The Deck Of Boons And Banes Subverts Traditional D&D Mechanics In Delightfully Surprising Ways

Creator Ginny Di and publisher Media Lab Books are releasing a third-party product for Dungeons & Dragons called The Game Master’s Deck of Boons and Banes, and as my friend group’s resident Dungeon Master I could not be more excited. Unlike The Deck of Many Things’ instantaneous chaos, the Deck of Boons and Banes introduces narrative-driven blessings and curses that can have long-standing consequences and lead to compelling roleplaying moments. My absolute favorite aspect of the deck is how some of the cards can subvert the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons that haven’t changed in years, even adding the potential for danger to traditionally safe activities (like sleeping!).

The Deck of Boons and Banes is both a deck of cards illustrated by artist Tim Foley and an accompanying booklet that details the stories and mechanical benefits/detriments that are tied to each card. There are 20 boons and 20 banes, for a 40-card deck that covers a wide variety of powerful abilities and imposing challenges. One card sees your character bonded with a helpful but mischievous faerie sprite, for example, while another brings your character’s murderous shadow to life. “The elevator pitch is I want to make your games feel more epic,” Di told me. “I want to make those highs feel higher and those lows feel lower.”

She continued: “One of the reasons that we go through [the highs and lows] is the drama and the magnitude, not just of our experiences, but also of our effects on the world. And that’s one of the things that has always drawn me to fantasy. When you hit high levels of play in games like D&D, you want that drama too. I personally think you want that drama the whole time, but particularly at those high levels. [But] I find that sometimes when you hit those high tiers, rewards and punishments both can become much more difficult for a Game Master to execute on that scale. There’s only so many cool magic items that you can get before it starts to become less exciting to get a cool magic item.”

And then in regards to punishments, Di said, “I think often when you hit those high levels, a lot of GMs will default to much more deadly punishments because we don’t know how else to elevate the drama. Either a punishment is just tedious, like session after session to have to deal with something annoying, or it’s deadly. And I feel like those should not be the only options. My goal with this deck was to create a tool that Game Masters could use to create big, dynamic experiences in gameplay. When you have a triumph or a reward or something good happening, you want that win to feel really huge and really epic and to affect the way that your gameplay goes going forward. As a player, when I receive a reward, I want to feel excited about how that reward is going to affect the game going forward.”

Like I said at the top, I’m most looking forward to how the deck will subvert certain aspects of playing D&D, specifically the mechanics where player agency doesn’t already exist. I like playing D&D, but parts of it lack much in the way of opportunity for those juicy story-driven choices that make the game so fun. Take Long Rests, for example, a mechanic that allows characters to sleep off deadly wounds and recover spent Class Features and spell slots. It’s a “safe” part of the game. There’s no true mechanical downsides to sleeping. Sure, your character can’t see an ambush coming, or they might get robbed in the middle of the night, but these story beats don’t deter a D&D party from avoiding rest altogether. They just add some risk. But what if going to sleep did carry terrifying consequences?

Di described Creeping Stoneflesh as an example. The bane initially causes one of the character’s legs to turn to stone, halving their movement speed and giving them disadvantage on Acrobatic and Athletic skill checks. It can’t be undone by the usual methods (like casting the Greater Restoration or Remove Curse spells), and every time your character chooses to sleep, you roll a d20 die. Depending on what you roll, your character might wake up with their other leg or one of their arms turned to stone. Maybe nothing will happen. Regardless, the act of sleep is now a gamble your character has to take. Running out of spell slots or accruing levels of Exhaustion is awful, but manageable (for a while, at least). Meanwhile, having both of your character’s legs turn to stone means they can no longer walk, and losing an arm to the creeping stone will prevent them from wielding two-handed weapons or leaving a hand free to cast spells.

That can create a terrifying degree of reckless momentum in a character’s story–they’re compelled to keep moving, both in the literal sense of skipping sleep so the Creeping Stoneflesh can’t continue and in the more narrative sense of encouraging the party to avoid standing around and talking and instead jump at any chance to fix what’s happened. That’s such a cool throughline in terms of both gameplay and storytelling, and the deck is filled with cards like this, allowing a Game Master to have a more tangible effect on how a player chooses to play the game.

“I didn’t want these cards to feel like they just took something that already happened and then made it stronger or made it weaker,” Di said. “I didn’t really want to be like, ‘The bane is that your armor class is lower,’ and you’re like, ‘Okay, that’s not…anything.’ I wanted all of them to feel really narrative and to feel like they bring something new to gameplay that is unique and that feels like it’s a shift to the way that you’re playing. Even though we are operating on the framework of D&D gameplay, which is consistent–I’m referencing long rests, I’m referencing spell slots, I’m referencing armor class, etc.–I wanted to make sure that each thing felt like a unique way to use that.”

