A note on Cortex Prime Kickstarter Spotlights

A note on Cortex Prime Kickstarter Spotlights

There have been some questions and some confusion in the player community about the status of Cortex Prime. Silence can give space for misinformation to flourish, so we felt like we needed to weigh in with a quick note about where we’re at and how we got here.

The Kickstarter for Cortex Prime funded back in 2017, five years before Dire Wolf became involved with the project; it was an ambitious campaign with some exciting goals, but it wasn’t our rodeo. After the Kickstarter campaign was over, Fandom acquired the underlying rights to Cortex in 2019 and took on Kickstarter fulfillment. Three years later, the long-promised “Spotlight” Kickstarter stretch goals had still not been delivered when Dire Wolf acquired Fandom’s RPG properties in August of 2022.

We didn’t expect completion of the project to take as long as it did, but we spent over a year (and a couple hundred thousand dollars) producing digital volumes of Spotlights that had been promised to Kickstarter backers years earlier – for pledges from which, it’s worth noting, we never received a dime.

That left a total of 351 backers who had pledged for physically printed & bound copies of the Spotlights. We dug into the logistics, and found that the costs associated with layout, physical production, as well as the ongoing opportunity costs against work for new projects were costs we weren’t prepared to pay. So we made the decision to close the books on the twice-inherited Kickstarter, and let our team move forward on other RPG projects currently in development.

We know that that decision is frustrating to some of you, and that you’re not receiving everything you expected when you initially backed the Cortex Prime Kickstarter way back when. We get it – but there’s also a limit on how much money we can spend fulfilling other folks’ promises. We feel like we’ve done right by Cortex fans, and look forward to sharing both new RPG projects starting from a clean slate, and upcoming expanded content for Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince RPG in the coming months.


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