Animal Hospital
There’s nothing more tragic than the loss of an animal companion. Your furbaby loves you, trusts you, and fights selflessly to defend you. That’s why, when Rover inevitably runs out of dog years, it usually turns into a somber moment around the gaming table. That I cannot abide. Wizard might feel differently, but I find that reenacting Where the Red Fern Grows cuts into the general mood of hilarity that I prefer in my games. That’s why I decided to turn those dead-dog frowns upside down with a custom companion. Meet the ability toucan.
ABILITY TOUCAN
Aura moderate transmutation; CL 8th; Slot –; Price 2,000 gp (+2), 8,000 gp (+4), 18,000 gp (+6); Weight 1 lb.
DESCRIPTION
This tropical bird has an oversize beak that slowly shifts in color throughout the day.
An ability toucan is a living creature. Treat it as a raven with the magical beast type and the improved evasion advanced rogue talent.
An ability toucan grants its bearer an enhancement bonus to one randomly determined ability score of +2, +4, or +6. Each morning, roll 1d6 to determine that day’s bonus: 1= STR, 2 = DEX, 3 = CON, 4 = INT, 5 = WIS, 6= CHA. Treat this as a temporary ability bonus for the first 24 hours of pet ownership. An ability toucan must be in physical contact with its bearer to confer this bonus.
CONSTRUCTION REQUIREMENTS
A mama toucan and a daddy toucan that love each other very much.
You may have noticed the requirement about being in physical contact. That means you can’t squirrel your ability toucan away in a familiar satchel or send it to the back lines for safety. If you want your bonus, your trusty toucan must perch bravely upon your shoulder. At half the cost of the equivalent belt or headband, you get a nice cost-savings. And with the addition of improved evasion, your li’l buddy might even survive a few encounters. The design intention is to add a little risk/reward to pet ownership.
Unfortunately for the toucan in my own game, improved evasion doesn’t hold up against cloudkill. The poor thing choked to death on Laurel’s paladin’s shoulder last session, and was summarily an ex-parrot. Even more unfortunately for my no-tragic-puppy-death intentions, not even the phrase “I lost my ability toucan” could cheer up the group. Laurel had been very careful with her pet’s safety. The party was level 15, and she’d managed to keep Bill the ability toucan alive since level 6!
So the group made like Witch in today’s comic. There was a formal ceremony. The alchemist produced the requisite precious oils. We rolled on a custom reincarnate table. The result.
There was much rejoicing. Or at least, there was much rejoicing until the very next encounter, when Bill the ability rabbit got double-tapped by a pair of spined devil unholy blights. Once again, improved evasion was not up to the task. And once again, we found ourselves in sad player territory.
“Why would you take away this thing that I love?” cried Laurel, accusation burning in her eyes.
“I didn’t! It wasn’t me! It was the spined devils!”
We haven’t been on speaking terms since.
My unfortunate party has yet to re-reincarnate Bill. If they do, I suspect that he’s going into retirement. The poor little guy has been through a lot, and he fully deserves to live out his remaining days running free (or flying… or hopping) on a nice big farm in the country.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever lost an animal companion? Was it an emotionally fraught experience, or did you find fried familiar as amusing as I’d hoped it to be? Sound off with the tale of your own lost li’l buddies down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
Are we taking bets on Magus’ reincarnation? If so, I’ve got five on something canine.
I would never be able to live without the cat jokes.
Edit: Speaking of which, she doesn’t need reincarnate. She’s got 8 lives left.
It hasn’t quite happened in my games yet, but the last session I ran, one of the villains had a Hell Hound pet. Once the players killed it, the main boss went to turn on the player who dealt the final blow, only to be turned away by Sanctuary. She then turned to that player’s own pet for revenge, bringing it to negatives and almost moving forward to deliver a killing blow against it.
Luckily, one of the NPC companions specialized in trip, and managed to prevent her from delivering a fatal blow to the party pupper. Which I’m really glad about, because I’m sure the party would have hated me for it.
The Pokémon RPG sounds more intense than I expected.
You should see (well, listen) to what the Terrible Warriors did with Pokemon.
https://www.terriblewarriors.com/pokemon-rocket-resistance
WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS
OH GOD I REMEMBERED A CHILDHOOD STORY ABOUT A BOY SAVING UP FOR TWO DOGS AND COULD NEVER FIND WHAT IT WAS.
