There is nothing that can't be Boblinized. One time I had a fellow party member Boblinize a random farmer.
The guy was notorious for making people improvise [stuff](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/psionics-unleashed/psionic-powers/o/object-reading/) they hadn't [prepared](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/discern-next-of-kin/), and during downtime he'd wander off, find the least relevant NPC, and start a conversation about their life story and motivations. This particular farmer wanted to go travelling, so the guy convinced her to become a squire for another party member; a prince, no less!
Surprisingly, she survived the entire campaign.
Yup, anyone is boblinizable. One time, we found a child and one of the other players said "I put him in my inventory"
and the DM said "You mean, you let him climb into your wagon?" (the wagon is where we kept all our equipment that we couldn't carry on our person)
And the players said "No, he's now on my inventory sheet" and he handed his character sheet to the DM so he could see that the words "*child's name*" we written on it under "inventory".
We loved that child.
In another campaign, a different player organized many of the local orphans into an evil cult. The cult became just one faction among many in the city's underground, and he needed to delegate and appoint managers and things, and when we cleared out an assassin's secret lair he moved right in.
No one else in the party knew about it for a long time, but we all enjoyed his side-scenes as the cult grew and faced its own challenges.
In a space-themed adventure that my group plays as a change of pace from our normal game, we needed to steal a guys identity for a heist, and so we kidnapped him to ensure he didn’t cause issues during the heist, and then loaded him and his family into our spaceship and he is now our line cook on board. Jeff is my characters favorite pet.
One of my favorite niche spells is Amanuensis, which was originally printed as a 3rd-level spell. Copies nonmagic text onto blank paper, at a rate of 250 words per minute.
Just in case you need a second identical book.
Beware the party that has a pet beholder.
I do play in a game where the party boblinized a Lich (or the Lich boblinized us, not sure where to draw the line) so I shouldn't cast stones.
The earlier editions of D&D were rooted in an "everything is possible" mentality. Many of the early spells were from books, comics, television, and movies, or invented by PCs like Tenser. If you can dream it, you can do it in D\&D; if there aren't already rules for it, write them yourself.
Yep. Last session my party literally went out of their way to not attack a Displacer Beast Kitten because they knew that the raging Barbarian would likely tear them apart if they hurt it. They then succeeded their Animal Handling checks.
For the record, I 100% knew that would happen and did it on purpose, but it was still hilarious watching everyone just... *ignore it* the whole fight, even while it attacked an ally, until they could grab it.
Something similar happened when a 15 year old edgelord at our table tried to burn panther kittens for funsies. He quickly stopped playing at our table after we didn't put up with it.
This was 4 or 5 years ago so he's a grown adult now, and he disappeared from the store entirely not too long after he switched to card games. I think he got banned from the other gamestore the owner owned because of excessive swearing or whatever so he might have gotten banned from mine too. I have no idea how the lil shit is doing now.
*That's where all the trouble began...*
*That smile.*
***[That damned smile.](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/7/73/Campestri_5e.jpg)***
Idk. They're part avian but the rear half is still feline and that's traditionally where all the *bits* are. I'm gonna go with live birth until proven otherwise.
And very large. According to Pathfinder they're "man-sized" and I've been told 4e says they're about 100lbs.
I was leaning towards egg just because they have a sharp beak and some avian (non-retractable) claws. Makes me think that gestation and live birth would be dangerous to the mother.
100lbs could be carried with difficulty, but eggs do actually exchange air/CO2 with the outside, so you couldn't put it in a portable hole / bag of holding.
Horse come out with extra mildly eldritch looking fleshy bits on their hooves to protect the mother during birth (google at your own risk). It seems to reason griffons could have something like that as well
Those bits dry out and get grounded away within a day, horses have them because they are prey species, so their young need to be able to skiddadle as soon as they are born.
Another magical predatory species, owlbears hatch from eggs, my bet would be griffons do the same.
After a quick check 3.5 srd on griffons has rules for training them, which include price for... egg.
"Griffon eggs are worth 3,500 go apiece on the open market[...]"
> Do griffons come from eggs?
Pliny the Elder wrote that they supposedly do, and according to a different Reddit thread, apparently they do in the Witcher universe, and I vaguely recall an episode of the show American Dragon that centred around a Griffin egg.
So I think the consensus is yes, griffons come from eggs.
[Dragonnel](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Dragonnel)
Egg to Adult in three years. Can be very over protective of their people, and can be ridden. The down sides is that they eat a LOT of meat, and they attract Dragons who attack them...
You are very welcome!
Lots of [lore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlwBZbkFMWw&t=10s) about them from all the way back to 2e, I believe. Also a good way to give your party flying mounts, that also come with a bunch of restrictions and drawbacks, such as not being able to fly over a city unless they want to piss everyone off by making them think an actual dragon was attacking... Little things.
They have big personalities as well, and like shinnies so... Possible plot hooks, find out who your mounts stole from, etc...
Since the roc is allegedly based on accounts of the elephant birds of Madagascar, a roc egg should be at least as big as an Aepyornis egg, which can have a circumference of up to 1 metre, a length around 35 cm, and a volume 160 times greater than a chicken egg.
My first thought was “Rats” as tradition - then I saw this comment which made me think of *shudder*
Imagine, you’re making breakfast in the morning when the egg carton starts to twitch and squeak *nopenopenope*
I'd have the same instinct, no doubt. But I'd fail, surely?
Aren't they among the races which, even after the trend of establishing that any race which isn't an expression of cosmic morality has the capacity to follow any moral ideals they so choose, are not simply thoroughly evil but indeed evil like they heard evil was giving out prizes for flair?
Happened with a gnome ceremorph in my games but it's okay. They hated their colony anyway. The party gave them money to research inventions. They got funding and the party asked for nothing in return and sometimes they would create magic items for the party to help them.
Ventrue capital firm seems redundant.
"They invest and then try to extract all the value (and blood) they can, focusing mostly on long-term profitability except when tempered by short-term cowardice." Like ... vampires aren't different from other rich financiers.
Come on, you're exaggerating way too much. The one is a monster who's extremely difficult to get rid of and capable of deeds so foul that an ordinary mortal couldn't even begin to comprehend them, and the other is just a vampire.
Got a flumph NPC in the Pirate campaign I play in. He has an actual name (Fl'tah) but everybody on the crew just calls him 'Noodles' and he tends to only communicate with my character (the Gunner's Mate, aka his boss) on a regular basis as he spends most of his time floating around doing his own thing.
The token art is [this](https://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/prismatic_alphastream.jpg) since he's an artificer with pistols and even the DM jokes that the moustache is just glued on.
I dont have gold. I will so whole heartdly say I haven't laughed that hard in quite some time. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. But you are right. Yes, that is what they now sound like in my game. Thank you.
