If you’re not following Paizo’s RPG Superstar 2011 contest you should be, if only because you get loads of really high quality game content for free out of it. So far it’s 32 wondrous items, something less than 32 archtypes, 16 villains, and soon 8 Golarion locations and 4 adventure plots.
As always props to Paizo for their openness and customer engagement!
I have a lively question running at RPG Stack Exchange on “How do you help players not focus on the rules?” I and my group tend towards a more old school “rulings not rules” approach when it comes to the game, and some of “the kids nowadays” who have come up on 4e or even 3e are very, very gamist and expect the rules to be God. You have to get them out of that mindset to achieve simulationist (and ideally immersive) play. I’ve had some good answers to the question, as well as a small set of “Oh that’s evil,” which I expect I guess. And a subset that insist you have to change the rules system and use a indie storygame or something if you don’t want rules lawyering, which I think is silly because people have managed to play D&D and other crunchy games in a non-gamist way for thirty years, I guess 4e has warped everyone’s default expectations so much that they can’t conceive of that.
Anyway, chime in here with good ways to help someone who is trying to get out of their “the game is about the rules” rut and enjoy “the game is about a ‘real’ fictional world” play. If you don’t like that style of play, fine, move on, I’m happy for you but don’t want to hear it.
Sixth Session (10 page pdf) – “Race for the Devil” – Elias Tammerhawk’s ship has been sighted at the Devil’s Elbow, and a pirate crew has retrieved some interesting artifacts from the site. Everyone wants to get there, but Riddleport’s mighty short on boats. The PCs decide to gamble on a one way ticket – but a one way ticket to where?
This time, we get started on the second chapter in the Second Darkness adventure path, Children of the Void, or at least my heavily modded version of it. Beware spoilers.
Like many sessions kicking off a new plot arc, this one was mostly wandering around in town – information gathering, buying and selling, talking to NPCs. Serpent went and talked to Fenella Bromathan, new Speaker of the Order of Cyphers. He noticed her a while back, and her super pale skin and dark hair is the same kind of odd coloration that he has – and he doesn’t know his mother, who he suspects was a witch or fey from Irrisen. He can’t find a good way of coming out and asking her about it, though.
Then the race was on to Devil’s Elbow. The PCs were bound and determined to get out there ASAP, and after the dwarves left heading that direction and Morgan Baumann (who Freeport fans will recognize) turned them down, they decided “what the hell” – they used Wogan’s swan boat feather token to head out there even though they would have no way back, reasoning that they’d be able to beg, borrow, or steal a ship once they reached the island.
And that plan would have worked, except that Mama Watanna was angry. The water goddess had made love to Sindawe and blessed him, contingent on him being faithful to her – but then last time, he and Hatshepsut made love. She often sends an orca to watch over Sindawe on his travels – and lo and behold, once they’re two-thirds of the way to the island, I roll a random encounter of 5 orcas. That’s fate right there, so I knew those orca were Mama Watanna payback. They attacked the ship and managed to breach its hull – the party probably could have killed them all, but Sindawe allowed himself to be carried off by one of the killer whales. Hatshepsut refused to let him go gently into that good night, and clung to the back of the beast as they dove into the ocean depths. I figured that was good enough to summon the goddess herself. He had to spend an Infamy Point to convince Mama Watanna that he wasn’t really cheating on her because Hatshepsut is, like, basically one of her priestesses. In earlier sessions, before I knew whether Sindawe and Hatshepsut would fall for each other, I had considered whether Mama would possess her to be with Sindawe because she is about the closest thing Avistan has to a proper mambo, so this wasn’t totally off base.
In the end, most of the party was left clinging to a rock in the middle of the sea, thinking that the two monks might be lost, while Sindawe was really having more goddess/Hatshepsut sex deep underwater.
Thirty-ninth Session – It’s large scale war planning as Lucullus falls, we win at Ignatius, and a new alien spills a load of historical beans. We’re sick of always playing defense, so the Lighthouse heads out to Medurr space to get them on board one way or the other, and the B Team takes the Red Queen to go pacify some alien-collaboratin’ pirates.
We didn’t actually do all that much this session – the B Team took some autistic kid off Lucullus, and then that system promptly betrayed the Alliance. Then we interrogated a new alien called an Evrem, and used our alien communication artifact to talk to everyone we know. More out of luck than anything we send a battle group to Ignatius and they take out an External fleet there – the aliens split their forces, bad idea for them. It was a long series of planning and events we weren’t there for. But we’ve set the stage for violent anti-pirate combat at Ptolemy and violent diplomacy with the Medurr next time.
