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 your games are expected to be set in lands far from places where such spices are grown, whether you 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)