Tales of Xadia by Fandom Tabletop, based on the Netflix cartoon series The Dragon Prince. It’s very much a Western swords and sorcery spin on Avatar: The Airbender. (The showrunner was the head writer on Avatar.) It’s got castles, magic spells, armies, elves, dragons, sword fights, kids running around being heroes, etc. It’s decent YA stuff.
The TTRPG is built on the Cortex system, which is a ruleset that’s been around for a while, primarily used for licensed products like the Serenity, Smallville, and Marvel Heroic games. I guess it was owned by Margaret Weis Productions before Cortex was sold off to Fandom, and they refreshed it with Cortex Prime. (Yes, that’s Fandom, the company that used to be Wikia and owns a ton of fan wikis.) I didn’t have a lot of familiarity with the system, so I picked up a digital copy of Cortex Prime too.
Like many modern TTRPG books, Tales of Xadia comes with a code to redeem a digital copy. In this case, it’s a whole web app experience. There’s a web version of the rules with bookmarks and search fields, etc. You can store characters in the site and there’s even a dice roller. You can also export a pdf of the book. Unfortunately, the character builder is still a WIP, so there isn’t a guided step-by-step way to create your characters, but it’s nice to be able to store and access them online with any device.
A weird omission is that the pdf of the book is very barebones. It doesn’t have bookmarks or a linked table of contents and nothing is hyperlinked in the text. According to the studio, Tales of Xadia is a “digital first experience” so I guess they really want you to use the online app. It’s odd because the Cortex Prime web experience is the same as Tales, but the pdf you get for that book is fully linked and formatted.
The art is gorgeous and fits in nicely with the anime/cartoon. Pages are laid out well. Tons of lore for the world and its people. Lots of diversity and pronoun use, so if that’s a bugaboo for you, this is the wrong property to dive into. Personally, I like it.
The only complaint (which is common for many TTRPs) is that building your own character, instead of using a template, involves a lot of flipping back and forth, consulting rules, and charts, and getting tripped up on a few notes that are important but only mentioned in one spot, and not where you’d expect it. I guess the going back and forth stuff is less of an issue if you’re using the web app, but I’m holding the book in my hands so I’d like to use that.
The Cortex system is fine, if a little odd feeling in practice. Basically, you take a minimum of three dice and roll, pick two dice and total them up to beat a target number set by the Narrator. A third dice you don’t use in the total is the Effect, which is the impact of what you did, and the number rolled on it doesn’t matter, just the die type. The dice come from pools based on choosing one of your three Distinctions (the general “elevator pitch” of your character, like “Arrogant Noble” or “Weary Trailhand”) and one each from other relevant traits like skills, values, powers, assets, etc. Each trait is rated with a die type from d4 to d12.
An example using Tales would be if I want to jump over a stream without falling in (a 12 difficulty) I might roll my d6 in Agility from my Attributes, my d8 for a Distinction of being a haughty Sunfire Elf, a d10 for my Glory because one of my Values is that I want to always excel when an audience is around, and another d6 for having a Specialty as a Dancer. If my rolls were d6 = 3, d6 = 4, d8 = 7, and d10 = 8, I could choose the 7 and 8 to get a total of 15, but that would only leave the d6s to choose as an Effect, so I might want to use the 4 and the 8 for a 13 total (good enough to beat the 12 difficulty) and keep the d10 as the Effect because I really want to dazzle the onlookers with my balletic leap.
Things get more complicated from there thanks to special rules like SFX, Powers, Challenges, etc. but that’s the basic mechanic. For some folks, the amount of picking and choosing dice can be daunting. Like in the example above, maybe it shouldn’t be the d10 for Glory? I could use the d12 for my Mastery because I want to demonstrate how much I learned in my dance classes. Also, there’s some weirdness with Distinctions usually being a d8, which makes me wonder why have three different Distinctions? (In Tales, it’s not even “usually” it’s “always.”) Just have one at d8 and call it a day.
The Cortex Prime system is different from something like Fate, GURPS, or Cypher in that it really is more of a toolkit with a bunch of optional rules. There isn’t even a standard generic character sheet because the only mandatory stat is Distinctions. You might build a game about manners and backhanded compliments at tea parties so you’d only create stats for Distinctions, Relationships, and Etiquette. Unfortunately, this means that using just the Cortex Prime system to create your own setting and characters can be a ton of work depending on how mechanically deep you want the game to be. Thankfully, Tales of Xadia offers a fully-fledged world with the system already pared down to where it needs to be for the setting.