ABOUT THE GAME

Playtest Credits
Design and Writing
Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Rules Development and Consulting

Aaron Gray, Matt Click

Cultural Consulting
James Mendez Hodes, Basil Wright

Sensitivity and Inclusion Consulting

Jennifer Kretchmer, Rogan Shannon, Take This

Alpha Playtest Vanguard Crew

David Otterson, Ron Graves, François Bertrand,
Aaron Gray, Shvaugn Craig, Colleen Craig

Copyright © 2023 Scott Fitzgerald Gray and Insane Angel Studios


The CORE20 system is a d20-based fantasy roleplaying game
ruleset built on a foundation of freeform character building with
no classes and no levels. The brainchild of writer, designer, and
editor Scott Fitzgerald Gray, the game reworks the traditional
reckoning of checks, attacks, and other die rolls in d20 games as
simply marking out a tally of successes and flat failures, and lets
those die rolls fuel the narrative shaped by players and GMs
both in and out of combat.
Since 2004, Scott’s been working as a full-time freelance RPG
editor and designer, primarily on the Dungeons & Dragons
game — including working as an editor on the Monster Manual,
the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Player’s Handbook for 5th
Edition D&D. He’s written and edited upwards of two hundred
books, adventures, and articles for Wizards of the Coast,
including writing Dead in Thay in the Tales from the Yawning
Portal anthology, and being managing editor and co-creative
director for the Acquisitions Incorporated book. He’s written or
edited for MCDM, Ghostfire Gaming, Schwalb Entertainment’s
Shadow of the Demon Lord, Sly Flourish, Gamehole Publishing,
Green Ronin, Frog God Games, and others, as well as
for Dragon, Dungeon, Dragon+, and Arcadia magazines. He
also creates and publishes adventures and gaming supplements
under his own Insane Angel Studios imprint.
CORE20 first came to life in Scott’s home game in 2010, as a
loose collection of hacks and house rules for fantasy roleplaying
with no classes and no levels. It’s expanded inexorably since
then through six revisions of what we’ll call closed-alpha
playtesting, during which time the game has grown to include
new rules for spellcasting, combat, hit points, downtime, magic
items, skills, and much more.
CORE20 is a game that focuses on a number of the specific
aspects of heroic fantasy roleplaying that have been at the
center of Scott’s love of the game for the past 40-odd years. It’s
a game that reshapes the standard pass/fail mechanics of many
fantasy RPGs into a more story-fueled system for resolving skill
checks and combat rolls. It’s a game that thrives on long-term
campaigning rather than accelerated sprints through various
heroic tiers. It’s a game that moves away from the fantasy-
superhero trope that modern fantasy games often push toward.
It’s a game that makes character building the foundation of the
story, working around the idea that even before the GM asks the
in-game question, “What do you want to do?”, every player
gets to ask the question:
“Who do I want to be?”
And then they get to answer that question in a new way.
What’s It All About?
Hello! Scott Fitzgerald Gray here, switching to talking about
myself in first person. If you’re reading this version of the “About
the Game” document, you probably found it at the following
URL:
http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest
At that same location, you’ll also find:
• The full version of the CORE20 Player’s Guide
• The full version of the CORE20 Magic Grimoire
• The CORE20 Playtest Creature Package, featuring foes, foils,
allies, and NPCs from the eventual CORE20 Creature
Compendium
• A short set of Playtest GM Guidelines that explain why they’re
not the full CORE20 Campaign Guide
CORE20 Playtest — Insane Angel Studios © 2023
About the Game
Those four documents (along with this “About the Game” info)
make up the core of the CORE20 playtest. Along with those
playtest rules, a number of free starter adventures for the game
will drop in that same folder as time permits.
You might have seen previews of the game on the CORE20
design and development blog (https://core20rpg.com), and I’ll
be talking more on the blog in coming weeks about the
development of the game, what inspired it, how it’s changed
(drastically in some cases) over more than 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 work on turning d20 rolls from a
state of static pass/fail ennui into something more dynamic,
shooting 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 almost twenty years. 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.
The State of the Game
The four documents mentioned above — the full Player’s Guide,
the full Magic Grimoire, the Playtest Creature Package detailing
more than 180 potential foes, and the Playtest Gamemaster
Guidelines — comprise the CORE20 public playtest. If and when
the full CORE20 system comes into being, the Player’s Guide
and Magic Grimoire will be joined by the full Creature
Compendium and by the Campaign Handbook — a GM-
focused book that’ll talk about running games, building game
worlds, and more.
The Magic Grimoire — a volume collecting spells and magic
items — exists as its own thing as a response to the age-old
question of whether magic items in a d20 game belong in the
player’s book or in the GM’s book. Both approaches have been
tried, and both have their limitations, including the size of an all-
in-one player’s book and the annoyance of walling off one of the
coolest parts of the game from people who should rightfully
have access to it. In the end, given that CORE20 is by default a
high-magic game, a separate Magic Grimoire covering spells
and magic items seemed a good idea, serving as a sourcebook
and reference for all things magical in the game.
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The Campaign Handbook is entirely hypothetical at this point.
When it appears, though, it won’t be a traditional Dungeon
Master’s Guide-style tome talking the GM through everything
left out of the player’s book. That’s because the CORE20
Player’s Guide is intentionally densely packed with material that
often isn’t part of the player’s book in a multibook RPG. That
includes sections on applying the rules, downtime, safety tools,
table rules, and other topics that appear in the Dungeon
Master’s Guide for 5e (or which thus far haven’t appeared in
D&D at all).
As well, the Player’s Guide has a stealth mission of being the
