Specific Familiars (from APG)

[Johann Weiss]

Is there any cost to taking one of the Specific familiars from the Advanced Players Guide? There's 3 listed and they just seem to be better than any regular familiar because they have normal abilities plus some type of magical ability.

[shroudb]

yes. they say the cost on each of them: you have to dedicate an amount of familiar abilities to get them.
4 abilities for spellslime
6 abilities for fairy dragon
8 abilities for imp

there's a feat to reduce the requirement by 2 abilities for witch and for familiar master archetype

[Xenocrat]

One downside is that they're going to attract more notice and not be useful for some missions. You can send your dove, cat, or seagull to scout stuff in a town without much issue, but your flying spellslime landing on the eaves of the local inn is not going to be subtle.

They also reduce your flexibility at the cost of getting a package discount. If you don't like climber and always give your familiars flying, the spellslime has a dead ability.

[kaid]

Xenocrat wrote:

One downside is that they're going to attract more notice and not be useful for some missions. You can send your dove, cat, or seagull to scout stuff in a town without much issue, but your flying spellslime landing on the eaves of the local inn is not going to be subtle.

They also reduce your flexibility at the cost of getting a package discount. If you don't like climber and always give your familiars flying, the spellslime has a dead ability.

True but on the flip side if you take the feat taking one basically gives everything they are listed with + two more. I think as more of these get published it will be more and more worth while.

[shroudb]

kaid wrote:

Xenocrat wrote:

One downside is that they're going to attract more notice and not be useful for some missions. You can send your dove, cat, or seagull to scout stuff in a town without much issue, but your flying spellslime landing on the eaves of the local inn is not going to be subtle.

They also reduce your flexibility at the cost of getting a package discount. If you don't like climber and always give your familiars flying, the spellslime has a dead ability.

True but on the flip side if you take the feat taking one basically gives everything they are listed with + two more. I think as more of these get published it will be more and more worth while.

the feat is just reducing the required abilities by 2, it's not granting you a full improved familiar from the get go and giving you 2 extra abilities to boot.

that means that even with the feat, you are spending 2 abilities to get even the spellslime. So you would need 4 abilities and the feat to get spellslime+2 abilities.

[Xenocrat]

Humanoid form on specific familiars may help with their weird appearances if you can add on some disguise or illusion magic to cover up their remaining strange features.

[Gisher]

Xenocrat wrote:

One downside is that they're going to attract more notice and not be useful for some missions. You can send your dove, cat, or seagull to scout stuff in a town without much issue, but your flying spellslime landing on the eaves of the local inn is not going to be subtle.

They also reduce your flexibility at the cost of getting a package discount. If you don't like climber and always give your familiars flying, the spellslime has a dead ability.

Well, now I have to get a flying spellslime. That sounds awesome!

[Lightwire]

Party jealousy. Because anyone who claims they don’t want a pet slime is clearly fooling themselves.