Magus's Innocuous Familiars

BIOWARE FORUM THREAD

Small familiars that are more like spies than meat shields such as rats, bats, crows, and vipers. For builders this system enables much more flexibility with regards to a familiar's appearance and abilities.

I first developed "Innocuous Familiars" for Arnheim (a module I made and played in 2012), but then reworked the whole system for the January 2013 Custom Content Challenge. The inspiration for the project was to make familiars more like their original pen and paper versions, in which the familiars are primarily small animals, and the magic-user acquires them through casting a spell.

Here are the basics of this project:

• The standard familiars are replaced by typical animals: crow, bat, rat, viper. These starting familiars lack spell-like abilities and the stats to make a difference in a fight, but the fliers can actually fly, and the rat and viper can slip around doors which are very useful abilities for reconaissance. In addition to these starting familiars there are others which must be found in game such as dire creatures and beasts or even rarer magical creatures like Imps. These are more powerful familiars with the stats for combat, spell-like abilities, or both.
• The new spell, Bind Familiar, is used to gain new familiars through the course of play or to reincarnate a dead one. In either case, the process is the same: find a suitable creature and target it with the spell. You may have to negotiate with intelligent creatures and convince them to submit to the spell, otherwise a creature with an Intelligence greater than 5 will consider a wizard casting this spell on them as hostile.
• New features for familiars have been implemented: Spell Sharing of personal spells cast by the master, Master Benefits while the familiar is summoned (Alertness + some others), and Cast Master's Spell (familiars can recast a hostile spell which the master stores on them). Also, the Mark Target ability enables familiars to create a spell focus from a targeted creature or location. The Spell Focus can later be used by the master as a proxy target for a few select spells. A few spells were set up in the demo as examples: bestow curse (lvl 4), dimensional jump (lvl 4), and dimensional portal (lvl 5).
• There is an NWNX version which relies on NWNX_FUNCS available, and one which has no external requirements. Both work for multiplayer, but the NWNX version is superior for a multiplayer environment.

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In general however this package is not about what I am giving to you in it, but the flexibility it gives a builder. I will be releasing full documentation to explain how to use the new 2da to custom design new familiars. Its fairly easy to do and takes less time than creating 40 creature blueprints and a handful of their creature weapons and hides. You no longer need to create creature blueprints, although you can if you want, and so there are less blueprints overall to work with when you create custom familiars. With a modicum of scripting you can also set up your familiar to have its own spell-like abilities. I am creating some magical familiars to demonstrate how it is done.

I hope you all enjoy this. I've had a great time just tinkering with it as I develop it.