She continued: “Let’s see. I’m trying to think of another example that takes something that we’re very used to and shakes it up I guess. This is another bane–they’re not all mean, but banes are so fun–called Plague of Frailty that just makes you sickly and no healer can figure out what’s going on with you. Healing does not affect you the same way, and it affects the way that you regain hit points. It affects how you receive healing. If you’re the target of a healing spell or you drink a healing potion, all of the benefits of that are just halved all the time. Healing is already something that, especially in D&D, sometimes can be tough to come by, especially depending on the game. People talk about not even wanting to heal in combat because the effect is so small compared to the effects of damage that it can be tough to justify it. And I think this is one of those things that it can be quite terrifying to be like, ‘Wow, already it’s tough to get enough healing to bring you all the way back up to full unless you are taking a long rest and this bane makes it even tougher to accomplish that.’ I think taking something that is safe or normally good and then just undercutting it is definitely one of the tactics that we use with this deck.”

And, as the name of the deck implies, it’s not all bad either. There are cool boons to be discovered and storylines associated with each one. “I definitely have a bunch of favorites, but I will say that the artist, Tim Foley, quickly catapulted some cards onto my favorites list or higher up on my list that weren’t even necessarily favorites until I saw his art for them,” Di said. “Predictably, I think anyone who sees this card will understand why it’s the first one that comes to my mind when you ask about favorites–this card, Fey Favorite.”

She continued: “This is a boon, Fey Favorite, and basically it’s that the fey have given you their favor, and because of that you gain access to a few fey-adjacent things. You get access to Fairy Fire as a spell [you can cast at will], and then also you get this Pixie that is now your BFF. They go along with you and hang out with you, and they act almost in the role of a familiar, except since there’s still a level of mischief and chaos to their interactions with you. It’s not like you’re giving them orders and they’re obeying necessarily, but you have a pixie that’s your little buddy and goes with you and will be your ally. And that is just, to me, that was one of those cards that came directly out of my heart. I was like, ‘What do I want? What benefit could I receive where I would be so amped?’ And the answer of a little pixie that’s your buddy is number one on my list.”

According to Di, each card comes with two associated quests. For the boons, the quests detail how a character might earn that benefit, while the quests connected to banes describe how an adventurer might rid themselves of the harmful effect or transfer it to someone else (like, say, the evil mage who killed your character’s parents and doesn’t deserve the peace of death). “And you can use them however you want, obviously,” Di said. “That’s true of this whole deck–you can just use it in whatever way is functional, even if that means scrapping most of what I’ve done. But for the banes, we want the side quests to remove the bane to give players an avenue through which they can undo this terrible thing. I generally don’t think that a curse that lasts forever is fun. I like giving [players] an opportunity to undo it. And then for boons, you are undertaking the quest to earn the boon. If that’s how you as a Game Master want to use it, you can send a player on a specific quest.”

As Di went on to say, the boons help open up a lot of ideas for character classes that are typically in service of someone or something, like a Cleric, Druid, Paladin, or Warlock. A ruler could task their loyal knight with a mission, for instance, or a deity or otherworldly spirit could ask a worshiper or follower to do something as part of a pilgrimage or pact. But each boon and bane is versatile enough to feasibly work with any character class so everyone at your table can feel the love and/or pain.

With how the boons and banes are designed, it’s unlikely that a party will share in the Game Master’s benevolence and condemnation equally, so Di felt it was important to tie each boon and bane to character action. These are not meant to be passed out willy-nilly, but rare blessings and curses that are earned with good storytelling.

“I think it’s very, very important to tie these to your character’s actions in game, which is why we have these side quests,” Di said. “To give you the boon, for example, you need to actually execute something and accomplish something in order to receive it. [Game Masters] don’t have to use it that way. But the implication is you have to earn a boon of this strength. And with banes, a great example would be from one of my home games where I’m a player–I have a friend in that game, and she plays a Cleric character named Vanya who is just a force of chaos. She just does whatever she feels like in the moment. She has no filter. She says things she’s not supposed to say to NPCs; she’s that character. We love her for it. But what that means is that knowingly, the player absolutely knows that she’s doing this, but she is doing things that are high risk.”

Di went on to describe a storyline in which her D&D party found a book in a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, and the Game Master described the book as malicious and having dark and negative energy. The party tried to sell the book, but the bad energy coming off of it made the vendor wary of paying a high price for it, so Vanya’s player–playing into their character’s characterization as a reckless and impulsive agent of chaos–had Vanya say that the clearly dangerous book was, in fact, not dangerous and then open it.

“We had been told in as certain terms as a Dungeon Master can [that the book was dangerous],” Di said, “That, I think, is the perfect example of a time when a bane would be a completely rational choice to make as a Game Master and would not be targeting a certain player. That player has invited chaos into her character’s life. That, to me, is indicative of a player who wants that kind of chaos. She wants something crazy to happen when she opens that book; she’s doing it on purpose. And I have been that player too. I’m absolutely that player. I think being able to read the room [to see] when is it appropriate to really bring in a high stakes thing [is important]. And as long as you communicate to your players that there are stakes around [an action]. ‘Hey, if you’re going to draw this card, if you’re going to open this book, if you’re going to unlock this tomb, it’s been telegraphed to you that this is a risky choice.’ And then when there is a consequence to that risky choice, nobody’s shocked. Nobody feels troubled. Nobody feels like they’re being targeted.”

