[PFS] Homunculist's Homunculus Familiar

[Invictus Novo]

I'm new to the Pathfinder Society play, but have been playing D&D and Pathfinder for years. That said, I'm interested in playing a Homunculist in PFS play and have a few questions.

The wording for this ability is:
"The homunculist has created a living homunculus in the shape of an animal or vermin. It functions in all ways as a familiar, treating the homunculist's alchemist level as his effective wizard level."

Questions:
1) What stats do we use for the familiar? Is it the stats of the animal or vermin of which it takes the shape, the homunculus stats (just looking like an animal/vermin), or some hybrid?
2) Does it retain the construct abilities as the homunculus does?
3) What is it's type? Construct or animal/vermin?
4) Does it qualify us for the Improved Familiar feat?
5) Could you have this ability, as well as take the Tumor Familiar discovery at the same time?

Thanks, I want to make sure if I create this character that everything goes smoothly in the PFS games I play (especially since I don't know the GMs).

[Gisher]

It is really unclear. The text seems to be missing a lot of essential information. For what it is worth, the writer chimed in on his original version.

Rogue Eidolon wrote:

N. Jolly wrote:

So any word on what a 'living' homunculus

I've been holding off because this one is more complicated. I can't comment in a way that's more than speculation to the homunculist because my clarification was cut, likely but not certainly to copyfit. However, I will post a rundown of how it started, but I'm using my Rogue Eidolon alias because as much as my clarifications weren't official FAQs before, this is completely and utterly unofficial. With that out of the way, here's the rundown of how it went (and how I'll run it in my games):

Super Unofficial Rundown:
The homunculist has actually created life. What they created is a living creature that, as the ability says "It functions in all ways as a familiar". So you pick hedgehog, and you get the exact same hedgehog as everyone else does, except you created it in a lab because you are just that awesome. You go Victor Frankenstein! Despite the auto-link feature on d20pfsrd that sometimes overlinks things, this does not make it the specific creature "homunculus." That paragraph is the same one I sent in. However, I realized there might be some ambiguity, so to make sure this was super-clear, I included a later ability that specified what would happen if the homunculist later decided to take Improved Familiar and get the actual creature type homunculus (which seemed like something a homunculist player would want to do). After all, it's a construct, and their special familiar is alive. Here's what it said:

Quote:

Life Given Form (Ex): If the homunculist takes the Improved Familiar feat, he may only select the homunculus. Despite being of type construct, a homunculist’s homunculus is actually a living creature with 10 Constitution, losing all construct traits.

In other words, you could take Improved Familiar to get a homunculus, but if you did, since your special creation is alive, you get a living creature with 10 Con and no construct traits. With this text gone, now if you take Improved Familiar and select homunculus, you're going to get the non-living one by RAW, but hopefully that at least resolves the ambiguity about what's supposed to happen if you don't do that.