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Tales of Xadia Playtest

The Dragon Prince is a Netflix show which took me a bit by surprise. Even though it’s obviously targeted towards teenagers, I found it extremely enjoyable to watch. A while back FANDOM, which had acquired the rights to Cortex Prime from Margaret Weis Productions, announced “Tales of Xadia“, a Cortex Prime RPG based on the show.

Today I found out that if you sign up for the newsletter on the official site, you’ll get provided with links to their playtest material. You not only get a playtest adventure, but also a pretty extensive rules primer. Both give a good impression on how the final product may look like. If you are interested in creating your own Cortex Prime setting, the rules primer may also be of interest to you too since it gives another example of a Cortex Prime build (in addition to the one included in the core rulebook).

If you are even remotely interested in either “The Dragon Prince” or the Cortex Prime RPG, I highly recommend checking “Tales of Xadia” out.
Stargazer

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

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2 comments

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johnkzin

How are you liking it as a game?

My wife and I love the show, but my experience with cortex is pretty minimal. Does the setting do well with that rule set? Did they have to do much modifying of either one in order to make it work?
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    Stargazer

    I have to admit I am not really a Cortex Prime expert. There are still some mechanics I need to wrap my head around. So take anything I say with a pinch of salt.
    Cortex Prime should work with any setting without having to modify it at all. The trick is that the mechanics are highly modular. The Cortex Prime Game Handbook basically is a toolset which allows you to pick and choose the mechanics you think fit best for the setting you want to play in. And that’s what they did for the Tales of Xadia game (and the other upcoming Cortex-based games). From what I’ve seen so far, the setting is completely unchanged and based 100% on the Netflix series. If you’re interested in playing Tales of Xadia I highly recommend getting the playtest material I linked in the post above, and not bothering with the Cortex Prime Game Handbook at the moment, since it’s not needed to play.
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