There’s a lot of versatility in when you can use this deck as well. Though Di and editor Jeff Ashley designed the mechanics for each boon and bane to be something earned in a higher-level D&D 5e adventure, a scaling system allows Game Masters to rework how the boons and banes work for lower-level adventurers, and the language of each boon and bane ensures they can be used in similar TTRPG systems.

“[Scaling] was a huge part of our consideration for the mechanics for this deck because, unfortunately, the problem with high-level play–in my experience–is that because it is so much less common, because so many people never make it into those higher levels of play, resources for those levels are just fewer and farther between,” Di said. “As a creator of resources, as a creator of supplements, I am told frequently by my subscribers and my patrons that they prefer resources that are for lower-level play because they’re just more likely to use them. But what that means is that when people ask for resources for higher-level play, it can be tough for me to justify spending a lot of time on those kinds of resources–I know that it’ll be applicable to fewer people. One of our goals with this was not only to make it something that was valuable to those people in those high tiers of play who need more resources, but something that is accessible to lower-level games and also within those brackets, because obviously below level 10 and above level 10, even in those chunks, there’s still a huge difference. It was very important to us to make sure that each card had an element of built-in scaling that it would do on its own depending on what environment you’re playing in.”

She continued: “The nearest parallel for this deck within the canon of D&D is of course The Deck of Many Things, but a lot of The Deck of Many Things’ results are just instantaneous, one-off things. And because they are random, they are inherently divorced from the narrative of the game just because of the way that they’re being generated. And my goal for this was really to create something that was very interwoven with the story that could become a part of the story of your game, and that had its own story along with it that gave it flavor and narrative that could be dropped in and incorporated into your game. Each of these boons or banes, I want them to feel to the player character that receives them like they affect the story of that character. And because of that, I think that there is so much flavor in this deck that could be brought into other [systems] as long as you are willing to adapt. I think that that flavor is still valuable. If this was just mechanics, if this did not have [an accompanying] guidebook, if it was just mechanics and no flavor, then I would be like, ‘You’re better off just getting something [else] for [a different system].’ But I think because there is so much story in [the Deck of Boons and Banes] that could absolutely have value for other systems.”

I could see this deck working in systems like Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant, Paizo’s Pathfinder 2e, Metal Weave Games’ Tales of Myriad, and Critical Role’s Daggerheart. And speaking of systems, I asked Di if she ever planned to write the Deck of Boons and Banes for a different system given the ups-and-downs D&D has had over the past year and Wizards of the Coast planning to (somewhat) move on from D&D 5e for its new edition. She’s been working on a product for D&D during a year when there were quite a few months that players had no idea what the new edition was going to look like.

“It is scary to be a game writer who writes stuff for 5e during this time because you just don’t know until you know whether or not stuff is going to keep working,” Di said. “I was really hoping that the idea of things being backwards compatible was going to end up playing out and be an official thing because when I hosted Wizards Presents, they were like, ‘I think it’s going to be backwards compatible,’ and I was like, ‘Great,’ but then a year later, I had not written the book [for the Deck of Boons and Banes] yet and I wasn’t 100% sure that [the backwards compatibility promise] was going to end up being true. And I am relieved now. I’m very relieved about the way that that has ended up shaking out. Obviously, there are changes that make that backwards compatibility a little bit more complicated… But I feel pretty confident that the things that I’ve written into this deck were built on this stable foundation of how the game works [and] that [Wizards of the Coast] really made an effort to not change too much in the 2024 rule books.

She continued: “I think there are a lot of changes in those new rule books that are neat and good and positive, and there are also some where I’m like, ‘What up with that?’ But that’s inevitable, I think, when anything that you love and that you’re very familiar with gets adjusted. I feel confident with this deck that it will be just as functional at the table as it would’ve been with 5e. Obviously we wrote it in the context of 5e. There’s a very real possibility–and I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but there is a real possibility–that there’s something in this card deck that’s like, the language has slightly changed now, or we don’t quite do that thing the same way anymore. But I also think that it’s going to take a really long time for people to shift their tables over to the new game [system]. And some tables just won’t.”

That didn’t stop Di from wondering whether she should at least delay working on the deck if only to see how the new D&D edition was going to shake out. “But ultimately, when I started working on this almost a full year ago, I just hit this point where I had to be like, ‘I can’t stop all of my work on the off chance that something is going to get changed that ends up making that work useless,'” Di told me. “I basically had to just say, ‘I’m going to keep creating and I’m going to keep creating with the information that I have now, and when we get new information, if things need to change, if I need to adapt, then I will adapt.’ But I wasn’t willing to just press pause on everything I was creating to just exist in limbo for a year.”

You can preorder The Game Master’s Deck Of Boons And Banes from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Bookshop, and Indigo. The deck is set to launch on October 1.