Roleplaying Games | Climate Fiction
Climate Disasters are the New Dragons
Cortex Prime + Hammerheads
RPGs about disaster relief or emergency response are rare. CRASH//CART is basically Bringing Out the Dead meets Bladerunner. Rescue City is a setting for a kid’s RPG about emergency responders. Aside from Hammerheads, those are the only examples I know of.
Cortex Prime is a modular roleplaying game system that aspires to emulate any genre. Fantasy. Mecha anime. A Guy Ritchie movie. Whatever. It’s a big toolbox of RPG mechanics that fit together in a lot of different ways, like Lego bricks. Because it’s modular, homebrewers can rearrange it to make it work for anything.
To showcase this flexibility, the Cortex Prime Game Handbook includes three example settings. Eidolon Alpha is mythic fantasy adventure, and it’s kind of boring. It’s basically Scion meets Exalted meets Visionaries. TRACE 2.0 is a mashup of The District and C.O.P.S. with all the cybernetics replaced with neoliberalism. Way better. Then there’s Hammerheads.