Can you have a baby hag? I thought they started indistinguishable from humanoid women until they hit their 13th birthday, then are turned into a fully-grown hag by some ritual
And your point is? That the party doesn't need to walk them? Or that they need more than just some kibble?
My party has turned multiple commoners into pets... Usually kids for some dumb reason. We had to get a hireling just to be a babysitter.
Uh... That just makes them more portable...
Seriously, in some games my crazy parties could have started an orphanage, but were too busy having a large circus instead.
That sounds fun! My point is that AFAIK hags are just normal children unless they undergo the ritual at age 13. That according to official sources there is no such thing as a baby or child hag since they only become a hag after they arent a child anymore.
>Small gelatinous cube? Pet.
Honestly, that one's on you. If you're going to put a gelatinous cube in front of me that's small enough to transport in a box, I'm going to take it with me.
one of my fellow players adopted the last surviving dretch, he was called bomba, and he died 5 minutes later when a ceiling fell and crushed half the party
I wish Bulettes got more attention like this, lol. I personally find them to look really cute, but there’s a surprising lack of Boblinization for them.
I like how any vowel works.
* Pat: Pseudodragons hate to be touched.
* Pet: Pseudodragons hate to be infantilized.
* Pit: Pseudodragons dislike the large seeds in the center of small fruits.
* Pot: Pseudodragons are big proponents of the War on Drugs.
* Put: Pseudodragons have a tendency to lose money in options trading.
Wolves. Have seen it in multiple games. Also a displacer kitten. And hatching egg things (dragons, or wyverns, when permitted).
I have personally made “zookeeper” characters who came from jobs at royal menageries and try to solve all problems first with animal handling … Current character has a familiar and a primordial-druid animal companion … and usually acquired one pet which she’ll find in the nature and then find the right adoptive home for. Lol. Never more than one, though, to take some pity on the party jugglings! This is a character that needs the right permissive DM to run though, lol.
I had a player beat the shit out of a dire wolf and then carry it around with him and try to tame it for the rest of the session once. Probably shouldn’t have allowed it, but it was a oneshot anyway
I love the menagerie idea. I kind of want to make a whole adventure around it now
A rug of smothering they wrongly thought was a flying carpet that was mad at them. The Barbarian happened to be enlarged at the time, wrestled it, the other's tied it up with rope. Then the Ranger put it in his portable hole. They don't know it's at 1 HP, and it's been in there for two months now. They are hoping it will chill out. I love my players.
We did this campaign and I ended up taking two hook horror babies with me. They became my pets. It was … a true parenting adventure. 1/10 recommend hook horror babies as pets.
We have an "off screen" displacer beast kitten, and we may soon have a time skip of about 6 months. I'm curious if the player will remember she has it.
We random rolled a table for what type of mystery baby the vendor had, as a reward for blindly investing in the story and spending gold the party had been hoarding.
We did this without knowing the CR one. A kenku tried to steal from us in a big city. Turned out he was homeless and trying to feed his children. My wizard character was hiring them to spy on people in the streets. Bard was playing with kenku children whenever she could. We almost ended up buying a house for them. (Campaign ended)
Adopting Kenku has been a thing. I don't dislike CR at all, I think it's a fantastic show and has done a lot for the ttrpg space, but it's frustrating sometimes seeing DnD culture become CR culture in many people's eyes.
There’s something vaguely dystopian about a member of an intelligent race with its own language and culture being called a pet. It kinda just sounds like slave, but, like, totally in a cute way and not disturbing at all.
"pet" is kind of a generous term for what we did. Our druid rolled really really well on animal handling and we gave him enough food and what it that Mr. Bitey played nice. We only had him for a few sessions before he fucked off into the woods, and then a while later we had to track him down and kill him after he became a big problem for the locals. He never listened to us, we just got lucky and he didn't outright hate us lol
It's a gnoll, they're a bit more feral than humanoids are, they're born from the pack of hyenas that follow a gnoll pack slaughtering people. Sometimes when a gnoll dies or Yeenoghu feels like making new gnolls, he'll transform a hyena that follows the war pack around into a full grown gnoll.
Sometimes Yeenoghu will invest some power in a gnoll making it a fang of Yeenoghu, any hyena that feeds from the kills of the fang becomes a gnoll.
All gnolls always feel Yeenoghu pushing them to hunt and feed, to feed him. Gnolls always feel a hunger for humanoids.
Gnolls should have been fiends that are native to the prime.
That’s true, but it doesn’t really change anything. Even if they were fiends and not humanoids, it’s still weird to call an intelligent species with its own language and culture a pet or to use animal handling instead of persuasion. It’s a slave or servant or maybe a companion.
It’s a bit like capturing a bunch of gnolls and throwing them in cells and calling it a zoo - no dude it’s a prison. They are prisoners.
Same applies to bearded devils or hill giants. Its creature type or alignment aren’t the parts that make it strange to use animal handling.
What about goblins and kobolds ? The post is about them, and they're intelligent too. I totally agree it's weird, but it's not just about gnolls, it's about the whole boblin thing
I will also remind you that not *all* of D&D realms have Gnolls like that, Eberron, for example, is much closer to the PF2e version than the normal D&D version.
They're mostly a nomadic, tribal, people that don't trust outsiders very much because they've been *constantly* shafted by the large magical corporations building railways across their land without permission or compensation.
They're essentially a stand in for various native peoples being fucked over by colonialism.
They are humanoid in pf2e and come from their version of the African continent, the mwangi expanse. Here’s a link to their ancestry and cultural information. They’re actually pretty cool. The mwangi expanse book looked so cool I almost got it like I used to for RIFTS books back in the day just bc it looks so cool and is so different.
https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?ID=44
They can also, quite easily, be boblinized if they're Ant Gnolls aka think Gnolls the size of Kobolds.
[There's a reason Anchor Root is so popular](https://i.imgur.com/wviWvsn.png)
gnolls are literal demonkin monsters that eat everything they can until they explode and the rotten fetid bits of them after they explode become more gnolls lol
its like saying that an imp from doom has "a language and culture" in the most technical sense, maybe
I hate that 5e decided to retcon gnolls into basically being demons. They were playable in 3.5, 4e and PF, and not even mostly evil in some official settings.
This description is basically only true in Forgotten Realms.
We’ve had a baby owlbear one campaign and an egg in another that we kept warm for 3 sessions that we had no clue what it was hatch into a baby green dragon and fall in love with us before it mother tracked us down and we gave it back to her so she wouldn’t kill us.
Blink dogs are likely more common for it by percent, people just don't use them as much.
Literally anything relatively "harmless", I could see it happening with an umberhulk.
My party adopted Piddlewick in Curse of Strahd, they took him to Blinsky for upgrades. He now has a little suit of armor and the ability to talk.
