Taking Things to the Next Tier

After last’s week’s release of the player-facing components of the CORE20 ruleset, this week sees the rest of the full CORE20 playtest go live!

http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest

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

On the other side of that link, you’ll find an extradimensional space on Google Drive that holds:

• The full CORE20 Player’s Guide, featuring all the rules of the game for players and GMs.
• The full CORE20 Magic Grimoire, collecting the many spells and magic items of the game.
• The CORE20 Creature Playtest Package, featuring more than 180 foes, allies, and folk of the world from the eventual CORE20 Creature Compendium. The creature package comes in a regular and low-color version, and the introduction section explains why.
• The CORE20 Playtest GM Guidelines, providing a brief overview of what a GM needs to run the game, and explaining why those guidelines aren’t the full CORE20 Campaign Guide.
• A form-fillable character sheet.
• A free starter adventure.
• An About the Game doc talking about how we got here.

Carried in the wake of this tsunami of material, the CORE20 playtest is officially underway! What you’ll find in the playtest folder is everything you need to play CORE20… well, forever, really. Even without the full Creature Compendium and the Campaign Guide that’ll eventually provide guidance and advice to GMs about encounter building, campaign design, and more, the Player’s Guide and the Magic Grimoire contain all of the game. For free. Everything. Honestly, a bit more than everything (see the note in the About the Game doc for more about that).

As I mentioned in the previous CORE20 update, I’ve been working full time in RPGs for twenty years now. I’ve worked on a lot of amazing stuff over that time, alongside a lot of amazing people. But of all the things I’ve worked on, CORE20 means to the most to me. Thank you for letting me share it with you.

(Art by Xavier Beaudlet)

Game On

Today’s preview of the CORE20 RPG is a big one! Because it’s… well, most of the CORE20 RPG!

The full versions of the CORE20 Player’s Guide and the CORE20 Magic Grimoire are available for download right now:

http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest

The “About the Game” PDF in the playtest files folder sets up what’s in those two books, and features the intro you’re reading right now. But it also has additional info about the game and some of the goals of the playtest process. The playtest package of wondrous foes and foils, allies and NPCs from the CORE20 Creature Compendium will be following next week, along with a quick GM’s overview of the game. And there will be some free starter adventures dropping soon after that.

I’ll be talking more on this very blog in coming weeks about the development of the game, what inspired it, how it’s changed (drastically in some cases) over ten years of play, and so forth. But one thing I can address here and now is the question of why I’ve done all this. And the answer to that, quite simply, is that CORE20 is a game I’ve wanted to play for most of my life, and it’s a whole hell of a lot of fun.

CORE20 is built around the framework of d20 fantasy, so it’ll feel familiar to anyone who’s ever played d20-era D&D, from 3rd Edition through 5th Edition. But it’s different. CORE20’s narrative-focused mechanics turning d20 rolls from a state of static pass/fail ennui into something more dynamic are meant to shoot shared-story fuel straight into the heart of the game. A foundation of freeform character building lets you do things as a player that class-based games sometimes struggle with. It lets you do things that class-based games simply can’t do. It lends itself to a wide range of play styles, including the option of running low-combat campaigns where you aren’t forced to just ignore your character’s default battle prowess. Rather, you get to swap the battle prowess you don’t need for things that are more important to who your character is and what you want them to do. 

I’ve been working on Dungeons & Dragons (alongside a few other RPGs) for twenty years now. Everything I’ve ever worked on has taught me something about the game that I didn’t know before. Every person I’ve been fortunate enough to work with has shown me new things about how this amazing hobby and its amazing design space have evolved. I know that fantasy RPGs are different for everyone. I don’t presume to know how you play, or the things that make the game the most fun for you. 

But after forty years of playing and after twenty years of working on the game, every single thing that’s ever made the game the most fun for me is in CORE20 somewhere. And I’m very, very proud and happy to share it with you.

(Art by Xavier Beaudlet)

Opus Arcana

While partaking of the excellent Eldritch Lorecast last week, I listened to the team talk with increasing degrees of lament about the chronic lack of a solid magic item crafting system in D&D. Different approaches from different games and game systems were discussed at some length, along with the different goals that characters and players often have for magic item crafting. (For those interested, that discussion is here.)

In the end, the consensus was that there are simply too many different approaches the game can take to magic item crafting, and all those approaches typically fall flat at some point. It was then left to the uber-talented James Haeck (who I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked alongside on numerous projects) to comment that there’s likely no way to ever make everyone happy with a magic item crafting system unless there’s a genius game designer out there who can thread that needle.

And, well, here I am. 😀

Chapter 8 (Player's Guide) and Chapter 2 (Magic Grimoire) Excerpts — Magic Item Crafting Preview

CORE20 has a fairly straightforward and extremely usable approach to magic item crafting, because that approach is built on a number of straightforward and usable foundational steps. At the base of the process is the idea that in the game, characters have ways to earn income during downtime that are tied to their skills. The wages that a character can earn week to week during downtime are synced up with the wages earned by NPC hirelings in the game, with most characters’ advanced state of skill use letting them easily pull down expert hireling wages whenever they’re not actively adventuring.

The rules for crafting mundane items are in turn tied to the rules for earning income. The game’s crafting rules are built around the idea that instead of earning a certain number of gp working for someone else, a character can instead create weapons, art objects, armor, alchemical substances, and more at half cost. Effectively, a character crafting an item pays half the item’s typical market cost for raw materials and overhead, then provides their own labor for free.

Building on the rules for mundane item crafting, magic item crafting functions in exactly the same way — albeit at a higher level of artisanship and specialized knowledge. Creating magic items involves the labor of master crafters, magic users, and the item crafter, but when all those artisans come together, they do so using the same rules for crafting mundane items. (The thing that allows crafting magic items to use the same rules of in-game economy as crafting mundane items is the way that magic items fit properly into the overall economy of the CORE20 game world, as talked about in a previous update.)

