Not every treasure belongs in a hoard, not every bauble is traded for coin.
Sometimes you want to reward your player characters with the favor of the local townsfolk, with a ship captain's gratitude, or a city watchman's respect. But just what does a caravan leader's respect earn your heroes at the end of the day? Now the answer is easy with 101 NPC Boons! Building on the concepts first discussed in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: GameMastery Guide, 101 NPC Boons helps provide nonmonetary treasure for those situations where stealing a dead man's boots just won't do.
Broken down by regions like Urban, Rural, Nautical, or Wilderness, and sorted by professions or social distinctions, 101 NPC Boons presents tokens of appreciation from all walks of life for any group of adventurers. There are eight new play-ready NPCs from CR 2 to 12 utilizing material from In the Company of Giants, The Ironborn of Questhaven, Wyrd of Questhaven, The Secrets of Divine Channeling, and The Secrets of the Luckbringer. Feats, traits and other interesting material from all of those products have been presented in easy-to-integrate sidebars and notes and ensuring these NPCs have everything necessary to quickly become a part of your game's story.
So do yourself a favor you won't regret—pick up 101 NPC Boons today!
Author: Ben McFarland Cover Artist: Edmund Leighton Pages: 20
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On the positive side, I always liked the idea of having a list of rewards for PCs that isn't just hand them some items or gold. It makes games feel less like an MMO and more like a story, and there are plenty of examples here. Plus there are quite a few NPC stats using some of Rite's classes/races.
On the negative side, a lot of the examples are pretty obvious kinds of boons, and it doesn't cover things like magical gifts or favors or any new rules to cover that. It's more of an example book of mundane things with a bunch of NPC stats. The NPC stats also break it up a lot making the list of boons a bit making it a bit hard to read.
The book would be at three stars for being useful but not really feeling vital or indispensable when forming NPC Boons, but it goes up to four stars because the NPC stat blocks inflate it's usefulness, and the flavor in which the boons are presented keeps the boons interesting.
This product is 25 pages long. It starts with a cover and credits. (2 pages)
Urban Boons (10 pages)
This section starts off talking about boons and how not all treasure goes in a chest. This is about rewards you can give your PC's that is not treasure. The first section is Urban boons, below is a few samples.
Beat Guard – friends with a city watchman, helps with gather information roles and getting a discount at a inn.
Politicians – A local lord is willing to loan out money and items to the party.
Guild leader – they can give discounts on their craft, might know places to hide, or provide some local history about those that have used their services.
Caravan Leader – Allows the group to travel with them in safety, local knowledge of good camp sites, bandits and other dangers, who is open to bribes etc.
Beggars – Know about the sewers, or out of the way locations, provide local knowledge, gather information, following others etc.
There is also 4 full stat blocks and 5 feats in this section.
Rural Boons (5 pages)
This section is a list of varies rural boons one can find around villages and towns. Below is a few examples.
Sheriff – local knowledge, escort, local threats, helpful people, and may even come with the PC's as a henchmen for short periods.
Rancher – low cost on some animals, access to basic gear, some local knowledge and a safe haven.
This section also has 1 full stat block, 3 new feats and a new domain.
Frontier Boons (3 pages)
At the edge of civilization, below is a few examples.
Explorer – Wide ranging knowledge over a wide area, know of local ruins, dangers, can act as a guide or with trade goods.
This section has one full stat block.
Nautical Boons (2 pages)
Boons that focus on sea travel, below is a few examples.
Harbor Master – reduce harbor fee, knowledge on pirates, smuggling, law raids etc.
Sea Captain – Can provide passage, safe havens or harbors, knowledge about pirates and other hazards.
This section has one full stat block.
Wilderness Boons (2 pages)
A few boons of things in the wilderness. Below is a example.
Fae – local knowledge, learn about old ruins or dungeons, local dangers and a connection to the local faerie court.
This section has one full stat block.
