Darkholme |
What happens to a familiar after its master dies? How about if the master gains a new familiar?
I know you can learn spells from a dead witch's familiar for 24 hours.
If the level 10 party wizard dies, does his old familiar still have:
HD 10
Wiz10 HP/2
BAB 5
Saves +3/+3/+7
Wizard's Skill Ranks
Alertness, Imp. Evasion, Speak with Animals of its Kind
Int 10
NA +5
Magical Beast
Or is it suddenly back to being a basic Int 2 Animal?
If the party wizard gets a new familiar, is he deliberately lobotomizing his old familiar, making it lose its identity, mind, and memories (this seems very evil to me).
Skylancer4 |
A familiar is a tool, an extension of them self, how is changing or upgrading a tool evil?
If the wizard didn't create the bond, the creature wouldn't have a personality in the first place. If the wizard isn't around there is nothing to "power" or provide the bond so it would go away. There has been discussion on if it is immediate or slowly happens, but I don't know of any "official" response on it. And honestly it is probably better that way, to let each table decide on their own. If it is for PFS I would imagine, if the character is out of the picture (dead), the familiar would be non functional as well. However it would be explained is fairly irrelevant at that point.
wraithstrike |
From a rules point of view it is not evil. It is just a class feature, and the connection to the wizard actually makes it better. The familiar will lose intelligence, but that does not mean it will forget the time with the wizard.
Although many stories ignore this, I think that by the rules it should go back to being a normal animal since the connection is gone.
Callum |
The rules are silent on this. However, given that the familiar's enhanced abilities are due to the powerful arcane bond between it and its master, it would seem likely that when this bond is broken, those abilities would go away. We do know this:
If a familiar is dismissed, lost or dies, it can be replaced 1 week later through a specialized ritual that costs 200 gp per wizard level.
So I would suggest that one week after the master's death the familiar has reverted to the simple animal it once was. This may well be a gradual process (which would make things easier if the master is brought back to life).
Set |
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I always worked it on a case by case basis, following the notion that any ruling not already in a book was up to the GM.
A familiar might die with it's master, might turn back into a normal animal, might absorb some fragment of the master's soul and become a new PC option for awhile, and / or might retain some (but not necessarily all) of it's familiar traits (losing stuff that is derived directly from the master, like half hp, saves and skill ranks, but possibly keeping natural armor and intelligence bonuses).
In my Freeport game, a 'quest-giver' NPC was a raven whose master was either dead or in temporal stasis or imprisonment or something, who used a ring of invisibility to skulk around and give cryptic advice from the rafters and rooftops to various information-gatherers in town, and was a very minor sort of crime-lord (that none of his people had ever seen, and who regarded the 'voice in the shadows' as being some sort of messenger, and not their actual boss). In that case, since the master wasn't necessarily dead (perhaps just trapped), I didn't have to worry about what the familiar kept or lost, but if I wanted to tell a story about a familiar struggling to retain it's fading intellect and hardiness after it's masters death (strong motivation to help get it's master resurrected!), the silence of the rules on the matter gives me plenty of leeway to do that, and doesn't prevent me from having something totally different happen if a similar situation occurs later.
Melvin the Mediocre |
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Actually, the familiars retain their intelligence and abilities, but no have no way to advance beyond that point. Doomed to a life of remembrance of the connections they had to their wizards, yet bereft of the mystic powers that bond conferred, most of them turn to booze and an endless string of one night stands and meaningless relationships, none of which can fill the lonely void.
This, compounded by the desolation stemming from their inability to communicate with most intelligent species, inevitably leads most to eventually join gangs with like types of base creatures banding together to battle their hated foes of other former familiars - bats vs toads; cats vs hawks, etc. In this way, they eventually kill each other off which is why "former familiar" is so rarely found on wandering monster charts. But woe befalls the unfortunate low level party that accidentally finds itself inside the territory of the Rioting Ravens, or Tumultuous Toads.
Rycaut |
A similar question came up while running Reign of Winter - I had an NPC with the party actually ask the Goat familiar to be her familiar (surprising the party a bit as they didn't think that NPC was any form of arcane caster).
My thoughts are that having the familiars (or animal companions) revert to their base forms seems a bit cruel. One option is that they generally become the familiars of other masters and/or get sent to other planes by external powers (witch patrons, Nethys etc.
However mechanically a new familiar is I think generally treated as having only the knowledge and skills of their current master with no particular past knowledge, skills or levels... but that's just the unwritten rules - as a DM you are certainly free to give familiars a richer backstory and history.
"Improved familiars" more explicitly have an extraplanar origin in many cases (though not all) so that helps a bit with what would likely happen to them on their master's death - they return home.
I can well imagine running a game where the familiar (and possibly animal companions) of the PCs have histories and backstories - that they reveal over time to their masters (possibly when the PC's are high enough level to have means of conversing fully with their familiars or animal companions - and possibly only if the PC's start to ask. As a GM I might just drop some casual hints and see if the players pick up on them.
Something like having a familiar (when the player is high enough level to have speak with master) say something like "I remember this ..." (where it is clearly not just something from a knowledge check etc). But to make this work I would have to had the familiars doing things and creating a personality for them prior to starting to hint at their histories and backstories (and tying that into the PC's quests and goals)
Dave Justus |
There are no rules as far as I am aware.
When I run games I assume that for a period of time, usually at least week although I've kept it kind of vague, a familiar is just as it was when the wizard was alive etc.
Although it doesn't specifically say this, I also assume that the 'magical' part of familiar is from some sort of 'spirit' or 'supernatural entity.' So it isn't really a cat getting all smarter and stuff, but a sort of possessed cat getting more and more linked with the magical entity due to the masters increasing power. So in that sense, you aren't making a cat stupid when you get your new raven familiar, you are merely separating the cat from the power source. This is just how I picture it though, I don't know of anything in the texts that really support it.
cnetarian |
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Actually, the familiars retain their intelligence and abilities, but no have no way to advance beyond that point. Doomed to a life of remembrance of the connections they had to their wizards, yet bereft of the mystic powers that bond conferred, most of them turn to booze and an endless string of one night stands and meaningless relationships, none of which can fill the lonely void.
This, compounded by the desolation stemming from their inability to communicate with most intelligent species, inevitably leads most to eventually join gangs with like types of base creatures banding together to battle their hated foes of other former familiars - bats vs toads; cats vs hawks, etc. In this way, they eventually kill each other off which is why "former familiar" is so rarely found on wandering monster charts. But woe befalls the unfortunate low level party that accidentally finds itself inside the territory of the Rioting Ravens, or Tumultuous Toads.
We should be so fortunate if this happened to all familiars. Some turn feral and become real threats, the Demon Lady Jezelda was once the Pekinese familiar of an evil Azlanti wizard who specialized in transformation magic, after his death she figured out a way to transform herself into a wolf to survive better and a human so she could travel in civilization when she wished. This was acceptable until Jezelda tried to increase her power by turning a human into her own familiar, with the well-known results. Of course her followers refuse to talk about her origins because it is kinda embarrassing that your deity was once a small dog familiar, but if you ever encounter Jezelda and want to get a rise out of her call her a "yappy little puppy" or ask if "Jez-Jez want's her belly rubbed."