The Man Who Smuggled Indie Design Into the Mainstream

In 2012, a superhero RPG launched with Marvel’s name on the cover and the DNA of the indie RPG movement inside. Characters didn’t roll Strength to lift a car. They rolled Love + Lois, or Duty + Team — the question was always why you act, not what you can do. A visible pool of dice on the table grew every time something went wrong, ratcheting tension like a ticking bomb. There was no character creation system at all — just twenty-three pre-built heroes you swapped between scenes, like reading a comic book where the camera follows whoever matters most right now.

It won the ENnie Gold for Best Rules, the Origins Award for Best RPG, and it was dead within thirteen months.

The license expired. The publisher’s statement was blunt: the game didn’t sell enough copies to sustain an ambitious Marvel license. The RPG industry’s niche economics collided with Hollywood IP pricing, and economics won.

But Marvel Heroic Roleplaying had already done its damage. Thousands of traditional gamers — people who bought the game because it said “Marvel” on the cover — found themselves playing with narrative mechanics they’d never encountered before. A Gnome Stew reviewer captured the long-term effect: Marvel Heroic was a large part of why he moved into exploring games with more narrative elements, leading him to Fate and various Apocalypse World-derived games.

Cam Banks didn’t invent narrative RPG design. Vincent Baker, Ron Edwards, and the Forge movement did that. What Banks did — and what arguably requires equal skill — was translate those ideas into a language that mainstream gamers could hear. He built a bridge between two worlds that barely spoke to each other, and thousands of people walked across it without realizing it was there.

From Auckland to Krynn

Cameron Banks was born on July 21, 1971, in Auckland, New Zealand. He studied history, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Waikato — a combination that reads like a syllabus for designing character-driven RPGs. His encounter with Jonathan Tweet’s Over the Edge in 1993 was the crack in the simulationist dam: here was a game that prioritized surrealist storytelling over mechanical resolution, suggesting that dice could serve narrative rather than merely adjudicate physics. Amber Diceless Roleplaying reinforced the lesson. The antithesis of the dominant paradigm planted itself in his imagination.

In 1996, Banks emigrated to the United States, marrying his American wife Jess and settling initially in State College, Pennsylvania. His first notable design work was Elizabethulhu (2001), a d20 mashup of the Elizabethan era and the Cthulhu Mythos — an early signal of his lifelong aptitude for thematic cross-pollination.

The move to southeast Wisconsin in the early 2000s put Banks within orbit of Sovereign Press, Margaret Weis’s company producing Dragonlance d20 sourcebooks. He started as a freelance writer in 2003 and quickly became indispensable. He contributed to nearly every book in the line: Bestiary of Krynn (2004, two ENnie Silver Awards), the 730-page Age of Mortals campaign trilogy (Key of Destiny, Spectre of Sorrows, Price of Courage), Holy Orders of the Stars, Towers of High Sorcery, War of the Lance, Dragons of Krynn, and Races of Ansalon. He published a Dragonlance novel, The Sellsword (2008), the first volume in The Anvil of Time series.

The Dragonlance work established his reputation for stewardship — taking a beloved setting and expanding it without betraying its core identity. It was editorial and narrative work, not mechanical innovation. But it taught him how licensed properties functioned as shared universes, a skill that would prove essential when he turned his attention to a different kind of engine entirely.

Stripping the Engine Down to Bare Bones

When Sovereign Press became Margaret Weis Productions, Banks became Cortex System line editor and eventually line developer. The original Cortex System, designed by Jamie Chambers for the Serenity Role Playing Game (2005), was a competent polyhedral step-die engine: roll relevant dice, add them up, beat a target number. Its most forward-looking feature was Plot Points — a meta-currency letting players gain extra dice, reduce damage, or make small story changes. Serenity was a hit (four print runs in year one, 2005 Origins Award), but the system beneath it was conventional.

Banks’ transformation began around 2009. As he described it: “I stripped the Cortex System down to the bare bones and rebuilt it.”

The resulting Cortex Plus was not one system but three radically different games sharing a common engine philosophy. The core mechanical shift moved from “add all dice” to roll-and-keep — roll one die from each trait set, keep the two highest, add them. But the deeper innovation was that each game’s trait sets reflected what mattered to its genre rather than defaulting to universal attributes.

This was the insight that would define his career: the thing you roll for should be the thing the story cares about.

Three Flavors of the Same Truth

Smallville RPG (2010), co-designed with indie publisher Josh Roby, was the most radical departure. Characters had no Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence. They rolled Values (Duty, Glory, Justice, Love, Power, Truth) and Relationships (die ratings for connections to other characters). Clark Kent saving Lois from a runaway train rolls Love + Lois. The question is never how strong you are. It’s always what you’re willing to sacrifice.

Character creation used collaborative Pathways — players moved through life stages, drawing connections between characters, NPCs, and locations on a shared relationship map. By the time the first session began, every character was already entangled in a web of dramatic tension. Five stress types were all emotional: Insecure, Afraid, Angry, Exhausted, Injured. It won the 2011 ENnie Judges’ Spotlight Award.

