Category: Hype

Are your tactical players zoning out during your Cortex game? Zone them back in. Split scenes into tactical zones, assign zone distinctions, zone complications, and zone traits.

Make Cortex crunch with Get Into the Zone, a mod article by Wil Hutton, in Xine One.

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“Everybody talks about zones in Cortex but nobody ever implements them.” That changes today—or rather, next Wednesday.

Wil Hutton (AKA @rivetgeek) has put together a compact article detailing how to put zones into your Cortex game. This was, I think, the first article we planned to include in Xine, and I really liked what Wil came back with.

I won’t spoil the details of this two-page article, but I will say that this piece makes me think we’ll start seeing Cortex maps in the future, and everybody loves a good map. I’m excited.

If you’re also excited, sign up for our mailing list (see what I did there? Subtle, huh?) at the top or bottom of this page. Our release mailing list is only to notify you of new releases and nothing else: so you know when the good stuff drops.

The animals on the ark survived, but the Shepherd who gathered them did not. Now you, in all your furry, feathered, or scaled glory, face a new dawn in a Catastrophe-wracked world.

Build a home and survive in DisemBARK by Lynn Jones, the capsule game of Xine One, which debuts May 31st!

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The “capsule game” is a super-short game that goes smack-dab in the middle of Xine, so when you open up the zine, it naturally falls open to this ready-to-rock game.

When I asked Lynn to write up a capsule game, I told him that our issue theme was “Beginnings,” which he could adopt or ignore to whatever degree suited the game he’d write. He came back with “what about the animals coming off the ark and beginning a whole new world?”

Which is not what I was expecting.

I am a big fan of surprisingly different ideas, though, and when the first draft of the game came back, it blew me away. It was unique, it was grabby, it had surprising amounts of depth. I wanted to play it immediately.

With formatting, our projected wordcount for a two-page game turned out to be far too big, and the “capsule” game spilled over to another spread. Oh well! It’s a great game, and I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of it!

Inevitable plug: if you haven’t already, get on that release mailing list to hear when Xine One and DisemBARK drop!

While you’re here, we’ve got a character file for DisemBARK!

Xine is our love letter to the Cortex RPG Community. It’s a compact little zine filled with punchy articles, professional art, and all manner of dice pool gaming goodness.

And it’s coming out in one week: May 31st!

We are incredibly excited to put together the world’s greatest (and, admittedly, only) Cortex RPG Community zine. The game itself has always been superlative; the community that’s organized around that game even more so. Compiling and polishing top-notch articles for that community is a dream come true.

Xine and all its content will be released under the Cortex Community License, which means all of its articles are ready to use not only in your home games but also in your own Cortex projects. We love the community’s sharing vibe and we’re eager to start contributing to our favorite Big Pile of Game Stuff.

Xine is also, and will always be, free to download.

The first issue of Xine is packed with five high-octane articles by Cortex designers old and new. In the following week we’ll be teasing each one, so stay tuned.

Speaking of staying tuned, sign up for our mailing list to get pinged the moment a new issue of Xine drops (and nothing else: this list is just for new releases). The signup form is at the bottom of this page.

If you want more Xine updates beyond releases, including progress updates towards the next issue and sneak peeks on who’ll be in it, check out our support page.

We’re excited to launch this zine and we’re excited to have you along for the ride with us.

Happy Gaming!