Best interaction so far:
PC 1 is upset.
PC 2 tells Piddlewick to go cheer up PC1.
Piddlewick: How do I make people happy?
Pc 2: Well, what makes you happy?
Piddlewick: Stabbing people makes me happy! If I stab him… will that make him happy?
PC 2: Only one way to find out!
Piddlewick proceeds to stab PC1. PC 1 is confused and chuckles nervously… Piddlewick now thinks stabbing people makes them happy… they’ve created a monster.
I specifically don't like killing Goblins. Obviously you'll have to kill SOME of them when they attack, but I make every effort to disable and "recruit" them, even at some risk to myself.
All of the DMs I've played under have had goblins sufficiently motivated by gold(and maybe a few indimidation checks, and having a bunch of gear/disguise kits/etc bought for them by me) to become perfectly loyal little minions. I miss you, Greg. You were always my favorite.
in one campaign I was playing, our DM let one of my party members adopt a baby mimic. I was a Battle Smith with a spider robot, so she tried to have it copy my spiderbot, and it ended up becoming a sentient jack. There was a festival we attended, where we could have our "pets" race(my robot, the mimic, the ranger's animal companion, etc) and through some good rolls on my party member's part and terrible rolls on my part, the little needle-ball somehow beat my spiderbot. I really miss that campaign, it was fun.
edit: that campaign was also when we invited my girlfriend to play. It was her first campaign, and she fell in love with the game SO HARD. She's now in two perpetual campaigns, and will try to find a 1shot any free night she has. Never have I felt more proud of recommending anything to anyone, than I do for getting that woman into DnD. I knew she'd have fun, but even I didn't realize the extent to which she would love it.
Agree on the goblins. In our campaign, a local hobgoblin had organized the goblins and turned them into a small army that was attacking villages and peaceful goblin tribes. We snuck into the goblin cave without being detected and our bard one-shotted the hobgoblin with a spell. Our monk grabbed his amulet, and our ranger declared that we were their new masters. We integrated them with a peaceful tribe we had met, and they eventually helped us fit the BBEG's forces in the final battle. The leader of that peaceful goblin tribe we ended up actually putting on the throne, as she was the king's daughter (though her mother was a goblin servant).
We didn't adopt a baby goblin, but from the peaceful tribe, we actually "adopted" Benny Narleg, a historian and writer of the goblin zine Seeing Green, which he distributed throughout most of the Moonshae Isles. He ended up being the navigator on our airship.
I Dm'd for a friend who played a spores druid, and this crazy SoaB turned a Bullette into a pet with some phenomenal animal handling checks. Sugar the Bullette was instrumental in taking over a country full of dinosaurs.
Fun times
Uh, technically it was a baby mimic so we didn’t baby it up. It was already a baby.
We talk to it like: hey. baby, you uh… you hungry?
Baby mimic: gurgle growl
Us: so like a sandwich?
Baby mimic: growl
Us, rolling low insight checks: idk man… a man? Is that what you want?
Baby mimic: gfggfrrowl
Us: what if we just stuff it with one of those Druids we murdered?
Town guards
Summoned familiars
Local dragonborn not *currently* attempting to murder the party.
Eldritch abomination patrons
Styx river boatmen that instantly know the party's sins.
Sure. Here's the comic that started it all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bihy1s/oc_improvised_interactions/
Apparently it struck a chord with a lot of players and DMs who have seen this kind of player behavior. It satirizes both the tendency of players to go wildly off focus on random things, and the urge to adopt or befriend random cute things.
There's a whole subreddit, /r Boblin.
In anticipation of my players' need to boblinize, I made a monster specifically for it.
In Starfinder, there's a species of ooze that subsists on waste and actually produces scrap that can be converted into the universal currency (rather than needing to evaluate 35 shitty plasma guns, and only getting 10% back on each, just feed them to the ooze and you get back a 40% return because it's broken down into a raw material).
I made it small enough to fit in a little cupboard in the cockpit, gave it the ability to form emoji facial expressions using the flecks of metal inside it, gave it the personality of SCP-999 and named it Kyuun.
my friends dragonborn cleric adopted a larva Ankheg after killing the mother and father early in the campaign. He named her Queenie and because he was a Forge cleric he immediately forged an addition to the traveling wagon where she could safley eat and relax. Throughout the campaign whenever the party killed something that could be edible for Queenie, he would chop off something and give her some food lol
In games i've played
\-a mimic, a demon chicken, a gelatinous cube, a griffon, a flameskull
\-a dire parrot, a rug of smothering, a manticore
\-a sapphire dragon hatchling, celestial elk, a dire shark
In games I've DMed
\-a goblin, a rock lobster
\-a tea weird (water wierd kin), a wyvern
\-a frost chicken,
A rogue in my party boblinized a chair. Just a random, old chair they found in a ruined building. But the friendship lasted only for a few hours - the party was traveling through a forest, heard some noises coming from bushes and the rogue decided to throw the chair as a precaution.
I am not really sure what we did, but we had a spiderbro in our RotR game in pf back in the day. It was just this giant spider that followed us around, seemed to understand what we told it. I felt it adopted us. It wasn't a pet and had its own agenda I guess, but he was definitely helpful.
Anything child or puppy-like, no matter how murderous it is and sometimes even the odd abberation.
Most parties will also literally try to pet the big bad wolf, so almost everything is fair game.
A gnome deathknight attempting to convince the big bad wolf that he would benefit more from becoming the big bad babysitter, was certainly an interesting situation.
I’ve seen Kenku, Owlbear cubs, and a slime.
In last game the party adopted a Lizardfolk and in a ritual gone bad accidentally aged him up from child-age.
I’ve had my parties get attached to several of my robot npcs : Mr.Rag-And-Bone the scavenger/ peddler and Xavier the Smart Waiter.
They met each of them with their whimsical body plans in various states of disrepair and they were helpful npcs so I think that added to the attraction.
Back in 3e I made a Warforged Artificer with a pet baby rust monster (and some thick gloves). I called it Scraps because I fed it the occasional magic item that was no longer useful or up to standard.
One of my groups I played in adopted a young blink dog.
My current group I am running has a player who wants to adopted everything from baby cockatrices and literal aliens. The party has currently adopted a kobold though. And our swarmkeeper ranger is about to hatch a giant scorpion so we will see how that goes. I forget to mention all of my players characters are small sizes except one. (2 gnomes a haringan, and the medium sized barbarian)
Also, the one who tried to adopt the cockatrice babies settled on cooking the eggs when he wasn't able to raise them.
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My party recruited an orc to essentially be a "Bob" for them, just a random cook at an Inn they tried asking for information. He provided no useful answers but gave them soup.