At its heart, the CORE20 system is a game focused on letting characters and players do whatever they want to do as heroes in a high-magic world.  Making it easy for characters to craft magic items as part of downtime, making use of their own skills and of the connections with other characters and NPCs derived from their adventures, is just another part of that.

(Art by Dean Spencer)

Call to Action

The action economy of the CORE20 RPG has been designed to give characters and their foes a maximum amount of flexibility in determining what they do in any given round while the game is in initiative, and to make sure that players are able to make meaningful choices regarding the actions they can take each round. As with most parts of CORE20, if you’re familiar with any d20-based fantasy game, you already understand the basic setup of how things play out round by round while the game is in initiative. If you’re primarily familiar with 5e D&D, you’ll note some differences, though — which will actually make CORE20 that much more familiar to players of 3rd edition and 4th edition D&D.

Chapter 5 Excerpt (Player's Guide) — Action Economy Preview

As detailed in the preview, everything your character might do in the game can be accomplished as a standard action, a minor action, a move action, a free action, or a reaction. There are a number of regular activities in the game that are locked into specific action types. For example, making weapon attacks or casting a spell is always a standard action by default. Drinking a potion is always a minor action, as is first pulling that potion out of an accessible pocket, pouch, or bandolier. Moving your speed, or shifting half your speed to avoid opportunity attacks, is always a move action. But for the many, many other activities your character can attempt, the setup of standard action, minor action, and move action is meant to allow GMs and players to quickly decide on what type of action fits the activity best. 

Making an Acrobatics check to slide down a bannister in the governor’s mansion? Because it involves movement, that’s a move action. Smashing a window open to jump through it while escaping a zombie horde? If the window is solid enough that smashing it takes most of your focus and attention, it’s a standard action. But if you can smash through it without needing to fully focus, a minor action is more appropriate — leaving you free to get off one last attack or spell before you flee.

The setup of actions in CORE20 is also designed to maximize your options for what your character can do while the game is in initiative. In most rounds, a character will use their standard action to make a weapon attack or cast a spell; use their minor action to make a quick skill check, grab up useful equipment, get the drop on their foes, or hold their turn; and use their move action to get into or out of position. But if you’ve got a reason to want to forgo that standard-action spell or attack in order to move twice on your turn, you can do so. If you want to give up your standard action to use a minor action instead, you can do that too. By forgoing your standard action and your move action, you can even take three minor actions on your turn if you want to — and there are many times in the game where doing so makes sense.

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The initial part of this preview excerpt also talks about the way the game handles adjustments to your die rolls, which can take the form of bonuses, boons or banes, and advantage or disadvantage. Bonuses and advantage are familiar to anyone who’s played 5e D&D, while boons and banes are originally from the Shadow of the Demon Lord RPG by the amazing Robert J. Schwalb, and have been ported into CORE20 with Rob’s generous permission.

The final part of the preview then talks about action points — a mechanic that gives player characters an option to shift the balance of probability and fate in their direction just a little bit. Every character has one action point by default, granting the ability to take an extra move action or minor action, to convert a critical hit against them into a regular hit, to automatically stabilize while dying, and much more. But just as with everything else in CORE20, action points are gained by taking a feat — Heroic Action — letting you build a character whose adventuring exploits show off a legendary touch of good fortune.

(Art by Jackie Musto — http://www.jackiemustoart.com)

The Means of Magic

One of the issues that’s dogged Dungeons & Dragons since the beginning is the eternal dichotomy between magic items being really freaking cool, and magic items getting kind of redundant because your characters just keep on collecting them forever. The fiction that fantasy gaming is inspired by has a radically different setup, creating scenarios where the finding of a magic blade or wand is a capstone moment in the single adventure that defines a protagonist’s life. But the protagonists of our games don’t stop at one adventure, and neither does the hunger for magic loot.

Chapter 2 Excerpt (Magic Grimoire) — Magic Items Preview

As long as magic items last eternally, every new magic item found in the game undercuts the awesomeness of all the old magic items sooner or later. Magic items feel important at the big moments in a character’s life — a sword claimed from the destruction of a battlefield, a ring seized from a fallen foe, a staff hidden away in a tomb for a dozen generations, and on and on. But as characters rack up more big moments and the magic that comes with them, older items that once felt memorable are inevitably set aside, becoming little more than footnotes in a life story of adventuring.

Games that make attempts to create a magic item economy — including third and fourth edition D&D — make this process a little easier to deal with by creating a sense that magic items are meant to be sold off at some point. But the scale of that economy seldom makes complete sense, built as it is around the paradigms of 1) adventurers are rare sorts of people, 2) magic items are so obscenely expensive that only adventurers can afford them, and 3) if the market is so small, why are so many magic items being made that old dungeons are all somehow full of them?

There are lots of different ways to try to shape a better approach for magic items from a world-building perspective. Chief among those are the easy options of carefully limiting magic items and absolutely not worrying about where they come from. (To cover all its bases, D&D 5e wholeheartedly embraces both approaches.) 

CORE20 takes a different approach, though, by working with the idea that magic is ubiquitous in the world, known to and made use of by most people. This ubiquity is driven by the idea that magic items are relatively inexpensive and freely traded, making up an important part of the world’s economy rather than just being the overpriced toys of adventurers and villains. And what makes both those ideas work is that magic items in CORE20 don’t last forever.

The workaday magic items known to every edition of D&D and pretty much all other fantasy roleplaying games, from weapons to armor, wands and scrolls, magic rods and idiosyncratic one-off items, are imbued with magic that’s ephemeral. It fades over time, with the magic of potions and scrolls draining away within weeks or months if they aren’t used, to weapons and armor fading more slowly but never lasting the length of even a moderately successful adventuring career.