WOAAHHHH
(may or may not be on a frustration spree from trying to learn how to draw and sucking really really bad)
I’d have gone with Old Yeller, but I don’t think rabies is a common plot point in most games.
How about Of Mice and Men? – “I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.”
Uncultured swine that I am, I’ve never read it. My shame knows no bounds.
Lucky for you, you don’t have to, thanks to the wonders of modern technology! And snark. So much snark.
https://youtu.be/_vAIp_c7-0A
Let me explain, no, there is too much… let him sum up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMyLbPvjTvg
Fine! I’ll check it out of the local library. Yeesh…. 😛
Crafting requirements are unclear. What feats are needed to craft the ability toucan? Can I ignore the love requirement in exchange for a +5 DC increase? What about ignoring the daddy toucan requirement?
You can replace any requirement except the feat. Any requirement.
As no feat is listed, and depending on how you read it (are mommy+daddy+love one requirement, two, or three?), it’s a +5/+10/+15 DC to craft without any requirements (no gold cost even!).
On another note, per RAW you could technically add +5 DC to replace the gold cost of any item you craft, as it is listed as a requirement and is not a crafting feat. However, attempting to do this may lead to thrown Dungeon Master Guides.
Munchkin: “I want to replace the material cost with a +5 DC increase! The RAW says I can do that!”
GM: “…sure. Give me a Spellcraft roll.”
Munchkin: “Success!”
GM: “Great, you’ve completed your magical item. Now give me a Knowledge(Planes) check.”
Munchkin: “Why? Anyway… Natural 20! That’s a total of 32!”
GM: “Nice, you’re on the roll! You recognize the creature that just emerged from a planar rift as a Pleroma, an Aeon tasked with guarding the balance between creation and destruction. Now give me a Fort save against it’s Implosion spell”
Munchkin: ” D: “
https://pics.me.me/life-uh-find-a-way-22205888.png
Mick the boar did get killed in battle once. Irlana cried the entire way back to the village. When they got there, the rest of the party loaned her enough gold to pay for a resurrection spell. (Which was a bit ironic as later on Irlana became the richest person in the entire kingdom.) I believe that happened at level 6 or 7. After that, her build came online with the AoO’s of death so Mick was
I mean, what kind of monster wouldn’t make that loan?
I’m guessing the “That Guy” monster. Luckily, my group doesn’t have any of those. Oh, and the end of that last cut-off sentence is “safe since everything else died first.”
Shadow Dancers shadow companion got a taste of a +3 spear a few sessions ago, 3hp below zero brought him a 30 day vacation from adventuring.
DM said it will be the same shadow that returns.
How do you flavor the shadow companion? Is it a normal undead, or a Peter Pan style shadow, or some kind of unique creature?
he’s the Azlantan prince that was burried in the tomb in Revenge of the Kobold King.
I based my character on having run through those modules and picked up his level of oracle there, collecting all those burried souls as the haunt curse.
The strongest one was Prince Zelfin who is now adventuring with Shadow Dancer to compensate for the millennia of boredom in his grave.
He also serves as a bit of plot device of Knowledge (history) of the appropriate time for anything the DM wants us to know in Rise of the Runelords AP.
Also provides plot reason for our Paladin of Iomedae to get along with an undead, that wasn’t planned however.
The other spirits are a bunch of smart arses doing the haunty curse and providing plot device for my sudden jumps in skill proficiency whenever I decide to dump leftover points on a skill. They tell me how to use magic devices effectively for example.
Goddamn I love companion classes for this. Makes my GM heart happy.
In our current Runelords campaign I’m playing a wildblooded sylvan sorcerer to get an animal companion (a cindersnake called Loki), we have a ranger with a fire pelt cat (Angus) as a companion, a witch with a Bluejay familiar (Jim Jam), and even the kineticist has a familiar (although his is just a sentient ball of fire called Flim Flam).
The witch has also trained several ravens as messengers (can’t remember their names other than Quoth), and the kineticist had a riding gecko (liekko) which died and was reincarnated into a bear.
Suffice it to say I would be far more upset about losing Loki than losing my own character. I think that sentiment if probably shared by the whole party other than the kinesticist, who’s gecko-bear reincarnation was a sense of great amusement.
