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)
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