It doesn’t matter if your name is literally Summoner. If you summon critters from the great cosmic terra incognita to do you bidding, you’ve got to ask yourself some serious questions. A few examples:
- Did I just create life? Does that make me a god? An honorary Frankenstein?
- If the creature already existed elsewhere, what was its life like?
- Do its buddies think it was just abducted? Am I the magical equivalent of a UFO sighting?
- If I get to decide what my eidolon looks like, what did it look like before the summoning?
- Can I visit my summoned critter’s home plane? Does it have an address? Should I send it an nice gift basket with an “I’m sorry for making you fight inbred hillbilly ogres” note?
In the case of Rouge the Eidolon, it would appear that her home plane is full of unshaped potential eidolons. And also mean girls. I’d probably want to get out of there too.
But as we continue on our month-long journey through planar cosmology, I think it is worth pausing to ask yourself the most important questions from the summoner’s big book o’ brain teasers. Where do summoned creatures come from, and what is their home like? Sound off in the comments with your own idiosyncratic takes, novel interpretations, and bizarre head canon!
Come to think of it what does Rouge think about Summoner?
I assume it’s fairly negative since he’s an abrasive sleazebag, but I have no idea what sort of perspective a summoned Eidolon would take about things
Maybe it’s like a work release program.
On the one hand, she has to deal with Summoner.
On the other, she isn’t trapped in Limbo with the incorporeal Libby-squad – and unlike Summoner, they’re immortal.
Reminds me of a PC who had another PC as a slave. The slave PC was much tougher than the slaveowner PC but went along with it on the theory that once the slaveowner PC had gotten rich enough, the slave PC would kill him and take all of his stuff.
I think this question is somewhat answered in the patreon comics. Respect in his face, but a loathing behind the scenes?
See the hover text on this one: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/historical-accuracy
In my opinion, spiritual entities can come from pretty much anywhere.
“Eidolon” can probably be both a species and a job description.
I remember a Summoner who played their eidolon as a devil trying to reform. Serving as an eidolon was his parole, more or less.
Anyhoo… Poor Rouge. :-/ If I were her, I wouldn’t want to go back to this lot, either. No wonder she bothers to keep Summoner alive, if this is where she has to return once he finally pops his clogs.
“I’m going to be a dragon when I’m finally summoned.”
“Well I’m sure that I shall be an angelic creature.”
“And I want goose that lays gold eggs for Easter!”
Bunch of hypothetical brats, I tells ya.
Ms. Laurel really does give Rouge a very nice physical manifestation. She should just ignore the unmanifested Libby’s. (Sabrina the teenage witch-reference)
I wonder, why did Summoner want to go to Limbo? Or did he take a wrong turn after Albuquerque? 😉
The question you really ought to be asking is, “Why don’t they have their forehead symbols on that plane?”
Is he… is he dead?
Well, the glowing runes only appear while the eidolon is summoned. Which means either Rouge was called with a gate or similar spell, or Summoner went to go visit her.
Generally speaking a think it’s best to just let the player decide where their particular summons come from. With so many ways a character could gain their magic, it shouldn’t be surprising that a spell might at a fundamental level work in a completely different way for different casters, even though the final result will be more or less the same. With that being said, my general preference as a player is this: the summons (excepting things like the Eidolon or the Guardian Spirit) aren’t “real”. The specifics may vary, but as much as I love summoning, I just don’t feel comfortable with either forcefully dragging potentially sentient being to fight and die for my benefit, or having to rely on their goodwill for my main “power source” in case of more consensual arrangements (same reason why I have an issue with playing most divine spellcasters, and also why I love the Oracle so much). Calling forth fragments of the Dimension of Dreams (which is good one of my pet builds does it), creating temporary magical constructs using platonic ideals of extraplanar creatures as templates, etc. neatly sidesteps the whole uncomfortable conversation.
But do those newly created creatures lack free will? What are the ethics of dream stuff? If you’d like to use your phone a friend on this one, the Tatterman is on line one with his opinion.
https://xkcd.com/390/
Aleays relevant. ALWAYS!
Oh jeez! That’s existentially horrifying.
So, what article(s) is Summoner reading in that newspaper? The Sunday comics? What’s the title of this interplanar publication
Maybe it’s a planar road map, and Summoner has gotten them lost because he refused to ask for directions.
Judging by the front page picture, there’s a new exhibition of abstract art opening in Plotsville.
You know, Rouge does have a bit of a Veronica Sawyer hairdo… Are we gonna see those other Eidolons wearing scrunchies and wielding mallets in a future comic?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathers:_The_Musical
That presupposes the existence of additional Summoners. Definitely a monkeys paw situation right there.
