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Unfamiliar familiars


PhilHibbs

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Splitting off from a slightly drfting thread:

46 minutes ago, Crel said:

1) Poo on you, I like RQ3's familiars. :P Of course we did some really weird stuff with them, which definitely wasn't in RQ3-base. I may have turned an AD&D miniaturized iron golem into my familiar and dumped way to much POW into it...

You could have a Nilmerg familiar in Glorantha, although they have fixed INT so that isn't as good as something that has free INT but lacks POW.

Craziest familiars I've seen/had:

  • Stoorworm, Diminish SIZ to 1, living in a sack
  • Chimpanzee shapechanged into an eagle
  • Dolphin shapechanged into 2m giant (claustrophobic Durulz sorceror SIZ-Diminished living in his backpack)
  • Twin brothers who had Fix Intelligence cast on each in turn and made each other into mutual familiars
  • Hag, familiar to an Uzko sorceror
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Gee Ma, lookit me! One side comment and three threads! (I jest, I jest--I'm grateful to learn my commentary's apparently fruitful. :))

2 hours ago, Tywyll said:

But but how did you get around crippling yourself to make it? I just never understood it!

I mean, I did cripple myself.

Something very relevant to this is that we played that any sacced characteristic dropped 1D6 into the familiar (I think this is because my GM wanted to speed up sorcery progression so it wouldn't take us the near-decade it took his brother to reach "scary sorcerer" tier, but can't recall). We played with tons, tons of houseruled stuff, and a lot of it was in the sorcery. Basically a nasty mashup of Petersen's Presence-based sorcery, with his Tekumel sorcery, but Duration was still a relevant Art and each of the Arts was always a skill, not learned from St. Malkion; our "saints" were the Tsolyanu of Tekumel, which adds a sort of Lovecraft/Howard feel to even the "Stability" sorcerers. Free INT was mostly relevant for # of spells held, and getting some bonus Presence for manipulating sorcery.

That being said... I absolutely crippled myself binding it. May I go off on storytelling tangent? (Why yes Crel, you may. Thank you, Crel...)

My character started with 17 INT, dropped like 5 points into my first familiar. That familiar gets killed by a shuriken from a (Gloranthan-ish? Daughters of Darkness) ogre sorcerer named Abdel--who I am going to hunt down and gut someday--so I'm on a year and a day clock for the INT & POW spent to return (familiar was an owl, boring, I know, but had all other stats needed). During that time we go chasing treasure in the AD&D dungeon Lost Isle of Castanamir, which has a golem workshop. Three small ones are doing calisthenics, and some larger (and more POW-erful ones, according to my shaman buddy) are under sheets. Mild PTSD attack (got an arm ripped off one time by an animate statue under a sheet) and ten minutes later, I realize the smaller ones are harmless, and.... iiiiiinteresting.

So I bugger off in the middle of the night(? no sense of time in a demiplane) and start the familiar ritual. Like 15 hours later an iron golem drags me back to the party. I'd sacrificed 5 more INT, a bunch of POW (forget how much, something like 6?), and about half my CON to make sure it was a complete creature. The golem was on calisthenic autopilot, and just kept doing toe-touches while I did my sorcerous hoodoo, until my brain got all up inside it.

End result is I've got a CON of like 4, INT 7 (yes, lower than species minimum...) and like 4 or 5 POW and have a robot buddy who can't talk (no mouth) but is in constant mindspeech with me, doesn't need to breath, is basically a living suit of full plate (8AP all locations + can wear armor atop), and has no fingers. So yeah, I was absolutely crippled, even with our D6/attribute rule.

Of course Clonk ended up with like INT 15 and a whopping 37 POW (14+6ishD6) so he does the thinking for me now. But he can't talk, and Ignatius is a bit impulsive, sooo... It's a fun dynamic to roleplay. Clonk's very much the dominant mind, but the human body is still the only way it can actually communicate.

A consequence of this is, now that I'm GMing (and using our houseruled abomination of a ruleset as one of a couple sorcerous traditions) in My Glorantha it's the case that most archmagi have idiot bodies, and some super intelligent, dangerous familiar. I just introduced my players to Mularik Iron-Eye and they caught it right away, as his eye fixates on things and he sort of pauses between sentences as the two minds relay to one another (I'm largely GMing the group I used to play with, since our old GM's schedule changed and we haven't gotten that game back together yet).