If we get the Medurr to chip in, and our captive kararan scientists can reverse the klick egg-bioengineering so that the klicks will turn on the i’krl, we just might have a fighting chance!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged alternity, lighthouse, RPG, RPGs, scifi, SF, stardrive
If you missed the D&D-themed episode of Community on NBC, the whole episode is online. It’s mighty funny.
Best parts:
I thought it was interesting that it was pretty true to D&D. The DM did all the rolling, like Zak with the “D&D with Porn Stars” group, which is mildly unusual but good for novices and more freeform older ed play where you don’t have to roll 10 dice a round.
Fifth Session (15 page pdf) – “Sex, Death, Gods, and Demons” – [WARNING: NSFW] The PCs race to kill the last Keeper before the horror from the Dark Tapestry destroys Riddleport. But that’s not the greatest foe they face, as it turns out sex is the deadliest weapon of all.
No, seriously, this session is NC-17 rated (that’s X-rated for you old folks), so don’t read further if you’re easily offended. Also, there are spoilers for Richard Pett’s adventure Carrion Hill. Below, I give you a look into the planning that went into all this. Some people think RPGs should be bowdlerized like comics were under the old Comics Code. Well, I disagree; even most classic literature revolves around “adult” real world concepts about sex, infidelity, temptation, et cetera. I believe RPGs are a serious art form and don’t have to be just escapist power fantasy – if you disagree, you’re welcome to your own game, but to me it’s like Hamlet vs. Donald Duck comics – you can enjoy the latter, but if you claim they’re the acme of literature like the former, then real people will look down on you like the punk you are.
To telegraph the inclusion of sexual content in this session to the group, I added some sexual tension with Iesha at the Gold Goblin (always do a little foreshadowing) and then because of the nature of the Tommy scene especially I just plain told all the players (and our groupie Georgina who was spectating) that this scene would be sexually explicit and they could take a powder if they were uncomfortable, but they were all down. I felt that they all (Tommy mainly in this scene, Sindawe later on, and the others in their turn) did a great job of roleplaying through all these heavy topics. Good work guys!
One of Tommy the halfling’s long term goals is to become a respected and feared pirate/crime lord with a hot human mistress. He’s recently taken a level of assassin and is notable for his enthusiastic torture of the captured assassin Jesswin, and the trapped tiefling prostitute Lavender Lil has been #1 on the future-mistress list. Well, recently I got Paizo’s Lords of Chaos, Book of the Damned Volume 2 and the idea of the demonic boons and whatnot were interesting, so I thought I’d see if Tommy could be tempted. Turns out he could! You may remember Seyanna the succubus from the Riddleport Light back in Season One – she was a slave of the old sorcerer who used to keep it, Gebediah Crix. Sindawe ended up gifting her to a helpful imp. Fortunately for her, the tsunami hit the city immediately thereafter and in the chaos she managed to get the golden key that controls her away from the imp, tore him into devil bits, and went on her way. But a good GM never tosses away an NPC! Upon reading Lords of Chaos, I realized there was a perfect fit here. Nocticula (she’s on the cover) is the demon queen of succubi, assassins, whores, and related shenanigans. An aspiring assassin not afraid of getting his hands dirty and who has a soft spot for the demon booty – well that’s something that’s going to show up on her radar. So Seyanna (who can read minds, so knows all about Tommy, and reckons he’s a good Nocticula prospect) headed over to the House of the Silken Veil to get a job. It took some doing to fool the cunning head priestess of Calistria, Shorafa Pamodae, but that’s where succubi are Vikings. In fact, last time Tommy visited she was in the waiting room for her job interview – I gave him a Perception check to recognize the clothes she was wearing from their encounter in the lighthouse (she had changed form of course, but not clothing) but alas he failed it. So in short order she sexually enslaved Lil and laid out a high quality temptation for Tommy. In the end he accepted her dark gift. This entire scene was the most graphically sexual of the campaign, and it had to be, to reinforce the nature of these demons – sexual, perverse, violent – and make it clear what he’s getting into. Like any good ensnarement, there was an element of threat and an element of cupidity, it works on marks every day in real life and it worked on Tommy. It’s not clear what he plans to do now – go along with it? Turn against Lil? Try to get the succubus somehow? And what are her plans? Help him? Hurt him? Corrupt his precious bodily fluids? We’ll see, this has provided enough plot hooks to sustain a campaign into infinity.
