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Banes
by Monica G. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 05/11/2019 12:15:08

Banes is a book that offers a list of weaknesses that game masters can apply to the monsters or villains in their games to make them tougher for their players to defeat, and to provide a more interesting gaming experience in big fight scenes. Most game masters and players are already familar with the concept: the achilles heel that will take down a powerful monster. This occurs in one form or another in common tabletop RPGs, such as Pathfinder and D&D in the form of monsters that are aligned with a type of divine or elemental energy that take double damage from the opposite type of energy. For example, firey red dragons taking double damage from ice attacks, or evil creatures that take extra damage from the holy attacks of angels.

What this book does is take that concept and expand upon it. The book starts out with some guidelines about how strengths and weaknesses should be applied to your monster. How should normal damage affect the creature? When exposed to its bane does it take double damage? Does it die instantly? The last few pages of the book also have some nice guidelines about considerations that GMs should make in applying weaknesses/strengths to monsters and villains, such as how to adjust challenge ratings. There is also some great advice about more unique banes, such as ancient magical swords or stone from the elemental plane of earth, and how these might have special effects on a monster.

The real meat of the book is a nicely laid-out list of common monster weaknesses that includes the tells, damage results, and special effects for each. This list includes acid, bludgeoning, cold, iron, slashing weapons, electricity, fire, holy energy, piercing, silver, unholy energy, and weak spots. These are all fairly common weaknesses in fantasy games. Each type of damage has a half-page description that lays out some ideas for how a GM can give hints to their players that a creature is vulnerable to a type of damage to give them a fair chance of defeating it. For example, a creature that appears dry and dusty would indicate that it might be vulnerable to fire. This section of the book is very useful when you need some descriptive details during combat. If your characters are fighting a creature vulnerable to fire, use this book when describing to your players what their flaming sword does when they strike it. Overall, this is a useful book for game masters that is general enough to use for multiple gaming systems. Though it gives some guidelines that are well-suited to Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder games, the same principles can be applied to sci-fi, horror, or really any other genre of gaming.

Read the full review at Geeksagogo.com!



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Banes
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Banes
by Cornelius W. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 09/02/2018 14:12:12

I bought this RPG supplement for a Savage Worlds game. It has a nice variety of weaknesses, a bunch of different ways to apply them – way beyond "takes double damage" – and hints to find them out. There are also tips for the GM to handle the research scenes which I found well-written and helpful. It works very well with Savage Worlds and doesn't need to include any new mechanics or subsystems. We immediately had a lot of fun with the first session where we used a bigger enemy with a certain weakness. If you want to spice up the monsters in you game, go ahead and buy it!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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