It ends with a OGL and ads. (3 pages)
Closing thoughts. The art work is black and white and ranges from meh to pretty good. Editing and layout are well done. While I didn't notice any spelling errors, I did notice one layout error. If you are looking for idea's to provide your PC's with rewards with out giving them more magic items or gold, then these are useful items. Now let me say I did like the book, but I have some nitpicks with it. First I could have done with out the stat blocks, honestly since you never know what level the PC's will be when you give them access to one of these boons. The stat blocks are of very little use, unless you use the boon at that level. Plus I would rather customize any NPC's to fit the campaign location and the PC's. Which means I felt the stat blocks was while well done honestly a waste of space that could have been better used.
Secondly I think the a better format or to me a more useful way to do this, would have been to list each type, with a paragraph or two on what all they can provide in way of bonuses and boons and then list 3-5 NPC's. Just a name and a few lines to a paragraph about them, a few useful RP and personality traits or a bit of generic history etc. So what's my rating? Well I do really like the idea of this project and what I like of it, I really like a lot. But I just think it could have been done better and in a more useful way. So I am giving this a 4 star, but could have been a 5 with some tweaks I think.
This file is 25 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page SRD and 2 pages of ads, so let’s take a look at what can be considered npc-boons on the 20 pages!
So…what are boons? Ever wanted to reward your PCs with something different than treasure? What about personal favors? Yep, that’s where we’re going. The boons presented herein can be categorized broadly into the categories urban, frontier, rural, nautical and wilderness and some of the characters and 8 of them get their own respective stat-blocks in order to better enable you to judge what they can or cannot do. The obvious favors with the city-guard make for the first couple of boons, thankfully including names so you don’t have to improvise on the fly. The bureaucrat and the judge as well as the upper class are more interesting, as is the ironborn guard captain who gets full stats,as does the cool wyrd luckbringer/rogue Cirith Masked Starfall. If you haven’t checked the wyrd, ironborn and luckbringer out, you might want to – the pdfs are all great. The tendency to give the sample, generalist and extremely easy to implement boon-givers a name and minor backstory, sometimes even with a secret, makes writing adventures around the boons and judging on how the PCs might obtain them, rather easy. Want an example?
Well, there’s an insane bard (?) or oracle who is in love with a frog washed down the storm drain. Gold!
A divine channeler sample-character is also provided, including all the information you need to run him, so if you haven’t picked up Secrets of divine channeling”, no problem! The same goes for a rather cool Jotunnar taskshaper explorer character, of course. You see how this book goes beyond being a bland list of skill- and monetary bonuses, not only in the characters that get their statblocks, but also in e.g. short sections on fae-boons, a ghost-contact and even an awakened advanced deer.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to the traditional b/w-two-column standard of RiP and the stock-art is nice, the non-stock-art even better. The pdf is bookmarked for easy navigation. Oh boy, this is hard. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how to rate this book, as I’ve never read one like it before, which definitely is a plus. First of all, I want you to know that neither mechanically, nor with regards to the fluff there is anything wrong with this pdf. It actually features a lot cool ideas and characters that can easily serve to populate a given setting, be it a city or a rural area and the general usability of this book makes it a valuable asset to have as a DM. The statblocks make for another bonus, as the characters provided are of the trademark cool race/class combination or RiP. It serves as a nice guide to some of the other RiP-publications, offering excellent sneak peeks at pdfs you might have missed. This is a humble book, not a crunch-heavy list that beats you over the head with values and calculations. Nor is it an intricately-woven story connecting all the NPCs. Rather, 101 NPC boons is just that: A lot of useful boons with some statblocks and great, evocative ideas in-between. I sincerely believe that almost any DM should and could use this book, if only as a nice little library to help if (s)he has to improvise an NPC for a plan of the PCs. The only thing I truly missed in this easy to implement book was a named NPC with a truly unique boon. And yes, I realize that e.g. luckbringer, channeler and taskshaper serve this niche for those of you who don’t yet know them, but I have read, reviewed and used them all and thus for me personally that doesn’t count. ;) In the end, though, I practically have to settle on a final verdict of 5 stars, as this book is severely needed out there, does something different and is immensely useful.