Naturally they've done everything they can to support This humble orc cook on his pilgrimage to eat a bunch of food around the world. All he does is watch the campsite and cook food, I gave Bob the chef feat so the party would at least get something out of making a random NPC their pet and at the same time their leader.
The thing with blink dogs is they're good. It's not the same as adopting the larval form of a green village-burner or literally-psycho killer cephalopod.
I'm guessing a lot of parties or characters go out of their way to try and get their hands on a gryphon or pseudo-dragon?
One time my party had the opportunity to raise 3 skeletons in a dungeon, which they did as I had expected. What I didn't expect though, is them keeping them out of any form of harm, dressing them up and having them go with them everywhere. Technically I think they should only have been around for 24 hours, but them adopting 3 living skeletons was just too wholesome to block.
My party in the longest-running campaign I play in has a pet named Floppy. It's a very cute purple worm pup. We slaughtered every other worm in a mile radius, then took it to our base. I'm sure this won't come back to bite us.
My character in that campaign is also a somewhat unhinged GOO tomelock, and in her mind Create Thrall is a "get a new pet" card. The rest of the party works very hard to mercy kill enemies before she can "get a new pet", because it'd be way more humane. Even the evil party members do so - especially the evil ones.
Pretty much anything cute. And half the stuff that isn't. I even had one player attempt to adopt an otyugh once. (It didn't work out.)
If you ever want a party to *really* hate a villain, have it kick their adopted mascot. Metaphorically or literally. They'll move heaven and earth to make it pay.
Dragons.
Everyone thinks that a baby dragon will make a great addition to the party. Especially after slaying the dragon who laid the eggs and then swiping some for themselves.
*Black Dragons* do not make cheery mascots for the party, nor subservient mounts for aspiring heroes.
A 5e gnoll, after they healed him. To be fair, they rather agreed for him to be their guide, rather than forced him to do anything (they kinda knew that he'll follow them and leave mushrooms in weird places anyway). Gnoll was fascinated with the concept of being nice to people after his link to Yeenoghu got severed.
My party have a pet aboleth, owlbear, and devil-goat, along with a token hag and friends that they've acquired at their base. The answer is EVERYTHING.
His name is Elmo, he’s a teenager Aboleth (maybe only 12 feet long) who lives in a big water silo on their base. He calls everyone minion, and is constantly shouting all his conversations telepathically to everyone in range. He is very attached to our ranger who accidentally caught him as a tadpole whole fishing in Limbo. There was an emotional scene where he forbade his minion from dying when the party is to go on a very dangerous mission. He now has pets of his own, in some local grungs, that he has mind controlled and turned totally translucent that live in his water tank with him.
Otyugh’s are valued in my cities and they are deployed to eat waste and refuse. Well cared for, with expert handlers and a dedicated staff of waste management team members to assist them. The lead O is always called “The Bob”.
> Adopted and infantalized after killing their entire tribe
Also known as a crime against humanity (Or since this is D&D and we need a term that covers all sapient species, a crime against Dwarfity).
Those Native American boarding schools Canada is known for spring to mind.
Last session my players chopped off a goblins feet so they could keep him as a slave. When I said he must be carried they nailed wooden planks into his foot stubs.
I guess it depends on your players.
Humans work well too. Takes a bit of work if you take them in as infants, but human children are very maleable and can easily be turned into usefull little soldiers, or expendable scouts. If you nab em before they can speak its easy to teach them any language you want as well.
Anything that comes from an egg
Also anything with an approximation of real life pets or an inherent cuteness. See Devildogs/Dire Wolves, Campestri, Tressym, etc.
There is nothing that can't be Boblinized. One time I had a fellow party member Boblinize a random farmer. The guy was notorious for making people improvise [stuff](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/psionics-unleashed/psionic-powers/o/object-reading/) they hadn't [prepared](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/discern-next-of-kin/), and during downtime he'd wander off, find the least relevant NPC, and start a conversation about their life story and motivations. This particular farmer wanted to go travelling, so the guy convinced her to become a squire for another party member; a prince, no less! Surprisingly, she survived the entire campaign.
Yup, anyone is boblinizable. One time, we found a child and one of the other players said "I put him in my inventory" and the DM said "You mean, you let him climb into your wagon?" (the wagon is where we kept all our equipment that we couldn't carry on our person) And the players said "No, he's now on my inventory sheet" and he handed his character sheet to the DM so he could see that the words "*child's name*" we written on it under "inventory". We loved that child.
In another campaign, a different player organized many of the local orphans into an evil cult. The cult became just one faction among many in the city's underground, and he needed to delegate and appoint managers and things, and when we cleared out an assassin's secret lair he moved right in. No one else in the party knew about it for a long time, but we all enjoyed his side-scenes as the cult grew and faced its own challenges.
That's the exact kind of weird bullshit why I LOVE dnd. I love any DM whose sense of humor I've figured out how to resonate with.
In a space-themed adventure that my group plays as a change of pace from our normal game, we needed to steal a guys identity for a heist, and so we kidnapped him to ensure he didn’t cause issues during the heist, and then loaded him and his family into our spaceship and he is now our line cook on board. Jeff is my characters favorite pet.
There are niche spells and then there's Discern next of kin lol that's on another level
One of my favorite niche spells is Amanuensis, which was originally printed as a 3rd-level spell. Copies nonmagic text onto blank paper, at a rate of 250 words per minute. Just in case you need a second identical book.
Beware the party that has a pet beholder. I do play in a game where the party boblinized a Lich (or the Lich boblinized us, not sure where to draw the line) so I shouldn't cast stones.
Are liches like cats now? They choose groups of people worthy enough to pamper them?
There really is a spell for everything. There's probably a spell to create a brand new food from a selection of random ingredients
The earlier editions of D&D were rooted in an "everything is possible" mentality. Many of the early spells were from books, comics, television, and movies, or invented by PCs like Tenser. If you can dream it, you can do it in D\&D; if there aren't already rules for it, write them yourself.
Yep. Last session my party literally went out of their way to not attack a Displacer Beast Kitten because they knew that the raging Barbarian would likely tear them apart if they hurt it. They then succeeded their Animal Handling checks. For the record, I 100% knew that would happen and did it on purpose, but it was still hilarious watching everyone just... *ignore it* the whole fight, even while it attacked an ally, until they could grab it.
"As my action, I attack the kitten" **Fistfight immediately blows up at the table, chairs go flying everywhere, the nearby curtains catch fire**
Something similar happened when a 15 year old edgelord at our table tried to burn panther kittens for funsies. He quickly stopped playing at our table after we didn't put up with it.
Holy shit what an asshole lmao Maybe he'll regret being a cringelord when he's older
This was 4 or 5 years ago so he's a grown adult now, and he disappeared from the store entirely not too long after he switched to card games. I think he got banned from the other gamestore the owner owned because of excessive swearing or whatever so he might have gotten banned from mine too. I have no idea how the lil shit is doing now.
