More Playtest Monsters

As of right now, the v1.1 update to the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package is live for your gaming pleasure! As always, you can find the new document and all the other v1.1 playtest docs in the CORE Playtest Files folder on Google Drive: 

http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest

(If the short URL doesn’t work for you, you can click or copy the full link here.)

The initial v1.0 Playtest Package featured a solid array of over 180 creature stat blocks from d20 fantasy, covering potential foes, foils, enemies, and allies for your CORE20 games. The v1.1 package ups the monstrous ante to over 240 stat blocks with the addition of 54 new creatures, including:

• Bulette
• Grick
• Hippogriff
• Ilvalaak — a new name for the naga
• Kraal — inspired by the grell
• Krenshar
• Werebear
• Mesmeroth — a renamed and reworked gibbering mouther
• Oni
• Peryton
• Praetyrian and venenatus — two new drakes
• Remorhaz
• Revenant
• Satyr
• The skulker — a revisiting and combining of the classic AD&D monsters the trapper and the lurker below
• Specter
• Transfixer — the piercer, but really cool
• Vampire spawn
• Vargouille
• Vermacarn — a reworked carrion crawler
• Vocoeur — CORE20’s version of the displacer beast
• Wurfrur — the renamed blink dog
• Xorn
• Lineage traits for the gnoll and the mergyyr (a new name for the merfolk), allowing the easy creation of a broad range of NPCs

And many more! 

In addition to new threats and allies, the Playtest Creature Package has seen all manner of updates, tweaks, corrections, and rules and language fixes. Huge thanks as always to all the folks in the playtest who have pointed out typos and asked the questions that have let us make the game even better. (The Playtest v1.1 Changelog doc in the playtest folder notes changes to existing stat blocks and lists the playtest package’s new creatures.)

Once again, the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package is available in two variations. The regular version features the stat block color-coding throughout all sections of the stat block, while the “(Low Color)” version features the color coding only on stat block section heads. (A post back toward the beginning of the public playtest talks about the evolution and design of the stat block format, including using color to make it easier to navigate stat blocks during play.)

I’ve been playtesting and fine-tuning all these new creatures in my own campaigns for a while now, and I’m happy to finally turn them loose. Good gaming!

Art by Xavier Beaudlet

Creature Preview: Mesmeroth

A gibbering mouther by any other name would… well, still be pretty horrible. But the renaming of this classic weird fantasy aberration was a relatively late addition to CORE20, in the course of my learning that ableist language is something that too easily hides within familiar usage.

The gibbering mouther was so-named for the endless maws that would appear across their amoeboid form, and for the confusion-inducing gibbering of the voices that would issue forth from those many mouths. Terrifying heroes since the early days of AD&D, the mouther had always seemed a classic aberrant creature to me, possessed of an alien intelligence whose very language would tear at the minds of those who heard it.

Except then during a round of sensitivity consulting on the last CORE20 alpha playtest, I was asked, “You do know that ‘gibber’ and ‘gibbering’ likely originated as a description of the speech of the mentally ill, right?” And I said, “Uh… no” — even as I realized I probably should have. I definitely wish it was something I’d known when I was the editor of the 5e D&D Monster Manual in 2014, so that there might have been a conversation on the topic at the time. Not that it likely would have made any difference, as D&D is a large ship that changes course very slowly when it comes to dealing with making little fixes. Thankfully, though, CORE20 is a bit more nimble in its desire to improve the language and context of the game.

During the final alpha playtest of CORE20, the gibbering mouther became the mesmeric mouther for a time. It’s now become the more subtly named mesmeroth in the upcoming public playtest CORE20 Playtest Creature Package v1.1. The mesmeroth for our game is built on the chassis of the SRD mouther, but swaps out the traditional confusion effect of their many voices for a luring drone that draws adventurers ever-closer to their doom.

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

Creature Preview: Gnoll

The gnoll has always been one of my favorite humanoids, back from the days when “humanoid” was a dirty word in D&D, used exclusively to describe the evil, monstrous folk designed to antagonize the humans and demi-humans (elves, dwarves, and the like) who were the heroes of the game. D&D has always had a consistently one-note version of who gnolls are and how they live, building on the evil pack hunters of AD&D and 3e, to 5e’s fiend-spawned humanoids/actual fiends. But in keeping with the central tenet of CORE20, it felt like gnolls in our game would be most interesting if they can be anything they — and you — want.

It’s easy to focus on the gnoll as a feral hunter, and to create a stat block that builds them out around that single theme. But as with the worldborn lineages in CORE20 (the game’s name for D&D’s humanoids), the cultures of the more unusual — and often magically evolved — wondrous worldborn are meant to cover the broadest possible range of characters and types. As such, the upcoming update to the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package sets up the gnoll as a lineage trait stat block, giving them the same treatment as humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, and the rest of the worldborn lines. 

