Narrative Shift

I mentioned in the previous CORE20 design diary that in a 5e game I’m a player in (with an amazing GM and a great group of fellow players), my elf druid once failed a saving throw against being stunned in the first round of a fight. It was a magical effect, with a DC 12 saving throw each subsequent round to shake it off. And I rolled 11 three rounds in a row, effectively sitting out an entire combat because I missed hitting a target number by 1.

Now, I’ve had problems with the rigid pass/fail ability check, saving throw, and attack roll setup of standard D&D for a long while now. Going back to 3rd edition, in fact, and the adoption of the universal “roll a d20 and try to roll high” core mechanic. Previous editions with combat tables and THAC0, and rolling high with a d20 but rolling low on percentile dice or 3d6, set up a rather nebulous sense of what success actually meant and felt like. But 3e with its d20-roll foundations and a robust skills system gave players a much stronger sense of: “Well, I failed by 1 again…” 

Still, in all my years of being mildly annoyed at “Almost succeeded!” and “Failed miserably!” having exactly the same in-game effect, I don’t think any single moment of play summed up the problem as well as that fight did.

How It Plays Out

Introducing the sliding scale of success for skill checks, saving throws, and attack rolls changes the mechanics of the game for sure. If you can succeed with complications on rolls that would be failures in D&D, you succeed more often. If characters — and monsters — are dealing damage or reaping other benefits from attacks that would usually have had no effect, fights go faster. And even if the characters and their enemies are hitting with complications at about the same rate, so that there’s no real difference to the outcome of the fight, that fight feels more dynamic. The sliding scale of success creates a sense of combat as a range of active possibilities, rather than the hit-miss binary possibility that’s been foundational to d20 games for so long.

As an example, consider a combat encounter that took place in one of my CORE20 games a few weeks ago. This was a fight against a malevolent trapdoor spider — the monstrous spider of the Playtest Creature Compendium, with some extra hit points courtesy of the creature having learned how to use the spellmarks of cure light wounds they’d found on the bodies of the travelers they’d been waylaying for months. 

Here’s how the start of round 1 played out:

• The party’s sidekick creature springs into action and gets a hit with a complication. Because this companion deals practically no damage, the players collectively decide that they forgo damage in favor of distracting the spider by the ferocity of their attack — and giving the spider disadvantage on their next attack roll, just as the more combat-focused characters enter the fray.
• The spider, up next with two attacks, gets a miss and a hit with a complication. The latter makes a big narrative difference, because a single creature making a stand against a full party who misses completely in any round can drastically undercut the level of tension and threat.
• One character hits with their single attack — but what lets them hit is the disadvantage the spider has on their defense roll. The sidekick’s initial attack feeds into an attack two turns later, affecting how the combat unfolds.
• Another character misses the spider, then gets a hit with a complication. The damage they’ve rolled is pretty weak, though. So rather than dealing half damage or working up a complication that would hinder the character, the player decides to forgo dealing damage in order to throw the spider off balance, imposing disadvantage again on the spider’s next defense roll.

All told, across three rounds of an exciting combat, the characters racked up eight hits with complications. Which is to say, eight attacks that would have been outright misses under standard d20 rules. The spider managed to turn four would-have-been-a-miss attacks into hits with complications, keeping pressure on the characters as opposed to missing four times out of six. And by dealing half damage each time (because monstrous spiders aren’t particularly imaginative), they kept the threat level high in an otherwise easy fight. 

Twists and Turns

On top of everything else, a Magic check late in the spider fight made by a character activating a failing bead of force was also a success with a complication. That meant that even as the potent damage dealt by the bead’s force field finished the spider off, a pulse of eldritch energy spilled out of that force field to deal half damage to each character nearby.

It was fun.

The straight-up pass-fail mechanic of D&D and other d20 games makes the story told in combat pretty simple. You hit or you miss. You deal damage or you don’t. But the sliding scale of success in CORE20 makes for more compelling combat narrative. Missed attacks, failed saving throws, and tanked skill checks absolutely still happen in CORE20. But having them not happen as often helps to alleviate the sense of combat being a waste of your time if the dice aren’t quite working as well as you want them to. 

