Unfamiliar
Who doesn’t want an obedient animal-bro to call their very own? As mystically-linked pets, familiars are useful in a thousand and one situations, limited only by player ingenuity. They can spy on enemies, run errands, and deliver the occasional well-placed touch attack. From a story perspective the plucky little furballs make fantastic comedic foils, snarking at their masters’ commands and grumbling as they carry out orders. They even come in handy for GMs wishing to impart a bit of useful intel to the unwitting party.
“Hey guys? Why is Chester growling at that apparently empty point in space?”
You see what I mean? Familiars are great. The only downside is that they are ever so slightly fragile.
Take my latest familiar, a standard issue 5e D&D raven. It’s a viking game, so the shtick is that this bird is a lesser servant of Hugin and Munin. In the opening scene of the campaign my guy performed the ritual to call him down from Asgard. As a rite of passage he went alone out into the woods, made the necessary offerings, and watched as the black speck winged its way down from Bifrost, a sure sign of Odin’s favor. And what did I do with this blessing of the gods?
“Viigar! Mimic a human crying for help. Lead the orcs away from the village.”
The orcs killed the poor little feather duster with extreme prejudice. That brought in Viigar II. He lost all one of his hit points from exposure to a Thunderwave spell. Viigar III came gamely back, and was with the party when we crossed the treacherous footpath towards a witch’s castle. Our ranger felt hungry eyes upon us, and so I sent Viigar up to scout.
“Look,” said my DM. “I get no pleasure from killing your bird. I’ll let him use your saves, OK? So have him make a Fort save with your bonuses vs. the fiendish wolf’s gaze attack as he crests the ridge.” And that’s how I acquired Viigar IV. The party ranger thinks I’m guilty of animal cruelty. I just hope that Viigar isn’t complaining about me to Odin every time he dies.
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hey hi, I like your art its very nice! keep up the good work! can you feature a necromancer as a hero too? just like in diablo 2
We’d like to. The problem is that when we get that many skeletons on-screen the comic tends to glitch out. I don’t want to expose our readers to that of kind frame rate problem.
Spoken like a true D2 player.
We’ve got nerd references for days!
😀
Yeah, familiars are either (or simultaneously) amazing or useless is most games. Still, they’re a lot of fun and add flavor so I tend to go out of my way to see if I can have one whenever I do make a character.
As a low level character, it may be cruel but you only have so many hitpoints and unlike you that familiar only costs 10 gp to bring back to life. There’s just no arguing with the economics there.
Now see, I tend not to mind the 10gp resurrection that 5e brings to the table. I look at it as a free pass to use my familiar for more than shoulder decoration. However, I just can’t shake that feeling that I’m supposed to be crying over the body of my l’il buddy whenever he happens to die. Although the whole bit about “when the familiar drops to 0 hit points, it disappears, leaving behind no physical form” makes that kind of difficult. Burying an empty shoebox just doesn’t have the same effect.
I choose to believe the reason behind that was somewhere someone had realized that they could more than make up the 10gp cost by becoming an exotic creature taxidermist.
Player: “No look, it says so right here. ‘Your familiar acts independently of you, but it always obeys your commands.'”
DM: “I don’t care how obedient it is. It’s not going to stand still while you try to fill it up with chestnut stuffing.”
I had a player who was a high-end barbarian and multi-classed to sorcerer, despite having 11 Charisma. He wanted to be a rage mage or something. He was thrilled to death about having a familiar, and ended up with a hamster (we ruled that it was effectively a rat). And it had half of his HP, which ended up being, like 105 or some ridiculous number. It was a virtually-indestructible hamster.
Was this barbarian perchance named Minsc?
http://img05.deviantart.net/f968/i/2015/024/5/c/go_for_the_eyes_by_neogoki-d8f6vfd.jpg
Attack BOO!
The Dwarf-Giant-Space-Hamster!
Eh, you can get those back for like ten GP and an hour. In 5e, anyway.
Well yeah. But you’re also abusing the gifts of Odin when your raven dies every other encounter. Norse gods are prickly about that sort of thing.