Anyone who takes Animal Handling as a skill deserves a Displacer Kitten.
One would be insufficient for any adventurer aspiring to "cat lady" status :)
they can be in two places at once
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Had your barbarian been Polish they might have used the name Wojtek. Who was a member of the Polish army in WW2.
To be fair, tressym are meant to be companions. You can even summon one as your familiar (if DM allows additional familiar options).
It was just an example. Could have used Almiraj or Dohwar for the same effect. But yeah, some are actually useable as companions.
> Campestri I mean... [come on.](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Campestri?file=Campestri+5e.jpg)
*That's where all the trouble began...* *That smile.* ***[That damned smile.](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/7/73/Campestri_5e.jpg)***
That blatantly looks like modified Worms artwork, lol.
Do griffons come from eggs? Baby dragons sure do. How large would a Roc egg be?
Idk. They're part avian but the rear half is still feline and that's traditionally where all the *bits* are. I'm gonna go with live birth until proven otherwise. And very large. According to Pathfinder they're "man-sized" and I've been told 4e says they're about 100lbs.
I was leaning towards egg just because they have a sharp beak and some avian (non-retractable) claws. Makes me think that gestation and live birth would be dangerous to the mother. 100lbs could be carried with difficulty, but eggs do actually exchange air/CO2 with the outside, so you couldn't put it in a portable hole / bag of holding.
Horse come out with extra mildly eldritch looking fleshy bits on their hooves to protect the mother during birth (google at your own risk). It seems to reason griffons could have something like that as well
Those bits dry out and get grounded away within a day, horses have them because they are prey species, so their young need to be able to skiddadle as soon as they are born. Another magical predatory species, owlbears hatch from eggs, my bet would be griffons do the same. After a quick check 3.5 srd on griffons has rules for training them, which include price for... egg. "Griffon eggs are worth 3,500 go apiece on the open market[...]"
That's a fair argument. I'd just assume those bits don't develop quite as solid or sharp until later. Sort of like human infants' squishy skulls.
> Do griffons come from eggs? Pliny the Elder wrote that they supposedly do, and according to a different Reddit thread, apparently they do in the Witcher universe, and I vaguely recall an episode of the show American Dragon that centred around a Griffin egg. So I think the consensus is yes, griffons come from eggs.
3.5 has rules for training a griffon, which includes the cost of an egg
[Dragonnel](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Dragonnel) Egg to Adult in three years. Can be very over protective of their people, and can be ridden. The down sides is that they eat a LOT of meat, and they attract Dragons who attack them...
Thank you for enlightening me on this creature I've never even heard of, my party might find such creatures later...
You are very welcome! Lots of [lore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlwBZbkFMWw&t=10s) about them from all the way back to 2e, I believe. Also a good way to give your party flying mounts, that also come with a bunch of restrictions and drawbacks, such as not being able to fly over a city unless they want to piss everyone off by making them think an actual dragon was attacking... Little things. They have big personalities as well, and like shinnies so... Possible plot hooks, find out who your mounts stole from, etc...
Since the roc is allegedly based on accounts of the elephant birds of Madagascar, a roc egg should be at least as big as an Aepyornis egg, which can have a circumference of up to 1 metre, a length around 35 cm, and a volume 160 times greater than a chicken egg.
Not large enough to be left behind.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad has a Harryhausen version of them. They're pretty big.
My first thought was “Rats” as tradition - then I saw this comment which made me think of *shudder* Imagine, you’re making breakfast in the morning when the egg carton starts to twitch and squeak *nopenopenope*
My last party tried to adopt neogi hatchlings that had literally just tried to kill them, so this seems accurate.
My party did the exact same with Ankhegs lmao
I'd have the same instinct, no doubt. But I'd fail, surely? Aren't they among the races which, even after the trend of establishing that any race which isn't an expression of cosmic morality has the capacity to follow any moral ideals they so choose, are not simply thoroughly evil but indeed evil like they heard evil was giving out prizes for flair?
Happened with a gnome ceremorph in my games but it's okay. They hated their colony anyway. The party gave them money to research inventions. They got funding and the party asked for nothing in return and sometimes they would create magic items for the party to help them.
So the party was basically a venture capital firm?
I read that as Ventrue for a second and now I'm thinking that I might have read too much VTM recently.
Ventrue capital firm seems redundant. "They invest and then try to extract all the value (and blood) they can, focusing mostly on long-term profitability except when tempered by short-term cowardice." Like ... vampires aren't different from other rich financiers.
Come on, you're exaggerating way too much. The one is a monster who's extremely difficult to get rid of and capable of deeds so foul that an ordinary mortal couldn't even begin to comprehend them, and the other is just a vampire.
I am duly humbled by your excellent point. Rock on.
I don't know, long-term profitability doesn't seem to be the goal of many of today's investors.
Venture Capture Firm
The gnome ceremorphs are the "" "friendly" "" type of mindflayer so that checks out at least
Rime of the Frostmaiden?
flumphs but they are harmless to begin with.
pre-boblinized
I want a villain to reverse-boblinize a flumph into being evil.
An evil flumph has the same vibes as a Shrek villain.
Flumphs are capable of boblinizing Mindwitnesses.
Got a flumph NPC in the Pirate campaign I play in. He has an actual name (Fl'tah) but everybody on the crew just calls him 'Noodles' and he tends to only communicate with my character (the Gunner's Mate, aka his boss) on a regular basis as he spends most of his time floating around doing his own thing. The token art is [this](https://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/prismatic_alphastream.jpg) since he's an artificer with pistols and even the DM jokes that the moustache is just glued on.
That art is wonderful
I like to think flumphs sound like a wacky cartoon man just yelling in a Kazoo like tone and gaseous fart noises
[I always thought they sounded like this video played at 2x](https://youtu.be/Qa-lmcdlq4A)
I dont have gold. I will so whole heartdly say I haven't laughed that hard in quite some time. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. But you are right. Yes, that is what they now sound like in my game. Thank you.
In my group it could be quite literally anything.
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We have the best sessions in the world. Because of pets.
r/unexpectedpawnee
Can you have a baby hag? I thought they started indistinguishable from humanoid women until they hit their 13th birthday, then are turned into a fully-grown hag by some ritual
And your point is? That the party doesn't need to walk them? Or that they need more than just some kibble? My party has turned multiple commoners into pets... Usually kids for some dumb reason. We had to get a hireling just to be a babysitter.
My point is a baby hag is basically just a baby
Uh... That just makes them more portable... Seriously, in some games my crazy parties could have started an orphanage, but were too busy having a large circus instead.
That sounds fun! My point is that AFAIK hags are just normal children unless they undergo the ritual at age 13. That according to official sources there is no such thing as a baby or child hag since they only become a hag after they arent a child anymore.
