Making animal intelligence magical beasts sentient

[Devil's Theatre]

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.

[Eltacolibre]

You can change stats of your creatures as you wish, if you are the GM.

The examples that are shown in bestiary are just the basic member of a race.

There could be so many reasons for a creature to gain intelligence in a fantasy world.

But well if for some reason, you really want to do it with mechanics:

Add the savant template...then just follow the instructions to create npcs.

[Set]

The Advanced creature simple template from the Bestiary can be used to snag a +4 to Intelligence, and then the rest needed can be gained by milking the NPC stat array, and / or using PC point-buy.

That all said, Sorcerer seems like a more intuitive fit for a beastie spellcaster, and Charisma is easier to get up to good spellcasting levels.

[Devil's Theatre]

Eltacolibre wrote:

You can change stats of your creatures as you wish, if you are the GM.

The examples that are shown in bestiary are just the basic member of a race.

There could be so many reasons for a creature to gain intelligence in a fantasy world.

But well if for some reason, you really want to do it with mechanics:

Add the savant template...then just follow the instructions to create npcs.

I was looking for a RAW way of doing it for piece of mind (plus I have a player who's a little bit of a RAW-Nazi, but to be fair he has calmed down on that quite a bit.)

That being said, I'm not one for third party material, but Green Ronin Publishing is a fairly trusted publisher, one of my favorites along with Goodman Games, and that is a very interesting and frankly, near perfect addition. So I may well make an exception. Thank you very much for letting me know about it.

Set wrote:

The Advanced creature simple template from the Bestiary can be used to snag a +4 to Intelligence, and then the rest needed can be gained by milking the NPC stat array, and / or using PC point-buy.

That all said, Sorcerer seems like a more intuitive fit for a beastie spellcaster, and Charisma is easier to get up to good spellcasting levels.

I had forgotten about the Advanced template. Thank you. As to the caster type, it's because of a story element that I want to go Wizard with it. Thanks though.