Because magic items don’t last forever, their value within an overall economy makes them pricey but not preposterous. An ephemeral magic potion of cure light wounds kept on hand by a village healer for emergencies costs 5 gp — a week’s wages for an average laborer in CORE20. The magic of an ephemeral longsword +1 found as treasure has a nominal value of 200 gp, consistent with the value of a great many nonmagical luxury goods, but not in the same ballpark as multiple years’ laborer’s wages or the cost of a modest house. (In CORE20, an open magic-item economy and a more restrained baseline for the cost of magic means that characters earn a bit less for adventuring than they do in traditional D&D, whose biggest problem is giving characters things to spend their money on. But that’s a topic for another update.)

Ephemeral magic gives characters the opportunity to naturally set magic items aside when those items fade. But it also gives them the opportunity to decide that a favored weapon or magical implement is worth keeping around, because the same economy that fuels the creation and trade of ephemeral magic items also allows those items to be remagicked — and at a lesser cost than crafting or commissioning an item as brand new. In this way, magic items become another part of what builds the story of a character’s adventuring life.

(Art by Chris Yarbrough)

The Way of the World

A majority of fantasy RPGs, starting with original Dungeons & Dragons, present themselves as being setting agnostic, not tied to any particular campaign world. Sometimes a setting-neutral game will end up with a bunch of possible official settings it can be attached to (as with contemporary D&D). Sometimes, it’s explicitly assumed that GMs and players will build their own worlds for a game (as with original D&D).

Even without a default setting, though, in the way fantasy RPGs set out rules for characters, magic, technology, conflict, and more, those rules inevitably end up saying a whole lot about a game’s expectations for its world.

Chapter 7 Excerpt — The World of Isheridar

Sometimes, the rules of a game make small statements. Like how prior to fifth edition D&D, every character knew the price of a horse but you couldn’t buy a camel off the shelf. Or how even in 5e, cinnamon, pepper, cloves, and saffron are named as valuable commodities, establishing that our games are expected to be set in lands far from places where such spices are grown, whether we want them to be or not.

Sometimes, the rules of a game make bigger statements. Like which of its many sapient peoples are automatically evil for some reason, implying that our games are set in a colonialist milieu. Whether we want them to be or not.

In CORE20, there’s a specific relationship between the world of the game and the rules — even though the world of the game probably isn’t going to be the world that other GMs and players make use of. Surveys of GMs routinely show that fully half run their own homebrew worlds, on top of the many GMs who use published campaign settings less as a fixed foundation and more as a starting point for their own world-building. 

At the end of the day, it’s my full expectation — and honestly, my deepest desire — that GMs and players play CORE20 in worlds of their own devising. But at the same time, the setup of a world called Isheridar touches on and inspires the rules of the game and the underlying vision of the CORE20 system at many different points. 

This preview covers a broad swath of information about the world of Isheridar — the world of my own gaming and fiction — which has inspired CORE20 as it’s grown alongside the game. This section of the core rules sets out the foundation of how the game and its rules relates to that world, so that GMs can best relate the game to worlds of their own. It creates a framework for understanding how a broadly civilized cultural mosaic can share a landscape with forgotten dungeons and monster-haunted ruins. It talks about the broad patterns in traditions of faith across uncounted cultures. It talks about the way in which conflict and adventures can derive from any number of sources, with the specific exception of the folk of certain worldly lineages being uniformly cast as feral oppressors. 

This section of the rules digs into the reasons why characters take up the call of adventure and the path of heroism. It explores the understanding of what it means to be a hero in a world on the cusp of history, standing between a past that’s been shattered and a future that no one can see.

Stories and Spells

As talked about in the previous preview, magic is the place where fantasy begins and ends for me, and spell magic is the most prominent manifestation of how magic is meant to feel in the world of a CORE20 game. This is true for all characters, not just adventurers, and regardless of whether those characters channel spell power themselves. A warrior focused on training and battle, an outlander wandering the wilderness, and a scoundrel dedicated to social niceties and shady deals have no reasons to understand even the basics of the workings of magic. But the spells that map out the presence of magic in the world are as real to those characters as the mythic heroes and distant lands they’ve heard of but have never seen. 

Chapter 1 Excerpt (Magic Grimoire) — Spells

Spells aren’t just mechanics and flavor for certain characters, in other words. They’re a part of each character’s broader understanding of the world’s vastness and scope, and the starting point of what makes a milieu magic. Spells take the mystery and threatening potential of the eldritch power that suffuses the world, then turn that into the promise of personal power, of an edge in battle, of health and protection from harm. The potential of magic to change the world is summed up by spells, turning them from just a list of options on a character sheet into touchstones that make the magic of the world feel personal.

Spells help define the different ways in which magic manifests within the world, marking out the dividing lines between the traditions of animyst magic (CORE20’s term for divine magic), arcane magic, and druidas magic. The distinctions between the secret workings of those spellcasting spheres in the world of the game is a topic of such complexity that only a rarefied group of lorists and sages can claim to understand it. But every child who grows up hearing tales of adventure uses stories of spellcasting to define a personal sense of the differences between the enlightening and vengeful life magic of animysts, the unpredictable and unforgiving eldritch power of arcanists, and the gentle and furious primal magic of the druidan.

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CORE20 builds the setup of its magic item system on the foundations of third edition D&D — and then kind of doubles down on 3e, creating a game milieu in which magic is an integral and essential part of life across all the world, not just the world of wealthy adventurers. Among other things, this gives us a system in which potions and spellmarks (a magic item that functions exactly as a potion, but which takes the form of a small breakable object such as a tile) can encompass a wide range of lower-level spells. And that in turn means that spell magic is something of potential in-game interest to every character, not just spellcasters.

