Familiars - Crouching Monkey, Hidden Toad (Encyclopaedia Arcane (d20))

The primary purpose of this sourcebook is to give players and Games Masters alike all the information they need to manage familiars in their campaigns. Herein you will find chapters devoted to the process of summoning familiars and the effects of bonding with them. You will also find variant special ability progressions for familiars whose masters have gained in experience, a detailed guideline on how to improve a familiar via gained experience and training rituals, brief overviews of a couple prestige classes based on familiars, and a catalog of spells used to augment familiars. Finally, this work shall discuss how to implement the above rules and make familiars a living part of every campaign and provide a condensed list of familiars and their stats. Summoning a familiar is an important step for any mage and it should not be taken lightly. Familiars are much more than pets; they are an extension of the mages that summon them. To be more to the point, familiars are a part of the mage made manifest by his arcane powers and will and the mage should recognize that he invests much more than the components of the summon spell into his familiar. In fact, he invests a piece of himself that should be protected by the mage, lest it be lost to him forever.