Bandits: Eight New Creatures and a Rant

As always, we aim to release our content in whatever way is most useful for you, which is why here too we're once again taking the approach of a massive accompanying release of Beneos creatures, spells, and loot.

If you haven't, check out the Modular Outpost!

When I approach relatively simple creatures like bandits, the first thing I always ask myself is what you want from the creature. Sure, you can keep them as simple as possible, since it's just a throwaway bandit, but making it simpler is always something you can do as a DM. I use my own creatures all the time, and not every outing or every situation calls for me to use every ability every time. But I know I have them when the situation develops in a direction where they can add something to the tension or the variety.

Along with the maps, Beneos Creatures, Spells & Loot relases the following creatures:

• Bandit Roadscourge, the crew's shrewd leader

• Bandit Coachbreaker, the muscle and heart of the crew

• Bandit Ragstitcher, an exiled field surgeon

• Bandit Deceiver, a nimble-fingered mage fallen on hard times

• Bandit Carrion Crow, a versatile sniper

• Bandit Trapper, a sadistic pyromaniac

• Hound, a bandit's best friend

• Pack of Hounds, a multitude of best friends

This release contains basically a complete overhaul for any kind of bandit archetype, you will never be forced to use SRD bandits, bandit captains, thugs or whatever else passes for this genre staple again. They synergize with each other, with the Roadscourge at the head of the operation, the Ragstitcher keeping them from keeling over and the Carrion Crow delivering poignant ranged support, while the Coachbreaker does exactly what his name entails.

Because Bandits are dear to my heart and are emblematic for my design process, I want delve a bit deeper.

Establishing Identity

I want a DM to look at my creatures and immediately understand why this creature is called what it's called, why it does what it does, and why that's a story the players will enjoy experiencing over the course of a fight.

And I want a DM to look at the statblocks and have a clear picture, a story emerge that reflects this identity and makes it tangible for the players, through the dynamic between the creatures (especially when they belong to a faction and have synergies) or through the interactions of the creature's abilities with the players. The DM can always add as much of their own as they want, but they don't have to.

That's why it winds me up to no end every time I see guards or bandits that are just walking suits of light, medium, or heavy armor with one or two attacks per round. There's so much flavor in downtrodden, shrewd, and grimy bandits stalking a section of the road. Why not take these images of cart chases, trapped roadways, gold teeth, eyepatches, and knives glistening in the dark and bake them into the statblock, so the DM doesn't have to work overtime juggling mediocre statblocks and turning an interesting setpiece into a boring slog that has run its course after two rounds of combat.

This is not a creature, this is just math:

An Example

Your new favourite bandits share one trait: Frontier Fighters. Apart from some quality of life stuff that lets you, the DM, bypass limitations reservered for the players to get the most out of a creature while also maintaing, even underlining their identity, lets them drop to 1 hit point instead of 0 hit points once per day.

Standard stuff, usually used by berserker-type enemies where you want to telegraph that they keep on fighting. You could just give them more hit points, but you want to communicate the fact that they would have died and didn't. In this case, it lets the bandits keep fighting. But that's not the whole story, because they also share a reaction: Survival Instinct. Instead of just dropping to 1 hit point to keep getting smacked in the head, the bandit tries to play dead. It's a gamble, but maybe it pays off. You act dead and maybe you live to fight another day, or you get an opening later on, when the whole gang is down but has agreed on a signal to rise again for one surprising last strike.

If you think that this is too much text for a CR 3 creature, remember that you don't have to use any of this. If you just need a sad sack full of hit points for a quick beatdown, worry not! But you can do that yourself without even having to write anything down.

But the reason why there is "so much text" is the following:

These aren't just rules or game mechanics. This is actually pages upon pages of fluff, story hooks or pre-combat prompts condensed to a few lines of text. And if you start seeing it that way, this isn't much text at all.

Scenario: The Living Dead

The players travel down a muddy road through the countryside, yada yada. They've been warned of bandits, so it's no surprise when they find a bunch of bodies scattered across the road. Maybe they stop to help, maybe they ignore them. Now, of course the bodies aren't actually dead; it's the bandits playing dead. It's genius, really. They can gauge the party's size, maybe listen in on their musings about whether or not to help, get an idea of what they would be up against if they decide to attack. If the party stops to help, the bandits could even spin a tale of being the victims of an ambush themselves, playing along to find the perfect moment to strike.

You could go so far as to pull a switcheroo: the bandits are actually badly hurt and actually only half of them is "playing" dead because of a past encounter a few minutes ago. Now the the players arrive, and the bandits see a chance to manipulate the players into going after the bandits' original targets that managed to fend them off.

This doesn't have to work, not even for a second, but it gives your players room for interaction and establishes so much about the bandits that when combat begins, the players already know them to be deceitful and untrustworthy, and everything the bandits do now adds to that narrative. It gives them character, it gives them an agenda, it creates a narrative.

I could write paragraphs like this for every ability of every creature, but I don't have to. I mean, I do just that, but I do it in our special language that conveys all of the above into the rules you "need" to pull this off and by doing that, it evokes the images you then use to put the creature to use.

Gameplay = Narrative

And then the bandits' individual abilities tell more stories over the course of the fight. Every bandit archetype, from the classic dim-witted bruiser-brawler-tank Coachbreaker to the cunning Ragstitcher, is clearly characterized through its abilities and gives the players something to reflect on, a way to set their own impulses through engaging with the enemy. That doesn't work when you're just fighting 17 hit points in leather armor wielding a scimitar, because the players know these creatures and no longer see them as real beings but as a pile of numbers. The players stop thinking in terms of the world and only think in game mechanics, and at that point the fight is over and can be narrated away, because it has nothing left to offer, mechanically or narratively.

Our creatures are actors, not extras

Our statblocks don’t just serve as the building blocks of an encounter; you can create an entire session just by extrapolating from a creature’s abilities. Every creature’s statblock is designed to convey its identity in gameplay terms, and you can pick and choose any part of any statblock to use as a narrative hook for a session and have your players meaningfully make the connection during the climactic encounter.

The Frontier Fighters - Survival Instinct connection is just one of several I built into the bandits’ statblocks, as they synergize meaningfully on different levels too, with specialists like the Deceiver or the Ragstitcher being able to put a twist on the shared Survival Instinct reaction, for example.

Wrap-up

And if you use our creatures, you know this to be true. That it’s easier to tell great stories and run cool encounters when using our creatures, because they aren’t made to just give you a rough outline you can toss into the meat grinder; they are actors that play their role well. A great actor can elevate the stage through craft alone, and our bandits can turn the most basic “you get attacked while escorting a treasure chest” setup into a layered, interactive, and meaningful encounter with a genre classic.

These creatures are perfectly suited for any kind of roadside ambush or back alley mugging and paired with the already existing Gutterfists, this collection grows into a veritable army of mean-looking motherfoolers. Each of them plays their role well and will turn any kind of roadside ambush into an interesting setpiece, rather than a waste of everyone's time.

Thank you for reading, thank you for supporting, and have fun with this release!