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Awakening an Animal Companion

A

Amalasan

Member
How do I go about awakening my Rangers animal companion correctly in Herolab? I notice that there is a template in the 'Classes' tab, and a Spell Adjustment in the 'Adjust' tab. However both of these seem to interact a little oddly with the fact by BArger animal companion is an animal companion, rather than a standalone Animal NPC.

I thought about building the badger from scratch as an NPC, however the advancement for Animal Companions doesn't exactly follow the advancement for normal animals so I also wasn't sure if this would work out.

I realise that once awakened my Badger won't be able to be a true Animal Companion anymore, but a true NPC but I at least want to get his stats and abilities correct.

Also; how does character advancement work for awakened animals? Do I just add class levels at level ups? The badger would of coure be a Barbarian :-)

Thanks for your help
 
Amalasan said:
I realise that once awakened my Badger won't be able to be a true Animal Companion anymore, but a true NPC but I at least want to get his stats and abilities correct.
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The solution is to take a Badger animal to start with NOT a animal companion which are totally and completely different. Then apply the Awaken spell adjustment and you are done.

The big thing is that the Animal Companion Badger and a Badger animal are two different things. One is a class feature and one is an animal that can be awakened.

If your looking for a straight Badger animal stats you can go to "Portfolio->Import Stock" and import it that way. You will need the Bestiary 1 package to correctly do that.

If you don't want to buy the B1 for one animal you could use the Editor to enter the Badger race and it would be a good one to start with actually. Pretty basic really.
 
Sorry for the necromancy, but I was looking for a similar solution, and this isn't correct. An awakened companion doesn't revert to the stats that are normal for his animal type, or at least there is nothing in the rules that state they do. I have a post somewhere from James Jacob stating that it wouldn't, and there is a unique statted NPC, Eater of Elves, that is an awakened ape with different than normal dire ape stats which backs that up.
 
Gauthok said:
Here: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page=809?Ask-James-Jacobs-ALL-your-Questions-Here#40426

Note, "retains the stats it gained as your companion".
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Shrug JJ is not a "rules" guy. He does great fluff but ask him the same question again a month later and he will give a different answer based on his mood. Why really only an official FAQ is what LW works off of.

The answer above still holds in that you will most likely need to build a "special" creature in the editor to support this corner case of the rules.

Currently as seen HL does not have an easy way to Awaken an Animal Companion currently. You may wish to submit a bug report and see if the template/spell adjustment can get changed/fixed to work with an AC.
 
If you look at the description of the Awaken spell it says "An awakened animal cannot serve as an animal companion, familiar, or special mount." so I believe if you cast this spell on your animal companion it would stop being an animal companion and become a normal animal of its species with the changes from the spell, but no longer be linked with you in any way.
 
Aaron said:
If you look at the description of the Awaken spell it says "An awakened animal cannot serve as an animal companion, familiar, or special mount." so I believe if you cast this spell on your animal companion it would stop being an animal companion and become a normal animal of its species with the changes from the spell, but no longer be linked with you in any way.
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Thanks Aaron I had found that after I wrote above but got busy at work. :)

To further this info I found the reference in the Animal Archive which is posted on d20pfsrd HERE. Which goes into depth about how as soon as you awaken an AC it becomes a NPC and you must take Leadership to have it actually follow you as a cohort.

Which also backs up my James Jacobs is awesome at story but don't trust his "rules". ;)
 
there is also a magic item that awakens you AC, it adds a +3 to its intel. the item is collar of the true companion out of the ultimate equ. book
 
I'm not going to belabor the point, but the argument wasn't that it continues to be your animal companion. The argument is whether or not it retains the stats it had as an animal companion or uses the base stats of an animal of its type.

The problem I have with the latter approach is that many animal companions have no real base animal type. They are generic, like "ape", "big cat", etc. So, my new cohort's stats change radically if I make him an awakened dire tiger vs an awakened lion, even though a dire tiger AnC and lion AnC have the same stats.

I believe there is no official ruling, which is why I went with JJs. If there is an official ruling, I'd still use JJs, just realizing it's a house rule.
 
Gauthok said:
I believe there is no official ruling, which is why I went with JJs. If there is an official ruling, I'd still use JJs, just realizing it's a house rule.
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Which still matches to what I mentioned above. If you are in a houserule area of the rules you will need to use the Editor to make those rules for your group.

So in this case decide with your DM what the Animals stats are suppose to be and make that as its own Unique Animal Race in the editor. Then you can easily apply the Awakened spell adjustment.
 
So, I'm actually the DM much of the time for our group, and I was planning on using the JJ "rule".

This came up for me because I decided to write up an NPC with an animal companion that she heavily invested in, and then it awakened and turned on her. I'm having trouble figuring out how to stat him in HL though.

Some of the challenge is that I want to apply Evolved Companion, and let him keep the hooves and tail slap attacks. I can see how I could take a dire ape, add stat bonuses, add nat armor, etc. Those attacks are giving me grief though. That, and the evasion and free multiattack.
 
Ok, awesome. That solves that then. :D

I haven't used it much as a DM yet. Didn't realize the NPC stuff gave so many more options.
 
A lot of those options are pretty recently opened up, as of the Rise of the Runelords encounter library release.
 
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