D&D General Your best pets

[BookTenTiger]

Group pets are really fun. I'm not talking about official familiars or beast master companions, but the stray dog adopted by the party, or the faerie dragon following you for spare magic items.

Once I ran a game in which some grateful goblins gave the characters a gobdog, a green-furred mix of a dog and a warg who was basically an ordinary dog but could speak a few words of Common. The characters loved that dog!

What are your best pets?

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Not a pet, but more of a mascot — Weasel, a teenage boy that followed my first 3e party through the Dalelands, tending to our camp and horses etc. while the party adventured. He was a good kid.

 

[Blue]

This was a teaching campaign I was running for my kids, niece and nephew a number of years back. One of the characters was an Eldarin "teen" on the run for her life, her parents killed on Court intrigue. Due to the party's actions, a portal to the feywild got closed, and with it a "shelter" in the mortal lands started to fail due to lack of fey magic. Long ago a brass dragon had made a deal with a fey lord to protect her wyrmlings until she returned as she needed to do something dangerous. It ended up killing her. The fey kept to the exact letter of the agreement, including keeping them as wyrmlings. If the magic failed, they would have bee trapped there with no food, light, etc. So the party went to rescue them.

Oh I should have expected that they would adopt them. Before next session they were all named and artwork was drawn. From there forward there was no turning back.

They sorta understood some Draconic, and the party ended up teaching them a bunch of things. I gave them each their own personality and a neurodivergent tick that the kids could see representation in.

Oh, and do you know what happens when really several hundred year old dragons get released from being held as babies? They start to grow at an accelerated rate. Just fast enough to keep up with the party as it leveled and not die to an errant AoE. I wish I could say I planned that but it was just a happy accident that I had an excuse.

 

[GuyBoy]

My granddaughter, who was 8 at the time, tried to befriend the tied-up wolf in LMoP and rolled a natural 20.
The aforementioned wolf, now named Whisper, became her pet and lasted through the entire campaign and beyond as I played them through other adventures to level 10. She now has a large furry toy of a wolf named Whisper!

 

[Savage Wombat]

I had a campaign where the PCs were trapped in the Aztec underworld, and I wanted them to have a guide. Because of some myth I read, I gave them a small black dog with a nametag that said "Virgil". All Virgil ever did was run around fights doing Aid Another actions, but the players loved having him around so much, it was great.

 

[BookTenTiger]

In my last campaign a random encounter had some Meazels (evil fey) having killed the sailors on a raft heading downriver. After the fey were dispatched the characters found three giant pigs on the raft. The pigs were meant for the market downriver, but instead the characters adopted them and trained them for riding.

I came up with a Downtime Activity for training animals, and as part of it we rolled random traits for each pig. One wound up with a top hat, and one loved to drink beer. The third one wound up having piglets!

 

[aco175]

The current pet is a magic item skeleton-cat named Skele-Cat. The PC who claimed it is the wizard who has a fascination with necrotic things. It acts mostly like a normal cat, but can be forced to attack and blow up like a shatter spell before reforming over the next 10 minutes.

The player seems to enjoy it as well and makes up things the cat is doing that is normal for a cat, but strange for a skeleton. When it rubs up against you, it makes a bit of strumming sound. It will sit and lick itself, but it just appears to be moving its head back and forth. In the last dungeon, the Pcs came across a pit trap that had gone off and the cat jumped in it to chase a rat that was crawling around. It mostly runs around for flavor, but can be a bit useful once a game night.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

In one campaign they came to the site of a magical catastrophe that created a number of living magical spells. Most tried to eat the PCs, but they they also discovered a living Tenser's floating disk that the adopted as a pet. They named it Bob.

 

[bedir than]

One campaign adopted an ale drake as an NPC. They're intelligent, so it wasn't quite a pet. But they're also basically drunk all the time, so they kind of are.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

The party bought two Greater Worgs to use as mounts that they named Neelah and Millie.

They became the primary drivers of the group’s steampunk cannon carriage. However, at some point due to the the high amount of chaotic magic that exists in my world, the two have since become fully leveled characters, a Monk and Barbarian specifically, that are currently traveling as permanent companions on their quests. Millie is a big but lovable brute taking after the chaotic Barbarian Tortle of the group, while Neelah is the more serious and willful of the two, not happy to just sit on the sidelines while her masters are heading out for adventure.

Plus, Worg is technically a proper language, so the Tortle Barbarian can communicate with them via the Ring of Tongues he has. A lot of fun shenanigans have abound.