Party Mascot
Woolantula the Servile is friggin’ adorable. I don’t care that Oracle and Miss Gestalt seem to have other opinions on the subject. That l’il demon spider is a bucket of rainbows and sunshine, and I’ll shank anyone who says different!
Of course, there is plenty of different-sayin’ when adventuring parties consider adopting an adorable mascots. I’ll never forget the pirate campaign where Laurel and I first started gaming together. What started out as a lean mean ship o’ the line soon became a floating humane society. No less than four war hounds, an intelligent parrot, a light-fingered monkey, a seal animal companion, and a selkie were aboard. We couldn’t very well leave any cute thing behind, of course. As bloodthirsty rabble of the first order, we had to be kind and merciful to puppies! (Never have I so sympathized with Witch.)
Then there’s the phase spider infant I saddled a certain pair of paladins with. After their thoughtless slaughtering of a nice newlywed couple, the gods compelled them to find a good home for the surviving child. I thought that baby Petunia the phase spider was a little angel. She took turns living in the paladins’ cloak hoods, sucking on the occasional rat, and teleporting into hard-to-reach places to practice her web spinning. That time she caught and nearly ate our magus’s kestrel was hilarious! Still can’t figure out why they dropped her off with that nice aranea lady so quickly though.
More recent is my big fluffy buddy Foosh. He’s a blatant Appa rip-off, but I’ll be damned if I don’t love the big lug. I don’t even care that he eats whole trees or will only obey commands if you toss him a pumpkin. He carries my howdah and he licks my face and actually says, “Foosh!” when he wants attention. And of course he’s totes adorbs.
I realize I’m just listing off my animal companions here, but cute is cute! So in celebration of Woolantula’s overwhelming cuteness, tell us all about your own party mascots, animal companions, and furry friends. Does everyone in the party love ’em, or do they get on some players’ nerves? Let’s have a proper pet beauty contest down in the comments!
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The Petunia the Phase Spider leads to a blank image for me, so there might be a problem with the link.
Good looking out.
Fixed.
One of my favorite things to inflict on new parties is the ratty raccoon. They always run across the mangy thing somewhere far from town and I’ve yet to have a party not take the bait. Once they’ve taken him in and cleaned/fed him, he attaches himself to the most powerful party member (not dumb, that’s the one who will be defended his furry hide) and proceeds to do raccoon things to the party. If it’s not wizard locked, then he can get into it. When I first dumped one on hubby’s party, he got into the gnomes small barrel of molasses that he kept for feeding the horses their chop. That was an extra couple days in camp cleaning :).
Had a wizard who had a rooster. Not a familiar, just a pet he had at home. The third time it drew in encounters with it’s middle of the night crowing, the ranger made it an ex-pet.
Kender had both a war hound and a war condor that he “found”.
But the favorite by far was ferrets. I had so many ferrets in the party over the years that we actually made a table for what random stuff the ferrets brought back. They were excellent ways to bring a town encounter to the party. Usually by being chased by the person they “acquired” that small, shiny, EXPENSIVE item from :).
Ferrets, eh? Methinks I detect a Beastmaster fan.
https://media1.tenor.com/m/sank0DYlPdEAAAAC/beastmaster-beastmaster-ferrets.gif
Oh definitely. We went to see the movie as a group and it was ferrets from then on.
Also, if you ever get a chance, read Craig Shaw Gardner’s Eternal Apprentice series. You’ll get to read the line, “Wild pigs and ferrets? You are a new forbidden delight!”
The world of literature opens before me like the infinite regress of the lotus blossom. And it’s full of ferrets.
My party recently explored a ruined city infested by totally-not-zerg from the Shadowfell. For the rest of my party that meant hordesvof creapy-crawlies to murder. My ‘explosives expert’ (refluffed blaster caster) however immediately fell in love with the majestic banelings (dog sized spiders covered in explosive glands that roll up to enemies and then detonate) and decided she wanted to tame one.
It took a couple attempts due to not having animal handling proficiency (no points for guessing how the failed attempts turned out) but eventually I managed to tame one. His diet consists of explosives, he’s no use for anything except being cute (only in the eyes of my character though) and my character absolutely loves him.
An important first trick is “come.” A second important trick is “don’t explode.”
Unrelated to the topic at hand, but I absolutely LOVE what Oracle’s done with her hair. I don’t know how she’s making lab safety gear look good, but she is
Backlit hair is like an instant blowout.
Most of the groups I’m in/GM for doesn’t have mascots as such (sometimes someone has a familiar or animal companion but those are typically a “their character” thing rather than a group as a whole thing).
But recently we did have an exception. A cute little green leshy familiar called “Rodfrugt” (root vegetable Danish, our local language).
