Familiar's alignment

[Bradley Mickle]

I have a concept I'm thinking of throwing at my players, but want to confirm whether it is legal before doing so.

What is a familiar's alignment?

I have always assumed it would be the master's. But my concept is an evil enchantment specialist that has a dominated his good familiar and uses for misdirect. Is this possible? I can't find anything that would indicate it is not.

[A_psychic_rat]

considering nothing specifies otherwise i would actually assume the familiar has the same alignment of the base creature, which is mostly neutral for alot of familiars

[Arachnofiend]

There isn't anything against it as far as I'm aware, and even if there is it's enough of a niche case that making an exception for an NPC is acceptable.

[Gisher]

There are alignment requirements for some Improved Familiars, but I don't know of any for regular familiars.

[Zelda Marie Lupescu]

Yeah, generally neutral for non-specific creatures. The only time in any incarnation of D&D when it directly said "your cat is evil" was in the Ravenloft campaign setting, but that was specific to the nature of familiars in the setting. The Dark Powers replace/corrupt all familiars/animal companions. Even a paladin's horse was Lawful Evil in Ravenloft.

[LazarX]

Bradley Mickle wrote:

I have a concept I'm thinking of throwing at my players, but want to confirm whether it is legal before doing so.

What is a familiar's alignment?

I have always assumed it would be the master's. But my concept is an evil enchantment specialist that has a dominated his good familiar and uses for misdirect. Is this possible? I can't find anything that would indicate it is not.

The familiar's alignment is that of it's base Bestiary entry. As to what you want to do, ask your GM, there isn't any rules support.

[Weirdo]

OP is the GM.

The rules normally do not permit an evil character to have a good familiar. Base (animal) familiars default to neutral, and improved familiars must be within one step of their master on either alignment axis. A TN master can have a LG familiar, but a LE master cannot have a LG familiar because that's two steps on the Good-Evil axis.

If you think it would be interesting for your NPC then go ahead, but I would make sure that players who know the rules aren't blindsided. If this is in character generation phase, or a player is considering Improved Familiar, tell them that you have a houserule in play. If mid-game you may want to remind them that a familiar's alignment doesn't always match their master's (perhaps by introducing an NPC with a different-alignment familiar with a different rationale, eg trying to redeem an imp) and/or show the familiar acting odd in some way. In particular if you're talking about the Dominate spell, a DC 15 sense motive check will reveal the enchantment - and be prepared for the players to remove the Dominate effect.

This is especially true if he is a covert antagonist and you expect that the good familiar will make the PCs overlook this.

You should also consider carefully how Dominate might affect the psychic link between master and familiar, which is assumed to be consensual.

[Zelda Marie Lupescu]

Oh, okay yeah so if you are the GM then yeah... I totally agree with everything Weirdo said! :D

Reminds me of how sometimes I will allow good characters to have an evil familiar (like say an imp as an example), in violation of the rule. Cause the familiar is trying to corrupt the wizard. Which, as I said in my previous post, see Ravenloft. That's where I got the idea, kinda.