Or any other class with a vaguely mystical ‘pet’ as a class feature. Improved familiar users, Magical Child, Spiritualist, Shaman comes to mind.
And of course, Snowflake makes an excellent Heather.
Why are Summ and Rouge floating around in an Astral Plane bubble? Rope Trick? Some form of astral travel? He couldn’t afford a larger demiplane?
Obviously they just carjacked Glenda the Good Witch and need to lie low while the heat dies down.
I think anyone who tries to carjack Glenda will discover that her real nickname is “Good But Not A Pushover” and will get exactly what they’ve got coming to them. 😉
I like to think eidolons are petitioners trying to expedite the process of becoming an actual outsider of their plane. Kinda like an unpaid internship.
If that’s the case here as well, Summoner is in for a rude awakening when his waifu-dolon transforms into a protean one day.
What about Rouge makes you think she’d opt for protean?
You mean, other than the potential to visit madness and violence on Summoner someday? 😉
This reminds me of the gag campaign idea I once had of PCs who are recruited into some wizard’s “Summon Adventurers” spell scheme. Essentially, the PCs live in a demiplane with a good amount of resources, but at literally any time, someone somewhere in the multiverse could cast Summon Adventurers (the wizards is selling scrolls of this spell everywhere) and they’ll get poofed into the middle of who-knows-what and ordered to do things. Could be peasants trying to save their town from orcs, could be greedy businessmen planning to destroy their competition, could be someone who really needs some traps cleared. The PCs, when summoned, are summoned creatures and are affected by all their regular rules (including Banishment and Protection from Evil), which means that death just sends them back to the home base demiplane. For plot convenience purposes, Summon Adventurers is probably hours/level (with Greater Summon Adventurers lasting days/level), and the PCs may have more free will than is typical of summoned creatures (though for a certain type of player, being required to follow orders but free to do so “creatively” if they oppose their master could be very rewarding).
The main point of this campaign (besides occasionally satirizing how players abuse summoned creatures) is to have an absolutely wacky problem-of-the-week campaign where literally anything could be in next session (including extremely difficult or unbalanced things, since PC death and failed missions don’t end the campaign) and hopefully some roleplaying about how the characters are adjusting to their new lives.
Never ran it, probably won’t ever run it, but anyone who wants to steal it is free to!
I think a lot of us have had that idea. I don’t know of anyone that’s actually pulled the trigger and run the campaign though.
Not a bad one-page mini dungeon, now that I think of it….
“Unshaped eidolons are notorious for their jealousy. Though they lack bodies of their own, they can innately cast vicious mockery at will, requiring no material components. ”
I should certainly hope they don’t need material components, considering that vicious mockery is already a verbal-only spell.
Careful! You push up your glasses any harder and they’ll fly out the back of your skull.
Playing a summoner, these are things I’ve had to headcannon a lot. If you are going unchained eidolon, it is a lot clearer where they come from and where they go. In every case however, they come from one of the final destinations of spirits, where they wonder before taking a form. Becoming an eidolon is often a much better alternative to some pit fiend grabbing you and turning you into a sentient pile of goo. At least when your time is up, you are much stronger than your typical new spirit on the plain. You are even very likely to connect to a like minded summoner, so if you want to be a dragon, you don’t end up a literal skills monkey.
Other summoned creatures heed the call of summoners for their own desires. It is a great excuse to go to the prime material to punch the face of evil/good/Dave. It isn’t something they can typically do just wandering their home plain, and getting to the prime material plain isn’t nearly as easy to do any other way. It is a blind summoning though. You do not know where you will end up, otherwise you would not choose to take the Plainer Binding portal. As a side effect, if you are lucky and get chosen by a powerful summoner, you might end up with a “power up.” Augment Summoning is just a step away from the advanced template after all!
What… What did Dave do deserve extraplanar retribution?
Isn’t it his fault that the whole crew of Red Dwarf died in at least one dimension?
Also, I like the idea of the Planar Binding portal. Anyone can go through, but you have no idea where you’ll end up. It’s like the lottery of escaping back to the prime material.
Worse is that it looks just like the standard summon monster portal and/or Planar Ally portal! If you go through, you might get showered with gifts and be able to go whenever you choose, and do whatever you want, or you might get stuck on guard duty, not able to leave a single room for the next thousand years. Truly a gamble
I like the idea pf eidolons coming from the Dimension of Dreams or Akashic Record. They’re Jungian beings created from humanity’s collective unconscious and given specific form by the individual Summoner’s psyche.
You want Chaos gods? Because this is how you get Chaos gods.
