Strength Bows

Strength Bows

Building Strength Bows is a closely guarded secret. Building such a bow is a long, expensive and exhausting process and so few are around. To begin the bow is composed primarily of steel specially wrought so it has a high tensile strength. Finding high enough especially high-quality iron and the other materials needed to alloy with it is difficult. The steel is reinforced with horn and sinew to control how it bends and springs. Tradition is that the horn and sinew should come from some powerful beast slain personally by the person the bow is being built for but this does not have any true bearing on the crafting of the bow. The bow must be designed as a short recuve bow, any attempt to make a long or composite strength bow will fail, resulting at best in just a normal bow or at worst with something that does work at all.

While crafting the bow the bowyer must make a crafting check with one of the following results:

Critical Failure: Bow appears to be a regular strength bow but sometime in the next month or two will snap when drawn causing 2d4+1 damage to the wielder.  

Failure: The bowyer has failed to make a strength bow but may reroll. If the reroll is successful then instead they have created a normal bow out of expensive materials, on a second failure the result is so flawed cannot even be used as a normal bow.

Success: The bowyer has created a strength bow. Strength bows can only be effectively used by an archer with a strength of at least 17 but allows the archer to add half of their Strength bonuses to hit and damage to their attacks in addition to the Dexterity bonus to hit. Additionally the bow adds half (rounded down) of the wielder’s strength bonus to hit to its range categories (e.g. a +2 bonus to hit these bows have +1, +2, and +3 to each range category).

Critical Success: The bowyer has created a marvel; a Greater Strength bow. These bows can only be effectively used by an archer with exceptional strength (at least 18/01) and allow an archer to add all of their Strength bonuses to hit and damage to their attacks in addition to the Dexterity bonus to hit. The bow adds the wielder’s STR to hit bonus to each range category (e.g. if they have +3 to hit add +3, +6, and +9 to the normal short bow range categories). Additionally, if the arrow fired from this type of bow does maximum damage against a medium or smaller target then target is also knocked prone.