As with worldborn NPCs, the gnoll’s lineage traits can be added to one of the game’s twelve nonplayer character stat blocks, creating gnoll-themed scouts, warriors, and wildlings who’ll feel at home alongside any previous versions of the gnoll. But you can also use the flavor and culture of the gnoll to lend a distinct shape to spellcasters, protectors, scoundrels, and more. 

Additionally, it’s easy to see how the stat block lineage traits for the twelve worldborn lineages in the Playtest Creature Package have been adapted straight from the player character traits in chapter 4 of the CORE20 Player’s Guide. So it’s an easy guess that these gnoll lineage traits have been created with an eye to a future project — setting up character traits that will allow players to create wondrous worldborn characters in addition to the baseline worldborn options. More info on that as it comes together.

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

Creature Preview: Bulette

The bulette is a delightful monster whose name I definitely pronounce as “bull-EHT,” not “boo-LAY” as some do. (I have been known to joke that the creature is only pronounced “boolay” if it comes from the Boolay region of Greyhawk. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling landshark.)

The bulette for CORE20 maintains much of the feel of the D&D original. As a tier 3 creature, it makes an excellent solo threat against a tier 1 or tier 2 party, built for power and jumping, and with a prodigious ability to flatten foes. In a recent encounter, I was able to happily confirm that this design had its intended effect when, after watching a bulette break the ground with a surging leap, then drop onto a pack of miniature mammoths they were hunting, the player characters elected to all flee the scene at high speed.

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

Creature Preview: Cheetah and Hippopotamus

A half-dozen or so new creatures will be making their way into the already-well-populated “Animals” section of the CORE20 Creature Playtest Package, including the cheetah and the hippopotamus.

The cheetah was a creature I’ve wanted to set up for CORE20 for a while now, just because translating the speed of their 70-mile-per-hour sprint into game terms just gets weird. I also liked the idea that cheetahs in our world are known for almost never attacking humans, which makes them a bit novel for carnivores.

The hippopotamus was another animal I wanted to have a CORE20 version of, because it’s well known that the hippo is one of the most dangerous large animals in our world in terms of the number of people they kill annually. And because that’s a well-known fact, many players are aware of it, which means it’s great fun to see their reactions when an adventuring party runs into a hippo in their own world.

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

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. The confusion effect of the umber hulk always seemed a bit 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 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.”

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 fatal 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.)

Statistical Anomaly

Creature statistics have been a very moveable feast since the earliest days of D&D. The monster stat block has undergone steady mutation through varyingly complex forms, both in the main game line and many of the games that have split off from D&D.

In the early days of AD&D, creature statistics were sparse, amounting to bare combat stats, size, and a rough intelligence rating that was the only reference to a creature’s ability scores. In the 3rd edition days, monster statistics expanded with more details but inherited a scattered flow of information from AD&D. Not until the later stages of D&D v3.5 did the concept of the organized stat block finally emerge, to be inherited by D&D 5e and many other d20-based RPGs — including CORE20.

Years in the Making!

The creatures, monsters, and other foes who fill the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package were one of the very last pieces of the game to come together. Prior to that, during the alpha playtest, I and a small number of brave GMs played the game using stock D&D 3.5 monsters updated on the fly for new rules and conditions, and with a very loose reckoning of how the challenge ratings of 3.5e translated to CORE20’s looser encounter building.

As a result, I had a lot of time to think about what a CORE20 creature stat block might and should look like. And a thing I thought a lot about during that time was how to move away from the 3.5e and 5e approach that views stat blocks mostly as a summary of a creature’s ability to kill the characters or to be killed in return.

Full disclosure: the CORE20 stat block is still mostly about combat, for the simple reason that CORE20 is a game that absolutely knows how much fun it is to fight monsters. But one of the things I thought about for a long time through the alpha playtest was how to work up a stat block that didn’t imply that combat was the only purpose of the game, and that didn’t intentionally make every potentially useful bit of noncombat information as hard to find as possible.

As such, the setup I came up with in 2023 for the CORE20 stat block starts with noncombat options, then works its way down into more-violent action options. And as I tweaked and fine-tuned a few early attempts at the setup, I realized that what I ended up doing reflected an overall general approach to how monster encounters typically play out. (The Playtest Creature Package talks about this setup as well.)

Top Down

When the characters first notice a monster, it’s often important to determine whether or not the monster notices them back — and how fast the monster moves toward the party if they do. That’s why the Senses and Speed lines are at the top of the stat block. Size is next because if a creature is moving toward the characters, the first thing they likely notice is how big or small the creature is, and how scared they should be as a result. Languages below that sets the scene for what kind of threats or parley might be in the offing before contact between creature and characters is made. Encounters then suggest what other creatures might be lurking nearby and unobserved, waiting to see how that initial contact plays out.

