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Dungeons and dragons monster manual 5
Dungeons and dragons monster manual 5





A very unlucky party could be TPK’d by this, and said party will probably throw the dice at you if this happens. In battle the Banshee takes a punt on an insta-kill move.

dungeons and dragons monster manual 5

I would ensure a Banshee’s damage is always incidental, not tactical. Running a Banshee tactically seems silly – it is a tormented spirit, and is probably fairly disinterested in throwing down with some grubby murderhobos.

dungeons and dragons monster manual 5

The sense of motion is also quite an achievement, as the Banshee is clearly emerging from some desolate place. It looks appropriately ethereal whilst still having some kind of definition, and manages to look furious and haunted all at once. Encountering a Banshee is a quest, and should lead to social encounters or investigations that uncover the history of the spirit.

dungeons and dragons monster manual 5

The Banshee seems to be best used as a quest-based monster – a random encounter with a banshee will feel cheap and lack the appropriate gravitas (especially as it has a fair chance of striking lucky and murdering an entire party in a single move – more on that later). This can be great as most of the encounter writes itself in your player’s heads, but also demeaning because players instantly know how to respond. The Banshee is another creature with an obvious mythological basis and instant recognition. It might actually make for an interesting campaign plot, although you'd have to come up with a way for the PCs to win. I briefly misremembered the author as Jack Vance, which would have made for a cooler reference. They are amusingly cheesy in my opinion, and certainly no more "This exists for players to kill it!" than oozes and Dire Wombats.John Varley's "Press Enter" is at the dark end of the tradition, although it's specifically about electronic devices. So in addition to "a wizard did it!" and "there's just a whole lot of free-floating magic here", you can add Animated Objects as a sort of special no-turn undead the overwhelming rage / anger / sadness / love / lust / loneliness of the former inhabitant manifests itself through the furnishings of the place.

dungeons and dragons monster manual 5

I think Stephen King did a short about that idea, too. This can be amusingly Disneyesque as in Beauty and the Beast or as dark as the Fritz Leiber story where the "protagonist's" anger suffused everything around him, so that his typewriter keys started attacking him as he tried to write, the band-aids attempted to smother him, and so on. Animated objects also have a long fantasy tradition when the Great Magical Event took place, the very furnishings gained a form of life.







Dungeons and dragons monster manual 5