Moreover, the rarity of full misses in combat — especially for characters making multiple weapon attacks per round using the Rapid Attack or Rapid Shot feats — makes turns totally lost to missing feel narratively interesting in their own way, just because they’re so unusual. Because as with fiction, swinging between crushing failure and smashing success with no real intermediate states of accomplishment rarely lets a story feel as exciting as it should.

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Questions about success with complications or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

Art by Dean Spencer

It’s Complicated

As befits a game built on the foundations of D&D from the 3.5e and 5e System Reference Documents, CORE20 plays an awful lot like D&D. When I’m talking to people who ask, “Well, how does X work in the game?,” the answer is very often, “Just like you’d expect it to.” That’s why I try as much as possible to not talk about the stuff you already know the game can do (let you be heroic, use magic, fight monsters, et al.), so as to focus on what’s new and different and interesting. And at the very top of the new/different/interesting flow chart for the game — alongside freeform character building with no classes and no levels — is CORE20’s narrative-focused setup of achieving successes with complications.

Success with complications is written up three times in the CORE20 Playtest Player’s Guide, describing the slightly different approaches taken on the topic for skill checks (“Measuring Skill Success” on page 104 of chapter 6), saving throws (“Measuring Saving Throw Success” on page 246 of chapter 9), and attack rolls (“Measuring Attack Success” a bit later in chapter 9 on page 265). One thing to acknowledge for when you play your first CORE20 sessions is that thinking about success with complications will take a bit of time. It did so for me when I first formalized those systems, even after thinking about them for quite a while. It did so for the CORE20 alpha playtest players in my home games. When I’m running intro games, it takes a bit of back and forth to initially explain to players how the system is meant to work.

Decisions, Decisions

Deciding what a specific complication on a skill check, saving throw, or attack roll might look like requires some thought, and it’s okay if this process feels a bit strange to you — because thinking this way is something you’ve likely never done before in a d20-based game. However, once you get into the flow of how the sliding scale of success in CORE20 is meant to feel, it takes very little time for it to start to feel natural. And if you’re anything like me, going back to the standard pass/fail state of stock D&D and other d20-based games can quickly start to feel a fair bit… well, not natural. 

(An aside: In a 5e campaign I was playing in earlier this year, with a great GM and a fabulous group of players, my character got stunned and had to make a DC 12 Wisdom save at the end of each turn to shake it off. I had a +6 Wisdom save mod! And I still rolled an 11 three rounds in a row. In CORE20, the first of those rolls would have ended the effect, with the added bonus of something else interesting happening. In D&D, not so much.)

One of the things that can make players wary of mechanics that involve coming up with complications on the fly is that it can feel like it’s going to be difficult to come up with things that are different every time. I’ve heard more than a few players new to CORE20 say that not yet knowing the mechanics of the game well enough makes it difficult to come up with different mechanical options for complications whenever an attack roll gets almost close enough. So it’s important to understand that you absolutely don’t need to come up with novel options for every single complication, nor do you need perfect mastery of the rules of the game to make complications work.

But What Does That Look Like?

Combat is the area where success with a complication can feel most alien to first-time CORE20 players. And the best way to work around this is to not worry in the slightest about the mechanics of what a hit with a complication might look like. Rather, focus on the story, describing how your near-miss turns into a hit narratively, and only then working with the GM to figure out the mechanical impact. 

“I make contact, but my blade can’t all the way through their armor.” If I’m your GM, I’ll probably suggest that the complication on your attack is that you’re going to deal half damage.

“I hit so hard that I end up slipping.” Even as you deal full damage, that bit of narrative can cover lots of options, from being slowed until the end of your next turn to falling prone from the follow-through of your own attack.