This was the climax to Carrion Hill – what is essentially a Spawn of Yog-Sothoth from Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” is loose in Riddleport and they are trying to get rid of it, starting with killing its summoners so it can’t kill them itself and take their power. The last Keeper runs an asylum, of course. You should have seen the dismayed looks on the faces of the players, they knew it was going to be Real Messed Up ™. Richard Pett did a good job on this adventure adding all kinds of cool setpieces and Lovecraftian horror tropes.
In the end the PCs couldn’t quite kill the Keeper before he ran away and loosed the resident chaos beast – and then as they slew him, the Spawn showed up. I was liberally adding Will saves to prevent Wisdom damage as a stand-in for Sanity mechanics. The best part of this was when everyone managed to get clear (well, Wogan just about didn’t, but Sindawe helped him out) and ran off as the chaos beast and the Spawn met. Everyone, that is, except the curious Serpent, who stayed behind, peering at the meeting out of curiosity. Would they fight? Is one the other’s baby or something? Would they mate? Well, he’ll never know, because he rolled a natural 1 on his Will save and went completely insane – temporarily (mostly), but his mind blanked out and he came shrieking and gibbering out of the asylum behind the others.
I let them get away with just “blowing up the gas lines” in classic Call of Cthulhu fashion instead of fighting the spawn. They were all beat to hell and were clever slash lucky enough to get the spawn and the chaos beast to meet (that was a pretty low percentage play). And then they were like “Oh, the gas lines! All that leaking dwarven gas line stuff during the flood was foreshadowing!” And I was like “Uhhh… Yes! Yes it was!” So they gleefully wandered away from a burning asylum as many insane people burned to death screaming. Shadow Riddleport will be quite lively if anyone visits again! And the spawn might be dead. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a big ass chaos beast. Or maybe it’s napping. No hints from me!
We changed our gun rules for this game – we had been using these rules I put together, but Paizo has their new gun rules from the upcoming Ultimate Combat out for playtest so we thought we’d use them. We like using period-appropriate guns especially in a pirate game of this sort, so slow to load black powder wheellock pistols and muskets are in the hands of some of the local guards, and our cleric of Gozreh, Wogan, has a soft spot for them. They’re expensive, but he’s managed to get a small collection.
We had mixed results on the rules. These new guns perform a touch attack at short range, which was a nice boost and let him actually hit things. But damage was just too small (1d12 musket/1d8 pistol). Since you have to reload for a long time, you can’t get in a lot of attacks and certainly can’t get the rapid shot/multishot/iterative attack kinds of things every bowman has. So someone with a bow can pop off 2 or more arrows a round for 1d8 + STR damage each even at low level, but with a pistol you can fire once every other round for 1d8, not easily enhanceable. I’m going to boost damage significantly (2d6 for pistols, 3d6 for muskets) – guns are expensive and require a special feat and are slow, so there needs to be compensation.
I hadn’t been planning on doing this in the same session as the succubus thing, but that’s how it ended up happening. Anyway, you may remember that back in Season One, Sindawe ended up making love to an avatar or something of voodoo goddess Mama Watanna, after which she blessed him but warned him he had to be faithful to her and keep it secret. I basically ripped off RL African deity Mami Wata for this bit. To quote the relevant bit from Wikipedia, “Mami Wata’s association with sex and lust is somewhat paradoxically linked to one with fidelity. According to a Nigerian tradition, male followers may encounter the spirit in the guise of a beautiful, sexually promiscuous woman, such as a prostitute. In Nigerian popular stories, Mami Wata may seduce a favoured male devotee and then show herself to him following coitus. She then demands his complete sexual faithfulness and secrecy about the matter. Acceptance means wealth and fortune; rejection spells the ruin of his family, finances, and job.” And that’s what happened. Anyway, Sindawe got a CHA boost out of the gig and has been faithful so far.
Well, he’d developed this friendship with Hatshepsut, monk and priestess of a lost civilization they thawed out back in Viperwall. At first, it was just “let’s not murder her” when Serpent wanted to just murder her… But then he stepped in to help since she doesn’t speak Common and sometimes axe kicks people who violate her weird ancient customs. And Sindawe wanted to learn Aklo from her to have a secret party language. As they are both monks they ended up fighting together a lot, and saving each others’ lives from time to time – Sindawe has even spent his precious Infamy Points to help her out.
