Cats and Dogs
I’m honestly impressed that Barbarian’s salon is equipped for pet grooming. It probably costs a premium what with the scratching and biting and potential for contracting vampire / lycanthropy. But hey, that’s what a d12 hit die and a good Con save are for.
Any dang way, you know how I mentioned way back in “Animal Cruelty” that I always wanted to try a “you’re all animal companions” campaign? My group finally got the chance. It’s a 5e game, and we all wound up rolling awakened dogs using the fabulous Animal Adventures supplement from Steamforged Games. Laurel is playing a corgi warlock, or “corglock” for short. I’m running a cane corse fighter with a heavy dose Rome, and it’s been all manner of fun mixing gladiator with pit dog tropes. Growling our threats, barking curses at my enemies, and greeting newfound acquaintances with a polite butt-sniff have all been amusing. But as you may surmise from today’s comic, that kind of RP is also a bit of a tightrope.
When you’re an intelligent animal trying to get along in polite society, there’s this constant negotiation between animalistic behaviors and humanoid ones. Should one expect to be served at ye olde inn, or is it better to drink your water from a nice puddle? Do you sleep in the stable? Is it polite to lick oneself in mixed company? Hell, even the old if a dog wore pants meme is liable to reenter the conversation.
This mess isn’t just limited to awakened animals though. As our own Magus demonstrates time and time again, catfolk PCs have to decide how cat-like they want to be. Centaurs may have to reconcile themselves with beast of burden duties. Last time I contracted lycanthropy back in Ravenloft, I immediately switched over to dramatic irony mode leading up to the first full moon. (You know what I could go for? A nice rare steak. And hey, it’s a pretty nice night out. Does anyone fancy a stroll in the fog? We can chase carriages if you’re feeling frisky.)
So in the interest of better worldbuilding, what do you say we swap stories of the animalistic adventures we’ve enjoyed across the multiverse? When you’re playing an awakened animal or a beastfolk type character, do you like to be treated like any other PC? Or do you prefer for the campaign world to be full of surprised NPCs shouting, “You can talk!?” Let’s hear all about the balance between man and beast in your own games down in the comments!
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I’m GMing a Mummy (the Ressurection) game in which my players are all animals, as animal mummies were a thing. They are “normal” anumals, with some odd behaviour, but do not expect to be treated like “humans”. However, they have to have this skill “Human Ken”, which is the opposite of the WoD skill “Animal Ken”. This makes sure that they are able to make their wishes clear to humans. They are also part of an ancient egyptian Horus cult, which has at least one person being able to communicate with them, as this cult is, in my world, basically an intelligence and troubleshooting service for farao, and his successors. And they are able to understand each others speach, otherwise intra party talk would be akward. But the small cat, lion cub, falcon, ibis, jackal, mongoose and small hippo have done some good work in maintaining Ma’at in the world.
Cool premise. I dig the skill swap for Human Ken.
I’m a fan of centaurs. They’re one of the seven core races in my home 5e setting. Typically, I don’t mind being tasked with pulling a wagon or carrying a bunch of gear. They’re simply better at it than non-centaurs, and handling such a task probably doesn’t take much effort.
All my centaurs so far have drawn the line at being ridden, though. It’s embarassing, I figure. Maybe demeaning. Plus I don’t really want to be a part of someone’s weird munchkin nonsense, and that’s usually what an attempt to ride the party’s centaur turns out to be.
That’s not just personal boundaries. That’s a letter to HR: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/beast-of-burden
Barb’s favorite customer are probably Eldritch Archer and Druid.
Druid because she’s actually calm enough to sit still in her chair and happily pays the biggest bills for her grooming. It’s only tricky when she brings her pet along (especially if she also brings her boyfriend along with it).
Eldritch Archer is high-demand but easy to incapacitate and pays well.
I imagine she banned Fighter from her salon after the Bugbear incident.
Naw. Fighter stills has the Shears of the Norel Company:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/macguffin
He saves big on haircuts.
Our Mummy’s Mask has bits of this.
One of our NPCs is a magical cat who can turn into human form. Thus you have the arrogance of a cat in a person and the desire of our female PCs to pet her.
We’ve also added a Sphinx NPC to the group (who reluctantly agreed to petting at first but is slowly warming up to it).