“I end up getting way closer than I wanted to.” That could be a hit that deals full damage to the foe and 1d4 bludgeoning to you as you take an armored shoulder to the face. Or it could be a hit that deals no damage but leaves the foe scrambling to get away from you, imposing disadvantage on their next defense roll.

“I come in hard. They scramble to get out of my way, and just barely make it.” That might be an attack that deals a measly 1 point of damage, but which leaves the target dazed until the end of their next turn, or slowed, or weakened. Any minor detriment that you suggest as a player and that the GM signs off on makes a perfectly acceptable lesser substitute for a full wallop of weapon damage.

Then, after you’ve worked through the narrative of a few different ways to hit with a complication, you’ll inevitably discover that some of those ways become your favorites. And when they do, just use them each and every time if that’s what you want to do. I’ve seen players whose combat-focused characters always hit hard go with half-damage for every hit with a complication — especially when those players are looking down at high rolls on the damage dice for sneak attack or ruthless attack. I’ve seen other players whose damage output isn’t great make consistent use of dealing no damage on a hit with a complication, in exchange for throwing a foe off balance to impose disadvantage on their next attack roll. That way, the damage the character missed out on has a solid chance of being more than made up for by the next hard-hitting ally who steps up.

Getting Up to Speed

When D&D 3e first dropped, one of the biggest challenges for me as a former AD&D 1e player was dealing with skill checks, because the skill system as 3e codified it had never been a part of the game as I had played it. Remembering that all characters could make skill checks, trying to decide which skill check was the best one to cover a specific activity, trying to remember DCs and adjustments — all of it took time at the table. But even by the end of my first session of 3e, thinking about and making skill checks felt natural. CORE20 treats the success of the d20 roll quite a bit differently than D&D does. But it won’t take long for the sliding scale of CORE20 success in combat to feel natural, especially if the story of your character’s complications is your focus.

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Questions about success with complications or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

Art by Dean Spencer

Statistical Anomaly

Creature statistics have been a very moveable feast since the earliest days of D&D. The monster stat block has undergone steady mutation through varyingly complex forms, both in the main game line and many of the games that have split off from D&D.

In the early days of AD&D, creature statistics were sparse, amounting to bare combat stats, size, and a rough intelligence rating that was the only reference to a creature’s ability scores. In the 3rd edition days, monster statistics expanded with more details but inherited a scattered flow of information from AD&D. Not until the later stages of D&D v3.5 did the concept of the organized stat block finally emerge, to be inherited by D&D 5e and many other d20-based RPGs — including CORE20.

Years in the Making!

The creatures, monsters, and other foes who fill the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package were one of the very last pieces of the game to come together. Prior to that, during the alpha playtest, I and a small number of brave GMs played the game using stock D&D 3.5 monsters updated on the fly for new rules and conditions, and with a very loose reckoning of how the challenge ratings of 3.5e translated to CORE20’s looser encounter building.

As a result, I had a lot of time to think about what a CORE20 creature stat block might and should look like. And a thing I thought a lot about during that time was how to move away from the 3.5e and 5e approach that views stat blocks mostly as a summary of a creature’s ability to kill the characters or to be killed in return.

Full disclosure: the CORE20 stat block is still mostly about combat, for the simple reason that CORE20 is a game that absolutely knows how much fun it is to fight monsters. But one of the things I thought about for a long time through the alpha playtest was how to work up a stat block that didn’t imply that combat was the only purpose of the game, and that didn’t intentionally make every potentially useful bit of noncombat information as hard to find as possible.

As such, the setup I came up with in 2023 for the CORE20 stat block starts with noncombat options, then works its way down into more-violent action options. And as I tweaked and fine-tuned a few early attempts at the setup, I realized that what I ended up doing reflected an overall general approach to how monster encounters typically play out. (The Playtest Creature Package talks about this setup as well.)

Top Down

When the characters first notice a monster, it’s often important to determine whether or not the monster notices them back — and how fast the monster moves toward the party if they do. That’s why the Senses and Speed lines are at the top of the stat block. Size is next because if a creature is moving toward the characters, the first thing they likely notice is how big or small the creature is, and how scared they should be as a result. Languages below that sets the scene for what kind of threats or parley might be in the offing before contact between creature and characters is made. Encounters then suggest what other creatures might be lurking nearby and unobserved, waiting to see how that initial contact plays out.

