Does an Eidolon have a "life" outside of when it is called by a Summoner?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


Wasn't sure where to stick this......Hopefully here will do.

Opinions ???


I figure it depends on the eidolon, on what the GM says, and what the summoner's backstory is.

It's a bit like asking "what do fighters dream of when they sleep?" There's a million possible answers. All are right and all are wrong depending on who's running what and who's doing the dreaming.

Scarab Sages

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I always think of Eidolons as a fragment of a more horrible, powerful, whole. An aspect of something beyond the summoner's comprehension. This is why they're mutable and grow in power - it's not that it is actually getting more powerful it's that the summoner is able to understand more of the thing they're drawing upon.

Sovereign Court

I think of the eidolon as a sort of proto-matter creature that the Summoner shapes to his will. Perhaps it had a life before it was summoned, but imo that life was a very simple existence 'adrift'.

The summoner's power ends up forming the eidolon's mentality nearly as much as its body, which is part of the reason the bond between them grows so strong. FWIW.

Contributor

This free web fiction story is all about an eidolon separated from its summoner:

Faithful Servants


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Pathfinder Adventure, Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

This all depends on the GM and the backstory. For example, one of my GMs decided that he wanted eidolons to actually be 'real creatures' that were being summoned.

One of my summoners was summoning an 'aspect' of an extremely powerful gold dragon when he summoned his eidolon. When the summoner became more powerful he was able to summon more and more powerful aspects of the dragon. In this case, the eidolon didn't really have a life of its own outside of when the summoner called it, because it was a small part of a larger creature.

In another case, I had a synthesist summoner who had a shadow creature bound into his own shadow when he was very young. Eventually he learned to summon it around himself. The shadow creature by itself was relatively weak, but my character was able to strengthen it and modify it with his magic as he grew in power as a synthesist. This eidolon was constantly aware of what was going on around the synthesist whether or not it was summoned, and would try to help and protect him (both benefited from the shadow creature 3.5 template). The funny part is that I created this character before the Shadow Caller archetype came out...


Matrixryu wrote:
The funny part is that I created this character before the Shadow Caller archetype came out...

That's not funny it's scary. You have premonition or clairvoyance. You might want to go on talk shows and help people connect with their dead ancestors or something. Spooky!


Pathfinder Adventure, Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber
MendedWall12 wrote:
Matrixryu wrote:
The funny part is that I created this character before the Shadow Caller archetype came out...

That's not funny it's scary. You have premonition or clairvoyance. You might want to go on talk shows and help people connect with their dead ancestors or something. Spooky!

... you may have a point, because I also wanted to make an enchantment focused Kitsune Sorcerer before their crazy favored class bonus came out D:


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My eidolon totally has a life. It lives in Hollywood with a pair of nymphet porn stars, and snorts metric tons of cocaine in order to fuel its tiger-blooded tornado of awesome. When I summoned it, they had to cast Ashton Kutcher in its place.


I tend to think of most eidolon, as something like the 3.5 vestiges.
A fragement of a powerful being, that is living an "un-life".


I've used three NPC summoners in my game, and I've gone both ways on whether or not the eidolon has an outside life. The first was a Cheliaxian devil summoner, who I basically treated as having bound a devil to his service, and would dismiss the current devil and bind a new devil as he rose in power (nupperibo to lemure to abishai, etc.), with any powers the normal devil had that the eidolon didn't being chalked up to the binding magic sealing those powers. The second was a tribal shaman, whose tribe was guarded by a powerful spirit. The spirit could not enter the world unless invoked, and how much of it could manifest was dependent on the shaman's strength. The third (and only one that was an adversary of the party and not a fill-in GMPC for when we had less than four people at a session) was a wayang summoner who shaped his own shadow into a shadow eidolon (this was before the ARG came out. If they face him again, he'll be getting an upgrade from the "fetchling" entry). Of the three, the devils and the spirit had independent lives, but the shadow eidolon did not.


I stand by my theory that eidolons are actually aspects of Rovagug, when foolish mortals weaken the barrier of his prison, so he can perform more experiments on potential shapes of future spawn. Originally posited here.

It would strongly imply that they're probably being judged for how effective they were when not summoned, which means there's at least thought, if not actual living, going on.


Summoner is a base class. It's fluff is intentionally open.

Shadow Lodge

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It can be fun to have an Eidolon with an independent life. In a recent campaign, a random extraplanar portal sent the party to the demiplane where the Summoner's Eidolon lived in his downtime. Later, the Summoner was trapped with antimagic, unable to summon the Eidolon. The rest of the party used a Planar Ally spell to summon the Eidolon and recruit it to find and rescue the Summoner. Since we'd already established the Eidolon was independent, and we knew the Eidolon's name and could request it specifically, the DM allowed the tactic.

The Summoner was played as emotionally dependent on her Eidolon, and her reaction when the Eidolon came to the rescue was beautiful.


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This?