I wondered how he’d respond to a spark; I just needed the right time. Hatshepsut got hit by the chaos beast’s attack during the run on the asylum and nearly got mutated. She puts up a stern front but the whole “guess what it’s hundreds of years later and your gods and people are all dead and you’re a hobo now” thing is tough on her, and the chaos thing really shook her. Buty she has her pride. So in Red Sonja fashion, she challenged Sindawe to spar, and when he won, she offered herself to him. And he decided, “OK, let’s do this.” I knew some random hottie wouldn’t be tempting to him, but a reliable comrade, that’s a different thing.
So what will happen with an irate water goddess? I guess we’ll see! One PC uses sex to get into bed with a higher power, and one uses it to get out. Interesting times.
Was it sex-drenched? Yes. And that’s how you do it! As a result we have personal investment and drama! Roleplaying isn’t dead yet. Stay tuned for next time, when we kick the second major campaign plot arc into high gear.
Posted in session summaries
Tagged D&D, horror, NSFW, Pathfinder, pirates, reavers, RPG, RPGs, sex
Topless Robot had a hilarious contest for the worst RPG character you ever ran across. Go read the winning entries; I got an Honorable Mention for the sad but true tale of the lesbian stripper Summer’s Eve and her sister/lover, played by a pair of twelve year old boys at a con.
Fourth Session (10 page pdf) – “The Rotgut Ripper” – When strange and virulent diseases affect the PCs, their hunt becomes more deadly as it becomes clear their quarry is hunting them in turn. Will they be added to the Rotgut Ripper’s sick collection of trophies, or is an even worse fate incubating under the Stink?
In this episode, we finish out Dungeon #105’s “The Stink,” which I’ve slotted into the plot of Richard Pett’s Pathfinder module Carrion Hill, and then livened up by adding in a crazy bad ass serial killer. Hyram Crooge is mentioned as the guy who runs the junkyard and is secretly both a bugbear and a serial killer in the Riddleport material, but that’s all there is on him. I decided to make him a demented follower of Urgathoa, goddess of disease, who kills women and defaces them to resemble the goddess. He has killed a lot of people – the dead bodies ascribed to him by the locals are actually just the rejects, people he kills and then decides are not worthy (elves and effeminate male prostitutes especially sometimes get killed before he realizes they’re not women – to bugbears, humans all kinda look alike). Eventually some ghouls found him and they started incubating some hellish super-diseases. This plan was somewhat cut short by the tsunami that inundated Riddleport and its dump and generally messed things up. He was participating in the main Carrion Hill plot as a random cultist seeking forbidden knowledge, those guys always smell each other out. Crooge is a creeper, and so in his garbagey lair, he stalked the PCs looking for ways to kill them once they made their presence known.
This was a design challenge for me as a DM. I don’t like to cheat/fudge especially in situations like this where it’s frustrating for the players anyway, so I didn’t want to just do a bunch of fiatting of how this guy could evade the PCs. Solo rogues are often meat for the beast anyway.
Here’s Hyram Crooge’s character sheet as the Rotgut Ripper. I did two things – one is really maximize stealth, with a +18 Stealth, Camouflage and Fast Stealth rogue abilities. That worked out pretty well, he’d attack from a distance and as soon as he could move into concealment (which, as they were in caves made of garbage, was practically ubiquitous) he could stealth again.
The other was to try to maximize the Intimidate chain. He had +18 Intimidate, Intimidating Prowess (+STR to Intimidate), Cornugon Smash (free Intimidate on a Power Attack hit), Scent of Fear (special bugbear feat from Classic Monsters Revisited, which was worthless), and Frightening (up the number of rounds of shaken, and escalate to frightened). The plan was to scare people off to avoid being trapped into melee. This worked kinda OK, but not super – he really needed Dazzling Display so he could Intimidate more than one person at a time, but that requires Weapon Focus so however you slice it he comes out one feat short. Of course, Intimidate works a little too easily in Pathfinder so that could have made it too overpowering (and frustrating!).
