I am thinking of playing a Elven Ranger in an upcoming campaign and I will be just going straight Pathfinder Ranger 1-20, but I asked my DM if I could use the Ranger Substitution levels from Races of the Wild and he agreed. I was going to take the Elven Hound companion at 4th level and realized he needed to be slightly updated with the new way animal companions work. Here is my conversion, feedback is encouraged.
Elven Hound(Cooshee)
Starting Statistics: Size Medium; Speed 50ft; AC +4 Natural Armor; Attack Bite(1d6); Ability Scores Str 17, Dex 17, Con 13, Int 2, Wis 12, Cha 8; Special Qualities Immune to sleep, low-light vision, resist enchantment, scent, sprint
7th Level Advancement: Size Large; AC +2 Natural Armor; Attack Bite(1d8); Ability Scores Str +8, Dex -2, Con +4
The starting statistics are a straight transfer over from RotW, no conversion needed(excpet for their bite damage which was 1d8 with the Improved Natural Attack feat, so I just removed the feat for the base creature reducing the damage back down). The 7th level advancement pretty much follows suit with the rest of the medium sized creatures becoming large(Ape, Big Cat, Wolf) for its Stats, Damage, and AC increases.
Now I do have a couple questions, first one is if you increase your companions Int to 3 or higher, what affect does this have, does he learn to understand a language or gain any other special abilities now that he is no longer of "animal intellignece"? Second question is, being a magical beast, would my Elven Hound companion get a d10 HD and Full BAB as he progressed along the animal companion chart?
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I am thinking of playing a Elven Ranger in an upcoming campaign and I will be just going straight Pathfinder Ranger 1-20, but I asked my DM if I could use the Ranger Substitution levels from Races of the Wild and he agreed. I was going to take the Elven Hound companion at 4th level and realized he needed to be slightly updated with the new way animal companions work. Here is my conversion, feedback is encouraged.
Elven Hound(Cooshee)
Starting Statistics: Size Medium; Speed 50ft; AC +4 Natural Armor; Attack Bite(1d6); Ability Scores Str 17, Dex 17, Con 13, Int 2, Wis 12, Cha 8; Special Qualities Immune to sleep, low-light vision, resist enchantment, scent, sprint7th Level Advancement: Size Large; AC +2 Natural Armor; Attack Bite(1d8); Ability Scores Str +8, Dex -2, Con +4
The starting statistics are a straight transfer over from RotW, no conversion needed(excpet for their bite damage which was 1d8 with the Improved Natural Attack feat, so I just removed the feat for the base creature reducing the damage back down). The 7th level advancement pretty much follows suit with the rest of the medium sized creatures becoming large(Ape, Big Cat, Wolf) for its Stats, Damage, and AC increases.
Now I do have a couple questions, first one is if you increase your companions Int to 3 or higher, what affect does this have, does he learn to understand a language or gain any other special abilities now that he is no longer of "animal intellignece"? Second question is, being a magical beast, would my Elven Hound companion get a d10 HD and Full BAB as he progressed along the animal companion chart?
I just found this today, as I am looking at generating some exotic companion options for my next campaign. I have a couple of thoughts for you and will try to answer your questions. Regarding the HD, animal companions are just that animals. we have no rules we can model a magical beast from, so as far as HD you're on your own. Since the companions are all essentially balanced in ability, I would say that the elven hound should have d8s to keep it on par with the other animal options. 3 int, simply opens up the full feat list, as described in the core rule book.
As for your stating of the hound, I think you may have it overpowered. I looked up the hound and you start it as a full stat, full size at level one. None of the companions do that from the get go (even wolf and ape are arguably juvenile dire animals). It appears that all of the companions mechanically followed a simple formula as follows:
1- at 1st level the animal is one size category smaller than the adult version. All attack dice are lowered via size rules (d8 becomes d6, d6 a d4, etc...) and stats are lowered based off the stat size change table located half way down this page.
2- If the animal moves from small to medium, or has weak stats, it upgrades at 4th level. IF it goes to large, or is especially tough (deinychous) it upgrades at 7th.
3- for a rare few animals (eagle, camel, horse) where no size change occurs, the animal gains +2 to str and con at 4th. This typically puts the animal at a net +2 over a vanilla version from the bestiary.
Thus, for this animal, I would imagine it would look like this according to the rest of the PFRPG companions (changes are in bold):
Starting Statistics: Size small; Speed 50ft; AC +2Natural Armor; Attack Bite(1d6); Ability Scores Str 13, Dex 19, Con 11, Int 2, Wis 12, Cha 8; Special Qualities Immune to sleep, low-light vision, resist enchantment, scent
4th Level Advancement: Size medium; AC +2 Natural Armor; Attack Bite(1d8); Ability Scores Str +4, Dex -2, Con +2; special ability: sprint
you could front load all of the natural armor at 1st, but otherwise this is much closer to all of the other animal companions I've seen.
YMMV of course.