Creature Preview: Warrener and Xorn

Two of the coolest monsters adventurers are likely to meet underground are the warrener — built from D&D’s umber hulk — and the xorn. Both are weird looking, not necessarily a threat unless you end up annoying them (intentionally or otherwise), and far more sapient than their appearance suggests.

The umber hulk was considered product identity in the original days of the Open Game license (as with the displacer beast). But with the movement of the Dungeons & Dragons SRD into Creative Commons, there are no prohibitions on a game built around the chassis of D&D (as CORE20 proudly is) from getting their umber hulk on. That said, that name always seemed a little meh to me, so “warrener” takes its place — from the way the relentless digging of these creatures creates warrens that wary underground adventurers learn to watch for and avoid.

One big update made to the warrener involves replacing the umber hulk’s confusion gaze with a slowing gaze. It was CORE20 developer Aaron Gray who pointed out to me that confusion effect of the umber hulk feels strange as an evolutionary defensive or offensive strategy, given that a creature under its effect is just as likely to attack the umber hulk as to flee them or stand fast. By slowing other creatures, the warrener is in a better position to catch up to prey, or to evade threats or creatures they just want to ignore.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat blocks in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Cyclops

When D&D was in its earliest days, giants were the well-known core of the so-called “true giants” — hill giants, fire giants, frost giants, stone giants, cloud giants, and storm giants — alongside lesser “giant-like” creatures such as ettins and ogres. As the game expanded, it made “giant” into a formal creature type and added other folk to that type. But in so doing, it created a kind of schism in the giants, whereby folk such as cyclopses and fomorians couldn’t be a part of the core identity because they were effectively an afterthought to it.

For both the fomorians (still awaiting final development) and the cyclops, I wanted to work with the idea that they were effectively peers of the core six giant peoples (renamed in CORE20 as the hallaek, the wiirdhar, the fiirmar, the rohkhad, the clohmad, and the istruhmad, because having sapient creatures with advanced and ancient cultures named in the languages of other cultures is part of that colonialism thing that D&D has long struggled with). But even as peers, cyclopses and fomorians (as athachs, ettins, and ogres) needed to be set up as outcasts from the core giant culture in some way. 

The specific angle for the cyclops and fomorians that appealed to me is that they have a connection to druidas magic, which traditionally isn’t part of the whole giant magical oeuvre. As such, the idea is that the giants have an overall ancient arcane tradition, but those two subgroups started messing around with nature magic and ended up splitting off from the giants’ central culture as a result.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Praetyrian and Venenatus

Two new drakes — lesser dragons related to the true dragons — are set to appear in the upcoming CORE20 Playtest Creature Package update. The praetyrian is built around the guard drake of D&D 5e, but felt like they needed a less mundane name. The venenatus is a brand-new creature created for CORE20 — a drake who feeds on magic, often of the sort carried by characters. 

When I wrote the first version of the venenatus (colloquially known as the dweomer drake) for a campaign, it was an original-to-me concept. The Forgotten Realms dweomervore (a similar theme, but very different execution) came to my attention only afterward, with the venenatus mostly inspired by the magic-eating disenchanter (another creature I use a lot, much to my players’ dismay).

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat blocks in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Wurfrur and Vocoeur

The blink dog and the displacer beast are two of the creatures I most remember falling in love with when I started playing D&D. Good-aligned extradimensional dogs ? Predatory phasing cats? An ancient enmity between them? Sign me up!

An interesting thing about blink dogs is that they’re sapient, meaning they’re not only intelligent but they have their own language. In AD&D, displacer beasts didn’t speak, but they gained that ability and an evil alignment in the 3e days, both of which they retain in CORE20. When I shared the ohoomwi, I mentioned that CORE20 is making a point of having all sapient creatures named according to what they call themselves, so that CORE20 names the blink dog as the wurfrur and the displacer beast as the vocoeur. But the naming of the vocoeur actually has an interesting side story to it.

Back in the early 2000s when Wizards of the Coast opened up D&D to third-party development by way of the Open Gaming License, that license called out elements of so-called “Product Identity” that were declared absolutely off-limits for third-party products. If you wanted to make material compatible with D&D using the Open Gaming License, you couldn’t use the name of the game or the titles of the core rulebooks, or the names of a bunch of planes, or a dozen specific monsters — including the displacer beast. 

