Crothian
First Post
Divine Forces Benton
Gods can be an important part of a fantasy game. It is a tightrope of information to walk though as people want different things from gods. Some wants lots of information but for me it is not the amount of info but how useful the information is. A nice creation myth is nice to read but usually has little bearing on a campaign or character. Lots of times it seems mechanical information is the most useful but then there is a solid group of gamers that despise stats for gods. Obviously a writer and book can not hope to please everyone but this one does a nice job of giving a wide amount of useful information.
Divine Forces Benton is a PDF by Interactive Designs. It is a sixteen page PDF. The book has a very basic lay out and it does seem shorter then the actual page count suggests. It also has basic book marks.
The strength of the book though is in the writing. The PDF is all about Benton, a goddess of luck, love, music and other performing arts, material wealth, and the sea. Those are quite a bit of areas for the goddess to cover and they do not really seem to go together all that well to me. The book explains her connection to a group of gods called the Seven Golden Gods.
It has a nice section of Benton in art work. This is a descriptive section but these types of details can be difficult to use in a game. It would be nice if the writer would include ideas to make use of some of the things they place in books. Not all players and DMs are going to be able to find uses for them and might need a little help with it. They have a section on the clergy and it is just a little longer then the section about the art. It has the domains for the clerics but it does not list the deity’s favored weapon.
The book has the avatar’s stats for those people that want them. More importantly though it has two unique items of the good listed. The items have the usual defining characters that items have with one really good addition. Each item specifically lists how the items can get in the hands of followers and what happens if the items are stolen or used in ways Benton does not approve of. These are nice details that easily lend themselves to adventures.
There is a prestige class called the Priest of Benten. It is actually not the easiest of classes to get into. It requires a level of Bard, 3rd level divine spells, BAB of +4, certain domains, and certain skills. The Bard level though gets mostly wasted as the class offers no bard spells or bardic knowledge. It has a few things that can be done with the perform skill but not much else. The class though is pretty good as it has a good list of class skills, full divine spellcasting, and it gains something every level. Saves are as a bard, attack bonus is as a cleric, and it has hit points as a cleric. The class gets some bonus domain and one thing I find a little odd is that they can get domains that are not domains of their deity.
This is a good and complete god that should be easy to add to one’s campaign. There is quite a bit of information here and really the only big thing I feel is missing is ways to adapt the god to one’s own campaign setting and pantheon of gods. But then few books seem to try to come up with other ways in which they can be used.
Gods can be an important part of a fantasy game. It is a tightrope of information to walk though as people want different things from gods. Some wants lots of information but for me it is not the amount of info but how useful the information is. A nice creation myth is nice to read but usually has little bearing on a campaign or character. Lots of times it seems mechanical information is the most useful but then there is a solid group of gamers that despise stats for gods. Obviously a writer and book can not hope to please everyone but this one does a nice job of giving a wide amount of useful information.
Divine Forces Benton is a PDF by Interactive Designs. It is a sixteen page PDF. The book has a very basic lay out and it does seem shorter then the actual page count suggests. It also has basic book marks.
The strength of the book though is in the writing. The PDF is all about Benton, a goddess of luck, love, music and other performing arts, material wealth, and the sea. Those are quite a bit of areas for the goddess to cover and they do not really seem to go together all that well to me. The book explains her connection to a group of gods called the Seven Golden Gods.
It has a nice section of Benton in art work. This is a descriptive section but these types of details can be difficult to use in a game. It would be nice if the writer would include ideas to make use of some of the things they place in books. Not all players and DMs are going to be able to find uses for them and might need a little help with it. They have a section on the clergy and it is just a little longer then the section about the art. It has the domains for the clerics but it does not list the deity’s favored weapon.
The book has the avatar’s stats for those people that want them. More importantly though it has two unique items of the good listed. The items have the usual defining characters that items have with one really good addition. Each item specifically lists how the items can get in the hands of followers and what happens if the items are stolen or used in ways Benton does not approve of. These are nice details that easily lend themselves to adventures.
There is a prestige class called the Priest of Benten. It is actually not the easiest of classes to get into. It requires a level of Bard, 3rd level divine spells, BAB of +4, certain domains, and certain skills. The Bard level though gets mostly wasted as the class offers no bard spells or bardic knowledge. It has a few things that can be done with the perform skill but not much else. The class though is pretty good as it has a good list of class skills, full divine spellcasting, and it gains something every level. Saves are as a bard, attack bonus is as a cleric, and it has hit points as a cleric. The class gets some bonus domain and one thing I find a little odd is that they can get domains that are not domains of their deity.
This is a good and complete god that should be easy to add to one’s campaign. There is quite a bit of information here and really the only big thing I feel is missing is ways to adapt the god to one’s own campaign setting and pantheon of gods. But then few books seem to try to come up with other ways in which they can be used.