Their design was shamelessly taken from the Questspout from the Swords-webcomic (the player had a plushy), but behaviorwise we’d have fun with ’em digging themselves down places and or curiously enjoying food and such like.
I made a custom mini for em from some greenstuff
I demand pics of the greenstuff mini!
Quest Sprout is one of my computer buddies! He sits on my desktop case along with Slack Wyrm and a kitty/dragon from a maker I follow.
Wizard with Improved Familiar: Infernal Parrot.
Pollux the parrot has a thick Brooklyn accent and is *clearly* an evil outsider sent to corrupt the wizard, but he’s just so darn loveable when he isn’t convincing the locals that he’s actually the avatar of a god of birds and deserves wine, delectables, and expensive cigars, or teaching unbelievably foul profanities to little schoolchildren.
The non-specific ” unbelievably foul profanities” is playing absolute havoc with my imagination.
The last character I played with a familiar/companion was a sailor in an Exalted game set in the west — and what I had was an albatross. Not much use in a fight, but perfect for avoiding one, since she could scout far beyond the horizon looking for other ships, or signs of other deep-sea perils. If we ran into pirates, we could be certain it would be on our terms.
Perhaps not the most endearing to the party, though. An albatross — especially of a breed dubbed “imperial” — is a big bird, often noisy, often messy. Not the ideal pet for living on a relatively small boat… but she earned her place in the crew.
What good is a bird familiar if you can’t crap on your partymates?
Oracle, you worked with Assassin for who knows how long. You are in no position to throw stones. Or shoes. Or sweep brooms. Or spray poison.
Seriously, be more chill, Oracle. =_=
My Caliban wizard had a bat familiar named Grimmric. People enjoyed the way I wrote his thoughts, and he became a valued scout, recruiter of mundane bats, and even delivery system for the party cleric’s spells when we were scattered around the battlefield.
Both my Goblin abjurer and my Android alchemist created homunculi, who were a wellspring of comedy. Our party oracle had been forced to wear a succubus costume to work at a bar, and she got hilariously cross at the Goblin when he made his first homunculus look like a mini-sucubus. In the other party, the Dwarf fighter kept having to fend off the homunculus from perching on his helmet. ^_^ Such fun.
Oracle is especially sensitive to arachnophobia. She can’t see the spiders so good, but the violin plucking SFX really get to her.
What was the theme song when Assassin was poisoning a well?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn2FI-9v_zI
Huh. That scans – except Assassin would have expected pay, I think.
Me, I might have gone with https://youtu.be/eqWpKATpZg4?si=qNPn8EnBhlPk-6Xv
That also scans.
My groups only ever had one mascot, and I think part of it is that they can stretch the suspension of disbelief. The cute critter that travels one our shoulders, yet always survives every environmental damage and area attack ? Yeah, a bit strange. They also turn out to be the only creature that doesn’t count against teleportation limits… Convenient, maybe too much so.
But we did have a slime called Vi. Round, squishy and harmless in all its anime-ness. Technically my monk had adopted her and was holding the slime in her hands during battle while fighting with her feet, making sure to always keep her out of harm, and she turned out to be our party mascot since NPCs loved to see us carrying a slime around. She even grew more sapient over time ! Then our characters went through a timeskip while she had stayed on the ship with our crew, and we came back five year later, to her having become pretty large… but still cute, round and squishy. Nowadays, she stays on the ship all the time, though.
Any chance you could get a detachable pseudopod to go adventuring with you like in the old days? “Daughter of Vi” or whatever?
Our merry band of scandinavian monster hunters has (in order from least to most troublesome) a norwegian elkhound named Max (he is a very good boy), a red squirrel named Ratatoskr (who might secretly be the literal, fallen angel Lucifer), and a dubiously sane frenchwoman named Mintel who has more in common mentally with a cat than any human (actually the other player’s character, but my character pretty much has to look after her as well, so I’m counting her in the “pet” list).
Why is your Frenchwoman a cat?
she’s basically feral, no concept of personal space, trespassing laws, or social cues. she spends most of her time lazing around our home base (pub), or hunting animals in the woods. when frightened, her standard response is to start swinging knives at everything. also once tried to flee pursuers by climbing an old (and extremely valuable) tapestry in a cathederal. Which my character had to pay for because she’s legally his responsibility and she’s broke.
French Catwoman sounds suspiciously like a player character.
Well, she is one. I’m playing the party’s “mom-friend” in a slightly more literal sense than usual.
My favorite was Bosco, the gigantic albino dog one of the party’s NPC friends picked up on her own separate adventure. I, the GM, took it as an opportunity to play with (read “abuse”) the animal companion creation rules, creating a dog that was unusually small for an adult grizzly bear.
