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)
The CORE20 RPG System 