A Life Well-Lived: Backgrounds in CORE20

Character backgrounds have been around in d20 fantasy games since before the phrase “d20 fantasy games” existed — but not always under that name. The concept of a background was known as “player character non-professional skills” way back in AD&D. These were a list of semi-medieval vocations your character might have picked up before their adventuring career took off, and which encouraged a DM to “adjudicate situations in which these skills are used or useful.”

D&D 3rd edition talked about background in a narrative sense, class by class, but focused on its newly minted skills system to cover any and all ideas of what your character might have been good at before taking up the call to adventure. For 5e D&D, backgrounds became a distinct mechanic focusing primarily on narrative, splitting the focus between a character’s former vocation (with backgrounds such as acolyte, sage, and sailor) and life experience (charlatan, hermit, and outlander, among others). 

As a system built around the idea of rules modularity and flexibility, CORE20 takes a slightly different approach. Backgrounds in CORE20 are all about life experience, and are intentionally broad in flavor and limited in scope so as to make them easy to fit to and personalize for any character concept.

Where Do You Come From?

As the CORE20 Player’s Guide puts it:

Your character’s background helps to define their life up to the point when they took up the path of adventure. Just as all characters have unique perspectives and traits defined by their lineage, all characters have a particular upbringing that shaped them in important ways. But where your character’s lineage helps to define their broader relationship to the world and its history, your background has a more direct connection to childhood, home, and family — whether your character carries the memories of those things dearly, or has walked away from the past with no desire to turn back.

Background Versus Vocation

The idea of past professions and vocations that can tie into a character’s adventuring lifestyle are also front-and-center in CORE20 — but are handled through the use of customized personal skill groups. Just as your character might invest feat slots in the Athletics, Magic, or Thievery skill groups to represent focus and training useful for an adventuring lifestyle, you can also take feat slots in a personal skill group, covering anything from Scout to Goat Rancher to Standup Comedian (all personal skill groups that have made an appearance in my CORE20 campaigns).

As part of their background, all CORE20 characters gain a +3 bonus that can be spread across one or more personal skill groups of a player’s choice, so that you don’t need to worry about downplaying skill groups useful for adventuring just for the sake of a more flavorful personal skill group. But you can likewise use feat slots earned during the campaign to improve your character’s prowess with personal skill groups, building a character whose past vocations continue to serve them.

A Range of Backgrounds

From the Player’s Guide again:

Nine different backgrounds cover the broad strokes of the experiences that have shaped your character — criminal, exile, gentry, magical, military, outlander, rural, wanderer, and urban. Your character’s background might be a strong match to their chosen path in life, with the benefits of a chosen background providing a foundation of knowledge and training. For example, many martial-focused characters choose the military background, and the magical background is a good fit for any spellcaster. 

Alternatively, part of the richness of your character’s story might come from the juxtaposition between the life they once lived and the life they choose now. A character with the outlander or rural background brings a unique perspective to a city campaign, just as a character who grew up in the city or among the gentry does in a dungeon. And backgrounds such as exile and wanderer can provide any character with an intrinsic sense of seeking something, which the campaign can ultimately provide.

Criminal

Take this background for any character with a shady past — or who plans to have a shady future.

Exile

This background suits any character who has turned away from their homeland or past, whether by choice or by necessity.

Gentry

This background is appropriate for any character who grew up in relative luxury, whether they’ve turned their back on that lifestyle or continue to flaunt it.

Magical

This background suits any character with a backstory tied to spellcasting, magical crafting, or magic-related lore.

Military

Take this background for any character who has spent time in proximity to organized battle.

Outlander

This background fits any character with an affinity for the wilderness.

Rural

Take this background for any character at home in villages and remote settlements.

Urban

Take this background for any character at home in the city.

Wanderer

This background reflects a life spent on the move, whether as a part of nomadic life or from a simple case of wanderlust.

The Way of the Wanderer

The wanderer background covers a lot of territory (pun intended) as far as the many types of adventuring characters who might make use of it — a former mercenary sellsword, a mage who spent years investigating sites of magical power, a con artist keeping one step ahead of the law, and more.

Each background comes with a range of unique benefits, and you can choose whichever one of those benefits feels like the best fit for your character. Working with the GM, you can also develop an alternative benefit that fits your character concept, and whose value is in line with the benefits presented here.

Universal Benefits

In addition to the unique benefits broken out for each background, taking a background provides a number of universal benefits at character creation.

Ability Score Increase

The life your character has lived (especially the early formative years) helps to shape their physical and mental prowess. When you choose your background, you can raise one of your ability scores by 2, or raise two of your ability scores by 1 each. Each background comes with suggestions for which ability scores to raise, but you can choose whatever ability scores reflect your character’s chosen path and training.

