Lineages in CORE20 (covered in chapter 3 of the playtest Player’s Guide) are a more expansive system than in any stock version of D&D, and have gone through a long evolution during the game’s alpha-version years (including switching to talking about “lineage” rather than “race” some time ago). The first big change expanded on the baseline setup of racial traits from D&D 3.5 (the system CORE20 was originally built out from), setting up that each worldborn lineage can provide characters with a broad range of options freely selectable by players, rather than having a single set of attributes that every member of the same lineage has to hew to. The idea was effectively to embrace the same freeform character building setup that the CORE20 rules are built on, but with the unique backstory of each lineage providing a general shape to one’s choices.
Unique Familiarity
The immediate advantage to this approach is that it dumps the traditionally bioessentialist setup of D&D races (the idea that all elves are X, all dwarves are Y, all orcs are Z, and so forth) on its head. Because as a player, you get to instead decide what being an elf, a dwarf, or an orc means to you and your character. If you’re playing an elf (as an arbitrary example) in a CORE20 game, you get to choose from among a range of lineage traits that all tie into the archetypal feel that elves have within D&D-style heroic fantasy. However, you’re not constrained within any sense that all elves in the world are slender and graceful, or are innately perceptive, or are automatically good with bows, and so forth.
If you want to play an elf who hits all those familiar touchstones, you absolutely can, because the baseline feel of each lineage through multiple versions of D&D are captured within the CORE20 setup. An elf’s resistance to enchantment magic and skill with the longbow, a dwarf’s stonecunning and improved combat prowess against larger creatures, a bugbear’s affinity for stealth and grappling — all those options are there if you want them. But whether you want them is your choice.
(An interesting side note — to me, anyway — is that CORE20 actually isn’t the only game I’ve worked on that’s made use of a broader approach to lineage or ancestry for player characters. When I worked on Arora — Age of Desolation from Ghostfire Gaming, lead designer Shawn Merwin pitched an ancestry system that’s even more freeform than the CORE20 approach, and I was able to use what I’d learned from writing the CORE20 system when we built the Arora system. That same ancestry system was then picked up and expanded on for the upcoming Ghostfire book Grim Hollow: The Raider’s Guide to Valika, which was pretty cool.)
This is Your Life
Each of the CORE20 lineages has a character’s choosable traits loosely organized along the lines of combat, magic, and the general feel of what it means to be a member of that lineage, broken out as combat traits, magic traits, and spirit traits. But in keeping with the freeform character building that’s the foundation of the game, you get to decide which of those parts of the game are important to your character. If you’re playing a gnome arcanist whose combat goals include staying as far away from fights as possible, you’re not forced to select combat-related traits that you’ll never use, focusing instead on your gnome magic and gnome spirit traits.
Even beyond the broad selection of traits that a lineage offers to your character, CORE20 also lets you freely select traits from a different lineage if those traits fit your character concept, which you can make narrative use of any way you like. If your goblin scoundrel trained with an orc weapon master for a time, the diligent ally orc lineage trait (allowing you to create a distraction that lets an ally make an unexpected attack against a foe) might be the legacy of that relationship. In my current campaign, the player of a bounty hunter character who’s a stand-up comedian on the side worked up a bit of backstory about the character traveling for a time with a gnome theatrical troupe as a teenager. Work the crowd — a gnome trait that grants advantage on Investigation or Perception checks when interacting with a group of people — is the character’s touchstone to that backstory and how time spent with the folk of another lineage shaped her.
Like everything else in CORE20, lineage is about helping you tell your character’s story. You can check out how the lineage rules do that in the playtest Player’s Guide, free to download. Chapter 3 tells you everything you need to know.
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Questions about lineages or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!
(CORE20 worldborn concept art by Jackie Musto)
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