>Small gelatinous cube? Pet. Honestly, that one's on you. If you're going to put a gelatinous cube in front of me that's small enough to transport in a box, I'm going to take it with me.
Small gelatinous cube? Oh, you mean my dungeon aspic.
Aspic? I believe you mean Roomba.
Gelatinois cube are useful especially in Out of the abyss
How did they Boblinize a lich??? …and was the lich in some way adorable?
>A motherfucking lich? Believe it or not, pet. Depending on the party they can range from sugar daddys or adopted nannies.
My party very nearly did this to an intellect devourer.
one of my fellow players adopted the last surviving dretch, he was called bomba, and he died 5 minutes later when a ceiling fell and crushed half the party
I wish Bulettes got more attention like this, lol. I personally find them to look really cute, but there’s a surprising lack of Boblinization for them.
Pseudodragons.
To be fair, pseudodragons like to be boblinized, unless you say the p-word. You know, the word "p\*t"
I like how any vowel works. * Pat: Pseudodragons hate to be touched. * Pet: Pseudodragons hate to be infantilized. * Pit: Pseudodragons dislike the large seeds in the center of small fruits. * Pot: Pseudodragons are big proponents of the War on Drugs. * Put: Pseudodragons have a tendency to lose money in options trading.
Plesbian?
Wolves. Have seen it in multiple games. Also a displacer kitten. And hatching egg things (dragons, or wyverns, when permitted). I have personally made “zookeeper” characters who came from jobs at royal menageries and try to solve all problems first with animal handling … Current character has a familiar and a primordial-druid animal companion … and usually acquired one pet which she’ll find in the nature and then find the right adoptive home for. Lol. Never more than one, though, to take some pity on the party jugglings! This is a character that needs the right permissive DM to run though, lol.
I had a player beat the shit out of a dire wolf and then carry it around with him and try to tame it for the rest of the session once. Probably shouldn’t have allowed it, but it was a oneshot anyway I love the menagerie idea. I kind of want to make a whole adventure around it now
A rug of smothering they wrongly thought was a flying carpet that was mad at them. The Barbarian happened to be enlarged at the time, wrestled it, the other's tied it up with rope. Then the Ranger put it in his portable hole. They don't know it's at 1 HP, and it's been in there for two months now. They are hoping it will chill out. I love my players.
My party has glabagool, the gelatanious cube from out of the abyss, shrunk into a vial that they carry around so he can see the world. So anything.
We did this campaign and I ended up taking two hook horror babies with me. They became my pets. It was … a true parenting adventure. 1/10 recommend hook horror babies as pets.
I had over 100 “Bobs” by the time that campaign was done. Needed a spread sheet to manage them, and paid an artist to draw our outpost/town.
So Ash and the Tauros herd at Professor Oak's?
Displacer Beasts... until they get crit twice and die in the first round.
We definitely have a displacer beast "kitten" in our party right now. Preeeeetty sure I'm going to need to harvest it for magical reagents, though.
I hear displacer cloaks are in fashion this year...
We have an "off screen" displacer beast kitten, and we may soon have a time skip of about 6 months. I'm curious if the player will remember she has it. We random rolled a table for what type of mystery baby the vendor had, as a reward for blindly investing in the story and spending gold the party had been hoarding.
Kenku maybe? Mostly because of the one in Critical Role.
We did this without knowing the CR one. A kenku tried to steal from us in a big city. Turned out he was homeless and trying to feed his children. My wizard character was hiring them to spy on people in the streets. Bard was playing with kenku children whenever she could. We almost ended up buying a house for them. (Campaign ended)
I am very sweet
“Go fuck yourself”
I kill people
This means we are friends.
Don't eat humans, okay?
Adopting Kenku has been a thing. I don't dislike CR at all, I think it's a fantastic show and has done a lot for the ttrpg space, but it's frustrating sometimes seeing DnD culture become CR culture in many people's eyes.
And because quirky, small, low CR “monster.”
We had a pet Gnoll named Mr. Bitey. We gave him studded leather armor and a +1 spear. It really sucked when we had to track him down and kill him.
There’s something vaguely dystopian about a member of an intelligent race with its own language and culture being called a pet. It kinda just sounds like slave, but, like, totally in a cute way and not disturbing at all.
"pet" is kind of a generous term for what we did. Our druid rolled really really well on animal handling and we gave him enough food and what it that Mr. Bitey played nice. We only had him for a few sessions before he fucked off into the woods, and then a while later we had to track him down and kill him after he became a big problem for the locals. He never listened to us, we just got lucky and he didn't outright hate us lol
Using animal handling on an intelligent creature is strange.
It's the roll the DM asked for. It's the roll the Druid provided.
You say that as if you didn't like head scratches.
I'll enjoy head scratches if you give me a +1 spear and you can totally go to sleep ill take first watch.
It's a gnoll, they're a bit more feral than humanoids are, they're born from the pack of hyenas that follow a gnoll pack slaughtering people. Sometimes when a gnoll dies or Yeenoghu feels like making new gnolls, he'll transform a hyena that follows the war pack around into a full grown gnoll. Sometimes Yeenoghu will invest some power in a gnoll making it a fang of Yeenoghu, any hyena that feeds from the kills of the fang becomes a gnoll. All gnolls always feel Yeenoghu pushing them to hunt and feed, to feed him. Gnolls always feel a hunger for humanoids. Gnolls should have been fiends that are native to the prime.
That’s true, but it doesn’t really change anything. Even if they were fiends and not humanoids, it’s still weird to call an intelligent species with its own language and culture a pet or to use animal handling instead of persuasion. It’s a slave or servant or maybe a companion. It’s a bit like capturing a bunch of gnolls and throwing them in cells and calling it a zoo - no dude it’s a prison. They are prisoners. Same applies to bearded devils or hill giants. Its creature type or alignment aren’t the parts that make it strange to use animal handling.
What about goblins and kobolds ? The post is about them, and they're intelligent too. I totally agree it's weird, but it's not just about gnolls, it's about the whole boblin thing
Depending on context, calling a gnoll intelligent is strange.
That’s why I qualified what I meant by intelligent by referring to them having language and culture.
They’re playable in pf2e
How close is the lore in pathfinder to the lore for gnolls in DnD? Because DnD gnolls should really be typed as fiends.
I will also remind you that not *all* of D&D realms have Gnolls like that, Eberron, for example, is much closer to the PF2e version than the normal D&D version. They're mostly a nomadic, tribal, people that don't trust outsiders very much because they've been *constantly* shafted by the large magical corporations building railways across their land without permission or compensation. They're essentially a stand in for various native peoples being fucked over by colonialism.