Thankfully, with CORE20 built around the Creative Commons version of the Dungeons & Dragons SRD rather than the OGL version, the limitation on using the displacer beast no longer holds.  But what I and a lot of other people found hilarious about the displacer beast being in WotC’s list of “we own this and are protecting it so you can’t use it” monsters in the first place is that the displacer beast was stolen by Gary Gygax when he created it for the AD&D Monster Manual. As Gygax himself talked about openly, the creature’s appearance and abilities were lifted from a short story by science fiction author A.E. van Vogt, in which the creature’s name was Coeurl — with both those names giving the vocoeur their CORE20 identity.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Peryton

You know you’ve done a good job at bringing a horrifying monster to life when your developer tells you, “Please don’t ever use this in a game I’m playing in.”

A feral magical predator, the peryton is known for their predilection for feeding on hearts — and for the fear that instills in characters who fight them, even before the fight begins. They are a creature both old (in game terms) and new (in real-world terms), having been around since the AD&D Monster Manual. But they were sourced not from ancient mythology (as many of the creatures of early D&D were) but from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings, written in 1957. 

The peryton’s hunger for hearts has traditionally been mostly flavor, with versions of the creature from AD&D through 5e detailing how a peryton will bite out the heart of a hero only once that hero is dead. But for CORE20, I thought it would fun (for the GM; players’ opinions may vary) to tie the peryton’s heart harvesting to the mechanics for death and dying — allowing the peryton to take a fallen character from dying to dead with unforgiving speed.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)

Creature Preview: Ohoomwi

I am digging into a final pass through a bunch of new creatures, getting ready to add those creatures to the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package v1.1 update. While that’s happening, I thought I’d post a few choice creatures here, giving folks a playable preview of a few favorite monsters of mine, and offering a smattering of thoughts about what goes into a CORE20 monster, design-wise.

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The giant owl has been a mainstay of campaigns since the AD&D days, where they were noted both for their ability to surprise prey 83 percent of the time, and for being intelligent creatures who spoke their own language. But that second part has always raised the question for me of: Why does a creature with their own language not get to use that language for the name others use to refer to them?

For me, the answer in a very broad sense is a) lazy writing, but also b) colonialism. Because the colonialist mindset lurking at the heart of D&D via its evolution from tabletop wargames works very much around the idea that the fantasy realm is human-centric, and that humans decide what place all other creatures have in “their” world. And though the names of classic D&D monsters are absolutely the least of colonialism’s evils, they’ve always nagged at me, so CORE20 has taken a shot at fixing them.

As with the eapachni (from the giant eagle) in the first version of the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package, the ohoomwi is understood to be named from their own language, as is true of all other sapient creatures. When coming up with the name (because I don’t speak Ohoomwi, unfortunately), I wanted something that not only had an owl-like echo to it but felt intrinsically non-European. At some point, I tripped across a reference to “hohomisiw” as meaning “owl” in one of the Cree languages, and from my childhood, I remember “ukpik” (which I learned as “ookpik”) as the Inuktitut word for the snowy owl, and “ohoomwi” fell out from that.

(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)

Divination With a Kick

A thing that’s been pretty common over the ten-plus years that CORE20 has been slouching its way from house rules to alpha playtest to proper playtest is that things get added to the rules that are pretty cool. And then a year or two later, I notice something else in the rules that I hadn’t thought about at the time of creating the New Cool Thing that suggests all kinds of potential for a Newer Cool Thing.

That was the situation I noted earlier this year when fine-tuning the “Lineages”chapter of the CORE20 Players’ Guide, and checking the setup of the eldritch affinity trait:

Eldritch Affinity

Choose a school of magic. You have a +1 bonus to the challenge throw for magic you channel of that school, including from spells and magic items. The most common schools for dwarf eldritch affinity are abjuration, evocation, and transmutation, but you can select any school of magic that fits your character’s backstory.

Eldritch affinity provides a nice mechanical benefit for spellcasting characters to boost the saving throws against certain of their spells. But it also provides a bit of suggested story by having each lineage’s version of eldritch affinity talk about the most common schools of magic tying to the spellcasting traditions of that lineage. (As with all such suggestions in CORE20, however, you’re always free to choose a different option that makes sense for your character.) 

Over a few iterations of the trait, I divided up the schools of magic between the twelve worldborn lineages in ways that touched on some of the broad themes underlying how characters of a particular lineage connect to the traditions of their past, and it all eventually felt pretty good. Except much later, I then took another look at human, lizardfolk, and orc eldritch affinity, all of which suggested divination as one of their schools of magic — and thought to myself, “Wait… how many divination spells have saving throws?”