For a split second, I wondered what kind of subspecies an (Angus) was.
“OK. This must be like an Orc (Blood) or an Orc (Black) situation. I wonder what abilities a fire pelt cat (Angus) gets?”
…
“I am an idiot.”
Hugin and Munin?
(Odin’s Ravens)
I don’t think so, but the next ones will be now if I have anything to do with it.
May they go to visit the Allfather slightly less often than Viigar did: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unfamiliar
I haven’t had a companion death in my games yet, but came close a couple of times.
In my Iron Gods game our Drow Arcanist has an adorable little Chinchilla; Sir Pika; who has endured, but suprisingly enough, survived all matter of horrible things.
Got blown up multiple times with fireball; strength drained to the point of going into a coma, and somehow even managed to not get chewed up by an aurumvorax… He even survived a cloudkill that killed the arcanist!
Gotta love having half your master’s total hit points. Suddenly you can take a punch, even as a fancy mouse!
He is the fanciest of mice, with an awesome perception check and a pretty good perform (cute) 😀
didn’t much help the shadow, even with only 50% damage taken.
one full attack with average damage was too much.
It couldn’t 5 ft. step into the floor and out of harm’s way?
not with a full attack in progress.
moving him there for sneak attack flanking would have been a good idea if I had managed to actually hit and be more of a threat than the 5 strength damage from the shadow.
Look at it this way: your defensive class feature worked as intended. That same amount of damage would have killed you!
BTW, did you ever wind up finding defensive items that your shadow could use?
I would have ben „just“ dying at -6.
Big disadvantage of unfluffy companion is they are destroyed at 0HP.
For shadow defence I just got me a fresh wand of mage armor.
which I didn‘t use that encounter
which wouldn’t have made a difference anyways – too high attack rolls.
but it will come in handy to boost the prisoners we freed.
Revised ranger in 5e is helpful for this, just letting you bring your animal companion back like familiars. In my larger campaign we’ve lost familiars repeatedly (scouting is dangerous!) and our poor ranger’s animal companion twice. Once to an invading goblinoid force after we killed the enemy commander’s pet, the second time, the poor thing failed its dex save against poison breath and was almost disintegrated fighting a green dragon.
In that same fight, the DM rolled four times in a row to get back poison breath and never rolled below fifty-five on 12d6. First character death and most of the party went down at one point, though we got him back (revivify).
Worst part was we did it to ourselves. We rescued the prisoner, drove off the dragon, then split up, half taking the prisoner out of the cave and half searching for the dragon’s hoard…and obviously the retreating group got ambushed. I felt deeply stupid after that. On the other hand, it did lead to the scene of our monk in spider-climbing slippers walking up to fight the dragon on a sheer cliff-face above the entrance and going three rounds before being brutally murdered.
Sturm the monk? I can dig it.
Why is it so difficult? Just re-cast Find Familiar and Brutus will be good as new. He shouldn’t even leave a corpse when he dies, he should merely poof. If you’re worried aboot them in combat, just use the pocket dimension option that seems to be a canonization of “My familiar stops existing when you aren’t thinking aboot them.”
My Paladin had a steed named “Diamond.” He loved apples, and hated puns, which caused tension because my Paladin loved puns. He also had a love of dressage (Horse ballet. It’s an Olympic sport for some reason) that he discovered when I used said dressage to win a Fey dance-off.
My Wizard went through two Familiars. His first was a Raven named “Thatso”, who kept dying stupidly. Eventually I switched it up to a bat named “Manuel”. Manuel was oddly oblivious despite his blindsense, so the joke was that he was always smoking my reagents.
Manuel also liked to hang from the bottom of Wasd’s hat: https://preview.redd.it/fsv6fclzbp731.png?width=675&auto=webp&s=14eb365750d461ff2fc2afd9860b0beb8f403b19
Imagine that the comic is about a beast master ranger.
Then why did you make it aboot a Fiend Warlock?
Nobody plays Beastmaster. If someone is thinking aboot playing one, we politely but firmly warn them away.
One of my party members pretty much swore off Familiars for life due to bad experiences from one specific (jerk-ish) DM, who kept going out of his way to kill it (plus a few accidental deaths). Since this was Pathfinder, it became a very costly chore to revive the familiar, and as the levels got higher, so too did things that could just oneshot familiars unintentionally, eventually resulting in a ‘never again’ scenario for that particular mechanic.
