Devil's Theatre's page

I'm looking into making a normal magical beast with animal level intelligence sentient and smart enough to be a study-based spellcaster and have no idea how to go about it.

Awaken doesn't work on the monster type and templates alter planes of origin, appearence, heritage or some combination of all of the above. So I don't want it to be dependent on such inherited templates. (Although I am not opposed entirely to them in specific instances.)

While one use I want would be perfectly suited to a half-dragon basilisk, since I would want this particular monstrous NPC to be a wizard and those two only net you a 4 Int, 9 if you raise it to max via permenant magic spells like Wish (which you may take note isn't even enough to get Cantrips!)

Also I like the mythos behind intelligent magical beasts and would like to be able to use NPCs like talking, intelligent (but otherwise normal) blink dogs and displacer beasts and the like.

Lastly, my campaign does incorporate D&D 3rd edition material (and of course it's revision "3.5") but not any (other) third party material.