TL;DR: This post converts Dexter Magic to Cortex Prime, from a previous conversion of Castle Falkenstein’s Sorcery to Dexter Magic—but everything could apply to any magic system. A while ago, Dexter Dunbar from the Fate Core | Accelerated RPG FB group left a comment about a post and was nice enough to let me develop a Fate hack…
Category: Cortex Prime
Saturday Special—HARD/WIRED: A Pace Opera
This post illustrates a point about narrative TTRPGs’ pacing and turns Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired into a game—thanks to the Cortex Prime engine, almost literally so.
Off-Topic—Cortex: Prime Iron
TL;DR: Cancer is a bitch, and getting over it long-term is not easy, even when you know what you should do for it. In this post, I pay back (and hopefully, forward) my role-playing friends for their help with that. It’s been a while since my last post, for a bunch of reasons, but the…
Wonky Wednesday–Self-Compels, Everywhere
Player-facing metacurrency earning is not a thing in Fate, but this post includes a recipe to make it work. Probably.
Theory Thursday–Snatching Success from the Jaws of Failure
Narrative fallout is often offered as a way to escape failure in narrative TTRPGs. This post analyses three systems implementing “costly success” and concludes with an observation, a hypothesis, and a gameplay option.
Cortex/Apocalypse–Cortex Got Moves
TL;DR: This post turns Apocalypse World’s moves into a Cortex Prime gameplay trick to make dice-rolling even more narrative, and if you don’t care for the reasons, you can jump right to it. Apocalypse World (AW) and Cortex Prime (CP) share more similarities than meet the naked eye. It’s a leitmotiv of this blog. I…
Wonky Wednesday–Mechanics or Roleplay?
In the inaugural post of this new series, I discuss narrative support and cognitive organization, with examples from Fate RPG and Cortex Prime. The ideas are half-baked, but I got this. Probably.
Z*ro F*cks Fr*day–A Troll’s Tale
TL;DR: This is not a revenge post. Only arguments, nothing personal, save maybe this “sign of adoration of stupidity”—if you don’t get it, that’s okay, it’s food for troll. Surviving leukemia taught me that immediate reactions are a waste of perfectly good neurotransmitters. So I try not to engage online folks with strong opinions and…
Peter’s Principle*–Overcome Anything
Overcome actions are one of four in Fate RPG, but they’re more subtle than they look and pop up in other TTRPGs in ways that are subtly different, and this post goes through a few.
TMI Tuesday–Contests in Cortex as Sequential Games
This post should have been titled: “Cortex’s Contests as Sequential Bayesian Games with Behavioral Strategies.” It was a bit much, so I left the Bayesian part out.
The Polverine 