Below that initial section of the stat block, a number of color-coded sections then dig into the mechanics-focused interactions between creature and characters. Abilities and Skills are first up, whether the GM is setting up a social encounter or needs to tap into skill checks for combat maneuvers, characters or monsters hiding from each other, and so forth. Then, for the many times when combat is the way an encounter is meant to go, the lower sections of the stat block focus on what a creature needs to get into the fight.

Defenses are first up in the combat portion of the stat block, to highlight the idea that even in combat, it’s okay for creatures to focus first and foremost on avoiding taking damage before focusing on dealing it out. A Combat Options section follows, incorporating initiative and any other always-on combat-specific features. Sections covering Standard Actions, Minor Actions, Move Actions, Free Actions, and Reactions then make up the bulk of the stat block, setting out a creature’s round-by-round action options in order of the effort involved in using them.

Pretty Colors

The color coding of the stat block from Abilities and Skills down is another thing that developed over years of thinking about what a CORE20 stat block might look like — as a direct result of my addled brain always having found it really difficult to parse the 3.5e stat block and many of its d20 descendants. With each part of the stat block coded with a specific background color, it makes it easy to quickly focus on a specific section as one gets used to that coding. When I’m setting up an encounter, I know that yellow and a creature’s initiative modifier is the first thing I look for. When a creature’s turn comes up each round, I know to look to red first for the standard actions that are a creature’s primary focus, then glance at the green minor actions to remind myself what else they can do.

The current color presentation is focused on the playtest, and there’s a version of the Playtest Creature Package that keeps the header colors but loses the background colors for folks who find that easier to read. Though the look and layout of the CORE20 books is only in its most preliminary stages at this point, the vision for the final stat block setup is a little bit more subdued than the playtest’s Microsoft Word formatting allows. Here’s a sneak preview of that setup featuring the behir again (one of my favorite monsters), as rendered by one of my favorite artists, the amazing Jackie Musto.

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Questions about monsters or anything else in CORE20? Email [email protected] or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

(Art by Jackie Musto — http://www.jackiemustoart.com)

Going Wild

For some reason, lots of folks seem to be talking about the druid’s Wild Shape ability right now. So I thought I’d talk a bit about how druid magic and wild shape connect in #CORE20RPG.

(TL/DR: Wild shape forms start with smaller creatures useful for recon and scouting, and you choose whether and how to power up to larger animals, wondrous beasts (*cough* owlbears *cough*), plant creatures, and even dragons.)

Chapter 10 Excerpt — Wild Shape

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Like everything else in the CORE20 system, channeling druidas magic (the moniker the game uses for the magic of nature) is a choice you make for your character. The baseline feat that allows a character to channel magic is called Eldritch Spirit. It serves as the prerequisite for the game’s spellcasting feats, but also allows characters to channel magic in other ways.

Druidas spellcasting is a common path that a character channeling nature magic with Eldritch Spirit can take, learning to shape the power of spells that interact with and manipulate nature’s innate power, from converse with animals to entangle, barkskin to control weather, and more. Taking a druidas creed is another option, granting a character unique magical abilities themed around a specific aspect of nature — air or earth, fire or water, frostlands or mire, and many more. But perhaps the most personal path of druidas magic is that of wild shape, allowing a character to undergo a physical transformation into a creature of the wild world. 

As with everything in the CORE20 system, the Wild Shape feat that grants the wild shape ability is a distinct option that feeds into other options, but which isn’t automatically tied to other parts of the game. Among other things, this means that a character channeling druidas magic doesn’t need to learn spellcasting in order to gain the ability to wild shape, or vice versa. 

One character who takes Eldritch Spirit for druidas magic might be a dedicated caster with maximum spell potential. Another might be a warrior of nature fighting against those who despoil the wilderness, and leading that fight in animal form. A third character might combine the two options if that fits a player’s concept for the character. But there’s no distinct advantage to choosing one of those paths over the others. It’s only ever about who you want your character to be.

When you first take Wild Shape, the range of forms you can take are focused on smaller animals useful for observation and reconnaissance, getting into tight spaces, and so forth. But right from the start, you can choose to invest additional feat slots to gain the ability to wild shape into larger combat-focused creatures. And as your character’s experience with using wild shape grows, other options for chosen forms open up to them — including the ability to adopt useful bestial features while the character is in their true form, to take on the forms of larger and more powerful animals, to adopt the shape of plant creatures, and even to take on the forms of wondrous beasts (*cough* owlbears *cough*) or dragons at the apex of wild shape mastery.

(Illustration by Kaek)