Even one of our PCs became a Catfolk via reincarnation, provoking unwilling petting constantly from the other PCs. She eventually fixed it by wishing it away.
Our Samurai is half-dragon, provoking the party’s leader Kobold to try get her to act on her draconic nature instead of repressing it. One of the ways he does this is by sneakily replacing her pillows with ones full of gold coins, so she can properly sleep on a hoard.
That’s a hell of a sleight of hand check on the kobold’s part. Epic level checks to get metal to feel like soft stuffing.
Zarhon never said the Samurai doesn’t notice her pillows have been replaced by coin bags. Just that the kobold keeps doing it…
It’s easier when said Samurai’s preferred method of relaxation involves a lot of booze. And yes, plenty of sleight of hand involved.
I am curious, how IS woodland shampoo made by the ents? Is there a ‘how it’s made’ episode out there on the manufacturing process?
It’s mostly a marketing strategy. They use ent-based products, but the mass-manufactured version of Woodelf Shampoo relies on extracts rather than homebrewed ent-draught. If you want to pay top dollar, you can still get “original recipe” from a few company-owned boutiques. That mess doesn’t flow downstream to private distributors like Barbie though.
I had a druid in a game of something D&D-ish… she was a dwarf, but she probably spent more time as a bear. Certainly that’s how the rest of the party met her in the first session… meeting in a tavern, she was the large furry shape asleep in front of the fireplace. Sleeping was something of a theme for her.
There have also been a few more, well, feral characters. I’ve played a few characters in various systems — Lunar Exalted, for example, or monstrous D&D campaigns — for whom eating opponents was perfectly normal behaviour. I mean, they wouldn’t go out of their way to dine on humans, but when sharp teeth and powerful jaws are your primary weapon, you’re not exactly going to be delicate about these matters.
Well how else are you going to acquire their forms? That’s just science.
Actually, the Lunar character never had the knack for acquiring human forms… this was purely because when you’re an immense predator that’s just bitten a bandit in half, you might as well swallow it. Protein is protein… and a Lunar digestive system isn’t going to have a problem with all the metal it was wrapped in either.
One of the other non-Exalted games though, it was as much psychological warfare… certainly the character was always hungry, but was also well aware of the effect it had on morale when the enemy find themselves in a scene reminiscent of an Alien movie.
Thadrik: “We’ve got Lizardfolk, Cat-Folk, (Although they insist on being called “Tabaxi”) Rat-Folk, (Nezumi) Turtle-Folk, (Tortles) and so on, but there’s no species of Dwarfoid that’s a halfway point between Dwarf and ape.”
Gharda: “Sure we do. But they insist on being called ‘Humans’.”
Thadrik: “That’s even more ridiculous than ‘Tabaxi’. At least that sounds like ‘Tabby’. I’ll just call them ‘Ape-Folk’.”
In the Menagerie campaign I describe a few posts down, we did often refer to humans as ‘apefolk’ (and halflings as ‘small apefolk’). It wasn’t an insult; just a description. It wasn’t quite a post-human world, but it was certainly a post-human-dominance one, and humans were now eking out the same perilous existence as other sapients like catfolk, merfolk, ratfolk, birdfolk (tengus and harpies), frogfolk (grippli), treefolk (dryads), and so on.
And while dryads were down-to-earth enough to count as just ‘folk’ like everyone else, more powerful fey were regarded with awe and terror as something quite alien. Dragons were less alien but still a terrifying category unto themselves.
Elves, interestingly, were not ‘skinny apefolk’ (‘earfolk’?), but always just ‘elves’. Setting them apart like that was a mark of suspicion, though, not honor. Everyone else was pretty certain (correctly so, as it turned out) that elves were to blame for the cataclysm that had driven sapients to the verge of extinction. And while we loved and respected our elven arcanist party member, she made it easy to see how that had happened. (“The forest is on fire, and it’s not my…oh, who am I kidding? It’s totally my fault.”)
This is interesting in the context of this discussion. Figuring out what counts as “folk” and what counts as “monster” is at the heart of fantasy worldbuilding.
How were your fae weird?
The powerful fae were weird psychologically. Any species that was naturally part of that world, including classic “monsters” like minotaurs or harpies, had desires and fears that made sense in context. The sapient ones always seemed like people, even if some were people we didn’t like. (One of my favorite moments in the campaign was when we won from a sphinx the right to ask three specific questions about the medusa assassin who was cutting a petrified swath through our allies. There were many things we badly needed to know about her location, plans, and tactics, but still our third question was ‘What does she want?’ It was the right question, and we are no longer enemies.)
