A review of the Cortex System Role Playing Game
Cortex System Role Playing Game
By Jamie Chambers
Margaret Weis Productions ( 160 pp, $29.99, April 2009)
There are a lot of things to commend this book to an experienced gamer. The rules are fairly simple yet cover a lot of ground. I like how the abilities are not really tied into specific stats that are sometimes hard to justify - this system is much more fluid. It also is not conducive to rules lawyering and if there is one thing I hate, it is rules-lawyering, so this is a positive for me. I can see where the OCD crowd who wants a rule for everything could be irritated with it, but I game by the principle that story precedes rules, and this rule set is made for that mindset.
Basically, after two or three hours of reading, a game master will feel comfortable enough to run the system. Layout is simple but functional black-and-white and an easy to read font. It’s fairly thin for being the core rules of a game system, but I liked that. It made the book less intimidating than a lot of other systems I have looked at.