When I talk about CORE20 being a magic-rich game, that translates to the spells chapter of the CORE20 Magic Grimoire currently sitting at 609 spells. That’s a bit of a jump from fifth edition’s 361 spells in the Player’s Handbook, and a modest step head even of the 500-odd spells available in all 5e books to date. This preview details the full lists of animys, arcane, and druidas spells, running from levels 0 to 18. (CORE20 spreads out the traditional D&D setup of 1st- to 9th-level spells into 1st- to 18th-level spells, so that spell level and caster level sync up.) It then shows off a relatively small selection of 120 or so of those spells. This includes a number of eldritch classics with mechanics and presentation thoroughly revised for the CORE20 game, some standard spells that have been given a new spin with updated mechanics, and some brand-new stuff to help make the world of your CORE20 game magic.

(Art by Dean Spencer)

Magic Makes the World

From a design and mechanics perspective, magic and spellcasting in D&D have always fascinated me, because they’re the original (and still-dominant) expression of a mini-game existing within the main game. The rules for spellcasting have always effectively been a game of their own. They build on the baseline rules of the game, for sure. But they take those baseline rules to extents and in directions that exist nowhere else in the game. So this week’s preview explores those extents and directions in CORE20, showing how the spellcasting rules let characters bring magic to life.

Chapter 10 Excerpt — Spellcasting

For me, magic has always been the most vital and visceral part of fantasy, both in gaming and fiction. I love the way that magic defines a world and the people in it. I love thinking about the ways in which magic might change worlds that resemble our own, and I love building campaigns in which magic as a tool of good or evil shapes the play of the game. I suspect it thus won’t be a huge surprise for anyone to learn that CORE20 is suffused with magic on every level.

(Important to note: This doesn’t mean you can’t play a low-magic game using CORE20. One of the central foundations of the game is that all its various rules systems are modular and optional, and downplaying the presence of magic and spellcasting in the world is dead easy. That’s a full topic for another post, though.)

CORE20’s baseline approach to spellcasting will be familiar to anyone who’s played any version of D&D (as will the spells in the game, which will be the next preview). But the need to separate the progression of spellcasting power from rigid class mechanics sets up some cool CORE20 differences from the D&D baseline. Some of those differences (spell points as opposed to spell slots, for example) are actually still very much D&D, having been built on ideas from the 3rd edition supplement Unearthed Arcana (one of the few non-core 3.5e books whose material was published under the OGL back in the day).

The spellcasting chapter of the game covers a lot of material, as it pulls together all the information and rules traditionally spread out in a spellcasting chapter and the write-ups for the game’s spellcasting classes. It then expands into new options for magical characters that go beyond the baseline game, and which feed the essential CORE20 paradigm of letting players build characters in ways beyond what traditional class setup allows. But there are still three spheres of magic that define spellcasting — animys, arcane, and druidas, with “animys magic” being CORE20’s term for what D&D calls “divine magic.”

In the world of the game, animys and druidas casters draw on common magical history, marking how animys magic first developed as an offshoot of druidas traditions. Arcane spellcasting shares a common form with the life magic of animys and druidas casters, but is built on distinct traditions and more mysterious sources of magical power. But the similarities in the three spheres of spellcasting overshadow any of their differences, creating a framework that helps define the importance and prevalence of magic in the world.

(It’s worth mentioning that there are actually two other spellcasting traditions in the game. Spelltouched magic allows characters to channel one or more specific spells innately rather than as learned spells. And primordial magic is the older, more chaotic form of arcane channeling that gave rise to the more codified traditions of arcane casting. But we’ll look at those another time.)

(Art by JE Shields)

When the Spirit is Willing

I got an email recently from someone following the playtest previews, who asked if the abundant character-creation options in CORE20 meant that you could play a ghost in the game. I’m sorry to report that the answer is no — for now, at least. (That idea is actually pretty intriguing, because the same process of building a character by selecting feats representing training and insight should work just fine for selecting feats that represent broader supernatural power.)

But I also mentioned in reply that you can have a ghost as your best friend in the game, which I think is pretty awesome. The spirit guide is one of the game’s two featured companion types, alongside the companion creature (a broader version of D&D’s animal companion).

Chapter 7 Excerpt — Spirit Guide

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The idea behind the spirit guide is that a bond created by a character and an NPC, a faithful companion creature, or even a sworn nemesis can be so strong in life that not even death can break it. A spirit guide has a spectral physical appearance, but isn’t incorporeal or undead. Rather, they’re transformed by death into a celestial creature whose physical form can be reshaped at their whim, and whose bond with their chosen character defines their renewed existence.

The spirit guide is relatively new addition to CORE20, and came about when a player in my main and long-running playtest campaign had a story idea for their character — a stoic dwarf engineer, dabbler in personal magic, and bath aficianado named Ruh. During Ruh’s initial appearance in the campaign, he was in self-imposed exile, having left his wife Caralah behind in his homeland some three hundred leagues distant. So during a long downtime break for Ruh that saw him return home, the player crafted some campaign narrative detailing that Ruh and Caralah had made a solo journey to return a powerful relic stolen to its rightful resting place after it was stolen by adventurers years before. Only during that adventure, Caralah was struck down by a magical malady that claimed her life and put her beyond the reach of resurrection. 

The player’s initial idea was to establish that the fell magic that had claimed Caralah had somehow preserved her spirit in a way that would let her speak to and through Ruh, allowing her to appear in the campaign as a noncombatant NPC, but without adding an additional body to the party. The player had in mind that his future feat selections could reflect knowledge that Caralah was passing onto him, letting the love of Ruh’s life effectively ride shotgun on his return to the main party.

I said I loved that idea a lot… but that we could probably go one degree better with the concept.

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A few iterations later, another memorable spirit guide (part of my current campaign, in fact) is Beros, the spirit of a faithful childhood pet. Beros is companion to Thalia, a notary field agent of a healing order dedicated to the old gods of death, whose village was struck by an earthquake years before. The brave Beros worked tirelessly in the aftermath to rescue survivors, but died in a landslide while doing so — then came back as a brave spirit guide and a very, very good boy.