Lesser fae like dryads had long since “gone native”, so they made sense too. Once you understood their physiology (photosynthetic, unable to venture far from their own specific stand of forest, and in that frozen post-cataclysm world, usually a little crazed from sun deprivation) and their culture (intensely loyal to one another, shy and suspicious toward strangers), you could hope to see eye-to-eye with them. Or if not, it would be because of a specific intractable conflict, or because those particular dryads were assholes, not because dryads are beyond comprehension.
The powerful fae, on the other hand, seemed orthogonal to our world. They cared very little about things that everyone else considered important, including their personal survival, but would fight to the last to make sure one specific abandoned hilltop was lashed by a perpetual blizzard, or one person fulfilled to the letter a seemingly trivial promise made by their great-great-great grandfather. They could be a great help, or a terrible threat, or just sort of there, but always you would walk away from them with the sense of having been outplayed in a game you would never understand.
And my guess, which may have been off-target, was that they were parasites. Their own world, wherever and whatever it was, was ancient, jaded, and worn thin, a wan shadow of reality. Any vitality it had left, it drew from younger worlds like ours, and this was a zero-sum game. They weren’t out to destroy us — and since we had powerful enemies who were, we were not above dealing with the fae — but they diminished us, and if their influence had turned out to be the last nail in our battered world’s coffin, they would have shrugged and moved on to the next world.
When I played a Triton it was a 7 on the anthro-xeno scale.
It’s a scale (Hehe “Scale) of 1-10 with 1 being “Blue human with gills, and 10 being “Creature from the Black Lagoon”.
When I played a Warforged in a couple of one-shots I took it up to 11, and rather than playing it as a metal person, I played it as robotic as possible.
X Machina is not the type of Warforged that cries aboot how its lack of emotions make it sad.
Fails a Wisdom save and its eyes show a windows-style rotating hourglass
Heh. Humans portraying robots… Narrative cyborgs in action.
X: “Enemy units’ futile attempts to harm the invincible X Machina-unit are futile, as the invincible X Machina-unit is invincible.
Than: “You’re also redundant.”
X: “That is correct Cleric-unit
X: Enemy units have… One. …Chance to surrender. Non-compliance may result in injury, exsanguination, disfigurement, and severe-cranial-weight-loss. Rolls intimidate
Zippogrif: “Hey X, how come you bother wearing clothes if you’re not anatomically-correct?
X: “Excellent query Wizard-unit! This unit’s prime-directive is to advance and spread civilization. This includes cooperating with the laws of civilization. This unit wears pants because the law requires wearing pants.
The hardest part of roleplaying X is that it doesn’t use any pronouns or names in its speech at all, not even basic stuff like “You”. Trip up on it a lot.
I bet there’s a page of the handbook of erotic fantasy that’s shows what happens later.
It’s always nice when we can set it up like that. :3
Gestalts and PCs living together, mass hysteria!
I’m glad that I’m not the only one who had that go through their head.
This is all I think about with Druids and Rangers (the beast master ones).
How far is too far when you are wildshapped and how much of a pet versus a companion is that creature that the beast master seems so attached to?
It has happened yet, but the discussion has been had of playing a beast master ranger with a “pet” druid…
Your campaign concept is illegal in 48 states. 😛
Since you keep your mental ability scores while wild shaped, there’s a good argument that your mind is unaffected.
The opposite is true of the polymorph spell, which has caused grief for some players at my group’s table…
You’ve gone too far when you try to fit the druid with a Collar of the True Companion.
Not by planning but by chance, we had a beastfolk-heavy campaign that we still refer to as “the Menagerie”. (In-game as well as out, actually; my earnest little ratfolk merchant registered his trading company as ‘Menagerie Imports’.)
In this case, most of us emphasized “folk” over “beast”, but the clashes of perspective were still fun. Nocturnal and diurnal species advanced competing arguments over our travel schedule. Those whose biological roots as prey had a distinctly different outlook from those like our sharklike merman, with roots as predators. (We had no feline party members, but we did help a roving gypsy-like band of catfolk, who invited us to dinner in gratitude. Cue a minor panic on the part of my ratfolk and our prickly ravenfolk (tengu?) duelist. And then, in move Magus could totally relate to but which will NOT go down as one of history’s great high-water marks of diplomacy, one of the catfolk tried to groom them with her tongue. “You’re TASTING me!”)