Leverage RPG (2010), co-designed with Rob Donoghue (Fate co-creator) and Clark Valentine, replaced skills with five Roles: Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Mastermind, Thief. Its signature innovation was flashback mechanics — spending Plot Points to retroactively reveal that the current setback was part of the plan all along, mechanically replicating the TV show’s con-reveal structure. Fred Hicks (Evil Hat co-founder) did graphic design. The team was a deliberate cross-pollination of mainstream MWP talent and indie Evil Hat sensibilities.

The design teams tell the story. Smallville featured indie designers in the main credits. Leverage was an explicit mainstream-indie collaboration. Banks was building a bridge, and he was doing it in public.

The Doom Pool and the Comic Book Engine

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (2012) was Banks’ solo lead design credit, and it unified everything he’d learned into the most acclaimed iteration of Cortex Plus.

The game modeled the narrative structure of comic books, not superhero physics. Characters were defined through Datafiles rather than character sheets: Affiliations (Solo/Buddy/Team, rated differently per hero — Wolverine excels Solo, Captain America with a Team), Distinctions (personality traits usable as d8 for benefit or d4 to gain a Plot Point, creating constant temptation to self-complicate), Power Sets with SFX and Limits, Specialties, and Milestones (character-specific story beats that award XP — Wolverine earns XP for choosing violence first). No traditional character creation system. Twenty-three pre-built hero datafiles. Players swapped heroes between scenes.

The Doom Pool was Banks’ signature invention.

Starting at 2d6, it sat on the table where everyone could see it. Every time a player rolled a 1, the GM could add a die or step up an existing one. The pool grew. Bad luck and risky play directly fueled the opposition. The GM rolled the Doom Pool to oppose player actions, activated villain abilities with it, created complications from it. It was simultaneously an opposition mechanic, a resource economy, and a visible tension meter — a ticking bomb that everyone could see counting down.

The elegance was structural. In traditional games, difficulty is hidden inside the GM’s head. The Doom Pool externalized it. Every player decision that generated a 1 made the world more dangerous, creating a self-escalating feedback loop that built toward climactic confrontations without the GM needing to artificially manufacture drama.

The Effect Die added another layer of strategic depth. When rolling, players chose two dice to sum for their Total (determining success) and one remaining die as the Effect Die (determining magnitude). The size of the Effect Die — d12 versus d6 — set the impact, regardless of the number rolled on that die. This forced a constant heroic gamble: do you take two high numbers to ensure you succeed, or sacrifice your Total to keep a d12 as your Effect Die for a massive impact?

MHR won the 2012 ENnie Gold for Best Rules, Silver for Best Game, Silver for Product of the Year, the 2013 Origins Award for Best RPG, and the 2013 Origins Award for Best RPG Supplement for the Civil War Event Book.

Then the license ended on April 24, 2013. Total published products: the Basic Game, Civil War, and Annihilation (PDF only). A planned Age of Apocalypse event was never released.

The game that proved narrative mechanics could thrive inside mainstream licensed products existed for thirteen months. But the people who played it never forgot what it felt like.

Cortex Prime: The LEGO Set of RPG Design

After MWP, Banks joined Atlas Games in February 2013 as brand manager and RPG Director, overseeing production on Feng Shui 2, Unknown Armies 3rd Edition, Over the Edge 3rd Edition, and Magical Kitties Save the Day. The Atlas tenure was more producer than designer — he managed complex Kickstarter campaigns and revitalized dormant brands. The Over the Edge work carried personal resonance: the game’s 1st edition had cracked open his design imagination in 1993 New Zealand.

In November 2016, Banks founded Magic Vacuum Design Studio and licensed the Cortex rights from MWP. The Cortex Prime Kickstarter launched in April 2017, raising $84,430 from 2,756 backers against a $30,000 goal. Fulfillment took until 2020 — a 3.5-year delay that cost momentum — but the resulting Cortex Prime Game Handbook won the 2021 ENnie Silver for Best Rules and received nominations for Best Game, Best Art, Best Layout, and Product of the Year.

Cortex Prime’s innovation was systematic modularity. Rather than three fixed flavors, it offered a single engine with interchangeable mods across categories: trait set mods (Attributes, Skills, Roles, Values, Relationships, Affiliations, Distinctions, Power Sets, Specialties), resolution mods (Doom Pool, Crisis Pools, Challenge Pools), consequence mods (Stress/Trauma tracks, Complications, Life Points), and advancement mods (Growth milestones, Pathways). A designer selects two or three primary trait sets, layers additional mods, and produces a genre-tuned game.

Want a superhero game? Affiliations + Distinctions + Power Sets + Doom Pool + Stress. A teen drama? Values + Relationships + Distinctions + emotional stress tracks. A heist game? Attributes + Roles + flashback mechanics. The system functioned as a LEGO set for RPG design — not a universal game, but a universal toolkit for building games.