Spirit guides are awesome.

(Art by Indi Martin © 2015)

The Paths of the Past

Backgrounds in CORE20 serve the same purpose as in most other fantasy RPGs — letting you shape a sense of where your character came from before they took up their current path of noble questing, dark-hearted revenge, or dungeon-based get-rich-quick schemes. But CORE20 backgrounds take a slightly different approach than in many other games, covering only the broad archetypes of criminal, exile, gentry, magical, military, outlander, rural, urban, and wanderer. That’s because each background is designed to let you create a baseline canvas showing where your character came from — then allow you to paint the specifics of your backstory with your feat choices and the languages, bonuses, and benefits your background grants you. 

Chapter 4 and 7 Excerpts — Background and Languages

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If you want to play a soldier, a sailor, a reformed cultist, a sage, or what have you, that’s great. But CORE20 has no unwieldy list of dozens of backgrounds for those and other specific paths. Rather, your initial skill bonuses and feats reflect what the experience of any of those specific life paths have taught you, juxtaposed against the foundational story of your earlier life that your background defines. Your choice of background provides you with an ability score increase, bonuses to be applied to personal and background-related skills, and your choice of a range of background benefits. And as with all aspects of the CORE20 system, customization is the norm, letting you work outside your background’s suggestions for ability score increases and skill choices if you like, and letting you come up with your own background benefits if you want to fully personalize your character’s journey.

Another thing your background provides you is your languages, so that section (from the “Life and Adventuring” chapter) is also part of this preview. Just as backgrounds are meant to provide the backdrop on which you define your character’s place in the world, languages help to define the feel of that world. CORE20 takes the usual languages of fantasy gaming as a starting point, then pushes into new territory by establishing that spoken languages and sign languages are equally widespread and universally used across the world. That setup was a notion that stuck in my head from the earliest days of reading about drow sign language in AD&D, thinking about how much sense it would make for sign language use to be widespread in places where people were routinely stalked by monsters — and then realizing that that described pretty much everywhere in a fantasy RPG world.Huge thanks are due to the disability and sign language consultants whose insight and suggestions helped turn my initial scattered fantasy thoughts on sign languages in the game into something more firmly rooted in the real world. Moving CORE20 as far away as possible from the ableist foundations that a lot of contemporary fantasy has always been built on was an important goal for the game, and I’ll have more to share on that topic in upcoming previews.

(Art by Daniel Comerci)

Ask Not What Your Lineage Can Do For You

Lineage — also called “ancestry,” “species,” or (historically and problematically) “race” in different games — is often the starting point of the process of creating your character in a fantasy RPG. Even when lineage isn’t the first choice you make for your character, it’s still likely the first thing that defines your character in their own understanding of themself. Because of this, the setup of what lineage or ancestry means in a game often sets the bar for how the world of the game feels. But unfortunately, most fantasy RPGs have a pretty narrow perspective on what lineage actually represents.

Taking its cue from Tolkien, fantasy gaming has traditionally treated lineages or ancestries as cultures — often defining them as such explicitly. Even more problematically, lineages are typically defined as monolithic cultures, laying down a single set of parameters that define your character’s place in the world, and creating a very real sense that your lineage or ancestry first and foremost defines who you are. Your personality. Your sense of morality and ethics. The way you view people different than you. 

CORE20 takes a slightly different approach, working with the idea that your character’s lineage is an important part of who they are — even as they get to define what that lineage means to them. 

Chapter 3 — Lineages

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In CORE20, twelve worldborn lineages have defined the spread of culture and civilization in the historic age — dwarves and gnomes; elves, halflings, and humans; essaruks and orcs; goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears; and kobolds and lizardfolk. (“Worldborn” in CORE20 is a word that replaces “humanoid” as it’s used in other game systems, so that the majority of the peoples of the world aren’t being constantly and explicitly compared to a minority human baseline.) The realms those twelve peoples inhabit is referenced in the CORE20 rules as Isheridar — a world-continent whose modern age has been the domain of the worldborn lines.

Isheridar isn’t a world that anyone interested in CORE20 is required to play in. (Everybody knows that most GMs like to homebrew their worlds, even when using published campaign settings as a starting point, and the game is meant for anyone to do with what they will.) But the foundations of how the twelve worldborn lineages have shaped history together through times of conflict, peace, renewal, and global empire, creates the in-game framework for how your character’s lineage connects to who they are — and how lineage and culture are very separate things.

Every character in the game world, like every character in our world, has at least one culture. This is the perspectives and foundational beliefs that come from the land in which you were born, the people you lived among when growing up, the realm where you decided to make your life. The places and people that have been part of your life help to shape you, whether they define you or whether you defy them. (Alongside lineage, your character also has a background that relates to your culture but is again separate from it. That’ll be a later preview.)

Lineage, though, is something different than culture. Lineage is the unique history you bring to your place in the world, occupying a space more permanent and profound than your culture. Your lineage means that no matter what culture your character hails from, and no matter how many cultures have been a part of their life, they belong to something else as well. They’re part of something larger than they are — part of a story that goes back to the beginnings of history.

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The mechanics of lineage express this connection to history with the same freeform approach to character building that CORE20 as a whole is built on. You choose a lineage — but then instead of being given a short list of traits that rigidly define your character through that lineage, you get a big list of traits to choose from, letting you define your lineage in terms of your character, rather than the other way around. 

There are no lineages that are better at one thing than another. There are no lineages more disposed to battle and bloodshed than any other. Martial, magical, and heroic traditions are found in the legends and tales of every lineage, and every character gets to draw from that in their own way.

Within those choices, you can often see the familiar archetypes of fantasy gaming in CORE20 — ambitious humans, stoic dwarves, disciplined hobgoblins, and so forth. But the wide range of choices you can make for your lineage traits (including characters being able to choose traits from any lineage if it fits their story, and to freely create characters whose ancestry is built on multiple lineages) lets you build archetypes rather than stereotypes. 