I was hoping for Gork & Mork, myself.
I’d prefer Mork and Mindy.
It’s interesting that living things in Warhammer created their gods (intentionally or unintentionally), while in other settings the gods created life. Which one truly deserves the label of divinity?
Orks. Orks deserve the label of divinity.
The plot of my first major campaign centered around there being a plane where the souls of warforged were coming from, and as part of the manufacturing process their minds were wiped. The BBEG was the local god of the plane, and he came to the material to get back his chosen people. They were semi-akin to fire elementals, and after he gave them their memories back they’d explode, turning into an animate mix of flame and shrapnel.
The god of Scanners is a deity to be feared.
This made me think of the Children of Azathoth, in Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow-series.
They were, in a way, quite pitiful creatures. Although sentient and possessed of enormous power, they were hopelessly insane and doomed to destroy themselves in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction capable of detonating whole suns.
Most of them died shortly after being ‘born’. Cthulhu tricked two of them into remaining dormant, giving them a false promise of a cure for their madness and prolonged life, only to wake them up and use their explosion to complete the stellar configuration he needed to slip the lock that kept him confined, and allow him and his cronies to invade the realm of the Elder Gods.
He was rather upset when he discovered the Elder Gods had kept the third and last Child of Azathoth semi-sane by ‘sedating’ it; it had been quite happily powering their realm for at least as long as Cthulhu had been trapped in R’lyeh. And when he entered the realm of the Elder Gods, and the last Child of Azathoth found out how he’d lied to and used to its ‘brothers’, well… Turns out there was a reason the Elder Gods had just evacuated their realm and let Cthulhu and his armies walk in without trying to fight him off.
After the explosion, the Elder Gods could just lock Cthulhu and his buddies back in their cells; they were in no condition to fight.
Azathoth is indeed a deity to be feared as well. O_o
For my Aasimar Aberrant Mind Sorcerer, the aberrations that can be summoned are pulled from the Outer Planes and given a sort of celestial overlay; think the angels from Bayonetta, with their alabaster and gold motif, but with horrible monstrosities just under the surface.
The eldritch equivalent of sweeping a turd under the rug.
We vary across three approaches. Deal, Magic and Off-screen. Deal is abasically that the summoner has done a deal to summon the being. Like: “I will give you something and in return i can call you to fight for me”. The Magic approach is based on Magic: The Gathering. Basically you don’y outright summon a being but a copy pulled from between the planes to battle for you. The Off-screen method is simply that you have many, an stock of them elsewhere and you summon them. Like on a mobile game i play, Might and Magic: Era of Chaos you need certain quantity of tokens of a certain unit to summon it and improve it. When you get some tokens it says you are getting a bunch of those creatures. So basically you got a reserve of them and use some on battle 🙂
We use either and all are valid 😀
I wonder if the magic the gathering method will see more play given the new Forgotten Realms set.
Or maybe they will say the creature are summoned from the Warp when the Warhammer 40.000 set comes out 😛
Oof. What would the world be like if WotC owned Games Workshop?
The quote “Where we are going we don’t need eyes to see” comes to my mind 😛
They’re made out of ambient energies. Summoned celestials are made out of ambient goodness, etc.
THE SPIRIT BOMB IS A SUMMON?
Sure, why not? No past (having just been created), no future (since the bomb’s about to blow up).
Goku is a conjurer?
I remember a series of comics wherein, as a minor plot point, one person got the power to summon her friends – who had their own lives. At one point one was summoned while dressed only in a towel, two others were summoned during an intimate moment with each other (fully clad, fortunately), and so on.
One campaign I was in, the summoned entities were bits of a god’s soul, split off for the duration of the summon then sent back to remerge afterward. This explained how there could be multiple of the summon at once, which might even fight each other.
Going from “intimate moment” to instantly fully clothed sounds uniquely uncomfortable. I hope no one was wearing jeans.
Beats the stuff that happens in serials like Negima, where people get summoned into fairly public places while they were, say, in the shower…
I meant that the pair were fully clothed while being intimate, at the moment they were summoned. One of them was feeding the other.
Bit late to the party, but my Illusionist could pull out some shadow illusion minions of his own. Since my shadow had to make up their form, I always assumed they were products of his own mind; his idea of what a “knight” was or “dog”. As for their minds, I equally assumed they were just parts of his mind from when he pretended to be those things. A piece of himself manifested outwards.
Sounds better than “always a bird.”
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/bokunoheroacademia/images/7/73/Dark_Shadow_Anime.png/revision/latest?cb=20170716172832
I recently finished building a cleric that focuses on summoning. He’s a drow of Erastil, the big brother to my half-drow monk Tamarie. His archetype gives Augment Summoning and Superior Summoning as bonus feats. He summons various animals to act as scouts or front-liners. I also gave him a permanent animal companion at level 5.