The game was set several centuries after a devastating magical apocalypse, which the elves insisted was totally not their fault. The frozen wastes had just recently thawed enough for scattered enclaves of survivors to resume contact with one another, so the perspective clashes were cultural as much as species based. Churrik the ratfolk was one of the few members of his clan to venture out of their cozy underground warren (an abandoned Dwarven city, actually) and explore the Surface, following in the footsteps of his idolized uncle, a shabby and failed itinerant peddler whom Churrik imagined to be a vastly successful merchant tycoon.
The Surface was entirely new to him, and he collected vocabulary pertaining to Surface creatures and phenomena as avidly as the tengu collected shiny rocks. He found it all in equal parts thrilling exciting and terrifying. After the cheerfully crowded warren he grew up in, it always freaked him out to walk into a room and be the only person there, and outdoors was worse, with the giant glaring orb in the sky. (We played on Roll20, so the other players were quick to notice how Churrik capitalized the Sun, and regarded it as a personal nemesis. He had nightmares in which it turned out to be the open eye of a vast, sky-spanning cosmic cat.)
But Surface Food was endlessly wonderful, and he was endlessly hatching plans to import chocolate or beer or coffee back to Queenswarren. Cheese, stereotypically, would send him into a blissful near-coma, much to the ravenfolk’s disgust. (“It’s rotted milk. What is it with you mammals and milk? Why can’t you regurgitate food for your young like NORMAL people?”)
Nice to have the whole party on board for the schtick. That “regurgitate food for your young” interaction is great!
My Kitsune has basically denied his fox half for years. As such, when he jumps back I’ve played him as having issues with some stuff since he’s forgotten how to do normal things that are easy in human form but harder in his Kitsune form. Specifically, he’s avoided drinking anything (cups aren’t built for this type of snout…), going to anyplace he’s familiar with as a human (its all too big since his kitsune form is ~3 inches shorter), tries to avoid walking in general (kitsune walk on their toes in their kitsune form which is strange to him now), and avoids any area that’s warm (too much fur!).
The one thing that did come over to his human form is his connections to the Fey and his diet. Foxes are omnivores but I knew a person who worked with foxes. He told me that they like meat, obviously, and a few of them adored fish. So what I did was describe his rations as finely cut food (the lack of molars means grinding is harder) all mixed together. And he jumps at any chance for fish or sushi.
This is a ‘read the table’ thing for me (most things are really). Does the table really want to see beast actions, or are they tolerating petting zoo people?
Generally, it is the latter, and that means objectively we’re all playing elves. Just instead of pointy ears, there tend to be pointy teeth, claws, and long faces.
Also, due to mysterious forces from worlds beyond (so IRL), that polite butt sniff RP’d character trait can get you in a lot of trouble if someone wants to be very unreasonable.
The corglock reminds me of a character someone in my gaming group was thinking of playing in a campaign.
For context, none of the players were taking their characters seriously (I was playing a little girl raised by bears [moon druid], while another player’s PC was motivated by wanting to buy a pig so he could propose to his sweetheart back at the village). Also for context, Welsh legend has fairies using corgis as mounts. So his plan was to play a sentient corgi (using forest gnome stats) with a pixie familiar via Pact of the Chain.
…unfortunately, he changed his mind and played a centaur. And then the campaign died almost immediately.
I suppose both the centaur and my Atalanta-druid would qualify as animalistic PCs, but neither of them really acted like it (the centaur was a standard nice-girl cleric and my druid was a semi-feral child with a sweet tooth), and again the campaign ended before we had much chance to establish characterization.
Back in Pathfinder/3.5, there was a splatbook called “The Noble Wild”, which… among having a large variety of different animals to play as, also offered a bit of worldbuilding to explain them. That these “noble” animals were just that: the highest examples of their kind (and thus had to suffer whatever traits that exemplified their species). The gods created them just before the humanoid races with the question on if they wished to Challenge or Serve the humanoid races. Some suffered for their choice (like Sheep, who chose to serve but got the Nobility bred out of them).