(Art by John Latta)

The Art of Non-War

In most class-based fantasy RPGs, there’s a default expectation that your character should be pretty good at beating other creatures up — even if that’s not part of what you want your character to be good at, and even if you’re playing a campaign where you want avoiding fights to be just as much fun as getting into fights. 

In CORE20, combat maneuvers are an attempt to help deal with both those issues.

Chapter 9 Excerpt — Combat Maneuvers

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One of the best things about D&D is that despite its roots in wargaming, despite the epic fantasy baseline of evil creatures doing evil things and needing to be dealt with by the forces of good and their friends who just want to get rich, the game offers plenty of ways to avoid combat. There’s negotiation and trickery, obfuscation and illusion, and so many other options in between. As a player, I love being able to think of ways to defuse a conflict that doesn’t need to end in bloodshed. As a DM, I love when the players decide to avoid direct conflict with two factions of antagonists by figuring out novel ways to get those factions to fight each other.

That said, though, once D&D combat begins, it tends to follow a specific pattern of the characters trying to beat their foes into physical submission, and vice versa. D&D effectively becomes the war game it started out as once initiative is rolled, with everyone focusing on committing grievous assault with weapons and magic. As a fairly old-school player, I like combat in D&D. I like the underlying model of heroic fantasy that sets up the game as a war story, wherein combat acumen counts as an important part of a characters’ ability to stand up for what they believe in — whether those beliefs involve the need to fight otherworldly evil, or being driven to save the people around you from political corruption, or even just noting how much ancient treasure is just lying around in forgotten monster-haunted vaults so maybe someone should go grab it.

But given how the foundation of any RPG is the idea that characters should be able to do anything they want, I long wondered to myself why D&D combat couldn’t also cover options beyond the characters beating their foes into unconsciousness the same way, each and every fight? And what if there were a way to make not killing monsters just as much fun as killing monsters?

Combat maneuvers in CORE20 are an attempt to make fights in the game more interesting for players looking for options beyond baseline fantasy violence. Maneuvers are very much about combat, as the name suggests. But they provide characters with some different approaches to dealing with enemies, building on the existing foundations of nonweapon combat (primarily in the form of grappling rules) that’s always been part of the game. They’re a set of actions that your character can take with the intent of not hurting your opponent, but rather of messing with that opponent’s ability to hurt you. Whether you’re tripping a foe up, slowing them down, messing with their timing, or making them second-guess their own willingness to fight, combat maneuvers let you try to control the flow of a fight to your own benefit.

Combat maneuvers can be entirely useful as an adjunct to beating down one’s foes if that fits a character’s combat style. Throwing an enemy off balance or sending them prone to set up your next attack — or the follow-up attack of an ally — is a great way to gain an edge in a fight. But maneuvers also allow characters to get out of fights they don’t want to be part of, or to create a nonlethal buffer of a few rounds in which to try to talk a furious foe out of fighting. And within the context of CORE20 allowing you to freely choose everything your character is good at, maneuvers are a perfect way to build a character who doesn’t ever want to go toe-to-toe and blade-to-blade with their enemies — but who needs to be able to handle themself if they’re jumped unexpectedly, and to quickly and safely get out of a fight they didn’t start.

(Art by Jackie Musto — http://www.jackiemustoart.com)

Going Wild

For some reason, lots of folks seem to be talking about the druid’s Wild Shape ability right now. So I thought I’d talk a bit about how druid magic and wild shape connect in #CORE20RPG.

(TL/DR: Wild shape forms start with smaller creatures useful for recon and scouting, and you choose whether and how to power up to larger animals, wondrous beasts (*cough* owlbears *cough*), plant creatures, and even dragons.)

Chapter 10 Excerpt — Wild Shape

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Like everything else in the CORE20 system, channeling druidas magic (the moniker the game uses for the magic of nature) is a choice you make for your character. The baseline feat that allows a character to channel magic is called Eldritch Spirit. It serves as the prerequisite for the game’s spellcasting feats, but also allows characters to channel magic in other ways.

Druidas spellcasting is a common path that a character channeling nature magic with Eldritch Spirit can take, learning to shape the power of spells that interact with and manipulate nature’s innate power, from converse with animals to entangle, barkskin to control weather, and more. Taking a druidas creed is another option, granting a character unique magical abilities themed around a specific aspect of nature — air or earth, fire or water, frostlands or mire, and many more. But perhaps the most personal path of druidas magic is that of wild shape, allowing a character to undergo a physical transformation into a creature of the wild world. 

As with everything in the CORE20 system, the Wild Shape feat that grants the wild shape ability is a distinct option that feeds into other options, but which isn’t automatically tied to other parts of the game. Among other things, this means that a character channeling druidas magic doesn’t need to learn spellcasting in order to gain the ability to wild shape, or vice versa. 

One character who takes Eldritch Spirit for druidas magic might be a dedicated caster with maximum spell potential. Another might be a warrior of nature fighting against those who despoil the wilderness, and leading that fight in animal form. A third character might combine the two options if that fits a player’s concept for the character. But there’s no distinct advantage to choosing one of those paths over the others. It’s only ever about who you want your character to be.

When you first take Wild Shape, the range of forms you can take are focused on smaller animals useful for observation and reconnaissance, getting into tight spaces, and so forth. But right from the start, you can choose to invest additional feat slots to gain the ability to wild shape into larger combat-focused creatures. And as your character’s experience with using wild shape grows, other options for chosen forms open up to them — including the ability to adopt useful bestial features while the character is in their true form, to take on the forms of larger and more powerful animals, to adopt the shape of plant creatures, and even to take on the forms of wondrous beasts (*cough* owlbears *cough*) or dragons at the apex of wild shape mastery.

(Illustration by Kaek)

Feats of Heroism

Presenting a big mechanical preview! Featuring (so to speak) an up-close look at the feats that are the mechanical heart of what your character can do in CORE20.