This whole situation also applies to any given NPC that might come along with you – unless you put them at part with PCs (which breaks the game balance), or they’re cohorts/class-feature companions, they WILL die a horrible, tragic demise to any given ‘challenging’ encounter balanced a party of 4-6 adventurers of the appropriate level.
There may be an upcoming comic featuring Commoner and Warrior concerning this theme.
Huh, so if you and Laurel aren’t on speaking terms, how did this comic happen? Is exchanging of notes and a third person serving as a intermediary required?
Also, quite the low blow, making the Toucan-grieving artist depict the death of an all too familiar, relate-able scene of a beloved companion’s loss, whilst the wound is still fresh. Must you rub salt into the wound too? 😮
Happily, the comic was written before the toucan died. Life, art, imitation, etc.
Quick, write a script about the big celestial farm in the countryside where all familiar / summons / animal companion eventually go!
Boy, Witch does not win any beauty pageants when she’s in a foul, raging or grief-blubbering mood. She should know better than pissing off a person with the option to turn people into snails as comeuppance.
At least it’s better than what Ranger might do if her precious hexapedal murder fluff bites the dust (as unlikely as that might be). Dr druid’s dino meets its match.
What’s that on Witch’s knee, by the way? A knee-pad, a tattoo, an injury? It certainly can’t bees, and it’s a rare look (well, outside of certain other handbooks, I imagine) at her robe-hidden legs.
I believe that is a kneecap.
Do you know, I hadn’t really considered making the auruvorax a recurring thing. I’d imagined it as a one-off comic gag about a wandering monster rather than a permanent animal companion.
Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes!
With a bit of open interpretation of a few feats, it CAN become an animal companion…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/monstrous-companion/
…plus, it qualifies for a certain special tactical maneuver as far as comedic potential goes (if one casually ignores the 200lbs weight it apparently has). One that druid either disagrees with or actively uses herself.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/thrown-for-a-loss
Oh, lit. I’d forgotten that monstrous companion functions off of the animal companion class feature.
Personally, the closest experience I had was my Halfling’s wolf companion nearly drowning in a bog during the very first combat of a campaign (a pit within the bog was conveniently right next to where the GM placed my wolf’s starting location). Luckily, I was able to dive in and rescue him, because I wasn’t losing my cavalier mount before even getting a chance to use him.
As a GM, the Druid in my pathfinder playtest sessions managed to have both an Animal Companion (Sir Bearington) and a familiar (Sir Nutterham). While the Animal Companion hasn’t been in too much trouble (besides nearly killing a player when it started to lick the confusion-inducing spores), the familiar hasn’t been as lucky when it’s popular non-combat location (the druid’s pants) is subject to the same AoE magic as the Druid. Luckily, the Playtest removing the cost associated with replacing a familiar made it not so bad for the player, who was already joking about what might happen to Sir Nutterham II (& I think we’re currently on Sir Nutterham the 3rd for when we finally run the final boss).
I’ll have you know that you triggered a thousand-yard-stare with those words: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PD-tlLuRJmg/V1GoTOeFTDI/AAAAAAAA3Sc/O4onsiHJZGU5jPA0B8DdvmQ_RJKONoMmACLcB/s1600/ns2.gif
“What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever lost an animal companion? Was it an emotionally fraught experience, or did you find fried familiar as amusing as I’d hoped it to be?”
Hahahahahahahaha ahhhhh yes… Killing familiars. Let me tell you the tale of two familiars, from different games but involving the same players.
Izmemnon was Sonya’s (Fey Pact Warlock) familiar. He was a Jackdaw (european crow-cousin) and was the closest thing the Warlock had to family, since her actual family got murdered in an ethnic cleansing incident. As the Warlock torched her home village in revenge for her family’s murder, and she served Baba Yaga, she was decidedly limited in the potential friends department. The one exception was Iz, and she frequently relied on his abilities; not to scout or fight or other familiar things, but to act as a sounding board she could trust. Even when Sonya found friends and a lover, she really only trusted, really only ever truly loved, Izmemnon.