Skill Affinity

A character’s background provides an aptitude for particular skills. At character creation, a character gains a +3 bonus that can be applied to a number of favored skill groups for that background. A character can take a +3 bonus to one skill group, take a +2 bonus to one skill group and a +1 to a second group, or take a +1 bonus to three skill groups, as the player decides.

All backgrounds also grant a character a +3 bonus to checks with any personal skill groups. These personal skill groups reflect the vocations, hobbies, and interests that are a part of every character’s life, and will often connect to the character’s backstory or environment.

Default Languages

By default, all characters can read, write, and speak or sign a regional language (typically tied to the area in which they have lived the longest or the most recently). Characters can also learn the spoken Imperial language or Imperial Sign — the twinned trade languages that became the universal lexicon of the Empire, and which are still used in most areas of the world. Characters of all lineages except human also know a spoken or signed lineage language tied to their lineage’s history.

As part of their background, your character gains three bonus feat slots to take the Learn Language feat three times — for a regional language, Imperial, and a lineage language.

Art by Vagelio Kaliva.

More Playtest Monsters

As of right now, the v1.1 update to the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package is live for your gaming pleasure! As always, you can find the new document and all the other v1.1 playtest docs in the CORE Playtest Files folder on Google Drive: 

http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest

(If the short URL doesn’t work for you, you can click or copy the full link here.)

The initial v1.0 Playtest Package featured a solid array of over 180 creature stat blocks from d20 fantasy, covering potential foes, foils, enemies, and allies for your CORE20 games. The v1.1 package ups the monstrous ante to over 240 stat blocks with the addition of 54 new creatures, including:

• Bulette
• Grick
• Hippogriff
• Ilvalaak — a new name for the naga
• Kraal — inspired by the grell
• Krenshar
• Werebear
• Mesmeroth — a renamed and reworked gibbering mouther
• Oni
• Peryton
• Praetyrian and venenatus — two new drakes
• Remorhaz
• Revenant
• Satyr
• The skulker — a revisiting and combining of the classic AD&D monsters the trapper and the lurker below
• Specter
• Transfixer — the piercer, but really cool
• Vampire spawn
• Vargouille
• Vermacarn — a reworked carrion crawler
• Vocoeur — CORE20’s version of the displacer beast
• Wurfrur — the renamed blink dog
• Xorn
• Lineage traits for the gnoll and the mergyyr (a new name for the merfolk), allowing the easy creation of a broad range of NPCs

And many more! 

In addition to new threats and allies, the Playtest Creature Package has seen all manner of updates, tweaks, corrections, and rules and language fixes. Huge thanks as always to all the folks in the playtest who have pointed out typos and asked the questions that have let us make the game even better. (The Playtest v1.1 Changelog doc in the playtest folder notes changes to existing stat blocks and lists the playtest package’s new creatures.)

Once again, the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package is available in two variations. The regular version features the stat block color-coding throughout all sections of the stat block, while the “(Low Color)” version features the color coding only on stat block section heads. (A post back toward the beginning of the public playtest talks about the evolution and design of the stat block format, including using color to make it easier to navigate stat blocks during play.)

I’ve been playtesting and fine-tuning all these new creatures in my own campaigns for a while now, and I’m happy to finally turn them loose. Good gaming!

Art by Xavier Beaudlet

Creature Preview: Mesmeroth

A gibbering mouther by any other name would… well, still be pretty horrible. But the renaming of this classic weird fantasy aberration was a relatively late addition to CORE20, in the course of my learning that ableist language is something that too easily hides within familiar usage.

The gibbering mouther was so-named for the endless maws that would appear across their amoeboid form, and for the confusion-inducing gibbering of the voices that would issue forth from those many mouths. Terrifying heroes since the early days of AD&D, the mouther had always seemed a classic aberrant creature to me, possessed of an alien intelligence whose very language would tear at the minds of those who heard it.

Except then during a round of sensitivity consulting on the last CORE20 alpha playtest, I was asked, “You do know that ‘gibber’ and ‘gibbering’ likely originated as a description of the speech of the mentally ill, right?” And I said, “Uh… no” — even as I realized I probably should have. I definitely wish it was something I’d known when I was the editor of the 5e D&D Monster Manual in 2014, so that there might have been a conversation on the topic at the time. Not that it likely would have made any difference, as D&D is a large ship that changes course very slowly when it comes to dealing with making little fixes. Thankfully, though, CORE20 is a bit more nimble in its desire to improve the language and context of the game.