book that has all the rules a GM needs to actually run the game.
When it appears, the Campaign Handbook will cover topics like
building encounters, crafting adventures, campaign
architecture, different styles of game narrative, world-building,
and much core. But CORE20 is built around the idea that there
shouldn’t be any rules, ideas, or game lore that the players can
and should make use of but that only the GM knows.
That said, though — in the end, the Player’s Guide playtest
document might actually be more game than it should be, but
that’s by design. The Player’s Guide holds just about every
possible option for character building that’s come up in over a
decade of playing CORE20 in various forms. As such, in addition
to all the usual feedback one wants to get from a public
playtest, I’m hoping to get a sense of whether it makes sense to
break out certain sections of what’s currently in the Player’s
Guide to other supplemental works.
The combat chapter, as one obvious example, is chockfull of
crunchy tactical options — but perhaps some of those options
would work better as part of an advanced combat guide rather
than needing to be part of the baseline rules. In the spellcasting
chapter, the unique magical abilities that come with the
traditions of animyst domains and druidas creeds are broken out
as forty-six distinct traditions — and nearly twice that many
unique magical feats that define those traditions. Maybe that’s
more than the core book needs? I don’t know — and I’m hoping
you can tell me.
Using the Playtest Documents
The playtest PDFs are fully bookmarked, and take an extremely
proactive approach to internal cross-referencing. Roleplaying
game books have always been challenging to navigate, even for
those of us pretty well versed in games. (When I first read D&D
3.0, I got so confused that I started keeping a notebook open
beside me so I could write down where I needed to go to look
stuff up.)
The Player’s Guide has the following sidebar explaining the
cross-referencing setup (with a similar sidebar in the Magic
Grimoire):
Cross References
Throughout the Player’s Guide, cross references will point out
places where additional information can be found on specific topics,
either elsewhere in this book or in other CORE20 books. Cross
references appear beneath specific topics the first time a topic is
mentioned in a section or subsection. If you don’t see a cross-
reference to an unfamiliar term, look to see whether that term has
been cross-referenced somewhere above and nearby in the text.
When a cross reference directs you to another chapter in the
Player’s Guide, that chapter appears first, followed by a section
reference and a page number. If no chapter reference appears
alongside a section and page number, that section is part of the
current chapter. If a section reference appears on its own with no
CORE20 Playtest — Insane Angel Studios © 2023
About the Game
page number, that section is in the same set of pages where the
cross reference appears.
A cross reference might instead direct you to one of the other main
books of the CORE20 RPG — the Magic Grimoire, Campaign
Handbook, or Creature Compendium.
In the playtest PDFs, each cross reference that gives a page
number within the same book is set up as a clickable hyperlink.
Clicking on the page number takes you straight to that page so
you can read up on the cross-referenced information. And if
you’re using a PDF reader that allows you to backtrack to the
last page you read (the free Adobe Reader is one such app), you
can easily dive deep into the book through multiple cross
references, then backtrack to where you started from.
Special Thanks
A lot of folks have read and provided feedback on earlier
incarnations of the CORE20 ruleset, and my appreciation for
their time and thoughts knows no bounds. Other folks have
alpha playtested many different versions of the game, and I
thank them for their feedback and incredible dedication (much
of which was directed toward converting stat blocks from D&D
3.5 on the fly, because figuring out the presentation for
creatures was one of the final pieces of the CORE20 puzzle to
come together at my end).
The Alpha Playtest Vanguard Crew noted in the credits for each
of the files making up the CORE20 playtest are the players of my
home campaigns, who’ve been run through so many different
versions of the rules at this point that I’m surprised any of us can
actually remember how to play the game. Their eternal patience
as regards my endless appetite for revising and expanding
CORE20 with little to no notice has been an endless blessing for
more than a decade now.
One of the names in that crew — Aaron Gray — talked his way
into being underpaid lead developer on CORE20 back in 2015,
and the foundational work he’s done on the game since then
has made it better in uncountable ways. The game as it stands
now would literally not exist without Aaron’s vision for the
potential of the rules, his steel-trap mind for game mechanics,
and his endless tolerance for having to constantly explain why
he’s right and I’m wrong about things.
Another of those names — David Otterson — has been here for
literally every moment of CORE20 wandering its way toward
reality. More importantly, David provided a big whack of
impetus for my finally getting to work on the initial house-rule
version of the game through his endless love of tinkering with
his character builds — but never just in the name of min-maxing.
Rather, his is always the perspective of thinking: “Could
changing this particular thing help this character tell an even
cooler story?”
A third of those names — Colleen Craig — is my partner in life
and dreams. She gets a special shout-out for allowing me to get
constantly and endlessly lost in my work, knowing that she’s the
only force capable of reeling me back into the real world when I
need to be.
I’ve worked on a lot of D&D over the last twenty years, and have
drawn much creative inspiration from so many of the designers,
developers, and editors I’ve worked with and alongside. One
person in those ranks gets special kudos here — Robert J.
Schwalb, who granted his gracious permission for Shadow of the
Demon Lord’s boons and banes to make their way into CORE20.
Across those twenty years, I’ve also drawn a great deal of
personal inspiration from folks I’ve worked with, whose example
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 About the Game