The answer, traditionally, is “Not many.” Detect thoughts and scrying have always been the big two (and scrying in CORE20 loses the saving throw in favor of the caster making a Magic check to connect to their target). So I thought I’d fix that.

Glimpse of the Future

The following divination spells are brand-new to CORE20, and are set to appear in the version 1.1 playtest rules update, coming soon!

Blood Tell

Divination

Level and Sphere: 2 — druidas
Components: Lexis, somatic
Range: 60 feet
Area: 15-foot-radius sphere
Targets: Each living creature in the area
Duration: 1 minute per caster level

Saving Throw: Will negates

Magic taps into the prophetic power of blood for each living creature in a 15-foot-radius sphere within 60 feet, forcing them to succeed on a Will save or reveal their weaknesses when gravely wounded. When an affected target is bloodied, you learn their lowest saving throw modifier and any immunities, resistances, or vulnerabilities they have. While the target remains bloodied, you know how many critical points they have, and they have disadvantage on defense rolls, saving throws, and opposed skill checks against you.

Broken Will

Divination

Level and Sphere: 2 — animys, druidas
Components: Lexis, somatic
Range: 60 feet
Target: One creature
Duration: 1 round per caster level
Saving Throw: Will negates

Visions of inescapable fate sap the willpower of the target creature, which must succeed on a Will save or have a d12 bane on Will saves for 1 round per caster level.

Harrowing Fate

Divination

Level and Sphere: 3 — animys, arcane, druidas
Components: Lexis, somatic
Range: 60 feet
Target: One creature
Duration: 1 round per caster level
Saving Throw: Will negates (refocus at end of turn)

One creature within 60 feet is harrowed with visions of their own misfortune. The target must succeed on a Will saving throw or have disadvantage on all d20 rolls for 1 round per caster level, refocusing the save at the end of each turn. 

Arcane Material Component: A pinch of black sand.

Malicious Tell

Divination

Level and Sphere: 6 — animys, arcane, druidas
Components: Lexis, somatic, material
Range: 120 feet
Area: 15-foot-radius sphere
Targets: Each creature in the area
Duration: 1 minute per caster level
Saving Throw: Fortitude negates (refocus on taking damage or having another condition imposed)

The power of grim fate permeates each creature in a 15-foot-radius sphere within 120 feet, forcing them to succeed on a Fortitude save or grant other creatures prophetic warnings of their intended physical actions. While the spell is in effect, each target has disadvantage on attack rolls, defense rolls, challenge throws, and skill checks using Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution. A target can refocus the save on taking damage or having a condition imposed on them.

Arcane Material Component: The torn corner of a playing card.

Mind Dart

Divination

Level and Sphere: 3 — animys, arcane, druidas
Components: Lexis, somatic
Range: 60 feet
Target: One creature
Duration: 10 minutes per caster level
Saving Throw: Will negates

A tendril of divinatory power lashes out at one creature within 60 feet, who must succeed on a Will saving throw or have their presence bound to you. On a failed save, the target takes 1d6 psychic damage per caster level (maximum 5d6) and gains no benefit against you from concealment or total concealment for 10 minutes per caster level. 

Open Mind

Divination

Level and Sphere: 4 — animys, druidas
Components: Lexis, somatic
Range: 60 feet
Area: 15-foot-radius sphere
Targets: Each creature in the area
Duration: 1 minute per caster level
Saving Throw: Will negates

Magic assails the thoughts of each creature in a 15-foot-radius sphere within 60 feet, which must succeed on a Will save or reveal themself to you. You immediately learn each affected target’s attitude toward you and your allies — friendly, indifferent, unfriendly, or hostile — and you have advantage on Persuasion checks involving them.

Uncertain Fate

Divination

Level and Sphere: 6 — animys, arcane, druidas
Components: Lexis, somatic, material
Range: 60 feet
Area: 15-foot-radius sphere
Targets: Each creature in the area
Duration: 1 minute per caster level
Saving Throw: Reflex negates

Shadowy visions of the future attempt to bind themselves to each creature in a 15-foot-radius sphere within 60 feet, forcing them to succeed on a Reflex save or have their fate temporarily unbalanced. Whenever an affected creature obtains a clear success on a skill check or saving throw, or a clear hit on an attack roll, they become overwhelmed by uncertainty over their next actions and are dazed until the end of their next turn.

Arcane Material Component: A copper piece.