And in the end, I know that in this adventure the PCs are racing the clock and have to face a bunch of foes without rest, so I didn’t want him to be too high a CR. On his home ground, playing him cleverly, he got a lot more done than he would otherwise against a whole party of fifth level folks. He’d make an awesome foe stalking a smaller number of PCs, so feel free and unleash him on your own groups.
After Crooge, I put in a Daughter of Urgathoa from “Seven Days to the Grave,” part of the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP. She had a big ol’ bucket of hit points and towards the end, she got lucky – down to 2 hp, she lasted 2 additional rounds due to bad dice luck on the PCs’ part.
Next time, we finish up Carrion Hill! I suspect portions of the next session will be X-rated, so be warned.
Posted in session summaries
BRP, aka “Basic Role-Playing,” the percentile based system most commonly encountered in Call of Cthulhu and other Chaosium games, is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. A number of new games are coming out that are BRP-powered, including the Charles Stross novel-based The Laundry and the future science fantasy Chronicles of Future Earth. That’s good to see, it’s also good to see Chaosium not being on the way out, as it was feared for a time.
If you haven’t played the BRP system, the great thing about it is that it is super easy to pick up. You have a skill list and the skills are all percentiles. If you want to see a BRP character sheet, go check out my site with the Scooby Doo crew statted up for Call of Cthulhu. I take this to conventions, and have yet to have anyone have trouble picking up the rules. Percentiles are intuitively obvious. “What is my chance of success? 60%? Okay!” Much better than “Well I’m rolling 8 dice and I need 4 results of 4 or more to succeed, and I can swap sixes and ones on Tuesday” kind of cutesy crap some games do. And as a nice bonus, skills you use improve – when you successfully use a skill you mark it, and later you roll the skill to see if you got better at it.
The problem is the flat percentiles. It’s fine for something like a one shot Cthulhu scenario where death by bad luck is part of the package. But for any skill where failure could be bad, you either want nothing in it or want it maxed out.
A simple example. I had a race card driver pregen character given to me with a “Driving: 60%” skill. Seems high, right? Not really, in practice. “You’re driving fast down the road at night? Roll Driving. You failed? Whoops, off the road, smash everyone roll damage!” Basically with that 60% skill, there was a 40% chance of death or disability if you failed it. How high of a skill do you then need to even bother to attempt something in a system like that? Even 70% or 80% is shy, you really need 90% to not feel like you’re throwing your life away. And certainly not with a 20% or 30%, so why put points into it at all? People end up stuffing all their skill points into a small number of skills to ensure a somewhat small number of humiliating defeats.
Sure, you can say the GM “should” assign bonuses or penalties for every check, but the reality is that flat-roll systems tend to be going against the skill most of the time, as opposed to a difficulty class system. Or that they should make everything a complex skill check to provide some normalization – but again, that’s not supported by the rules per se.
It’s a shame, because it really is the simplest system to pick up – everyone understands percents at a level even deeper than “I have a skill of 4 and am rolling d6.” But without any normalization, the outcomes always end up frustrating me. And if you need some kind of esoteric advice to run the system, it’s not really that simple after all is it?
Of course, you can just take the easy death thing in stride, and the games it’s been used for (Cthulhu and Runequest especially) have in my experience been about high mortality one shots or very short campaigns.
So what’s the solution to this, without losing the beautiful simplicity of “roll vs your 25?” I guess changing the dice to something more normalized, but not sure what that still has a 0-100 spread.
Thirty-eighth Session – The B team hunts dinosaurs and fights a pretty large number of draconic centaur Klingon type aliens. We hit them until they like us. Diplomacy is just like dating!
We had a lot of fun this session. The dinosaur hunt was entertaining. Peppin missed the whole attack by the Medurr assassins, but he was having fun trying to ride around on a riding dino. Markus always shines in the more savage locales – intrigue on the space station is challenging for him, but as a genetically engineered shock trooper, if a situation calls for beating the living crap out of something, he is the man to do it. Lenny got to be referred to as ‘our female’ all the time – the Medurr are matriarchal and we figured that we’d get more cred if we claimed Lenny was our female (he’s a lizardlike alien called a T’sa, and we figure there’s no way they can tell one way or the other). Lenny wasn’t consulted on this plan, which was hatched by a throwaway line last session, so he protested every time it happened, but no one paid that any mind. Lambert, Ten-zil, and Peppin all got to shoot up the landscape a lot. Ten-zil especially had some great additions to our tactical plans.