While exploring Castle Ravenloft at the climax of Curse of Strahd, she and Izmemnon got separated from the party and captured by Strahd. One thing led to another and she wound up chained to a bed in a nightgown about to be exsanguinated by Strahd, when she managed a spectacular roll and managed to slip free of the anti-magic shackles long enough to Misty Escape across the room, out of Strahd’s grasp.
Sonya looked back to see Strahd holding Izmemnon in his hands. “Lay back down in bed and let me finish, and I give my word neither you nor your bird will die tonight.” Strahd threatened, while Izmemnon screamed at her telepathically to just run, leave him, get out of here. The warlock paused, torn and conflicted, when Strahd added a little more pressure. “I know you believe Izmemnon can just be recalled if he dies, so I took the precaution of setting up a little soul trap for him. If he dies here, now, you’ll never be able to see him again.”
Sonya took a deep breath, looked directly at her Jackdaw, and whispered “I’m sorry” as she misty stepped away.
She almost didn’t her the crack of her familiar’s spine being sundered.
On the other hand, we have a party that uses their two weasel familiars, Firly and Thunder Skillet (don’t ask), for everything from trap detectors, surprise-animal-to-the-face, remote detonators, to improvised lockpicks. Firly has yet to survive a mission and is on his 13th incarnation so far. The most tragically hilarious death was when he got accidentally snorted by a very confused red dragon (command is an amazing 1st level spell).
So yeah, your mileage may vary. Mine certainly does, even with the same players in the same group!
I am both amused and horrified at the thought of Strahd dressing an adventurer up in a nightgown like she was a Barbie.
She was paralyzed at the time, so yeah, that was basically what happened. Except Strahd didn’t dress her up; he has servants. He is, above everything else, classy!
The player in question told me to play as dark as possible for this scene, as she knows I probably have the lowest tolerance of the group for such things. So I did, and gave her nightmares. Again.
Hahaha silly players, never bait the DM
Colin, why you hate Bill? What has he done to you to trap him in a cloudkill and then between TWO spined Devils Unholy Blight?
If my DM kills my familiar, well, errors can be committed. Now doing it twice and turning a noble beast like a Toucan into that abomination even for the standards of the Far Realm.
Killing a pc is okay you just ruin the day of a player, now killing a familiar, pet or animal companion is a sure way to angry both of them.
Blame the party’s wizard! He blinded and knocked prone all the spined devils in the opening round. What were they supposed to do other than AoE attacks!?
Blame the party’s wizard, that is no excuse. I am very surprised and disappointed. And i think that there is already a precedent:
https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/art/He-s-not-a-Pet-He-s-an-Animal-Companion-273296468
But on another topic, to forget the whole in our lives and the incresing darkness on this world now that Bill the toucan bunny has passed away. The um… clerical plans, are based on real medical plans right?
Insofar as they’re infuriating and practically useless, yes they are.
Good to know.
On other question, does the plans cover the destruction of raised-from-death adventures, so they are dead again and can be resurrected?
I ask for… a friend’s curiosity 🙂
That’s more expensive magic than basic plans will cover. Usually that sort of thing is written into a party charter.
I am impressed by the long life of the Toucan, improved evasion is nice, but there’s a limit to what it can do when you only have +4 reflex 4 hit points and 8 con (and that’s assuming that it gets to increase it’s hitdice from d8 to d10 due to being a magical beast), was it all luck and good positioning on Laurel’s part or did she invest anything more into protecting her lil-buddy?
Myself I have two stories of lost companions, through both from other players one was in my kingmaker campaign where the druids wolf got killed by a ghoulish cylops after having made it through the entire campaign (she got reincarnated into a boar) but since the druid had recently chosen to fall to save some people by feeding the life energy of a big area of nature to some soul-eating spirits, the Druid decided to retire to a quieter life as the high priestess rather than continue to adventure.
The other story is far less in the spirit of the whole thing in my opinion as this character I played togetter with in PFS had a single level in the Falconer ranger archetype and some kind of feat/class ability from the rest of his levels that allowed the poor bird to take an attack for him as an immediate action (which given that it had half the hit points of a first level companion inevitably killed it.)
The worst part was that if it somehow avoided being callously sacrificed for an entire adventure he would snap it’s neck and use it as a trail ration.
Super against the spirit of the thing.
Two words: paladin’s sacrifice.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/paladin-s-sacrifice/
That is a super cool spell and now I want to make a paladin that uses it.