Below that initial section of the stat block, a number of color-coded sections then dig into the mechanics-focused interactions between creature and characters. Abilities and Skills are first up, whether the GM is setting up a social encounter or needs to tap into skill checks for combat maneuvers, characters or monsters hiding from each other, and so forth. Then, for the many times when combat is the way an encounter is meant to go, the lower sections of the stat block focus on what a creature needs to get into the fight.

Defenses are first up in the combat portion of the stat block, to highlight the idea that even in combat, it’s okay for creatures to focus first and foremost on avoiding taking damage before focusing on dealing it out. A Combat Options section follows, incorporating initiative and any other always-on combat-specific features. Sections covering Standard Actions, Minor Actions, Move Actions, Free Actions, and Reactions then make up the bulk of the stat block, setting out a creature’s round-by-round action options in order of the effort involved in using them.

Pretty Colors

The color coding of the stat block from Abilities and Skills down is another thing that developed over years of thinking about what a CORE20 stat block might look like — as a direct result of my addled brain always having found it really difficult to parse the 3.5e stat block and many of its d20 descendants. With each part of the stat block coded with a specific background color, it makes it easy to quickly focus on a specific section as one gets used to that coding. When I’m setting up an encounter, I know that yellow and a creature’s initiative modifier is the first thing I look for. When a creature’s turn comes up each round, I know to look to red first for the standard actions that are a creature’s primary focus, then glance at the green minor actions to remind myself what else they can do.

The current color presentation is focused on the playtest, and there’s a version of the Playtest Creature Package that keeps the header colors but loses the background colors for folks who find that easier to read. Though the look and layout of the CORE20 books is only in its most preliminary stages at this point, the vision for the final stat block setup is a little bit more subdued than the playtest’s Microsoft Word formatting allows. Here’s a sneak preview of that setup featuring the behir again (one of my favorite monsters), as rendered by one of my favorite artists, the amazing Jackie Musto.

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Questions about monsters or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

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

A Lighter Fighting Touch

A confession: I really love combat in D&D and other RPGs. Like, a lot. My favorite class has always been the fighter. I love the story that plays out through a character’s choice of weapons and armor. I live for the vicarious feeling of reliving every heroic tale I ever read as a kid by having that fighter character stand against evil backed by nothing but strength and steel.

At the same time, though, I love the many and varied ways that D&D can play out without combat. In the home games I run, we can routinely go three full sessions back to back engaging in nothing but roleplaying, investigation, and skill checks. And when a combat scenario looms in those home games, I get full satisfaction out of the players engaging in elaborate plans to bypass that combat, or engaging in shenanigans that get two different enemies taking each other out while the party just hangs back and watches.

Combat is fun. But because I’ve always found avoiding combat just as much fun, I knew right from the beginning that I wanted CORE20 to support that style of play. Because CORE20 is built on the chassis of the Creative Commons D&D SRD, all the ways that characters can avoid violence in the game carry over, of course. If you also enjoy that style of play, you’ll find that the work-around-or-sabotage-the-bad-guys style of play actually works better in CORE20 than it does in stock D&D because CORE20 avoids the pass/fail tedium of skill checks that can make planning and subterfuge in the game sometimes feel undramatic.

The First Rule of D&D Club

In the end, though, d20 fantasy always inevitably wants to move toward skirmish combat, courtesy of D&D’s war game DNA. So I started thinking at some point about how one might try to create options in d20 combat that were more narratively interesting than just battering your enemies into submission with weapon attacks. And in so doing, I kept coming back to the question: What if not fighting the way you’re always expected to fight in a d20 game could be as much fun as fighting?