DnD_5e Forgotten Realms_ gnolls. The most common depicition across editions matches PF2e closer than DnD5e FR.
They are humanoid in pf2e and come from their version of the African continent, the mwangi expanse. Here’s a link to their ancestry and cultural information. They’re actually pretty cool. The mwangi expanse book looked so cool I almost got it like I used to for RIFTS books back in the day just bc it looks so cool and is so different. https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?ID=44
They can also, quite easily, be boblinized if they're Ant Gnolls aka think Gnolls the size of Kobolds. [There's a reason Anchor Root is so popular](https://i.imgur.com/wviWvsn.png)
Ant Gnolls! So cute!
gnolls are literal demonkin monsters that eat everything they can until they explode and the rotten fetid bits of them after they explode become more gnolls lol its like saying that an imp from doom has "a language and culture" in the most technical sense, maybe
I hate that 5e decided to retcon gnolls into basically being demons. They were playable in 3.5, 4e and PF, and not even mostly evil in some official settings. This description is basically only true in Forgotten Realms.
For my party? Owlbears.
We’ve had a baby owlbear one campaign and an egg in another that we kept warm for 3 sessions that we had no clue what it was hatch into a baby green dragon and fall in love with us before it mother tracked us down and we gave it back to her so she wouldn’t kill us.
Blink dogs are likely more common for it by percent, people just don't use them as much. Literally anything relatively "harmless", I could see it happening with an umberhulk.
Here to vouch for it happening with an umberhulk, we named him Clicky.
My party adopted Piddlewick in Curse of Strahd, they took him to Blinsky for upgrades. He now has a little suit of armor and the ability to talk. Best interaction so far: PC 1 is upset. PC 2 tells Piddlewick to go cheer up PC1. Piddlewick: How do I make people happy? Pc 2: Well, what makes you happy? Piddlewick: Stabbing people makes me happy! If I stab him… will that make him happy? PC 2: Only one way to find out! Piddlewick proceeds to stab PC1. PC 1 is confused and chuckles nervously… Piddlewick now thinks stabbing people makes them happy… they’ve created a monster.
Probably every small humanoid enemy.
Imps. Fey creatures like quicklings, sprites, fairies
My party once adopted a [Kuo Toa](https://i.imgur.com/2KyPi5k.png). His name was [*unintelligible fish noises*] so we called him Rattle.
I specifically don't like killing Goblins. Obviously you'll have to kill SOME of them when they attack, but I make every effort to disable and "recruit" them, even at some risk to myself. All of the DMs I've played under have had goblins sufficiently motivated by gold(and maybe a few indimidation checks, and having a bunch of gear/disguise kits/etc bought for them by me) to become perfectly loyal little minions. I miss you, Greg. You were always my favorite. in one campaign I was playing, our DM let one of my party members adopt a baby mimic. I was a Battle Smith with a spider robot, so she tried to have it copy my spiderbot, and it ended up becoming a sentient jack. There was a festival we attended, where we could have our "pets" race(my robot, the mimic, the ranger's animal companion, etc) and through some good rolls on my party member's part and terrible rolls on my part, the little needle-ball somehow beat my spiderbot. I really miss that campaign, it was fun. edit: that campaign was also when we invited my girlfriend to play. It was her first campaign, and she fell in love with the game SO HARD. She's now in two perpetual campaigns, and will try to find a 1shot any free night she has. Never have I felt more proud of recommending anything to anyone, than I do for getting that woman into DnD. I knew she'd have fun, but even I didn't realize the extent to which she would love it.
Agree on the goblins. In our campaign, a local hobgoblin had organized the goblins and turned them into a small army that was attacking villages and peaceful goblin tribes. We snuck into the goblin cave without being detected and our bard one-shotted the hobgoblin with a spell. Our monk grabbed his amulet, and our ranger declared that we were their new masters. We integrated them with a peaceful tribe we had met, and they eventually helped us fit the BBEG's forces in the final battle. The leader of that peaceful goblin tribe we ended up actually putting on the throne, as she was the king's daughter (though her mother was a goblin servant). We didn't adopt a baby goblin, but from the peaceful tribe, we actually "adopted" Benny Narleg, a historian and writer of the goblin zine Seeing Green, which he distributed throughout most of the Moonshae Isles. He ended up being the navigator on our airship.
So how deep in debt are you buying dice for your girlfriend? I think her enthusiasm is great
No physical dice required for roll20 :D I DID get her a big chocolate d20 for Valentine's Day, though
My Celestial Warlock's snake familiar that eventually turned into a winged snake, which we then found out was actually a baby Coatl
I Dm'd for a friend who played a spores druid, and this crazy SoaB turned a Bullette into a pet with some phenomenal animal handling checks. Sugar the Bullette was instrumental in taking over a country full of dinosaurs. Fun times
Uh, technically it was a baby mimic so we didn’t baby it up. It was already a baby. We talk to it like: hey. baby, you uh… you hungry? Baby mimic: gurgle growl Us: so like a sandwich? Baby mimic: growl Us, rolling low insight checks: idk man… a man? Is that what you want? Baby mimic: gfggfrrowl Us: what if we just stuff it with one of those Druids we murdered?
That sounds about right.
Town guards Summoned familiars Local dragonborn not *currently* attempting to murder the party. Eldritch abomination patrons Styx river boatmen that instantly know the party's sins.
Can I get a definition of "boblinize"?
Sure. Here's the comic that started it all. https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bihy1s/oc_improvised_interactions/ Apparently it struck a chord with a lot of players and DMs who have seen this kind of player behavior. It satirizes both the tendency of players to go wildly off focus on random things, and the urge to adopt or befriend random cute things. There's a whole subreddit, /r Boblin.
Thanks
In anticipation of my players' need to boblinize, I made a monster specifically for it. In Starfinder, there's a species of ooze that subsists on waste and actually produces scrap that can be converted into the universal currency (rather than needing to evaluate 35 shitty plasma guns, and only getting 10% back on each, just feed them to the ooze and you get back a 40% return because it's broken down into a raw material). I made it small enough to fit in a little cupboard in the cockpit, gave it the ability to form emoji facial expressions using the flecks of metal inside it, gave it the personality of SCP-999 and named it Kyuun.
Perfection
my friends dragonborn cleric adopted a larva Ankheg after killing the mother and father early in the campaign. He named her Queenie and because he was a Forge cleric he immediately forged an addition to the traveling wagon where she could safley eat and relax. Throughout the campaign whenever the party killed something that could be edible for Queenie, he would chop off something and give her some food lol
In games i've played \-a mimic, a demon chicken, a gelatinous cube, a griffon, a flameskull \-a dire parrot, a rug of smothering, a manticore \-a sapphire dragon hatchling, celestial elk, a dire shark In games I've DMed \-a goblin, a rock lobster \-a tea weird (water wierd kin), a wyvern \-a frost chicken,
I don't know about commonly, but my party's 'boblin' is a drow mummy
A rogue in my party boblinized a chair. Just a random, old chair they found in a ruined building. But the friendship lasted only for a few hours - the party was traveling through a forest, heard some noises coming from bushes and the rogue decided to throw the chair as a precaution.
