Primal Companion - Base Animal Properties & Evolutions


Rules Questions


I'm about to GM a game where one of my players will have a Primal Companion Hunter with a T-Rex. That's a pretty powerful baseline, but I want to clarify just how his evolution choices will interact with the base-line abilities of his animal companion.

My current question is, do the features that an Animal Companion has naturally qualify it for evolutions which rely on specific features?

As an example, the T-Rex has a pretty big tail already, does this qualify it for Tail Slap? Or would you have to pick up the Tail Evolution first, growing a second tail and then only get Tail Slap with that one?

I'm inclined to rule that each Animal Companion has a reasonable number of evolutions already, based on the physical form of the animal. I'm just curious if there is any official clarification on how this should work.


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So, there's two answers here. By the RAW, the Primal Companion Hunter does not get any ability to ignore pre-requisites.

Tail Slap: "...The eidolon must possess the tail evolution to take this evolution..."

So, yeah, by the pure rules, you need to give the T-Rex the tail evolution before taking Tail Slap.

Logically, however, you are right that it's silly and I would fully support a houserule allowing the T-Rex to count as having a tail already.


That's probably how I'm going to go about things.

The only downside I can see is how Improved Damage / Improved Bite stack. Since the T-Rex has a higher than normal base die on its Bite, you could stack both of those for a 3d6 attack at first level. I'll encourage the player to have a bit more fun with the options instead and that should keep things a bit more balanced.

Silver Crusade

Well try to be reasonable and talk to your player, as written this archetype can be very broken.

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