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)