And tucked away in the Edges section of his character sheet (publicly available to the party), was the unelaborated on Edge “Cu de Annwn”.
The posse seemed to like the big guy (hard not to adore the goodest of boys), though unfortunately I ran out of time to keep running the game just a few sessions after his introduction, and before I could reveal much about his supernatural side. I think they twigged to that when he literally ate an incoming hostile spell, though.
Never heard of a “Cu de Annwn.” But I knew without looking it was Welsh.
Here’s hoping Arawn’s Goodest Boy kept them company for many adventures to come!
Is Divine Herald back with the Anti-Party or still independent? He might cause some ‘balance issues’ to say the least.
What, having Herald back in the party might be unbalancing? Say it ain’t so!
(There may be a comic about this coming up.)
How’s Oracle able to tell Woolantula is a spider? She can’t exactly see them, and they might assume they’re a sheep if poked.
She’s only kind-of blind. See “clouded vision” over here:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/oracle/oracle-curses/
Does it have to be furry? My gladiator-turned-preserver has a pair of well-trained heavy crodlu: one for riding, and one to carry supplies. What’s not to like about a pair of 12′-foot tall ‘ostrich’ lizards with kick, claw, and bite attacks? Raiders or bandits quickly regret trying to mess with us.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/757752516099309639/1077590304728821801/Palomi_Crodlu.png
My preserver also keeps a Charm Monster spell prepared for the time we meet that ‘adorable’ critter we just need to adopt. Maybe a bulette? Although she’s close friends with a halfling, so that could be somewhat problematic.
I’ve also got a an elf in a different campaign with an elven dog (cooshee) and a dire wolf (courtesy of Charm Monster on that one) as pets. And the ranger has a grizzly bear and a trio of hawks as followers.
Heh. My last necromancer turned a defeated bulette into a unliving land tank. We rode around in its ribcage. Good times.
In a current campaign we have a PC who is a young elven girl. She’s supposed to be like 12, or the elvish equivalent. She’s also the party cleric and is being hunted by some baddies which is part of the reason we have her with us. But anyways, she has started to amass some pets. So far I think she has a pair of mastiffs, their puppy progeny, and another puppy who happens to be a hellhound that she managed to adopt, generally referred to as the ‘heckpuppy’. She also has a talking, intelligent horse.
The party is further rounded out by an owl familiar, an, ‘eldritch squid’ familiar, a spectral raven familiar, an NPC who is a wereraven, another who spent time accidentally transformed into a chicken, and a mechanical dragon.
Oh man… Elf girl leaning into that Snow White trope hard. XD
You guys ought to have a “familiar session” where you play as the critters and get into hijinks.
We just recently got what I am 95% certain will end up being our current party’s “mascot”.
An ill tempered gryphon (or griffon if you prefer the D&D spelling) named Bonesnapper, that our ranger (and druid) “nat 20’d” into being affectionate… but ONLY with them (it bit one of the trainers arm almost off when they were trying to bring it to us to “get ride of it” XD )
We already love it, our ranger wants to ride it and bring it with us all the time, and we think the whole attitude of the creature is perfect.
We want a Bonesnapper plush! (does anyone know where to get a good gryphon plush?)
Best pal/mount ever!
Cuddly enough? https://www.etsy.com/listing/787117201/harpy-eagleclouded-leopard-gryphon?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=gryphon+plush&ref=sr_gallery-1-20&frs=1&organic_search_click=1
this is the one we’re going with
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BTK7CZ18/ref=ox_sc_act_image_1?smid=A188WO8ADASLR0&psc=1
I had a Waddle Dee fill the role for my Glitter Hearts game, but the players didn’t take too much to it.
Instead the Neptunia CPUs wound up being the major “party friend” NPCs.
Side note: one of my characters adopted a house full of cats. I am still annoyed to this day that I did not get to bring them along with me.
How does Glitter Hearts compare to Girl By Moonlight?
Gotta mention our wildfire druid’s fire spirit. Fluffy grey fur, feathery wings patterned like a moth with matching antennae, a fluffy mane, long “eyelashes” about the size and weight of a small dog with a feathery tail twice as long as he was. Apparently it feels like a heated weighted blanket when he lays on top of someone. We took to calling him Little Man out of character.
Meanwhile, while the campaign never got this far without being cancelled I was planning on having my wizard get a familiar. While familiars are usually fey, fiendish, or celestial in origin, the DM and I were going to negotiate for her being aberrant for thematic reasons. She was going to be a literally silver coloured “fox” (“she’s still working on her fox shape, but I [my wizard] think it gives the whole look character”) named Luna with minimum three eyes at any given time. She couldn’t really make up her mind about how many eyes/mouths/tails/legs she was supposed to have so those would constantly shift in number, but she’d have been a sweet little gremlin and I like to think she would have made mascot status too.
