It’s been a while since we’ve seen an extended System Hack at Cannibal Halfling Gaming. Genesys Mecha concluded in September of 2019 and Cyberpunk Chimera concluded in May of 2020. And yes, neither of them were ever expanded into standalone products; while writing did continue behind the scene the scope of the ambition of both of the projects was simply too high to be completed in the spare time of one or even two nerds who also had jobs (and in one case, kids).

With all those caveats out of the way, I’m trying it again anyway. Both Genesys Mecha and Cyberpunk Chimera provided great deep dives and game design ideas, and with that in mind I wanted to set my sights on something that’s both been a personal quest of mine for a little while as well as something that will add to the game design conversation in a positive way (whether or not the article series leads to anything more). Cortex Prime is, in my opinion, one of the most flexible and powerful rules toolkits on the market. It’s also a toolkit that takes some effort and consideration to set up, which has prevented it from taking off in the same way as the similar but much simpler Fate. Cortex Prime also has many fewer worked examples than Fate, which has the exemplary Fate Worlds series as well as a number of Fate System Toolkits; instead, Cortex only has Tales of Xadia as a fully implemented Cortex game outside of its three in-book examples which are too short and a bit too unconventional to be accessible demos (their genres are police procedural, rescue team, and neo-classical fantasy). A good system hack will walk through the various mechanics, mods, and character options and discuss why each choice is made and how they’re going to work in the final product.

I have not myself chosen a conventional genre or even game idea for this system hack. Instead, I’ve chosen one of my secret game design white whales and, to avoid blank page syndrome, decided to implement it in Cortex Prime instead of writing new mechanics. This game design white whale is (fairly obviously if you read the title of the article) a colony sim. When I think colony sim, the archetypal game that comes to mind for me is RimWorld. For those of you who aren’t familiar, a default game of RimWorld starts with three colonists who have crash landed on a remote planet (a rimworld in the setting’s parlance) and must build up a settlement that enables them to have shelter, food, defenses, and some degree of psychological well-being. The game is described by the designer as a ‘story generator’, and in my most engaging playthroughs I’ve always ended up growing attached to one or more of my little colonist pawns as they eat, sleep, work, and inevitably have a mental breakdown or two.

A lot of readers who have played RimWorld will immediately question the idea of turning it into an RPG. RimWorld is built on a surprisingly deep parametric simulation which ensures that the game knows how all materials, items, and pawns (both human and animal) will react to outside events and conditions. Like in other similar games (i.e. Dwarf Fortress), the depth of simulation and quantity of things being simulated are what allow the games to (via apophenia) create such rich perceived narratives in the heads of their players. My goal is not to create a tabletop version of RimWorld. My goal is to create a tabletop RPG that explores the same conceit as RimWorld: Humans who are given the opportunity to rebuild in the wilderness of a foreign planet, where technology and resources can be plentiful but so can the dangers.

The next question, then, is why Cortex? There are a number of reasons, but most of them can boil down to flexibility. If the goal of this game is to create a different take on the space survival ‘story generator’, then having a flexible and robust resolution mechanic is key. Roll and keep and effect dice are core elements of the Cortex dice mechanic which can be employed in many different situations and in different ways to suit each of those situations. Additionally, all of the Cortex Prime ‘mods’ mean that picking and choosing dice mechanics and dice pool composition rules for all of the situations that will go in the game will be, if not necessarily easy, at least easy to stay within the bounds of the system as it exists without writing any new mechanics.

That’s not to say that there won’t be new mechanics, though. While I’ll go into more depth about how the game will work in a future article, the high level description still immediately betrays that it’s not going to be a traditional game. Like RimWorld I want this to be a game where the number of colonists can ebb and flow depending on outside circumstances. This means that this will be a troupe-style game with a number of characters that will typically be larger than the number of players. Additionally, base-building and resource management will be a part of this, meaning that the game will have robust stronghold-adjacent mechanics, at least similar to what Free League implements in many Year Zero Engine games like Twilight:2000 and Forbidden Lands. While such mechanics aren’t novel in the TTRPG world they aren’t implemented in Cortex Prime. And finally, I want this game to incorporate overland exploration, much in the way RimWorld does. Once again this may not require new or novel mechanics in the broad context of a TTRPG, but it will require implementing mechanics which will be new and novel for Cortex Prime.

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When all is said and done, there are two key design goals for this System Hack. First is to bound the ‘colony sim’ or ‘space survival’ conceit and figure out what that will look like at the table. Is the intent to stick with a RimWorld-style colonist pool that’s always countable? Is there an opportunity to transition to some sort of domain-style gameplay upon reaching a certain size? Are there completely different forks of this idea, enabling players to turn their homestead into a business? Is it interesting to push towards the amorality of RimWorld, or is that just a side effect of the simulation attempting to be morally neutral? And, more broadly, what is the satisfying narrative arc that will be generated? Will we see generational progress like Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, years passing that result in characters aging and dying, or a focus on smaller units of time? There are no right answers to most of these questions, but the questions will help focus the mechanics towards alignment with the vision for the game.

The initial articles in the series will be focused on narrowing down that vision. The next article will discuss the idea of a colony sim, what video game colony sims do well and poorly, and what a tabletop colony sim game would need to do to provide a unique but fun experience. After that we’re going to discuss RimWorld specifically, looking at mechanics, characters, and the setting to figure out what we want to adapt and what we want to abandon. After that, we’ll get into hacking Cortex. We’ll start with an overview of the system and identify what key choices we want to make, and then from there move to implementing characters, structuring conflicts, tests, and contests, and finally implementing the novel systems like exploration, troupe management, and base building.

Even for a multi-part System Hack, this game idea is going to be a bit ambitious. It’s not unlikely that some elements of this, especially some of the more novel ones like troupe management, will prove challenging to implement. By the end of this article run, it will be clear to me (and likely to the reader) if Cortex Prime ended up being an asset or a liability in this experiment. If asset, then there should be a path to making this into a playable game down the road. If liability, it should at least be possible to understand what about Cortex worked and didn’t work, and how to alter the mechanics of the theoretical game to make it work better. While something like this hasn’t exactly been done before, I don’t think there are many elements to this that are completely new. The goal is not to completely write a new playbook, but instead to use our vision of the end product to guide us towards something workable, usable, and hopefully fun. After all, a workable and fun game should be the goal of any System Hack. Join us next month and we’ll start looking at the video game that gave me this idea in the first place and figure out what needs to be added to the payload and what needs to be left on the launch pad.

Cortex Prime is available through Dire Wolf Digital. Header image from Cortex Prime, artist Merilliza Chan.

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