Combat maneuvers in CORE20 are the answer I came up with to that question — a set of rules that cover grappling, tripping, disarming, and a bunch of other combat options for characters who want to do more than just beat their enemies down each and every time. Combat maneuvers were actually one of the last subsystems I wrote for the game, back in 2022 for version 6 of the alpha playtest. It’s a pretty straightforward system, combining two familiar mechanics — skill checks on the attacker’s side and saving throws on the defender’s side — to do things a bit differently than d20 fantasy has traditionally done.

You can see the breakdown of available maneuvers in the table above, and can read all the details starting on page 259 of the Playtest Player’s Guide. But the general idea is that when your character gets into a fight, CORE20 provides ways that you can finish or get out of that fight that don’t just involve treating foes as bags of hit points.

Advanced Conflict Resolution

When I finished the initial draft of the combat maneuvers system, I put it to the test with a short urban campaign that had an unusual setup for character creation — no weapon feats. Characters could take Weapon Focus once, gaining a modest +1 bonus to attacks, if a player felt naked running a hero without a sword, but that was it. For everything else, the players had to think about ways they might get out of fights — because the campaign was absolutely going to involve combat scenarios — other than responding to violence with violence. And it was a great time.

(As an aside: One of the touchstones I made use of in that campaign when talking to the players about archetypal characters who constantly get into scrapes but don’t start punching their way out of those scrapes by default were the 1970s detective shows of my childhood. Those shows featured tough, hard-edged cops and private eyes caught up in the sorts of stories you’d expect — but those heroes were limited in how much violence they could use to respond to threats by the network standards of the day. Arguably the best of those archetypes (and my own personal favorite) was Jim Rockford from The Rockford Files, who famously kept his pistol hidden in a cookie jar, and whose go-to move was to punch a bad guy as a distraction before running like hell.)

Combat maneuvers weren’t the only thing that made the campaign memorable. One character made use of spelltouched illusion ability to keep foes guessing what was real, and the game offers plenty of nondamaging spellcasting options for characters who want to avoid bloodshed. But that campaign and the campaigns that followed have all shown off how much more interesting combat can be with enemies — and the characters from time to time — upended, unable to see, momentarily unnerved, running after their weapons when they go flying across the battlefield, and much more.

Most importantly, unlike the options in traditional d20 games for grappling, shoving, and so forth, CORE20 lets you build characters who are really, really good at avoiding lethal combat in favor of dealing with combat threats in other ways. Because you get to decide exactly which things your character is good at and which things they never bothered to learn, alternative combat options can be your character’s primary forte — not just a secondary add-on to their default ability to hack and slash.

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Questions about combat maneuvers or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

(Art by Gary Dupuis)

First of Your Line

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)

The Sweet Spot

Level-based play has been the foundation of roleplaying games since the creation of RPGs five decades ago this year — because D&D was the first formal and lasting incarnation of the RPG, and D&D had levels. Even though there were plenty of early RPGs that took a different approach (including Traveller, my second RPG), whither D&D went over fifty years, a lot of other games have followed.

Level-based games are generally great. They provide a setup that gives GM and players a fixed framework for reckoning the relative power of the characters, the creatures they fight, and the world around both. All of that is useful, as can be demonstrated by how popular level-based games continue to be. But there’s been one chronic downside to level-based D&D since the very beginning of the game, which is that some levels are a lot more fun to play through than other levels.

The Range of the Game

Since the AD&D days when I first started playing, Dungeons & Dragons has always had a sweet spot — from 3rd level through to 10th or 12th level. This isn’t a hard and fast rule. It’s a statement of my own experience and personal preference for sure, and as a broad level band, it’s not exactly a “spot” either way. But from AD&D through to 5e, this range of seemingly ideal levels has been something that many players, not just me, have picked up on.

The sweet spot of the game is the range of levels through which D&D feels most firmly anchored to the characters who drive the game. It’s the stretch of play through which D&D and related d20 fantasy games maximize fun, minimize complication, create the best balance of risk and reward, and shape stories that feel most strongly anchored to the player characters. The sweet spot starts after the point where you get to stop worrying about one bad encounter catalyzing a campaign-ending TPK, and extends up to the point before the stakes of the game too often stop feeling personal and real.