Besides the rare appearance of a Noble Beast within my games (the same player and their bevvy of Noble Cats), I had a session where the party were Baleful Polymorphed by a Circe-like villain and had a short adventure to be returned to their mortal forms.
I’d be keen on seeing a Noble Wild 5e conversion.
apparently catfolk are common enough in the War for the Crown AP to not raise eyebrows with the citizens. The tiger companion, named Cuddles, otoh has a cart with a cage to stay in while in towns. It’s a very expensive looking lock on that cage… to distract from the bolts in the hinges which have been swapped out for wooden pegs.
I once played a character in a D&D 3.5 + Pathfinder’s Spheres game where I was a Badger Bard with an Elf Ranger companion, instead of the reverse. I even performed so well that I got a Goblin groupie!
(I had the stats of a Human modified for Small size with a Badger’s rage. The Elf “Ranger” used the standard Spheres rules for companions/conjured creatures.)
Since the GM disallowed various Bard stuff I -very- wanted, I enjoyed the game less than I wanted to. One of our party members was a Tibbit Rogue, or a Small Humanoid cat creature named Buster McFluffyMittins who embraced his animalistic instincts.
Most of the animal-people I play are people first and animals second. For instance, while my tabaxi characters tend to have expressive ears and tails, a taste for fish, a love for rubbing against people and other catlike behaviours, they generally stick to ones acceptable in civilized society and may actively defy some stereotypes (one of them became an expert swimmer to spite people who assumed she’d hate water).
Now, with awakened animals, it’s a bit fuzzier (no pun intended). While they’re still animals first and foremost, how animal-like they act depends on multiple factors. Ones who want to befriend humanoids will act more human-like than ones who don’t care and ones who’ve been awakened a long time will know which instincts to suppress better than ones still getting used to sapience, among other things.
Ugh 🙁
Talking animals? Beastfolk? Small cute animals as character?
Sorry but i don’t have anything on that. Shrek’s The Puss in Boots? Guardians of the Galaxy’s raccoon? I hate that childish things, even when i was a kid. The rest of the group don’t hate them, but propose something like that and don’t be surprise for not getting invited next session. Any of that is more annoying than Jar Jar Binks. Yes, for me the are things annoyinger than Jar Jar Binks 🙁
Beast folk is either enough non-beastly to be folk or they are animals. Distracting a catflok with yarn is just plain stupid. It’s not cute or funny. I even dare call it stupid-racist. Do catfloks, elves or dwarves keep giving humans bananas? No, for we are not monkeys. So expecting a catfolk to act like a common cat is the same insult 🙁
Sorry for the rant. But there are thing. Childish ones that i simply hate. Cute, little, talking animals companions, groups of friends resolving problems and living adventures, and that kind of things. Things that present childhood as a wonderous moment full of magic and fantasy are just things that i hate 🙁
Almost as illegal as giving a Collar of the True Companion to a non-animal NPC.
I just remembered something relevant to the actual question!
In one campaign from years ago, one of the players played an aarakocra monk. (For those who don’t know, that’s basically a bird-person. And not the boring Christian kind of monk, the cool kung-fu kind, also have you read the whole comic?)
I was at college and the gaming group wasn’t, so I missed the sessions in question, but from what I heard the character only spoke in bird noises for the entire first session. The other players assumed the character couldn’t speak Common.
Now, one of the players missed the first session. He was playing an evil character, and decided to slowly test the DM’s boundaries…up until the point that he tortured an NPC for information while the party’s paladin maintained a threadbare performance of ignorance. But his first step on the path to increasingly-obvious evil was much simpler.
He threatened to roast the annoying bird if it didn’t shut up. Turns out, it did speak Common after all, it just needed a little “encouragement”. And the aarakocra barely squawked again after that (since everyone knew he could talk).
Hmmm, the only time I can recall playing a beastfolk type character whose beastness was relevant was when I was playing General Dream. A Miqo’te beastmaster (one of my homebrew classes which based on summoning monsters). Her main deal was…. sleeping. Not in combat so as to not be a kender level annoyance to other players, but basically in any other situation I treated it as fair game.
She also had a strong theme of sleepy cat going. Her companion’s name was Rem (who spent their entire in game life as a Spider Shark due to the game not living long enough for me to need to change its form), her cat familar’s was Nap, her magic staff/crossbow Rest, and her Nightmare mount…. Sleepnear.
