Familiar Thread

Familiar of choice, art, lore, settings. Everything goes here.

Tell us about your familiar user.

OP starts;

Cats, specifically the smaller varieties, developed a sort of precognition that can be interpretated into prophecy and/or sight into the unseen. This is, of course, due to their unique position in the food chain as both a nocturnal predator and prey animal. This explains their screwy habits of jumping at nothing and excessive denning (spirits are incapable of assailing certain enclosed, angular geometries).

Snakes, bats, owls, and other middle-ground critters have variants of these 'abilities' due to their statuses of nocturnal predation and/or preydom, which can be interpretated much like the cat habits. Snakes for example are known for feeling the movement of unseen creatures, sometimes movement that has happened long ago, rabbits on the other side of the coin are known for foreseeing what you have yet to decide on doing, mostly the dominant pair on a family.

frogs are best familiar. They pretty much constantly ooze magic-junk. If you averaged out all the animals on earth, you would get a frog. Frogs are pretty much tiny slaads, and are incredibly chaotic, which lends itself to sorcery. Frogs are incredibly witch-like, with green skin, warts, and scrawny limbs. If a wizard doesn't use a frog for a familiar, you can bet he uses them in spells and potions.
Frogs live in fetid water, a substance similar to poison, which must be boiled (cauldron, anyone?) to be made drinkable. frogs eat flies and other insects, and would probably eat pixies and fairies in a fantasy setting. They are heavily associated with disease, which in turn is related to magic. We discovered that electricity can cause dead frogs to "live" which is pretty much the start of necromancy.
In conclusion, frogs.

My last Sorcerer was into Falconry as hobby so his familiar was a pretty good Hawk and perception boost named Blithers while my last Warlock was a Celestial Pact of the chain Halfling who was basically in debt to his patron for getting freebie powers. His familiar was a Imp named Gus who was trying his darnest for redemption. Fun games.

My character have a spiderhawk as a companion. Basically a flying spider that was first trained as a messenger but can also tie up someone with web given the opportunity.
Did a bombing run once, with a grenade.

Loyal, reliable, proud as an eagle, also like to cuddle.

I'm playing a Moonknight cleric who has two enthralled animal companions.
A pair of owls who have learned various tricks.
Mostly they scout from the sky and guard my cleric while he briefly sleeps.
He believes they were sent by his god to watch over him.

Eventually his goal is to enthrall a direwolf.

My warlock has a Tressym as his fiendish familiar.
It's called Gar, but is a fiend.
So. Garfiend.

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The best are the ones you make yourself.

There is little spider. Live in my armor. Is pretty good pet. Catch flies and stingy flies. Not make noise or dirt. Very good. Is a drow thing.

Can fay be familiars?

No, they are unfamiliar and alien.
LISTEN!

You have me totally sold on frogs.

Excellent post my friend

is he frogftripping?

Cutest familiar coming through

Yes they can

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They’re the best familiars

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My familiar IS a dire wolf. Used to make up for my dark elf assassin track targets and since he's breddy big, he can make up for his middling direct combat prowess.

What the fuck is that sneezing fetish.

Ferrets. I own two so I'm partial to having a ferret as a familiar.

I had a WHFRPG bright wizard with a fiery hawk familiar & my wife played a green wizard & rolled bear. It was fun.

My Archfey patron wants more influence in the mortal world so most of her pact warlocks are of the sneaky manipulative type. Her familiars are basically corrupted fairies...this ones mine...

Oh wow, this is awesome, I wish I could put these into the setting I'm using.

Too bad I can't self insert and yeah I found, what is imo, the most awful gif I've ever seen and saved it for teh lolz.

I use this as the example of my tressyms.

For my first fantasy campaign ever, I picked a familiar that was recommended for Pathfinder(Can commune with deities, good perception and stealth, flight, etc).

I was caught off guard when I was asked to introduce my fairy and just blurted out "Navi".

Cue many Zelda jokes throughout the campaign. It was fun.

And in the second campaign, it turned out that she actually had a huge tsundere crush on my Arcanist, and now that he was married, a king, and all NPC-like, she was constantly harassing him and trying to sneak in laws that made polygamy legal in an attempt to mosey on in.

Ioun wyrds, hands down.

Get on my level scrub.

not entirely on topic, but i was watching a bunch of "pet birds cursing" videos and i was thinking that it'd be interesting if the "fairies" of a setting were just straight-up parakeets (and other intelligent parrot-likes)

they curse, have a rudimentary grasp of human morality, like shiny things, etc

One day I'm gonna stat one of these for a balanced familiar. The bonus to detection is obvious, along with its ability to climb, hide and slowly sneak, but its ability to use it's tongue to grab, push, and blind things with pinpoint accuracy is going to be trickier.

>hurr durr

In my setting, fairies drive people mad.

The party learned of a mage who had an unwilling but magically bound fairy familiar once. It seemed to work fine, until the mage started changing, getting irritable and depressed, isolating himself, burning bridges and cutting off social ties. He eventually shot himself in the head and the fairy was never seena gain.

>magically bound
Literal shit tier. If you need to magic bullshit your familiar into working you're doing it wrong, nothing sounds nor feels worse than having familiars work as some mindlink bullshit attachment.

Parrot familiar: Randomly cast spells and rituals.

Of course, I mean, if you want to play russian roulette that badly

better question; can a familiar be shiny and chrome?

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