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System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Overworld

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While the focus in RimWorld is on the stretch of land that you’ve claimed for your base, the entire planet is available to you to explore. You can see the spread of different biomes and factions when you select your landing site at the beginning of the game, but really exploring and interacting with the broader world is dependent on either sending out risky caravans or developing later-game technologies like drop pods and (now with Odyssey) gravships. For our System Hack, the base site is likely to feel a bit smaller, and venturing out onto the world map is something that happens sooner. Luckily, we have decades of wilderness exploration in TTRPGs to help us out. When looking at our overworld map, we want to make sure that exploration and venturing beyond the base site both provides interesting decisions and helps us populate a world with people and places that our players will want to explore.

The overworld is also where we start considering some of the setting assumptions of RimWorld, and deciding where we converge or diverge. RimWorld’s implied setting is fascinating, but the place where all of the setting ideas fail to emulsify is in the overworld. Beyond the dispersion of settlements being a clear game contrivance, the lack of any population buildup or agglomeration is just not how any planet would look after years of colonization. There is a line to be walked here; a ‘RimWorld’ would likely self-select for individualists who may want space and to be left alone, but there’s simply too many personal and economic benefits for larger settlement to assume there wouldn’t be any.

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System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Characters

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Characters are the key unit of play in any RPG, and our system hack is going to be no different. For a game modeled after RimWorld, though, we’re going to have to strike a balance between emulation and ease of use, especially considering how many characters may be at play.

Cortex Prime allows for a range of different options for modeling characters, collectively called Prime Sets. Different combinations of Prime Sets lend themselves to different genres, and each one has different rules mods that can be attached to it. Only one Prime Set is required, Distinctions, but luckily it works well for certain traits within the RimWorld framework.

After some consideration, the two core Prime Sets we’re going to use outside of Distinctions are basic ones, Attributes and Skills. Attributes may not be directly used in RimWorld, but giving each character a rating in Physical, Mental, and Social can also be used for stress tracks, recreation type preferences, and other underlying RimWorld properties that wouldn’t fit with other Prime Sets. We’re also going to look into Resources and Relationships, Prime Sets that will be important for the game but perhaps limited at character creation.

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System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Foundation

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Let me tell you, I’ve been playing a lot of RimWorld over the last month. The new Odyssey DLC adds a whole dimension to the game that was previously fairly difficult to access: Exploration. With a gravship, it’s possible to go to so many more places on the map, and thankfully they added more things to see on that map as well. Odyssey adds to and enhances the gameplay loop of RimWorld, but thanks to the gravship’s function as a mobile base, that gameplay loop is largely maintained even with the changes.

Thinking about how the gameplay changes and doesn’t change with the addition of the gravship proved to be a good way to start thinking about the gameplay loop of this System Hack. When I’m playing RimWorld, what are elements I want more of that the game isn’t really going to provide? What pieces of the game, on the other hand, are best left to a computer? The trouble with developing an approach to a colony sim RPG is that the genre and its best examples are fairly broad, and you need to make some narrowing decisions very early on.

As I said earlier when discussing my design goals, I’m not trying to emulate RimWorld. Rather, the goal of the game is to provide a similar conceit that leads to storytelling. We are going to be using a few setting concepts from RimWorld to ground the setting of the game, and we are going to be focusing at least notionally on the idea of a colony, a homestead of a handful of people who are trying to make their way on a new world. There are going to be things we want to lean into, like relationships, that can be given significantly more depth at a game table than on a computer. There will be others, like tile-by-tile building layout, that are probably best left on the PC. Ultimately the three elements we want to build from are going to be creating characters, building the settlement, and exploring the world.

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System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Inspiration

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Video games don’t make for easy translations to RPGs, especially if the video game isn’t really an RPG itself. For this continuing System Hack I’m aiming to put together a tabletop RPG that plays like a Colony Sim, and hopefully using Cortex Prime to do it. Before we get into any rules design, though, it’s time to look at my core inspiration for taking this project on in the first place.

RimWorld is a colony sim video game designed by Tynan Sylvester, and now supported and expanded through an entire team at Sylvester’s studio Ludeon Studios. The game was released in 2018 but had been in Early Access for five years at that point, and it continues to see frequent updates and support, including several large DLCs.

So how do we take that concept and translate it into a TTRPG? It’s not about the exact setting of RimWorld, though certain hard sci-fi conceits are going to port over. It’s more about understanding what experience the game produces, and then figuring out which elements of that experience could be employed to good effect in a tabletop game. With that in mind, let’s take a look at RimWorld’s premise and its mechanics, and get in the mood for some reverse engineering.

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