Under Fandom Tabletop (which acquired Cortex in September 2019), Banks led Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince RPG (March 2022), using Cortex Prime with Values, Attributes, and Distinctions. It won a 2021 ENnie Silver for Best Family Game. Legends of Grayskull: Masters of the Universe RPG was announced in 2021 but canceled after Dire Wolf Digital acquired Cortex from Fandom in August 2022. Banks continues as Creative Director at Dire Wolf from Auckland, having moved his family back to New Zealand in late 2018.

The Corporate Instability Problem

The story of Cortex is also the story of a system that never found stable ground beneath it.

Margaret Weis Productions. Magic Vacuum. Fandom Tabletop. Dire Wolf Digital. Four corporate owners in a decade. Each transition cost momentum, disrupted community building, and scattered institutional knowledge. The Cortex Prime Kickstarter’s physical Spotlight volumes for approximately 351 remaining backers were never fulfilled, with Dire Wolf citing costs. The promised Creator Studio on DriveThruRPG was never built as described. The community license — revised March 2022 — allows fan publishing on Itch.io and Patreon but does not constitute a truly open SRD.

This matters because ecosystem is influence. Fate Core was released under Creative Commons, and the Fate ecosystem exploded. Powered by the Apocalypse is effectively open, and PbtA games number in the hundreds. Forged in the Dark followed the same model. Cortex Prime — arguably a superior mechanical toolkit to any of them in terms of systematic documentation — operates under a restrictive license that has prevented the community ecosystem that powers its competitors.

Banks builds extraordinary engines. The roads they drive on keep washing out.

The Honest Assessment

Cam Banks did not create Cortex. Jamie Chambers designed the original system for Serenity. Banks rebuilt it — brilliantly, radically — but the chassis was someone else’s. The distinction matters under a methodology that values priority.

Many of his innovations have clear precedents in indie RPG theory. Values-based play existed in Burning Wheel’s Beliefs. Relationship maps were a Forge-era staple. Narrative authority sharing was central to Apocalypse World. Meta-currency economies powered Fate. Banks’ genius was synthesis and translation — taking these scattered innovations and integrating them into polished, accessible, award-winning products that reached audiences who would never have encountered the originals. That’s a genuine and rare skill. It’s not the same as inventing the concepts.

His major works are entangled with collaborators. Josh Roby co-designed Smallville. Rob Donoghue co-designed Leverage. The Sentinel Comics RPG was co-designed with Dave Chalker and Philippe-Antoine Ménard. Only Marvel Heroic carries Banks’ solo lead design credit, and it’s the work that most clearly demonstrates his singular voice.

Nearly all his significant games were built for licensed properties — Smallville, Leverage, Marvel, The Dragon Prince — that became unavailable when licenses expired or corporate ownership changed. This is the paradox of licensed-property design: the license gets you the audience, and then the license takes the game away.

The draft article proposed a total of 21 points with adjustments of +1 attributed to “Cross-Domain Mastery.” The methodology corrects the adjustments. Cross-Domain Mastery is not a trigger in the scoring system. The actual binary triggers — longevity, full-time career, and awards — all clearly activate, producing +3 instead of +1. The pillar scores hold. The corrected total is 23.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Cam Banks translates.

Not between languages — between design philosophies. The indie RPG movement produced brilliant, uncompromising games that most traditional gamers never encountered. Banks took the ideas — roll what matters, externalize tension, build characters through relationships, let the fiction drive the mechanics — and embedded them inside products that traditional gamers would actually buy. He didn’t water them down. He made them legible.

Smallville was a narrative RPG disguised as a TV tie-in. Marvel Heroic was an indie story game disguised as a superhero product. Cortex Prime is a Forge-era design philosophy disguised as a technical manual.

The through-line isn’t invention. It’s translation — the precise, painstaking work of making one world’s ideas comprehensible to another world’s audience. Banks speaks fluent mainstream and fluent indie, and his career has been spent building a bridge between them.

The bridge keeps getting its foundations washed out by corporate instability and license expiration. Banks keeps rebuilding it.

What Remains

The Doom Pool — the most elegant escalating-tension mechanic in RPG design, visible and growing on the table, turning player misfortune into mounting dramatic pressure.

The principle that what you roll should be what the story cares about — Values and Relationships instead of Strength and Dexterity, a design insight that entered the broader conversation and never left.

Cortex Prime — the most sophisticated modular RPG toolkit ever published, a LEGO set for building genre-tuned games, still waiting for the open ecosystem it deserves.

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying — thirteen months of a game that changed how thousands of people thought about what RPGs could do. Dead too soon. Still cited. Still missed.

Three Origins Awards. An ENnie Gold. Twenty years of building bridges between design worlds that barely spoke to each other.

Total: 23 points. Year: 2007.

23 points. 2007. The narrative engineer. Still engineering. Still translating. Still rebuilding foundations.

From Auckland to Krynn to the table where the Doom Pool keeps growing.