d100 Familiar Features

Familiars are fun. For my games I generally allow a Magic User that wishes to begin play with one to simply to drop a die from their starting 3d6x10 for gold. This die serves double duty as the Familiar’s HP.

Usually they’re treated as fairly mundane animals/pets (unless the Magic User has a First Level Spell Feature that applies to them), maybe a little more clever (smart as a Chimpanzee is generally a good guideline), but usually they’re just a bit of flavor, or potentailly a useful tool that might be useful situationally to solve a very specific problem. Since they’re hard to replace and fragile though, this makes them fairly bad fits as scouts and trap-springers, so I often caution the players to be careful with them.

But sometimes and in some settings it’s more interseting to give them some special abilities.

So here’s a list of One Hundred Familiar Features for inspiration. Perhaps the Magic User uses Magic Reasearch to unlock these secrets (time and money), or maybe they gain new features in play. I suppose you could even have one unlock randomly every few levels the Familiar survives as a tacit encouragement to be careful with those little critters.

Monster Miens by Type

Here is a table with some Monster Miens, inspired by the lovely Troika! Method of attaching a tiny table to the denizens of adventures in order to give them a little personality. While I adore the ones that are bespoke for each individual creature, I figured it might be useful to have something like this in a slightly more generic form.

It uses the d12, because that die seems unloved and rather lonely. It is ostensibly arranged to work alongside the standard 2d6 Reaction Roll if you wish (although those results will be weighed accordingly). Still mulling over a more extensive “d36” one that directly interfaces directly with some of the dice metadata for that lovely table.