It’s actually kind of weird that this sweet spot has been pretty much the same for players across multiple editions of the game, starting with AD&D, moving through 3rd edition, and now with 5e. But under the hood, despite each edition’s many mechanical differences, there’s a consistency and continuity to the kind of play experience that level-based advancement creates. Over four-plus decades of the game solidifying and revising its AD&D form, many, many players have identified that sweet spot and focused their play inside that level band. And because I’m one of those players, the feel of play that 3rd-level to 10th- or 12th-level D&D has long generated is the exact feel that CORE20 focuses on.

When I cranked out the first set of house rules that have since become the CORE20 system, I wasn’t thinking very much about the math of the game, because the math of the game at that early point was just the math of 3e D&D. But as I worked with the system and sketched out the first sense of how advancement by feat slot might work, I found myself guided by that long-held instinct that the game felt the most fun within that sweet spot. And I realized that in the course of working up the version of d20 fantasy that I’d always wanted to play, I could focus on that feel by addressing the two issues that bookend the D&D sweet spot — low-level characters (and in particular in 5e D&D, 1st-level characters) being way too easy to kill; and high-level characters too quickly becoming so all-powerful that the challenges they faced inevitably detach from real character story.

From Squishy to Superhero

In its earliest forms, D&D had a penchant for killing off starting characters, a style of play that’s been embraced in a charmingly retro way by newer games like Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark. But even with 5e D&D, plenty of GM advice and books (including a book I co-wrote) talk about treating the 1st level of the game as its own separate tier of play — and getting through that tier as quickly as possible to avoid characters getting splattered by a couple of bad d20 rolls.

In all versions of D&D, the squishiness of low-level characters relative to the foes they’re expected to face off against means that for many players, the lowest levels of D&D aren’t nearly as much fun as the levels that follow. And that’s why CORE20 doesn’t start at 1st level. A starting CORE20 character is still a relative neophyte compared to many of the threats they’ll face and the NPCs in the world around them. But the array of feats that a character can select with their 20 starting feat slots makes them more capable than the 1st-level characters of any version of D&D, in most cases recreating the feel of a 3rd-level character in 3.5e or 5e. And after starting within that sweet spot, CORE20 stays there.

At the other end of the level spectrum, beginning with 3rd edition in 2000, D&D expanded beyond some of the baseline paradigms that had defined the game through the AD&D years. And in the course of doing so, D&D effectively became a kind of fantasy superhero game. You were presented with a fixed progression of 20 levels of class features for all character classes, and the full expectation that rising to 20th level to become the most powerful heroes in the world was the central point of the game.

To be clear — there’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing fantasy superheroes. The original success of 3e bringing D&D back from the brink of bankruptcy proves that fact, as does the success of 5e bringing the game back from the brink of cultural irrelevance. If playing fantasy superheroes straight through from level 1 to level 20 and saving the multiverse through campaign after campaign is your jam, I love you for that. But through two decades of playing and working on D&D from 3rd edition on, I’ve thought a lot about how in the AD&D version of the game that’s the clear ancestor of 3e and 5e alike, it wasn’t always usual — or even expected — to play characters all the way up to 20th level as a matter of course.

In only a few cases did the character classes of AD&D actually have interesting class features at higher levels — and in most of those cases, those classes had a hard cap well below 20th level. Starting at between 10th and 12th level, the iconic AD&D classes got less robust in terms of their hit point progression. There was a clear mechanical cutoff point at which the world said, “Your hero isn’t going to be as good at this hero stuff as they used to be.” So in the AD&D days, it was pretty typical to play a character to anywhere between 9th level and 12th, and then retire them. Not because you had no options for continuing, but because that was the general level band at which you often felt like your character had accomplished what they first set out to do all those levels ago. That was the far end of the sweet spot.