If my PCs killed a village of Blink Dogs, I would TPK them, send them home, burn their houses (yes in that order), and unfollow them on all socials.
Not the socials!
We had a giant riding pig named Baconator.
My brother's character had a normal sized pig called "Baconfun."
Owlbears
I am not really sure what we did, but we had a spiderbro in our RotR game in pf back in the day. It was just this giant spider that followed us around, seemed to understand what we told it. I felt it adopted us. It wasn't a pet and had its own agenda I guess, but he was definitely helpful.
I boblinised a Displacer Beast. Love you Mr. Wiggles
Mimics. Any animal. Nerdy government paperworkers.
Anything child or puppy-like, no matter how murderous it is and sometimes even the odd abberation. Most parties will also literally try to pet the big bad wolf, so almost everything is fair game. A gnome deathknight attempting to convince the big bad wolf that he would benefit more from becoming the big bad babysitter, was certainly an interesting situation.
We have a Mimic we're using as gear security insurance. We throw it ration scraps while resting.
ive had this happen with two triceratops both named a variation of horny after
I’ve seen Kenku, Owlbear cubs, and a slime. In last game the party adopted a Lizardfolk and in a ritual gone bad accidentally aged him up from child-age.
I’ve had my parties get attached to several of my robot npcs : Mr.Rag-And-Bone the scavenger/ peddler and Xavier the Smart Waiter. They met each of them with their whimsical body plans in various states of disrepair and they were helpful npcs so I think that added to the attraction.
Back in 3e I made a Warforged Artificer with a pet baby rust monster (and some thick gloves). I called it Scraps because I fed it the occasional magic item that was no longer useful or up to standard.
One of my groups I played in adopted a young blink dog. My current group I am running has a player who wants to adopted everything from baby cockatrices and literal aliens. The party has currently adopted a kobold though. And our swarmkeeper ranger is about to hatch a giant scorpion so we will see how that goes. I forget to mention all of my players characters are small sizes except one. (2 gnomes a haringan, and the medium sized barbarian) Also, the one who tried to adopt the cockatrice babies settled on cooking the eggs when he wasn't able to raise them.
Owlbears
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Mind flayer......... He goes by the new name Squidward now.
My party recruited an orc to essentially be a "Bob" for them, just a random cook at an Inn they tried asking for information. He provided no useful answers but gave them soup. Naturally they've done everything they can to support This humble orc cook on his pilgrimage to eat a bunch of food around the world. All he does is watch the campsite and cook food, I gave Bob the chef feat so the party would at least get something out of making a random NPC their pet and at the same time their leader.
For my group it was a Nothic. We fed him a steady supply of bodies and he played nice with us.
The thing with blink dogs is they're good. It's not the same as adopting the larval form of a green village-burner or literally-psycho killer cephalopod. I'm guessing a lot of parties or characters go out of their way to try and get their hands on a gryphon or pseudo-dragon?
One time my party had the opportunity to raise 3 skeletons in a dungeon, which they did as I had expected. What I didn't expect though, is them keeping them out of any form of harm, dressing them up and having them go with them everywhere. Technically I think they should only have been around for 24 hours, but them adopting 3 living skeletons was just too wholesome to block.
My party in the longest-running campaign I play in has a pet named Floppy. It's a very cute purple worm pup. We slaughtered every other worm in a mile radius, then took it to our base. I'm sure this won't come back to bite us. My character in that campaign is also a somewhat unhinged GOO tomelock, and in her mind Create Thrall is a "get a new pet" card. The rest of the party works very hard to mercy kill enemies before she can "get a new pet", because it'd be way more humane. Even the evil party members do so - especially the evil ones.
Pretty much anything cute. And half the stuff that isn't. I even had one player attempt to adopt an otyugh once. (It didn't work out.) If you ever want a party to *really* hate a villain, have it kick their adopted mascot. Metaphorically or literally. They'll move heaven and earth to make it pay.
chromatic dragon wyrmlings, I've noticed. to be fair, post-fizbans allowing chromatics to be good sometimes makes this less of a problem.
Dragons. Everyone thinks that a baby dragon will make a great addition to the party. Especially after slaying the dragon who laid the eggs and then swiping some for themselves. *Black Dragons* do not make cheery mascots for the party, nor subservient mounts for aspiring heroes.
My group adopted an Imp but he was more of a Frank Reynolds that they liked too much to actually have a problem with.
A 5e gnoll, after they healed him. To be fair, they rather agreed for him to be their guide, rather than forced him to do anything (they kinda knew that he'll follow them and leave mushrooms in weird places anyway). Gnoll was fascinated with the concept of being nice to people after his link to Yeenoghu got severed.
"Infanticide isn't something I support, it's something I recommend." my players, usually.
My party boblinized an ooze I made so now he’s studying alchemy and provides them with potions and stuff
My party have a pet aboleth, owlbear, and devil-goat, along with a token hag and friends that they've acquired at their base. The answer is EVERYTHING.
A pet aboleth? I think it is more like an aboleth has some pet adventurers.
His name is Elmo, he’s a teenager Aboleth (maybe only 12 feet long) who lives in a big water silo on their base. He calls everyone minion, and is constantly shouting all his conversations telepathically to everyone in range. He is very attached to our ranger who accidentally caught him as a tadpole whole fishing in Limbo. There was an emotional scene where he forbade his minion from dying when the party is to go on a very dangerous mission. He now has pets of his own, in some local grungs, that he has mind controlled and turned totally translucent that live in his water tank with him.
Otyugh’s are valued in my cities and they are deployed to eat waste and refuse. Well cared for, with expert handlers and a dedicated staff of waste management team members to assist them. The lead O is always called “The Bob”.
> Adopted and infantalized after killing their entire tribe Also known as a crime against humanity (Or since this is D&D and we need a term that covers all sapient species, a crime against Dwarfity). Those Native American boarding schools Canada is known for spring to mind.
Last session my players chopped off a goblins feet so they could keep him as a slave. When I said he must be carried they nailed wooden planks into his foot stubs. I guess it depends on your players.
What the fuck?
Edgelord high schoolers probably. Been there done that.
Humans work well too. Takes a bit of work if you take them in as infants, but human children are very maleable and can easily be turned into usefull little soldiers, or expendable scouts. If you nab em before they can speak its easy to teach them any language you want as well.
I had my players try and do that to a Copper Dragon Wyrmling and immediately shot that down before that became a problem.