has helped me shape an extraordinary career in a highly

stressful creative space without losing sight of what’s most
important in both work and life. Among those people (and in no
particular order), Kim Mohan, Michael E. Shea, Shawn Merwin,
Teos Abadia, Meghan Ciana Doidge, James Introcaso, Jackie
Musto, Hannah Rose, Rich Lescouflair, Bill Benham, and David
Christ have made my life better by their presence in it.
Thanks to the many names in the playtest credits who’ve
provided rules, cultural, and sensitivity and inclusion consulting
for CORE20. It’s worth mentioning that only some of the
material in the game has been formally reviewed by these
amazing folks, although what I’ve learned from working with
them has made its way into everything else. But the
responsibility for what I’m sure are the many, many things
remaining to be made better remains entirely with me.
And lastly, thanks to you for checking out CORE20. I hope you
can see the same potential in the game that I saw way back in
2010, and that it brings you as much joy, excitement, and
narrative freedom as it brings me every week. I have absolutely
no delusions regarding how many rough spots remain in the
rules despite the last year’s worth of finishing up what’s
presented in this playtest. So as Kate Bush once said, please be
kind to my mistakes.

Thoughts and Playtest Feedback

We’ll be setting things up for properly organized feedback as
the playtest progresses, with update info posted to the design
blog at https://core20rpg.com. You can subscribe to the design
blog to be notified of updates — or you can get CORE20
updates plus D&D 5e and system-neutral tips and advice for
players and GMs by subscribing to the Insane Angel Studios
newsletter, “Missives from Mooncastle”:
https://missivesfrommooncastle.blogspot.com
Either way, I’d love to hear what folks think about the CORE20
system. I can be found on Twittex, Bluesky, and Mastodon
dice.camp as @scottfgray. Or feel free to drop a line to:
feedback@core20rpg.com

CORE20 Playtest — Insane Angel Studios © 2023 3