The New Ars Moriendi has game rules powered by Cortex Prime. This page provides supplemental information that the Game Handbook (which covers the engine behind the system) and the setting guide (which covers character creation and running the game) do not address.

Headings with the ¤ symbol are mods that can be applied to any Cortex Prime game. Anything else is setting-specific.

¤ Engagements

Without a detailed battle map, this system has to handle movement in a more abstract way. The environment for a given conflict can host any number of Engagements, which are simply groupings of characters.

When you’re not in an Engagement, you can join one at the start of your turn. If you are Engaged and you don’t want to be, you have to take an action to escape your Engagement. Nobody has to try to stop you, but everyone in the Engagement is allowed to try to stop you. If you do escape, though, you’re free from all Engagements until the start of your next turn. Your enemies can’t just chase you down immediately and make you waste every action you have on disengaging. That’d be dull.

Melee attacks can only be used against someone in the same Engagement as you. Ranged attacks can target anyone, with exceptions for cover and distance as appropriate.

Some Abilities or Assets have the Area Attack option, allowing them to target an Engagement. If you’re in the targeted area, you roll to defend — even if it’s your teammate attacking. Everyone whose reaction total is beaten by the attack takes the effect die as Stress or a Complication. Oh, and if you’re trying to give someone the SFX that used to be called “Area Attack,” the new title is Barrage. Confusing, maybe, but it’s a necessary change for this mod to sound sane in play.

¤ Quick Checks

With action-based resolution, sometimes things take longer than it’s reasonable to spend on a roll that either doesn’t matter much, comes up particularly often, or doesn’t have a clear source of difficulty but shouldn’t be tied to the doom pool. To this end, quick checks are simple, one-and-done checks that maintain some uncertainty of outcome while keeping the game moving.

A quick check is one die rolled by itself. Often, this will be an attribute trait or a specialty, but it can be anything. The key is that it’s the single most relevant trait to the question that the check is answering. The answer is “yes” if the die rolls a 4 or more and “no” otherwise. On a hitch, the answer is no and the situation may take a turn for the worse, if that’s possible and the GM hands you a plot point.

For example, the question “Can I slide over the hood of this car?” might call for a quick check of the Motion attribute. On a 4 or more, yes. On a hitch, the GM might hand over a plot point to throw a problem at you, like a twisted ankle or the car alarm catching hostile attention. The question “Can I sell this stolen watch on eBay?” might call for a quick check of the Crime or Business specialty, if you have it, with a buyer on a 4 or more and a report that gets your account suspended on a hitch. Some SFX might even have a quick check of your power trait built in rather than costing a plot point or having defined triggers. In this case, the question is simply “Does this SFX trigger?” and the backfire a hitch presents is a well-defined risk.

A quick check has a very defined success rate, depending on the trait rolled. Making a quick check with a d6 is essentially a coin flip. A trait with a d4 is as likely to succeed on a quick check as it is to backfire, while a trait with a d12 will pass two in three quick checks. Take these success rates into account when calling for a quick check or adding one to a different rules element, like an ability or signature asset.