During the final alpha playtest of CORE20, the gibbering mouther became the mesmeric mouther for a time. It’s now become the more subtly named mesmeroth in the upcoming public playtest CORE20 Playtest Creature Package v1.1. The mesmeroth for our game is built on the chassis of the SRD mouther, but swaps out the traditional confusion effect of their many voices for a luring drone that draws adventurers ever-closer to their doom.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Gnoll

The gnoll has always been one of my favorite humanoids, back from the days when “humanoid” was a dirty word in D&D, used exclusively to describe the evil, monstrous folk designed to antagonize the humans and demi-humans (elves, dwarves, and the like) who were the heroes of the game. D&D has always had a consistently one-note version of who gnolls are and how they live, building on the evil pack hunters of AD&D and 3e, to 5e’s fiend-spawned humanoids/actual fiends. But in keeping with the central tenet of CORE20, it felt like gnolls in our game would be most interesting if they can be anything they — and you — want.

It’s easy to focus on the gnoll as a feral hunter, and to create a stat block that builds them out around that single theme. But as with the worldborn lineages in CORE20 (the game’s name for D&D’s humanoids), the cultures of the more unusual — and often magically evolved — wondrous worldborn are meant to cover the broadest possible range of characters and types. As such, the upcoming update to the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package sets up the gnoll as a lineage trait stat block, giving them the same treatment as humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, and the rest of the worldborn lines. 

As with worldborn NPCs, the gnoll’s lineage traits can be added to one of the game’s twelve nonplayer character stat blocks, creating gnoll-themed scouts, warriors, and wildlings who’ll feel at home alongside any previous versions of the gnoll. But you can also use the flavor and culture of the gnoll to lend a distinct shape to spellcasters, protectors, scoundrels, and more. 

Additionally, it’s easy to see how the stat block lineage traits for the twelve worldborn lineages in the Playtest Creature Package have been adapted straight from the player character traits in chapter 4 of the CORE20 Player’s Guide. So it’s an easy guess that these gnoll lineage traits have been created with an eye to a future project — setting up character traits that will allow players to create wondrous worldborn characters in addition to the baseline worldborn options. More info on that as it comes together.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Bulette

The bulette is a delightful monster whose name I definitely pronounce as “bull-EHT,” not “boo-LAY” as some do. (I have been known to joke that the creature is only pronounced “boolay” if it comes from the Boolay region of Greyhawk. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling landshark.)

The bulette for CORE20 maintains much of the feel of the D&D original. As a tier 3 creature, it makes an excellent solo threat against a tier 1 or tier 2 party, built for power and jumping, and with a prodigious ability to flatten foes. In a recent encounter, I was able to happily confirm that this design had its intended effect when, after watching a bulette break the ground with a surging leap, then drop onto a pack of miniature mammoths they were hunting, the player characters elected to all flee the scene at high speed.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Cheetah and Hippopotamus

A half-dozen or so new creatures will be making their way into the already-well-populated “Animals” section of the CORE20 Creature Playtest Package, including the cheetah and the hippopotamus.

The cheetah was a creature I’ve wanted to set up for CORE20 for a while now, just because translating the speed of their 70-mile-per-hour sprint into game terms just gets weird. I also liked the idea that cheetahs in our world are known for almost never attacking humans, which makes them a bit novel for carnivores.

The hippopotamus was another animal I wanted to have a CORE20 version of, because it’s well known that the hippo is one of the most dangerous large animals in our world in terms of the number of people they kill annually. And because that’s a well-known fact, many players are aware of it, which means it’s great fun to see their reactions when an adventuring party runs into a hippo in their own world.

(Click on the stat block headers below to download the full stat blocks in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Warrener and Xorn

Two of the coolest monsters adventurers are likely to meet underground are the warrener — built from D&D’s umber hulk — and the xorn. Both are weird looking, not necessarily a threat unless you end up annoying them (intentionally or otherwise), and far more sapient than their appearance suggests.

The umber hulk was considered product identity in the original days of the Open Game license (as with the displacer beast). But with the movement of the Dungeons & Dragons SRD into Creative Commons, there are no prohibitions on a game built around the chassis of D&D (as CORE20 proudly is) from getting their umber hulk on. That said, that name always seemed a little meh to me, so “warrener” takes its place — from the way the relentless digging of these creatures creates warrens that wary underground adventurers learn to watch for and avoid.

One big update made to the warrener involves replacing the umber hulk’s confusion gaze with a slowing gaze. The confusion effect of the umber hulk always seemed a bit strange as an evolutionary defensive or offensive strategy, given that a creature under its effect is just as likely to attack the umber hulk as to flee them or stand fast. By slowing other creatures, the warrener is in a better position to catch up to prey, or to evade threats or creatures they just want to ignore.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat blocks in PDF.)