I think in 5e they recognized this issue and did what they could to eliminate it.
Familiars and ranger pets and paladin summoned steeds and artificer robo-pets can all be easily brought back to life as the same entity very easily. Though I mean…. a dead horse or dog you just bought or found in the wild has no such protections so….. shrug
Admittedly there’s nothing you can really do about old age… which has no actual mechanics and is therefore uniquely handled game to game anyway. One GM might say your ranger pet ages at standard rate and another might say it gains the same lifespan as the ranger as long as they’re alive. And well…. familiars aren’t even beasts, they’re fey, celestials, or fiends none of which likely even have a finite life span. (Though functionally they have the shortest average life span of any creature. How many wizards in a D&D world really manage to make it to Gandalf years with all the adventuring and magical accidents and being blamed for every random weird thing that happens? And since it seems to me that familiars just pop into existence when you summon them, I imagine when their summoners bites it they vanish too.)
Am I missing something about the beast master ranger, or is there an easy way around death for that one?
I like that 5e made familiars less fragile, but I sometimes wonder whether they overshot the mark. There’s very little risk in sending your adorable 1-hp rat into battle, and sometimes I want to shout, “Come back, Reepicheep, you little ass!” when he gets all heroic on me.
Ah I see where the confusion is. You’re probably looking at the Ranger in the PHB… which I’ve basically written off forever. I pretty much only use the Revised Ranger UA when thinking about 5e Rangers. Since the PHB Ranger was the only case where a Class printed in a 5e book really was notably any worse than any other.
The original Ranger can just replace the companion. The Revised Ranger can bring the same one back to life.
As for familiars…. yeah. On the one hand I didn’t like it that it hurt you when they died in 3.5 since they were (and still are) most likely to die by AoE than a targeted attack which just meant you got hurt twice by the same thing. But on the other hand 10 minutes and 10 gp for the amazing scouts and advantage granters (and other things depending on the familiar) is maybe a bit too cheap. The cost of not having them around for a short while would probably wind up meaning a lot more if they were built into the class and not just a spell you could optionally take or not.
Admittedly it’s hard for me to gauge if 10 gp is really too cheap or not. My experience with 5e has basically been “I have no money” (or at least none I could afford to spend when I didn’t need to because I needed to save up for something insanely expensive like a breastplate) or “I have money and nothing to spend it on” and basically nothing in-between. So if that’s not wildly atypical, the actual amount of gold is kind of meaningless. shrug
The charcoal was actually a bigger deal than the gold for me. In Out of the Abyss, scraping for material components was a significant part of the adventure, especially near the beginning. That made familiar death a serious obstacle for my chain-lock, which is the experience that I’d like to see supported: losing your li’l buddy is an interesting challenge rather than an outright catastrophe.
As a GM: The one moment in the campaign that anyone at that table remembered that the witch’s familiar needed to roll saving throws too, was when fighting four forms that explode on death. Of course they whittled them down evenly enough that the first one to be destroyed and explode destroyed and explode the next one, and so on.
Familiars may have the good evasion, but Flappy the bat did not roll well. He was dead for the next couple days as they needed to rest, prepare a teleport, warp to their patron temple, and then wait another day for someone to prepare a Raise. At least they had the materials on-hand.
Hey, there’s a reason they invented raise animal companion: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/r/raise-animal-companion/
First companion class I ever used was my gnome summoner Paulie Dingle and his basically-a-wookie-in-a-squirrel-suit eidolon McSquizzy. I don’t think McSquizzy ever went down in combat, only ever being dismissed when a quintet of celestial triceratops would do the job more nicely. Paulie himself had a pretty close brush with death at a point where teleporting to get rezzed was a no-go, and I was prepared to just keep going with McSquizzy as an unfettered eidolon. Thankfully it never came to that.
Then you have my 5e halfling revised ranger Reed Skinner, and his deinonychus companion Crow. Crow’s only close calls came from a superpowered stranglevine and a couple of enemies she found out the hard way were not at all impressed by nonmagical raptor claw pounce to the face. Reed actually did get killed (again in a no-rez-available scenario) and I was about to shrug and keep going with just the dino, but then the GM decided to retcon it and put him to just dying instead of decapitated like the trap stated.
The one time I did run a witch it was a (pre-erratta) scarred witch doctor, so all I had to worry about was a mask instead of a familiar.
