Monday, February 20, 2012

Flying Squirrel, Fox & Goat

These familiars are more exotic than the usual selections—perfect for witches, sorcerers with fey or verdant (Advanced Player’s Guide 141) bloodlines, and iconoclasts in general.

Lovers of wild places, plants, and animals, brown wizards often seem to have more in common with druids than with their fellow mages.  Bertrem Carr’s flying squirrel Pirrip was a souvenir of Bertrem’s early days in the woods, and now is almost as well known as the wizard himself.  Within a week’s ride of Bertrem’s home, young wizards with a flying squirrel familiar are assumed to be his apprentices.

The witch Poison Night keeps a mangy fox familiar.  Not only has borrowing the beast’s agility (expressed as her Reflex save bonus) saved her many times, but she takes pride in the number of diseases she has cultivated in the fox’s bloodstream—all of which can be released when her pet bites.

Apprenticed to a court magus, Corvus Jaleel was mortified when he called a goat as his familiar.  His peers and the young ladies at court made him a laughingstock, and his master’s distaste for the bovid was equally apparent.  Then war broke out in the mountains and he was sent to the front to train as a war wizard.  Now Corvus has been decorated many times over and his luck in familiars seems prescient.  Adimarchus the goat has saved his master’s life countless times by picking the surest trails, finding food after days of no rations, and once headbutting an orc off a cliff.

Pathfinder Bestiary 3 112–113

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