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 recover 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 their 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 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 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)