Markus got a lot of screen time since, as the most violent, the Medurr considered him the person to talk to. I felt bad that our ambassador didn’t have much to do, but Tim spent a lot of the time cutting up with Georgina anyway, so that worked out fine. I especially liked the scene after we fought off the assassins that had lured us in with a trapped dinosaur – Markus stalked over, terminated the dinosaur with a sabot pistol round point blank to its head, and whipped out his knife and carved a huge “IX” in its side to mark the spot. I was happy that Chris got the reference (Markus was in the Thuldan Empire’s IX Legion and has a big IX tattoo, I try to mention it from time to time). Bruce was all “what the hell” when it happened but Chris explained it to him. I like when everyone’s into it enough that they remember stuff like that about each others’ characters. Then later when Stykor asked Markus his “clan” I was momentarily at a loss, and Chris suggested “Clan Nine,” and that was a marvelous idea.
There were a lot of little jokes that didn’t make it into the summary but we were all in rare form. Having the entire group there was nice. Next time, Bruce is going to try to Skype in rather than driving from Dallas, we’ll see how well that works out, it’s an interesting idea if the tech is up to the execution.
Posted in session summaries
Tagged alternity, lighthouse, RPG, RPGs, scifi, SF, stardrive
Thirty-seventh Session (9 page pdf) – The B team goes to make contact with some new aliens, potential allies who really like and respect violence. If they like violence, they’re going to love us!
Bruce and Patrick were out, so there were just three of us to handle the diplomatic mission to the Medurr, a new alien race of matriarchal warlike draco-centaurs. Tim ran Ambassador Peppin, the Borealin dissipation-friendly academic, and Chris ran Ten-zil Kem, the dissipation-friendly VoidCorp exec. I ran Markus, the only sober member of the party.
It was an interesting session. There was the expected fight with the Medurr to prove we weren’t wusses – and Markus was firing on all cylinders. I beat the entire squad of Medurr down in two rounds (with some help from Peppin and Ten-zil).
Then we do a little clandestine research on them mainly with some of their many slave races – some cute little groundhog guys with exploding collars, mainly good for smacking around and getting you drinks, and the octopus people, who seem to have all the marketable skills but a fatalistic outlook that keeps them from rebelling. The Medurr seem like they can be a great ally against the Klicks and i’krl but there’s a high chance that like, say, every single Central American and Middle Eastern country, that if we arm them and train them too much we’ll just be fighting them in ten years. So we’re trying to strike a deal while planting seeds for future destabilization.
Funny note, with the D&D 4e lameness that is the Dragonborn in mind, we asked whether the female Medurr have breasts – they don’t. We were relieved. But then there was a picture of the octopus people and they are quite busty. We laughed sadly.
Next time, we go on a dinosaur hunt! Markus always welcomes an opportunity to generate some maximum overkill.
Posted in session summaries
Tagged alternity, lighthouse, RPG, RPGs, scifi, SF, stardrive
I submitted this magic item to the Paizo RPG Superstar competition, but sadly it didn’t make the cut into the top 32 (which are all very cool – if you want 32 more new magic items that have been voted as good by a bunch of game designers, go get ’em!).
Mine was designed to fill a gap – for classes that want to focus on “pets,” there’s not a lot of magic items that enhance that (besides a “wand of magic fang” or whatnot). Thus, the Harness of the Hero’s Helper. Short form is if you hold their leash/reins/whatnot then you’re treated as a level higher on the Animal Companion Base Statistics table (or similar familiar table, for familiars). The beauty of this is it can work for paladin/cavalier horses, or druid/ranger animal companions, or sorcerer/wizard/witch familiars.
Harness of the Hero’s Helper
Aura moderate transmutation; CL 9
Slot neck; Price 35,000 gp; Weight 2 lbs.
Description
This leather animal harness resizes to fit any kind of beast in a form appropriate for its type. When the owner keeps the harness lead in at least one hand, which requires them to be mounted on or in an adjacent square to the animal, the animal’s base statistics increase as if the owner were one level higher for purposes of serving as a bonded companion or familiar (including a druid’s or ranger’s animal companion and a paladin’s or cavalier’s mount). Bonuses granted are treated as morale bonuses, and extra hit points disappear when the effect ends and are not lost first like temporary hit points. The effect ends immediately if the owner releases the lead.
Construction
Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, animal growth; Cost 17,500 gp
What do you think?
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