Has anyone come up with fun or unique familiar ideas using the rules for familiars? It seems that with the build your own, you could make some interesting familiars.
Mine is a white bunny rabbit. We call him Roger. There is also a sorceress character in the party who is quite the femme fatale in her red dress. We call her Jessica.
Roger speaks in a ditsy air-headed feminine voice, while Jessica's deep voice always sounds angry, maniacal, and like someone ran over her throat with a motorcycle. Roger always refers to her as "Mr. J" though nobody in the party knows why (nor do they care to delve too deeply into the matter).
The antics they get into together are never ending.
The two I've been batting around aren't to original but I love them all the same.
The hag bloodline sorcerer I've thought up has a raven called Quoth (I know, typical), with fly (obviously) and Familiar Focus at 1st level and Cantrip Connection and Speech at 2nd with enhanced familiar.
The Squirrelmancer (Abjuration Wizard w/ Improved Familiar Thesis and Enhanced Familiar) that i desprently want to play, use squirrels as his familar/s ( I imagime he'll probably lose one or two alomg the journey). Spell delivery, climber and cantrip connection, to start, preparing other abilites according to the needs of the day. Considering gnome adopted ancestry or something else to get speak to animal. He's inspired by scientists with lab animals they've become attached to.
I like the new familar system, hopefully we get more options in the APG.
My Alchemist has a white monkey named Rocky (due to a pun in French, hard to explain in English). He has Manual Dexterity and Extra Reagents. And also fear of heights, so, even if he could climb, he wouldn't do it.
My enchanter wizard, Peter, has a talking tabby cat familiar named Tuna. Tuna is a very polite and helpful cat who has a bit of a Chicago accent and always refers to Peter as “Boss”. “Yeah, Boss!” “Sure thing, Boss!” “Uhh, Boss?”
The familiar rules are simple by design, I get it, but too simple I think. Some land animals can climb and swim pretty well, for example, and my level 1 wizard’s cat familiar should probably have a better athletics bonus that +1. It’s not a big deal really but if I had designed this system I would have broken down familiars into general animal types like they did for animal companions. Not really as a power boost, but to introduce a little more variety. I think a duck familiar should play out differently from a cat or a snake.
A co-worker and I were talking about this a few days ago. As a joke I thought it would be cool for a necromancer to have a rabbit afflicted by zombie lycanthropy. Full moon causing it to turn into an undead killing machine. I am sure it was influenced by the movie ‘Holy Grail’. It would be a nightmare to stat up but if someone wishes to do so you have my blessing. Or even dog on the idea, I don’t mind.
Beyond that I haven’t thought much about familiars, as a player or gm. Perhaps I am stuck in my old school ways when they were much more squishy and bad things happened to you if they died. Memory could be a little hazy but it seemed like a wizard took some damage or other negative such and such. Don’t have any of my books handy at the moment.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I've been playing with a few iterations of what I'm calling a Spellwarp Tortoise, a desert tortoise with a magical shell which makes for a great focus of magical energies. Currently I'm thinking of making a Conjurer whose thesis is binding magical energies into the tortoise's shell temporarily to release them over time. Every day they will have flight/swim/burrow/fast speed depending on if I'm focusing air/water/earth/fire energies, they will permanently have speech, and the third (and plausibly all others) will vary depending on what the character is working on. If I use the spellcasting ones I'll make sure the spell is tied to the element the tortoise is currently hooked up to.
Another idea I had was a pikachu familiar using spell delivery to cast shocking grasp volt tackle. I'd get improved familiar for scent, climb, and damage avoidance (to save pikachu from a flock of spearrow).
Or perhaps a sloth with climb and fast movement, the joke being that the sloth can move faster than anyone in the party, but never will because they are too lazy. It will be a long build-up for the joke, but I kinda want to throw spell delivery on, tell the GM about this, and leave those as wasted abilities until 4-5 months into the campaign when we are in a pinch and suddenly the lightning-sloth burst out to debilitate the boss before saying to the party "pick up the pace slackers!"