YouTube

Grand Lodge

Really depends on the DM. In my world Eidolons may be from a place that is antithetical to "standard lifeforms"

Liberty's Edge

One of the most complex characters (in terms of backstory) I have ever created was a summoner named Leon who was a full-time researcher. The subject of his research was the "true self" of an eidolon. It was his theory that because a summoner could change the form of an eidolon when he called it (through leveling up or transmogrify or what have you), that the eidolon's form when it appeared on the Material Plane was not it's "true self", and was rather like a form of living armor that the eidolon's soul occupied in order to defend its summoner.

I homebrewed a level 1 spell that allowed an eidolon to return to its "true form", which was basically an eidolon-only alter self that removed all of its form-based evolutions and transformed it into a specific humanoid chosen when the spell was cast on that creature for the first time. The spell was Willing Only and the eidolon had the power to dispel it itself as a standard action.

Leon's eidolon was named Anima, and she was a quadruped lion-shaped beast (typical pounce build for an eidolon), but her true form was that of a female elf. She bonded with Leon while he studied the truth behind her and her kind and eventually the two of them fell in love, which caused Anima quite a lot of pain because, as she put it, "To be honest, the hardest part is when he falls asleep. If I could have a single wish, it would be to fall asleep next to him, and wake up next to him. I may have awoken to my true self in the Material Plane, but there is still an impenetrable barrier between the man I love and myself."

Because of that, Leon's next major subject of research was a way to allow an eidolon to stay on the Material Plane at all times.

Of course, this was all fluff I wrote myself and has no official backing. I'm just letting you know about my take on summoners. I hope you found this helpful.


The only time I played a summoner was, shall we say, divinatory.

Lissala, in a bid to retake her rightful place in Golarion's pantheon, decided to incubate a new planar ally within the mind of a little girl. That little girl channeled this outside influence into an Imaginary Friend which eventually grew strong enough to affect reality as the little girl grew up. That little girl became Asira, my summoner. Her Friend became Veli, her eidolon, a flying feathered serpent, grapple and constrict build using some feats out of 3.5 Forgotten Realms' Serpent Kingdoms.

Veli believed he was born of an egg laid by Lissala herself. He was then given to a Caretaker, this little girl who was supposed to raise him, to take care of him, to help him grow big and strong to better serve his Mistress Mother Lissala.

Carrion Crown was a horror campaign after all so by the time the BBEG was defeated Veli had, heh, grown. Once he was a small-sized golden scaled snake with tiny jade feathers and little etched runes. Now he was a Large serpent made of mithril and gold with six jade wings and the runes of Thassilon carved and glowing down his flanks from head to tip. Asira has since disappeared from Golarion while Veli is available to worshipers of Lissala via Planar Ally.

I call this divinatory because I hard-coded this revitalization of Lissala's power into my home game Golarion before Shattered Star was rumored or announced.

Shadow Lodge

NeoSeraphi wrote:
stuff

With no offense intended, I would find the revelation that an eidolon's "true self" was a generic humanoid rather....boring. You summon a creature from across space, time, and parallel worlds; and it ends up looking like Bob from across the street?


my summoner I made characters for. One for the summoner and one for the creature and as the creature I had let the bomb drop that she had spoken to her mother and such in their plane of exsistance and learnt of how the summoner and her mother met, as well as the evil man who tried to force control over her mother.

Being a outsider, she doesn't need sleep, but it does state in the APG that when a summoner falls asleep, the creature dissappears so I thought she could easily spend her time with her family or enjoying whatever things Azatas and other CG creatures do in the other realms. Kinda like going home at the end of the day for her, but I had it designed where she comes from a different world where nudity isn't frowned upon, such as in a normal typical setting, however she does have a set of cloths her summoner bought for her to wear in public.

For roleplaying, it's quite interested as people think the two are a "item" and when she freaks the shit out of thugs but pulling back the hood of her cloak and revealing her human face with sudden scales around her neck of deep red and her finger nails being tougher than steel and in her mouth instead of human teeth she had razor sharp fangs.

Bottom line, the outsider does whatever you want them to do when they are sent back to their world either through your character falling asleep at bed or even being knocked out via a spell.

Liberty's Edge

Kthulhu wrote:
NeoSeraphi wrote:
stuff
With no offense intended, I would find the revelation that an eidolon's "true self" was a generic humanoid rather....boring. You summon a creature from across space, time, and parallel worlds; and it ends up looking like Bob from across the street?

This was a choice based on Anima's character. She chose the form that she did because she wanted to fit in and blend with people on the Material Plane.

The truth is that without further research, Leon had no way of truly knowing what Anima's true form looks like, and Anima herself could not remember her life outside of her summoning, so the two of them had to make a choice when they transformed her, and she made the decision to take on the form of an elf.

Though I agree, allowing her to take on the form of some strange outsider that I homebrewed would be quite interesting, but I wanted this to be approved by my DM and homebrewing an entire race of outsiders with their own appearance, background, ability scores and special attacks would be more DM territory than player.

Shadow Lodge

I see eidolons as the "stands" from Jojo bizarre adventure. They are part of the summoner, manifested by his will. they are not a creature by themself.
yes, even among stands there was some sentient stands, but that was more like the nature of the stand power and the ability to survive your creator death than saying the stand has a life of his own.


B.A. Ironskull wrote:

This?

YouTube

That is EXACTLY what popped into my head when I read the thread title!

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