Forgotten Weapons: Stonebow

[TheLe]

[imager]http://www.thele.com/thelegames/images/tn/forgottenweapons_stonebow_tn200w.jpg[/imager]The Stonebow. An ancient weapon designed to work much like a crossbow, but using stones as it's primary ammunition. This new series from The Le Games and Chaos Drake Press takes a look at this fascinating weapon and gives you all of it's glorious d20 stats for use in your campaign world. Inside you will find everything you need to know about the Stonebow, Repeating Stonebow, and the Stonebow Sworn (prestige class). But wait, there's more. Also included are brand new feats and new spells, to better balance out this marvelous weapon.

This zip file contains a fully illustrated Landscape PDF for easy online reading, A fully illustrated Portrait PDF for printing, and our standard no-image Rich-Text-Format version so that you can cut/copy/paste to your hearts content (and print without wasting alot of ink)! Each pdf is fully bookmarked for easy viewing.

Still not sure? Check out the free Demo!

 

[Crothian]

Stone Bow

Stone Bow

Now here is an interesting idea for a book. They have taken a lesser known weapon from history and expanded on it for the fantasy game. I like how they explain how the Stonebow was a hunter’s weapon and not ever used in warfare. I like that they have had the weapon adopted by the dwarves as a cross bow like weapon that shots rocks is defiantly something that they would enjoy. However in the end the book fails to make the Stonebow anything more then a sub optimal, if cool weapon. In today’s d20 world were people seem to care way to much about balance and being competitive in power I do not foresee many people taking a weaker weapon for long.

The book comes in a few nice formats. There is one for printing, one for on screen viewing, and a rich text format. The Le Games has been doing this for most of their releases and it is a very nice option. The lay out of the book and art though are not that impressive. It is an easy book to read and follow but they really do not add anything to the book. The PDF is book marked but not book marked that well.

The book starts of with a short historical piece of the Stone bow and then moves into some options like the repeating stone bow and types of ammunition. There really should have been a wider variety of mundane options and bullets here. There are only three kinds of new bullets, phosphorous, shatter, and smoke. There are two new feats designed specifically for the Stonebow. The first allows alchemical shots to be fired and the other allows for a skipping shot off of a flat wall to get around cover. Like the bullet they are nicely done but I would have liked to see more feats for the weapon.

There is a new prestige class called the Stonebow Sworn. It is limited to only dwarves and the descriptions has it that mostly women are in this class. The class has some neat abilities but too much of it like extra feats and some spell like abilities once per day are just okay. The class idea is cool and the boulder and volley abilities are cool, but the rest of the class just is not that mechanically interesting. The class does get some spells and there are twelve new spells in here. They offer some interesting options to the Stonbow like allowing the ammo to become ice or lightning. But over all the spells seem a bit weak for the level assigned next to the destructive power of the direct fire spells of the same wizard spell level.

The book has some nice potential but I think a little more creativity and length could be given to the subject. It for me is a nice first step and as a DM I would have plenty of things to start a foundation for creating more things for the Stonebow.