Feat Preview

This preview shows off some of the most ubiquitous and useful feats in the game, which appear within a broad cross-section of character builds and archetypes. But it’s not the game in its entirety, for that entirety holds many, many more cool bits and surprises.

To put the setup of these preview feats in context, check back to “The Start” and the introduction to Chapter 1: Building Your Character. That PDF preview goes into detail about how the feat format is read, and the different ways in which feats can be selected to build your CORE20 character.

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Thanks to everyone who’s dropped feedback so far! It’s awesome to see people as excited about the potential of CORE20 as I am. You can always find me at insaneangel@insaneangel.com, or on Twitter @scottfgray.

(Art by Beatriz Galiano Montesinos, used under Creative Commons)

Swing and a Miss

Another CORE20 RPG preview! This one builds on the previous skills preview, as it explores another way that the d20 rolls at the heart of the game can drive story in a robust fashion, rather than simply generating a string of pass/fail results.

Chapter 9 Excerpt — Attacks

The idea of turning skill checks into kind of continuum from failure to success, with degrees of partial success and failure in between, has pretty much always been part of the way I’ve played D&D from 3e on. And to be clear, that’s not a particularly novel idea. Lots of DMs grew quickly tired of the pass/fail monotony that can arise from 3e skill checks, and house-ruled the idea of partial success on a not-quite-good-enough roll. Lots of people (including me) have talked forever online about adopting the idea of a failed skill check not necessarily representing a failed action, but of representing succeeding on the action in an imperfect way.

Though 5e D&D’s skills system is quite different than 3e’s, 5e picked up 3e-style pass/fail checks largely wholesale for its rules — though one of the many oft-overlooked sections of the Dungeon Master’s Guide actually talks about a process for treating marginal success (1 or 2 lower than the target number) as a success at a cost. And of course there are other games that take a more nuanced approach to skill checks, even if they’re called something different in those games.

As you’d probably suspect, I like the current CORE20 approach to skill checks driving story more than I like other approaches. And as said above, I’d been informally playing that way for years, with previous versions of CORE20 using the usual pass/fail system, and me just processing skill check results in my head, deciding on the fly what degree of success any particular check felt like in the moment, and figuring out how the story changed as a result. 

Then at some point, I decided I should probably actually write up my process and incorporate it into the rules for skill checks. And I did, and it worked really well.

And then at some point after that, a thought suddenly popped into my head in the middle of a game: 

“If this system works so well for skill checks, how it would work for combat…?”

The answer, as I discovered when I tried it, is “Really, really well.”

So. This preview shows off the “Attacks” section in the combat chapter, which tells you everything you need to know about how your character can deal with those occasional moments in a fantasy game when other creatures insist on fisticuffs as a means of settling differences. Among the rules presented therein, this section sets up attack rolls using the same system seen in skill checks — embracing the idea that an attack can produce a continuum of effects between a clear miss and full contact, and rebuilding the foundation of the static hit/miss setup that’s been the default for d20-based fantasy combat since the beginning. 

As with the skill setup, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that this isn’t a brand new concept by any stretch. Lots of games have long embraced the idea of hitting for partial effect when an attack roll comes up short, from 4e D&D to Dungeon World and many more. But I like to think that what CORE20 does is just a little bit different. 

Because as with the original setup for skills, the point of partial success with an attack roll isn’t just the mechanical effect of dealing a lesser amount of damage, or allowing a foe to counterattack, or hindering an opponent’s defense (though you can do any and all of those things with a low attack roll if you like). Rather, it’s about the idea that thinking about how a less-than-perfect attack looks and manifests is a really great tool for keeping players engaged in what their attack-centric characters are doing in combat, giving them something to focus on beyond the baseline of “I need to roll high.” As with everything in CORE20, it’s about creating a framework where player and GM can work on and shape narrative together, transforming the mechanics of combat from a straight-up mathematical exercise into something better.

(Art by Jackie Musto — http://www.jackiemustoart.com)

Skills and Story

This update shows off a bit of the CORE20 skills chapter, and the place that skills and skill checks occupy at the center of the game. 

Chapter 6 Excerpt — Skills Intro

But to get the full gist of why skills work the way they do in CORE20, I need to ramble on for a bit about story.

For me, over forty-two years off-and-on of playing fantasy RPGs, story is everything.

I love story, first and foremost above all other aspects of the game. The sensation of being alive inside a story in a way I’d never felt before was what hooked me the very first time I played D&D. The urge to create and shape story with my closest friends was what fueled my long-term love of D&D and Traveller, and my later forays into Champions and MechWarrior and many more. 

Working in RPGs for nineteen years (as of this very week, in fact), everything I’ve ever written, every editing assignment I’ve taken on, has been filtered through a lens of understanding that everything in a game — general rules, hard mechanics, lore — is like an iceberg. The 10 percent we see is the words on the page, and that 10 percent is important. But there’s another 90 percent we don’t see, and that’s the potential for those words on the page to let players and GMs shape and create story from the foundations that the rules, the mechanics, and the lore provide.

Yes, I love combat. I love the mechanics of games and the way those mechanics work with and play against each other. I love monster mechanics and design. I love magic items to a degree that’s probably illegal in several states.

But in the end, for me, all of those things serve story. Story is what happens in the space between the GM asking “What do you want to do?” and the player’s response — with the coolest stories generally arising when the response is something the GM has absolutely no warning of and no way to predict.

Since 3rd edition, D&D has focused a significant amount of its “What do you want to do?” mechanic in the form of skill checks. Building on the combat engine that had always been the heart of the game, 3e skill checks were established along the same mechanical lines as combat — a die roll fueling a simple binary outcome. You make an attack roll; you either hit or miss. You make a skill check; you either succeed or fail. 

The problem is, binary outcomes are generally a lousy way to tell a story.