Well that’s a novel concept for a replacement character. Is there any rules support for it, or would you have had to homebrew?
Unfettered eidolons came about as an entry in bestiary 2 or 3, iirc. Basically what happens when an eidolon and its summoner get disconnected. I think the list of evolutions they have access to is more limited, and the cr adjusts based on how many evo points they have.
Gotcha. So you more or less use normal monster PC rules from there. Neat!
So, I’m assuming the in-comic text is relevant in the US healthcare system? I’ve not heard of a “primary” before.
And do you know, I don’t think we’ve ever had a pet / familiar permadeath? I wonder why.
More than you want to know here: https://www.medicare.gov/supplements-other-insurance/how-medicare-works-with-other-insurance
But yeah, it’s a US healthcare joke. Which is ironic, considering that the US healthcare system is itself a joke.
It’s never an animal companion in my group (they tend to avoid them, and familiars can be brought back pretty easily in 5e). No, what they end up becoming attached to is small-sized characters that they’ve talked to more than a few moments. Left to their own devices, I think they’d collect an entire village of halfings, gnomes, goblins, kobolds and ratfolk and become the village’s guardian tallfolk.
There’s a giant-themed adventure in there somewhere.
“Escape the jarl’s daughter’s dollhouse,” or something.
We were partaking in a horror one-shot in D&D, finalising our characters when our host’s dog wandered into the room. Leaning down to pat his dog, our host, who is a fairly new-fish player, looked to the DM and asked, “Can my character have a pet dog in-game?”. The rest of the players just looked at the host, but the DM managed to stay completely straight faced, as he said, “Sure, you can have a pet”.
It was a horror game. Within two hours the host’s fighter had been possessed and forced to murder his own dog.
Horror indeed. How’d the dog-owner take it?
Our group grows somewhat attached to our selection of assorted pack-animals, affectionately referred to as “Emry” (short for Emergency Rations). Emry 1 was left behind when we had to bribe the local wizard’s cabal for a long-range teleport spell. Emry II got eaten by manticores.
In our most recent fight, a fight that the GM EXPLICITLY WARNED US that we should pull out the big guns on or we wouldn’t survive, our NPC companion’s pet goat (Emry III) caught a stray melee attack and was on the verge of death. So the party Warlock decided to spend a full turn to Spare the Dying and the Misty Step it out of danger.
I’m pretty sure the party only let him off the hook because we were distracted by 2 other party members almost killing each other after the fight ended due to both being frenzied, and having the combined Wisdom save of a particularly obtuse rock.
That reminds me, how is the particularly obtuse rock’s bid for mayor going? ;p
Can’t blame a guy for saving his own ass.
(Dammit… Just saw it was a goat, not a mule. I’m keeping the joke anyway, because I was proud of it and have low standards.)
No no, the Warlock would have loved it- he’s the one always making bad puns in our group. I’m gonna save that for whenever we inevitably acquire Emry IV.
I have a familiar for my psychic bloodline sorcerer, I can’t wait till it finally dies so I can play it out.
The familiar got the Figment archetype, my character being psychic and all so the familiar is actually a part of his imagination: https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Familiar%20Figment
Plan is to be devastated by the loss and mourn for the day. Just to have the Familiar reappear the next day, while my character acts like nothing happened to the familiar and having no recollection of it ever dying.
Well there’s one way to design around the problem.
I imagine that Alchemist has something similar going on. Just grow another tumor if Abercrombie ever dies.
…y’know, if I were Witch, I wouldn’t pick a fight with Druid for anything.
I mean, on a good day, Witch is having a Bad (evil?) hair day. But after tangling with Druid, she’ll be full of twigs, cobwebs, bugs of indiscriminate origin, thorny brambles, and possibly even bats.
Like I’m pretty sure Druids get an intrinsic +3 vs Hair. I think I saw that in the SRD.
She’s a druid, not a katamari!
Or you could be like me: Tumor Familiar! – If it’s hurt or damaged, just suck it back into myself for Fast Healing 5. Unfortunately, Protector Familiar is not PFS legal on a Tumor Familiar, but they still make sick Maulers.
My solution was to use occultist + soulbound puppet + wood shape. Suddenly I had access to every familiar / archetype in the book! They were all named Jeremy.