Animal Cruelty
I dig the idea of talking animals in fantasy RPGs. It’s a classic fairy tale trope on the one hand, and allows for such hilarity as octopus paladins on the other. There’s even a full supplement to support the idea, which gives me hope that there’s an anti-party of noble animals now tracking Fighter down.
Shifting gears slightly, have any of you kids read A Night in the Lonesome October? The shtick is that various staples of Victoriana like Jack the Ripper, Victor Frankenstein, and Sherlock Holmes are trying to close the doorways between our world and the standard bunch of Mythos horrors that are threatening to bust through. This is only a minor subplot though. The real meat and potatoes of the novel has to do with the interplay between these figures’ animal companions. And let me tell you, I would go adventuring with Snuff the dog any day. Bottom line is that this is great campaign inspiration, and if you haven’t already read it you should seriously check this one out. Lonesome October was Roger Zelazny’s last novel, and one of his best.
Any dang way, I’m pretty sure I’ll wind up running a “you’re all the animal companions” game one day. Rewards will include the standard stuff like stat belts and bags of holding, but especially lucky player may also receive walkies, couch privileges, and bacon.
How about you guys? Anybody out there ever play or meet an especially cool talking animal?
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Not unless My Little Pony characters count. =P
Ponyfinder always counts.
I played a short (2-3 session) game once where the entire party played Awakened Animals, in a post-apocalyptic setting where the last surviving human used mysterious maybe-science-maybe-naturemagic powers to awaken animals. But the power sapped their strength each time, and eventually, they died awakening our group.
Our party ended up consisting of Brother Rollo, the Armadillo Oracle/Paladin who considered it his job to keep the party safe until they reached their destination of ‘somewhere safe’; Fetters, the Ferret Arcanist who was the human’s former familiar and the team dad; A Squirrel Alchemist who was nerdy and threw bombs from treetops; a Rabbit Unchained Monk who was nervous, twitchy and hauled the human’s top-hat around everywhere to sleep in; and a Cat Daring Champion Cavalier who tried to be all aloof and catlike but really was more Puss in Boots than Garfield.
The game ended after we reached a long-abandoned human town, and had to deal with an example of what had happened to the humans. ‘Shadows’/heavily hinted by the DM to be clouds of nanites. They pinged as evil so Brother Rollo got all his bonuses against them and kept it in the middle of a room until the rest of the party could get some light sources on it, which killed it.
Post-apocalyptic magical animals vs. grey goo. Nice. Star Wars GMPC game notwithstanding, your group sounds awesome and creative.
Love the concept of an armadillo oradin, btw. I can just picture this little dude in “natural” heavy armor.
Yeah, this group was a pretty awesome group. The DM who ran the first three tabletops I ever played (Marvel Superheroes, Serenity and Star Wars D20,) was a long time ago, but the DM and party I played the awakened animals and gunslinger/shaman in was just the last… 3-4 years. The main game was a homebrew setting the DM was making and ran over a year. He ran the Awakened Animals campaign as a short 2-3 session thing because he liked the idea so much. He was a pretty chill DM, it was a fun game.
We actually had rules for equipment in place that let us make things like armor and weapons, but they were made from junk and had to be simple. Brother Rollo had ‘armor’ made from cans and a shortspear that was literally just a sharpened stick. After Unchained came out, the DM said if we ever went back to it, we’d just use the Automatic Bonus Progression rules from that, so his shell actually would be getting thicker and stronger.
Well hey, if you’d like some 3rd party support, I happen to know a resource. Here’s the product:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/77980?affiliate_id=189426
Here’s the SRD:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/extras/community-creations/caedwyr-s-lab/noble-wild-species/
You need to check out Advanced Dungeons & Kitties:
https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=77482
Nice! That’ll scratch the itch, but I wonder if there’s a way to stretch it into a full campaign…?
I play in an entire Discord server dedicated to Them’s Fightin’ Herds tabletop.