Endgames

Even in the 5e era with a full 20-level setup and plenty of class features at the high end of the game, it’s a well-known phenomenon that most D&D campaigns end well before the apex of 20th-level play. In endless surveys and polls (including data shared from D&D Beyond at different points), a significant percentage of players report that they don’t run their campaigns much beyond 10th level. And I think the reason for that is that players instinctively recognize the special feel of the game within the level band that is the sweet spot — and the quite different feel that takes over if the game continues past that.

CORE20 has thus been built to let characters hold within that range of power where they’re strong enough to face off against the threats of the campaign, but not invulnerable. As with pretty much any RPG, the dangers the characters face off against will inevitably grow stronger. The monsters, environmental threats, and exploration and social challenges that give a party of 20-feat-slot starting characters a really hard time can typically be handled with ease by a group of veteran 40-feat-slot characters with a campaign’s worth of experience behind them. And even as that campaign continues and the characters get even more powerful, CORE20 makes it the most fun to build your character out with new features and new talents while holding within the sweet spot, rather than to simply focus on maximizing combat numbers the way superhero fantasy does.

It’s not impossible to build a superhero adventurer in CORE20. And again, if that’s your jam, the game will work with you to build a superhero adventurer unlike any that a class-based game can create. But doing so isn’t as easy or as instinctive as building a character who just stays in that sweet spot for the full length of their adventuring career — embracing the version of d20 fantasy that even many 5e players brand new to the game recognize as the best way to play.

In the next CORE20 design diary, I’ll talk more about the particulars of how CORE20 character building incentivizes staying in the sweet spot, through focusing on building characters horizontally rather than with the vertical focus that level-based games create.

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Questions about the feel of play or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

(Art by Eric Lofgren)

The Hit (Points) Parade

I’ve talked about how the game that has become CORE20 goes back to a first set of house rules I worked up more than ten years ago. But there’s actually one part of the CORE20 rules that goes back to twenty-four years earlier than that — critical points and defense points (written up in chapter 9 of the CORE20 Player’s Guide), which were a house rule set up for my AD&D games way back in the day.

“I Can Do This All Day…”

As it does for a lot of people, the abstract quality of D&D’s hit point system has long vexed me. I mean, it works fine for the most part. It’s not broken per se. But the idea of “Well, sometimes your hit points are actual physical damage to your body, and sometimes your hit points are luck, and sometimes your hit points are your ability to parry most of a blow away” always felt a bit weaselly to me. This is a less serious problem at lower levels, when the amount of damage characters can dish out and withstand is still relatively nuanced. But by the time a 10th-level barbarian can throw themself blindfolded off a 200-foot cliff and know that the fall has no chance of killing them, things start to feel iffy for me.

Way back in 1986, the idea came to me of breaking hit points out as two different numbers — critical points representing how many potentially mortal wounds your body can take, and hit points (I didn’t call them defense points then) representing your ability to avoid mortal wounds through training and skill. That original system was a bit more complicated than the CORE20 setup (because I was young, and because the one thing AD&D really needed was more complication). But the baseline idea of having one number representing your actual health and another number representing how good you were at rolling with attacks that would otherwise mess your health up started there.

Fast-forward a whole bunch of years, and in 2004, I dusted off critical points and hit points for my D&D 3.5e campaign. An updated take on those rules was inspired by my reading (and taking the useful improvement of using Constitution score as a baseline for critical points from) the vitality and wound points system in the 3.5e Unearthed Arcana supplement, with that setup itself sourced from the d20 Star Wars RPG. Then when one of my 3.5e campaigns became the initial test bed for CORE20 (or d20 CORE as the initial house rule experiments were called), critical points and defense points were ready to go.

Critical Thinking

The CORE20 hit point setup using critical points and defense points does a whole bunch of the things in the game, all by design. Chief among those is that it makes critical hits really freaking exciting when it’s the player characters hitting their enemies — and it makes critical hits really freaking scary when it’s the enemies critting the characters. Because a character will absolutely go down when their critical points drop to 0, even if they’ve got a ton of defense points remaining, the first critical hit in a combat encounter can throw everything into upheaval. Especially for non-martial characters who don’t have a ton of critical points or easy access to temporary hit points as a buffer, a character taking a critical hit can necessitate a huge change in tactics, as that character taking a second critical hit becomes a thing the whole party needs to worry about.

