Banes & Boons — Advanced Old School Revival

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Passive Abilities

Monsters have passive abilities called banes and boons. Banes and boons are vulnerabilities (banes) or strengths (boons) of the monster, coupled with a mechanic that describes how the monster reacts when subject to a particular type of peril. For those banes and boons that do not have a reaction associated with them, we call them traits. A monster may have banes and boons because of its type, or unique to it in particular.

Why Banes & Boons?

We use banes and boons instead of the "resistances" and "immunities" that appear in traditional RPGs to ensure that something always happens in the fiction even when a PC's efforts are thwarted by the monster's passive abilities. A dragon may be totally immune to fire, but what happens when someone tries to hit it with a fire-based attack? We could say that nothing happens, but that's not interesting, and it's often frustrating for the player to waste their turn in this way. Instead, we could say that a fire attack taunts the dragon, because the monster is amused that the puny adventurer dares to attack it with the one element it's totally immune to: the taunts reaction would then force the dragon to spend its next action targeting that puny adventurer. In effect, the PC's attack was ineffective, but the state of the fiction changed, because now the dragon is focused on the PC.

About Reactions

When a monster is subject to a peril of a particular type, it automatically responds with one of 12 standard reactions. These reactions describe what happens either:

When the monster is subject to the peril, or:
Instead of the monster being subject to the peril.

Using Reactions

While half the reactions are typically used for banes and the other half for boons, you can use any reaction in constructing a bane or boon. For example, the reaction Reflect is typically a boon, because it means that when the monster is subject to the peril, the peril reflects back to the source instead of affecting the monster. But if, say, you want curative magic (like a healing spell) to reflect off the monster and heal the source, that might be considered a bane for the monster if the curative magic would ordinarily heal it. Similarly with the fire dragon example from above, Taunt is typically considered a bane, because it forces the monster to focus on you after being subject to the peril. But as a boon, the dragon is taunted instead of being subject to the peril.

Anatomy of Banes & Boons

Here is an example of a bane with the Hexes reaction:

Fire (Frightened)

This bane is saying the peril "Fire" triggers the "Hexes" reaction in the monster, conferring a Frightened status effect. In other words, Fire makes this monster frightened.

Alternatively, a boon with the Resists reaction may look like this:

Divine (Haste)

This boon is saying the peril "Divine" triggers the "Protects" reaction in the monster, conferring a Haste status effect. In other words, Divine gives this monster haste.

(Only the Hexes and Protects reactions confer status effects like this, which are indicated in parentheses.)

Cold

This boon means the monster gets advantage when subject to perils involving Cold, and reduces incoming Cold damage by 2.

Traits

A trait is just a bane or boon without a reaction. Traits are always passive, but have their own rules text that describes how they interact with the fiction. For example:

Keen Senses (Smell). This monster has a keen sense of smell within a melee space, and gains advantage in any action involving this sense.

This is a boon that has no reaction; instead it's "always on" (passive) and provides a benefit to the monster.

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