Holy shit… That project was finished? I haven’t heard about that game in years! The trailer looks bonkers.
Never actually used this idea but here goes anyway:
What if an evil spellcaster’s cat familiar had it’s own scaled down evil fortress inside of the real evil fortress. Complete with things like mouse heads mounted on pikes outside of the entrance
You know what I say to that? You eat the cheese. Get in there!
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/04/20/a-matter-of-scale
Never played in something like that myself, but I’ve heard a couple of good stories.
One of my dad’s college stories was from a Gammaworld game he and his buddies played. My mom’s character was an intelligent penguin, one person was a talking horse, and another was an ambulatory psychic cactus.
I don’t remember if my dad ever said what his character was, mostly what I remember was apparently since my mom’s penguin couldn’t match most of the party for speed, whenever they we’re traveling the horse PC would carry her in one of his saddlebags. This ended up being a problem when they encountered a human survivor/warrior who the talking horse mouthed off at and got himself attacked by. My mom’s character ended up getting hit and killed when the enemy was going after the horse. Keep in mind I was told this story when I was in my teens something like the better part of two decades after it had happened, my dad was just telling it as part of the backdrop about the ambulatory cactus, and he mentioned that – since the horse effectively was the one who got her character killed – my mom was pretty mad about it at the time. It turned out not only was she mad about it at the time, she was STILL low-key pissed about it nearly 20 years later! Talk about holding a grudge… (Somewhat understandably.)
Anyways, the funny part of the story was the cactus. Since it was psychic, it would body-jack unintelligent wildlife and/or enemies and follow the party to participate that way, while it’s real cactus body would be miles away, slowly following in the party’s footsteps at the snail’s pace that was the fastest it could go. Apparently, the way the rules worked, if you were possessing a creature and it took damage, so would you, so when the fight with the human survivor started the vulture the cactus was possessing tried to swoop down from above to rake the guy. The possessed vulture ended up one-shotted and killed by the guy, so the DM described how – miles away – the cactus was trucking along through the desert wasteland when suddenly out of nowhere it just froze and then slowly fell over, dead.
Other than that the best pet stories I’ve got involve a cat and toad pair of familiars whose players spent a bunch of xp empowering, not to mention then getting more powers due to random shenanigans the party got up to, so the cat ended up set up with a miniature chariot it could drag around the toad in, which the toad would ride into battle. Armored. Casting lightning bolts out of. The cat meanwhile could cast Greater Knock once/day, and so more than once before assaulting a stronghold the players would just have the cat walk up to the front gate and ‘meow’ loudly at it, only for every shuttered window and barred door in the building to burst open in response.
The final note was (same players different party) the Warforged Artificer who had a Homunculus familiar designed to look like a shrunken down version of the artificer. The Homunculus unfortunately couldn’t talk, but the player used this to his advantage once when the party were questioning some captured bandits. The artificer just walked up to them, ominously let them see his Warforged face under his cloaked hood (and this was in a world where Warforged were basically unknown, the PC in question having awoken in some ancient ruins with no idea what he was or how he got there), and then told the bandits that if they didn’t answer the party’s questions he’d rip out their souls and put them into dolls, like THIS, where he held up the Homunculus who then flailed it’s arms wildly, obviously shrieking soundlessly.
Worked like a charm, the badits spilled everything.
Other than that, I’ve personally never had any REAL pet shenanigans – I just don’t tend to go for pet classes – but I did play a Werewolf Ranger in a Monstermash themed play through Pathfinder’s Carrion Crown AP alongside a Vampire Magus and Soulbound Doll Arcane Trickster, and the entire party would trade off in pretending various covers, claiming: the Soulbound Doll was actually the Magus’ familiar; the wolf-shapeshifted Vampire was actually the Ranger’s Animal Companion; or that the wolf-shapeshifted Werewolf was the currently-in-absentia-we’re-watching-it-for-him-Ranger’s Animal Companion. It was all very yakkity-sax playing in the background whenever the party got up to their weird hijinks.