what I saw when I first looked at the system which is why I backed the Hackers Guide.

If anyone is interested, I have a spare copy of the book available for sale.

M

[kreider204]

Thanks for the info. I'm hearing conflicting things about whether one needs other Cortex Plus rule books, or if the Hacker's Guide is self-sufficient. It's probably irrelevant, though, since I do have Leverage, and since I'm really only interested in the Action flavor anyway - heroic seems to be for supers and fantasy, and I prefer dedicated systems for those genres, and dramatic seems to require more than I think my players are capable of committing to ... I'll probably end up buying the PDF and printing out only the relevant parts for my purposes.
I'm really digging on the system so far, at least as I'm getting from Leverage. It's a narrative game, but still traditional enough for an old-schooler like me to wrap my head around. I love the narrative way in which combat is handled, as well as the fact that combat is just one small part of the expected gameplay. I also love how easy it is to stat NPCs. Need a generic security guard? SECURITY GUARD D6. Want him to be a bit tougher? SECURITY GUARD D8. Want to add some personality? HONEST D10 SECURITY GUARD D8. And if you decide you want NPCs as detailed as PCs, no problem, considering it takes about 10 minutes to make a PC! Very, very cool.

[moriarty777]

I think the Hackers book is fairly self sufficient BUT owning any flavor of an existing Cortex book / game will at least provide a solid example if not a better framework. I'm not a huge Cortex guy though it was interesting enough to invest in Marvel Heroic, the original Firefly RPG, and the first standalone Cortex book.

It is a shame though given that backers of the Kickstarter have been having a lot of trouble it seems in getting their hands on the copies they had backed and paid for with little communication from MWP. Enough that fans who backed the project have kind of soured on the company and some have even sworn off buying from them anymore.

I was more fortunate than others and got a couple of copies of the book.

M

[kreider204]

It is a shame though given that backers of the Kickstarter have been having a lot of trouble it seems in getting their hands on the copies they had backed and paid for with little communication from MWP. Enough that fans who backed the project have kind of soured on the company and some have even sworn off buying from them anymore.

Ya, I've been seeing quite a few unhappy posts at the MWP forums and RPG.net. It sounds as though most of the issues are finally getting worked out, but it's definitely enough to put me off any MWP Kickstarters or pre-orders (I'll just wait until things are actually available ... ). I hope that doesn't sour too many people on the company as a whole, though - they do make some excellent products.