Another thing that critical points and defense points do is make starting characters and lower-tier enemies more robust than the standard that D&D has long applied to low-level characters and their foes. Because all creatures have critical points built on their baseline Constitution score, that’s an average 10 hit points for every starting character and every worldborn NPC, even before monster math and feat selection build that up. Creating a 4 hit point wizard in CORE20 is technically possible, but you’d have to seriously work at it. As a result, even starting characters not focused on standing at the center of combat each and every encounter have an excellent chance of surviving their starting adventures.

Monsters likewise get a hit point boost from their default critical points. As an example, consider the lowly stirge — a creature weighing in at a mighty 5 hit points from AD&D 1e through 3.5e, before budget cutbacks reduced them to 2 hit points for 5e. At 5 critical points and 10 defense points, the CORE20 stirge is relatively weak even for a tier 0 creature (because Tiny and smaller creatures gain only part of their Constitution score as critical points). But in a combat where a 9/5 hit point arcanist takes on a 5/10 hit point stirge, both have a damage buffer that can make the fight more interesting.

One of the things I’ve long observed and been often frustrated by is that lower-level combat encounters in D&D can too easily swing wide one way or the other if all of one side acts first in the initiative order. When the characters all go first, the six foes they’re facing are suddenly three foes before the enemy side gets to act, and the fight is a rout. If all the monsters go first, half the characters start the fight bloodied or one character starts out already down and dying, and the party’s planned tactics go out the window to prioritize healing. But by having just a little bit of a hit point buffer, those sorts of first-round “Whoops!” moments become less likely.

As well, another benefit of lower-tier characters and creatures in CORE20 being a bit more robust is that it gives players and GMs options for getting out combat when one side would normally just demolish the other. Using the stirge as an example, with 2 hit points in 5e, one successful attack against a stirge slurping on a character all but automatically ends with a dead stirge. But with the 5/10 hit point CORE20 stirge, the GM often has the option to say, “You smash the stirge soundly, making them decide to take their 3 remaining critical points and fly off.” Likewise, just as starting characters being one-shot by ogres is less of a thing in CORE20 than in D&D, starting characters one-shotting bandits and cultists becomes a touch less likely unless that’s something the characters are interested in doing. In games with players who don’t automatically want to kill every creature they meet, this can be a good thing.

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Questions about hit points or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

(Art by Eric Lofgren)

“And hark! What Discord follows…” — Shakespeare

Checking out the CORE20 RPG? Looking for a place to ask rules questions, get updates, or talk about the game? The CORE20 Discord is now live!

Plans for the Discord are ongoing, but we’re looking to create a one-stop space where players and GMs can stay ahead of any playtest issues and updates while sharing what they’re doing with the game. Use the invite below to join us!

https://discord.gg/NaGnNSVRDF

And regardless of whether you Discord or not, questions about any aspect of the game or the playtest can always be sent to CORE20@insaneangel.com.

Tales of Adventure

Running a CORE20 campaign? Got a party of heroes all dressed up with nowhere to go? Then check out the first of an eventual bunch of free starter adventures for the CORE20 playtest:

http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest

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

Have a look in the “CORE20 Starter Adventures” folder and grab Sapirio’s Secret, a tier 1 adventure entirely suitable for brand-new starting characters. The CORE20 version of Sapirio’s Secret is an adaptation of a 5e version written by Scott a few years ago, and dishes up a nice one- or two-session mix of roleplaying, humor, investigation, and combat against a group of most unusual magic-users.

More starter adventures are on their way, starting with a CORE20 adaptation of Zengran’s Game, a one-shot written by Scott as part of Fantastic Lairs.

Enjoy!

(Art by André Meister)

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)