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.
The designers proudly admit that “Hammerheads is a love letter to Thunderbirds”. Instead of International Rescue, the heroes work for the World Crisis Agency. Like its inspiration, Hammerheads features super-cool crisis response vehicles of the same name: High-Altitude Multi-Mission Emergency Response Headquarters. Unlike the machines of International Rescue, Hammerheads are meant to stay out in the field to deal with long-term crises.
The disasters are what set Hammerheads apart from most RPGs. Hammerhead agents deal with everything from oil spills to hurricanes. In the game, disasters are represented by “Crisis Pools” of dice. The number of dice — from 3 to 6 — represents how wide-spread the crisis is. The size of the dice — from d6 to d12 — represents the crisis’ complexity or deadliness. A massive flood is mechanically identical to a volcanic eruption or a city held hostage by ransomware.
Hammerheads is not a combat-centric game. Technically the player-characters don’t shoot it out with bad guys. But bad guys are crises like any other. A militia trying to steal medical aid can “shoot” at players the same way a tornado can throw debris. Bullets are mechanically the same as two-by-fours at 80 miles an hour. And shooting back at that militia is just like hosing down a wildfire.
Hammerheads will strike a nerve with gamers that might be watching their states burn or their cities flood for the first time in a century. It’s a bare-bones setting, and leaves a lot of lifting to the GM. A paragraph on climate crises mentions how corporations contribute to the increasing climate disasters. And the “What Happens Next?” section suggests “A suspicious or interfering politician or lobbying group” and “An antagonistic or irresponsible company that contributes to the disasters” for future story threads. Building all this out as a GM is pretty easy because EXXON KNEW ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING THE WHOLE TIME.
Hammerheads explicitly lists climate change as a major reason the World Crisis Agency exists in the first place. This is one of the few roleplaying games that fall directly into the “climate fiction” genre, along with Hack the Planet and the tragically cancelled Reclaimer.
Cortex Prime has some issues. The rules are a clusterfuck for newcomers. The cornucopia of options threaten to drown the potential GM. It’s too much of a good thing.
Hero Games and R. Talsorian took a shot at a universal system in the 90s. The Fuzion system wasn’t great, but Champions: New Millennium included a graphic illustrating exactly which rules and powers and whatnot were in play. Cortex Prime desperately needed something like that. There is a fan-made menu of rules, but the designers of Cortex Prime should have thought of this first. Huge oversight.
But Cortex Prime’s greatest sin, as I’ve said before, is that the PDF isn’t on DriveThruRPG or Itch. You can buy the book from Amazon and probably dedicated game shops, but you can only buy the PDF from Fandom’s official website. To do that, you need to make an account. If you buy the hardcopy you get a free PDF, but you still have to make an account to redeem it. Walled gardens are some shady shit.
I don’t imagine this will last long. At some point they’ll cave and put it on DriveThru. The lack of exposure will eventually get embarrassing. But I could be wrong. Their marketing plan might rely on being completely unrelated to D&D and Cyberpunk RED and Mothership. So when someone from the mainstream press asks, “Like Dungeons & Dragons?”, they can reply with an emphatic “No”.
But you can play Hammerheads for free! The setting and relevant rules are on Cortex’s website, along with blank character sheets. It’s probably easier to learn Cortex through this free version. Instead of referring back to the modular rules Hammerheads uses (same problem Blackbox has), the rules are presented seamlessly.