She also liked to cook and eat basically everything. In fact, I’ll just link the character sheet here: https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=2051617
‘Sleepnear’ is horribly awesome. Was it an intentional pun on General Dream’s part, or a Pratchett-style crossworld pun where only a reader from outside the story’s universe will get the joke?
Or, perhaps best of all in my mind, did she hear of a legendary mount named Sleipnir, and filter the name through a cat’s ears and brain without realizing she was changing anything?
I’d say option 2.
I think the best part is it lived up to it’s name as she repeatedly slept atop of it.
I suspect this character of liking lasagna and hating Mondays.
There needs to be a comic where Magus interacts with the mousefolk from Unrewarding
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unrewarding
I predict Magus struggling to rescue/not devour the adorable mousefolk younglings, or Magus being given the ‘carried on a stick / stew cauldron bath’ treatment by a begrudging mousefolk tribe.
One day… One day I’ll actually make the dungeon we talked about in “Unrewarding.”
My lizardfolk in our Ghosts of Salt Marsh game probably counts. His motivations are food, hunting, and sunbathing. Books, clues left scibbled on the walls? Useless. Secret passage? That could be where the quarry went, let’s go investigate.
The previous campaign had a tabaxti in the party who was literally raised by alley cats in Waterdeep. She played very much inspired by her house cat to the point where her roll20 token was a pic of said housecat’s face.
Conversely, the game system Hc Svnt Dracones inverts this quite a bit. There’s still stereotypes based on what kind of animal your character is based off of, but along the lines of canids are loyal but stuffy, cats are energetic and charming, reptiles are level-headed but slow to come to decisions, mustelids are either stubborn walls or bounce-off-the-walls-hyper, birds are focused but can be sadistic.
I gm’ed a gamed where the parties pets were off on a mini adventure. it was fun never got to finish off the corral kabal though (evil awakened horses led by the nightmare that bit off the fighters hand)
M wife has recently started GMing a Pathfinder game based on the (Buddhist fables) Jataka Tales. The country the characters lie in is even called Jataka.
The only playable races are the animal folk – Vanara, Ratfolk, Catfolk, Tengu, Lizardfolk, Gripli, and Nagaji. Oh and now Kitsune as a new player wanted to play one of them. But we are very much of the “folk” first, animal second style.
Nice! Who’s the antagonist in that kind of setting?
The vilesst creature of them all, obviously: Man.
I primarily play beastfolk. Most recently, I’ve played a Talking Puma (not awakened, but born that way). In PF, I play Vanara, Ratfolk, and Grippli. In 3.5 I prefer playing Hengeyokai, Bariaur, Tibbits, Wildren, and whatever else I can get my hands on.
For 3PPf, I prefer the “Noble Animal” book, even though it’s a bit wonky. It serves well to make options for animal people.
Anyway, the Talking Puma is fun. When talking, I don’t use contractions or idioms. He’s a very literal and intentional character to play, and he turns heads when he goes in town. He can’t read or understand signage, but he does speak well. When called a demon or devil, he just stops and goes on a lecture about the nature of fiends and how he is just as much a beast as any other dog in the street. He’s a fun guy to play.
I think it’s hard to play a more beast-like than man-like creature and expect to be treated as just like any other PC. You’ve gotta lean into whichever aspect you want to, and to heck with how NPCs treat you; that makes for a more interesting story.
My favorite Hengeyokai that I’ve played was a VoP Fist of the Forest that felt it was his calling to be a champion of the wilderness and to show that a life with no material attachments, just one where you’d live off the land, would be the ideal lifestyle. It’d be the most enlightened lifestyle. And so he was a VoP character with a more natural focus than a “charitable civilization” bent.
I’ll always find it funny that you portray Eldritch Knight as acting as cat-like as possible, while looking like a human woman with cat-ears.
I did a writeup for an Awakened Mastiff that was later hit with a True Polymorph(or maybe Reincarnation) spell before becoming an adventurer. The True Polymorph version was under the idea that the character could later get hit with an antimagic field or something, and wind up transformed into a Mastiff, but still retain the awakened nature and adventuring abilities (with that in mind, Arcane Trickster is the easiest workaround for the “no hands” situation)