Sounds like a fox that an AI art generator tried to draw, lol
I’ve mentioned Irlana and her boar Mick before. Thanks to a houserule, Mazon the half-orc inquisitor freed up 3 feats and I gave her a wolf. My own Oracle, an Ifrit, also has a wolf. My dragonkin Alester has a familiar, a little flying dino, and thanks to gestalt will be getting a hippogriff next level. My drow druid has a dino. My sylph hunter has a wolf as does my undine ranger. The aasimar witch has an artic hare. And while my drow cleric Ren didn’t originally have a pet, thanks to gestalt and a mythic tradition, he got both a hawk animal companion and a gourd leshy familiar.
My bard Lurog also has a pet baby wyvern but I haven’t found a way to get him into something that has a mechanical effect yet.
Can you tell I like giving characters pets?
But which one is the cutest? :3
That would be a tie between the hare and the one I forgot to mention – Kei Warpriest is gestalted with Hunter, giving him a pet cat that I flavored to be a fox. Also Kei himself is a kitsune so he can be the pet whenever he wants.
I’m playing a third-party class called a Tamer. My little kobold’s entire Thing is that she has a team of pets fighting for her. So far, she’s got a pseudodragon (who may, if we ever get around to slaying a full-scale dragon, become one herself) and a fae-touched owlbear cub, and both of them are basically characters in their own right. Rose the pseudodragon set Rosaceae the kobold on the path to adventuring by showing her the weird bio-magic she could do and encouraging her to stand up for herself, and Raspberry the cub is a latecomer who’s a bit thick but he’s doing his best.
Hey, any owlbear who qualifies as “a bit thick” sounds like an owlbear genius to me.
Lumpy the Tumor-Squirrel will always be my first thought when asked about party mascots. My bomb-slinging alchemist was built around two things: Being socially awkward in an endearing way, and always being juuuuust off the mark when she made the occasional effort at cute things. Ex: She read a book about a girl in a pretty dress with a parasol, so she became obsessed with getting one. When she went to the local general store, she drummed up all of her social courage and slid the picture on the cover of the book in front of the clerk and tapped the picture of the parasol while fidgeting nervously. …She didn’t have the heart to NOT buy the brown canvas umbrella they offered her, and she only ever remembers it’s strapped to her bag after it stops raining.
But Lumpy? Lumpy was a whole other thing! When she hit the level to get a tumor familiar, she wanted to make something cute and friendly and outgoing and all the things she wasn’t! So she took a pound of flesh and molded it into a squirrel. I had a reference photo, sadly long since lost, of a squirrel with no hair, one eye SIGNIFICANTLY bigger than the other, teeth growing out at a 45 degree angle, and sitting with it’s little paws curled against it’s chest, claws overgrown and curling. My DM was HORRIFIED by this thing, and just hated it, but everyone else at the table thought Lumpy was the best!
Since then, if I ever run a game and need an alchemist, the party will find a little shop with a counter staffed only by a misshapen little abomination who will tap the board for you to pick your order, and will run off to the inaccessible basement lab to get Chalcey to whip things up for you. That expression he makes sometimes is a smile, I assure you!
Quick, everyone! Find pictures of horrible squirrel taxidermy!
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS9uQfg7O4KR5tlPrRVD_FHz9sBFItZpid1Xw&usqp=CAU
Is ‘mayflies’ the woolly-demon-spider version of the ‘biscuits’ curse for doggies?
One of our fighters in my Rise of Tiamat campaign has a tendency to attempt Animal Handling checks on a lot of the non-sapient enemies we face. This has resulted in the party now having an otyugh for a pet. For those unfamiliar with this creature, an otyugh is a Large aberration with 3 legs, 3 tentacles, 3 eyes on one of the aforementioned tentacles, and one very large mouth that it uses to eat carrion and waste. It is also somewhat telepathic, although it can only send simple messages and images and can’t receive replies. Ours is called Tiny (if I recall correctly), and is currently shrunken down so we can carry it in a bag.
My current party has my ranger/archaeologist’s animal companion, a bright orange velociraptor (https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/botm/images/f/f6/Vm_Art.jpg).
His name is Tequila Sunrise (Sunny for short), and he hates everyone except the ranger and, as of recently, the party paladin (who tends to share food with him).
He has bitten or tried to bite party members probably just about as frequently as he bites enemies.
He’s a horrible little gremlin bird and we all love him for it.