So CORE20 does things a bit differently.

Even as it’ll be eminently recognizable to anyone who’s ever played a fantasy RPG, the skills system in CORE20 allows a lot of customization. For a start, individual skills are set up within skill groups, giving players the choice of a straightforward focus on a broad range of things characters can do, or of drilling down to get really good at very specific tasks. Every skill group has two default ability scores it ties to, creating a baseline that says there’s more than one way to get good at something. Every skill check can also be made using a completely different ability score if the situation warrants.

Beyond that, though, skill checks aren’t a binary pass/fail in CORE20. Rather, every time your character makes a check, there’s a chance you’ll succeed perfectly, a chance you’ll fail badly — and an even wider range of chances for you to succeed, but not quite in the way you’d intended. The rules call this a success with complications, and it fuels the idea of the GM and the players working together to turn every skill check into a potential unexpected story beat. To try to make sure that everyone is constantly working within that space of having to deal with an unexpected outcome, knowing that that’s where the best story so often comes from.

(Art by Eric Pommer)

Side Quest: OGL

So the last time I posted about #CORE20RPG was the end of December. I had great plans then for doing regular updates, and a bunch of stuff already queued up to show and talk about as regards the game and some of its inner workings.

And then Wizards of the Coast had a little thing happen with the Open Game License.

Maybe you didn’t hear about that? You can go look into if you like. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Excellent.

When I wrote up the first draft of the first bits of CORE20 as an actual game system, building on the collection of house rules the game was for the first couple of years, it was fiercely and proudly a product of the OGL. 

Those first rules were built not just around the D&D 3.5 SRD, but on other OGL material including the 3.5 “Unearthed Arcana” — a book of optional rules that WotC released as Open Game Content so that everyone could use those rules to create new works. As the OGL intended.

For a long while, I’ve been wanting to find the time to turn CORE20 into something other people could test and play. And during all that time, I emphatically embraced the reality that the game was a product of the OGL.

The foundations for creativity that WotC laid for open gaming were a big part of what brought me back to D&D in 3rd edition, and eventually to work on the game — for WotC, and others — for eighteen years. For a long while, the idea of creating an OGL game was a point of pride.

And all those feelings are supremely bittersweet now, because certain people at Wizards of the Coast have looked at the multiple worlds’ worth of wondrous imagination that have come out of the OGL over two decades and decided: 

“Yeah, fuck that.”

So the last few weeks haven’t been great for me, as for so many other people in a creative community that I’m proud to be a part of. Because I’ve had to think a lot more than I ever expected to about how I want this game to come out.

In December, rumors started swirling in earnest to suggest what some of us had guessed at months before — WotC wasn’t planning to release 6th edition under the OGL. And at that time, I assumed the same thing that most creatives working in the OGL community assumed.

We assumed that Wizards of the Coast would be pulling a 4e by bringing 6e out under a new license. A closed license. We wondered if they’d sweeten that closed license for some folks with the chance to put third-party products onto D&D Beyond at long last. We speculated a lot.

We heard about companies being asked to sign NDAs, which seemed to confirm those speculations. 6e would break from the OGL. But hey, we’d still have the OGL, right? The wealth of material produced for D&D, the huge base of 5e players — none of that was going away. 

Right?

Anyway. Unless WotC does an even sharper about-face with the next draft of their new OGL, there’s not a chance I’ll be signing on. (Other people have noted the problems of OGL 1.1 far more comprehensively than I can. I’m not going to recap the issues.)

Wizards is now promising that any game released under OGL 1.0a can stay that way. And CORE20 is already and has always been an OGL 1.0a game. People have seen it, people have read it, people have playtested earlier versions on the way to making it the game I wanted it to be.

And even if WotC reneges on that promise, as they’ve reneged on the promises made when the OGL was created, here’s a thing. Most of what came into CORE20 via the SRD has already been rewritten. Much of what’s in the wildly-being-finalized open-playtest draft is brand new. 

The foundations and palimpsests marking where the game came from are clearly visible, as intended. But there are precious few direct lifts from any SRD in the game, and it won’t take much work to polish those direct lifts into their own thing if that becomes necessary.

So, whatever happens, #CORE20RPG is absolutely coming out. It’s coming out as the game I want it to be, and as part of the larger movement of creativity that is the legacy of the OGL. Even if there’s no OGL left.

Lots of other amazing, creative folks have announced that they’re responding to WotC’s OGL debacle by creating their own games. Building on what D&D means to them, by homage and inspiration.

And apparently, without meaning to be, I’m one of them. 

I’ll be getting back on schedule with previews and updates next week, which you can find here at the design blog. 

I’ve been playing CORE20 for years, and having an incredible amount of fun, even as I’ve been looking at it constantly and thinking to myself: 

“This can be more. This can be amazing.” 

Now I get to find out if I’m right.

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Addendum

Literally four hours after I wrote and posted the above, Wizards of the Coast made the unexpected announcement that they were abandoning plans to implement an updated OGL, and that they had taken the extraordinary move of releasing the D&D 5th edition SRD under Creative Commons, in addition to its existing availability under OGL 1.0a. 

(The story’s here if you somehow haven’t heard it. I’ll probably talk about this at some point, but am too generally giddy to do so today.)

The path forward for CORE20 still isn’t as 100 percent certain as it was prior to this past month, because although a promise has been made to leave OGL 1.0a untouched, that promise carries a tiny bit less weight than it did before the time that WotC decided it could revoke 1.0a. On the other hand, there’s been talk that Wizards might well release earlier editions’ Open Game Content into Creative Commons — including the 3.5 SRD that was the first SRD used to shape the game that CORE20 has become.

But this is huge news either way, and Wizards of the Coast deserves huge thanks for listening to what the creative community told them, and for understanding finally the real harm they were doing to themselves, their brand, and the community that loves the game.

(Art by Dean Spencer)