But from where do these summons originate? And how is it that they’re bolstered? Does the augment pull superior specimens from the ether, or does it actually enhance them as they come through?
My headcannon is that he has his own private zoo and every time he summons something, he’s teleporting them from that zoo. At first it’s just a few animals that are cared for by family members. But as he levels up and gets wealthy, he buys a zoo and zookeepers. As for the augmenting, they get enhanced as they come through.
“Lord of Darkness, Baron of the Fifteen Hells and Twenty Dimensions of Pain, I call upon thee! By thy True Name, I summon thee! Steve! Get your ass up here and fight this bigass dragon!”
“Seriously? Again?”
“You can’t die on this plane and you still owe me 5 gold from last week’s poker game, get out there and get with the murder, big guy.”
“Ugh. Fine. I do love murder.”
Steve likes to complain, but he loves every minute of it.
He does! The dimensions of pain have so much paperwork, you know? He even stopped cheating at poker night so he has an excuse to get out and about and get his hands bloody more often.
Alternatively, being summoned is the extraplanar version of pro wrestling / mixed martial arts / etc.
“Bro you gotta be summoning me more often! I’m ten points behind Algazorath the Many-Winged Thunderbolt, and I canNOT lose to that asshole this season or my sponsorships are going to disappear, you understand? I need more screen time. And see if you can get me some cooler enemies. You planning on fighting any vampires soon? The githyanki are tuning in to vampire fights like crazy lately and I think I can really up my appeal with that demographic, you know?”
I like this well enough to want to implement it. Friggin hilarious, my dude!
Thank you!
When we had our second pathfinder campaign (2-3 years, 10 people, a DM for the first half, a DM for the second half), I played an unchained summoner, fey caller. We had a custom setting and I wasn’t particularly interested in/aware of the actual Pathfinder lore, so I just skimmed a few things and made the rest up. I was shocked and confused when the official Fey realm setting actually came up for half a session.
I had envisioned the Fey world as an infinitely large plane of existence similar to fairy tale European countryside and forests. It had pockets of areas that were more or less stable, based on if the inhabitants in that particular area maintained consistency or if they often argued and overrode each other’s control of the world’s rules.
Both my summoner, Zhen, and eidolon, Rei, were dream walkers whose consciousnesses would pop in and out of various planes in their sleep. They met often as children, forming a lifelong bond that led to long-distance dating.
Zhen was a somewhat lonely, pious tiefling raised by his single, human mother and an inconsistent, mysterious father-like figure(who was both his father and a pairaka). He ended up making a lot of friends in these dream planar visits and learned to summon them in a sort of consciousness in a false body + magical items/auras/abilities way.
Rei was a human girl living in a very stable bubble in the Fey world, who claimed that she was a swan maiden. She would doze off often and claim that she had been adventuring with her cross-planar boyfriend and saving some other world from doom, which no one believed. Her eidolon from was her but wearing a recolored version of her grandmother’s swan maiden cloak and her eidolon powers manifested in Zhen naively believing that she was actually a powerful fey, unconsciously powering up said cloak.
After the campaign ended, they married and retired from adventuring to run a cross-planar restaurant in the Fey world.
Unfortunately, due to miscommunication and lack of interest, my idea of the Fey world was not conveyed to the rest of the group and my characters were quickly memed into Zhen, the waifu summoner, and REEEEEEEEEE. They were also believed to be a third of their age due to an insult made in the first session. Second DM maintains that he was not aware they were in a relationship for 75% of the campaign, and half the group might still believe that Rei was a formless, eldritch horror as per the standard summoner class.
What a sweet story! Love that character concept.
Relevant comic:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dignity
One of my favorite 5e spells is Find Steed (or, when applicable, Find Greater Steed). I like to think that the “celestial spirit” that is summoned is more than happy partner with a paladin to fight evil. Perhaps on Mt Celestia their involvement in the rest of the multiverse might be very limited, as would be their opportunities to make a difference. However, when summoned to partner with a paladin, they get the opportunity for more direct and ‘hands on’ involvement. This could make for some ‘fish out of water’ moments as they assume the form of a warhorse, but ultimately it is something as beneficial and desirable to them as it is to the paladin.
But then like… How do you explain Snowflake?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/tournament-arc-part-6-8
A pronunciation error on Paladin’s part when he cast the spell?
Or maybe the big, bad material plane with its unconsecrated oats and non-standard horse shoes corrupted Snowflake. 😉