Bantha
TR 2Beast · Large·Recommended levels: 3-5
Abilities
Saves
- STR +8
- CON +6
Skills
- Athletics +8
- Endurance +6
- Perception +4
Languages
- —
Traits
Banthas do not scatter when threatened; they close ranks. While another bantha is within 10 ft, this bantha has Advantage on saving throws against being Frightened.
An adult bantha weighs around four thousand kilograms and does not go where it does not wish to. It has Advantage on saving throws against being knocked Prone, moved against its will, or restrained.
A bantha will not attack unless it is attacked, its herd or rider is threatened, or a bonded rider commands it. Once roused it stays roused until the threat leaves or it is calmed with an Action and a DC 12 Survival check.
Actions
Lore
Banthas are the great shaggy herd animals of Tatooine — two to two and a half metres at the shoulder, four thousand kilograms of muscle under a coat of brown-black hair, and a pair of heavy spiralled horns carried by bulls and cows alike. Those horns grow a new knob each year, so a bantha's age can be read off its head by anyone who knows how to count them.
They are social to the core. Banthas move in herds, keep station on one another, and close ranks rather than scatter when something threatens the group — behaviour that makes them both easy to drive and genuinely dangerous to harass. A startled bantha is an inconvenience. A bantha that has decided the thing in front of it is a threat to the herd is four tonnes travelling in a straight line.
The Tusken Raiders of Tatooine ride them, and the relationship goes considerably deeper than transport. Tuskens keep banthas as mounts and as companions, bond individually with them, and — for all the fearsome reputation the clans carry offworld — do not kill them for meat or hide. Beyond Tatooine the animals have been bred on worlds across the galaxy as draught stock and as a milk source, and separate populations have drifted into their own forms, including the sparser-coated dune bantha of Tatooine itself and the long-haired banthas of Kashyyyk.
In Play
A bantha is a wall that does not want to fight you, which makes it the opposite encounter to the ronto standing next to it in the bestiary. It will not start anything — Docile Until Roused means the party chooses whether this becomes a fight — but Stubborn Bulk makes it nearly impossible to shift, and once roused it hits considerably harder than its Threat Rating suggests.
Trample is the thing to build around. A bantha crossing a line of characters in a straight line forces a DC 16 Dexterity save from everyone in its path, and a prone party in open desert is a party that has lost the initiative. Herds amplify everything: Herd Defence means they do not break and run, so a party that provokes one bantha has provoked all of them.
Against Tusken Raiders, the bantha is the encounter's centre of gravity — mounted raiders fight at reach from an armoured platform that fights back on its own account.
Adventure Hooks
- The Bonded Pair — A Tusken's bantha has been taken and sold through a settlement's stock pens. The clan will come for it. There is a short window to work out who sold it before they arrive.
- Count the Rings — A trader is selling a 'young' bantha at a young bantha's price. The horn knobs say otherwise, and the trader is not the sort to be corrected in public.
- Stampede Route — A herd is drifting onto a settlement's only approach road, and the obvious solution — drive them off with repulsorlift engines — will send four tonnes of panicking animal straight through the market instead.