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29 minutes ago, Crel said:

That being said... I absolutely crippled myself binding it. May I go off on storytelling tangent? (Why yes Crel, you may. Thank you, Crel...)

 

That's precisely what this thread is for!

Quote

End result is I've got a CON of like 4, INT 7 (yes, lower than species minimum...) and like 4 or 5 POW and have a robot buddy who can't talk (no mouth) but is in constant mindspeech with me...
Of course Clonk ended up with like INT 15 and a whopping 37 POW (14+6ishD6) so he does the thinking for me now.

Now that's an interesting idea. If the sorceror gives all their INT to the familiar, then it will end up being the dominant mind, so it's a kind of transhuman mind transfer. At least, the sorceror just has to believe that. So you create a sorceror character who gives all his INT but for a sinlge point to a familiar, then play the familiar. The sorceror could be completely wrong in their calculations, but hey, that doesn't matter.

Of course Nilmergs are small and crappy. Jolanti have no INT at all so that's no help. Hard to think of an ideal target for this, other than Herd Man.

Then again, RQG doesn't always give fixed INT levels, so Jolanti might have INT in RQ3 terms.

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Just now, PhilHibbs said:

So you create a sorceror character who gives all his INT but for a sinlge point to a familiar, then play the familiar. The sorceror could be completely wrong in their calculations, but hey, that doesn't matter.

Yeah, it all started from this character concept I had for jumping into a friend's very-high-level game where I'd be playing a sorcerer who messed up really really bad in those calculations and accidentally made one of those super-familiars. I didn't get to play that character, so Ignatius kinda did it in our normal campaign

In my current game, I'm limiting Tsolyanu-tradition sorcerers to (intentionally) sacrificing down to their species minimum in a stat.

Other crazy ideas folks had in that game include sacrificing one's own SIZ and STR to make a rock lizard into an extra-big rock lizard (aka Kaiju/monster mount) and getting a well-bred Herd Man (aka high stats) for a familiar to basically get a second human character (albeit one that needs to learn a lot of skills).

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14 minutes ago, Crel said:

Other crazy ideas folks had in that game include sacrificing one's own SIZ and STR to make a rock lizard into an extra-big rock lizard (aka Kaiju/monster mount) and getting a well-bred Herd Man (aka high stats) for a familiar to basically get a second human character (albeit one that needs to learn a lot of skills).

We always played that you can only give stats that they need to be a complete creature, which I think was the normal rule. The only familiar that I enhanced physically was my troll's hag, Esmerelda. She hit like a truck, and could take a fair pounding too. Boris was frequently mistaken for an enlo, but he had back-up.

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9 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

We always played that you can only give stats that they need to be a complete creature, which I think was the normal rule.

Yeah I describe myself as having started with RQ3 (around 2012) but really have no clue what RQ3 looks like "vanilla." Everything I've played has been houseruled to high hell based on rules the GM had played by for around a decade prior. So we just learned that as my playgroup's "base" RQ experience.

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As Char had to be traded stat for stat, I had a player who wanted to create a vampire, because theonly missing characteristic would have been POW, which is easily (compared to other stats) raisable. After that, we decided that all familiar stats were created with POW, if only to avoid this problem.

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14 minutes ago, Kloster said:

As Char had to be traded stat for stat, I had a player who wanted to create a vampire, because theonly missing characteristic would have been POW, which is easily (compared to other stats) raisable. After that, we decided that all familiar stats were created with POW, if only to avoid this problem.

Yeah, I've come across the vampire option before, but really, a sentient creature as a familiar is challenging, particularly something thoroughly evil (and chaotic) like a vampire. Also they're damn tough so good luck getting the jump on one. I rationalised the hag as rescuing a wretched, hateful creature from her miserable hell-hole of a prison. She probably used to be a beautiful dryad in an enchanting grove before something disastrous happened to her home. Now she gets to see the world and smack it with a gigantic troll maul.

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Craziest familiar one of my players ever made never got actual play as the game ended and I believe that was the last thing ever done.  They drained a wyvern of its blood then gave a ghost of a shaman size so that it would be the ectoplasmic plasma so to speak, ie, the wyverns ghostly blood.  Then bound the ghost into the wyvern.  Wasn't really an undead wyvern since it now had a soul, albeit a dead shaman's soul that flowed through its veins.  Decided the eyes glowed ghostly blue.  RQ3 days.  Was more maximum game fun than something that would probably work per the rules as written.

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