Introduction Chapter of Pets & Sidekicks!

Who doesn’t want a cockatrice pet? Just be careful unless your other pets get turned to stone!

Has your character ever had a beloved pet, a steed, or an NPC companion that, as your character leveled up, became too weak to take along on adventures? Your funny goblin friend or pet owlbear might have once been useful battle companions, but you can’t really bring them into the great wyrm’s den and expect them to survive. With regrets, you must bid them adieu. 

Pets and Sidekicks aims to fix that. In games like Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition and Dungeons & Dragons, which are predicated on the heroes becoming more powerful over time and facing ever-more powerful villains, allies should become more powerful too. In Pets and Sidekicks, you’ll find rules for NPCs that level up along with the characters.

Although these rules are designed for use with friendly NPCs, they have other uses! The Heroic Monsters rules in this book (which first appeared in a shorter form in Monstrous Menagerie II) are a generalized tool for adding levels to monsters, and so they can fill a number of needs. Want to beef up an opponent? Create a new beast form for a high-level character to polymorph into? Provide an easy-to-use, simplified character for a new player, or a secondary character for a more experienced one? Heroic monsters are easy to run, with only a fraction of the options available to a standard character, but with enough defenses and firepower to pull their weight alongside (or against!) the party.

Companions and Allies

Chapter 1 of Pets and Sidekicks provides new rules for NPC allies, including combat rules and a system for tracking loyalty and NPC motivations. It also contains new downtime activities for taming wild beasts, winning NPCs to your side, and teaching extra abilities to your new friends. Finally, no guide to pets and sidekicks would be complete without a selection of adorable pet tricks to teach your new be(a)st friend. Want your dog to wake you up when trouble approaches, your wild boar to bring back truffles, or your giant badger to act as a trained war mount? Have those pet treats ready, because with a little training, all this is possible.

Heroic Monsters

All the training in the world won’t help your pet owl if it still has 1 hit point. In Chapter 2, we’ve got rules for leveling up your companion. Just as when a character levels up, any monster can advance in level, gaining a higher hit point maximum and proficiency bonus, combat training, and new capabilities, similar to feats, called heroic features. With these combat training options and the scores of heroic features in this chapter, you can customize your companion, choosing from an array of abilities that include increased spellcasting and combat maneuver options, new ways to explore, and fighting tricks they didn’t teach your pet in obedience school. Finally, you can choose to give your companion a heroic flaw—that irritating quirk that, under the right circumstances, might just come in handy.

Character Options

While it’s possible to gain a companion by winning over an ally or training a wild beast, some characters have features that grant a mystical rapport with a particular companion. Chapter 3 contains a background that lets you start with a companion right away; feats that allow you to gain the most from your companions, allowing them to gain levels and other capabilities; a new combat tradition, Beast Unity, for fighting as a team with your pet partner; and new character features for each class, including seven new archetypes: the Cavalier herald, the Familiarist wizard, the Interceder cleric, the Necromaster sorcerer, the Shadow Tamer rogue, the Tutor marshal, and the Sculptor artificer.

Equipment and Magic Items

As the players accumulate more and more epic loot, your dog companion can’t be running around in that same old leather collar you bought at level 1. Chapter 4 contains new types of equipment, from aerial saddles to whistles, plus about 50 new magic items to enhance your companions’ attacks and defenses or give them the ability to fly, breathe fire, gain sentience, or teleport to your side. Other magic items include new bags of tricks and figurines of power that harness the power of heroic monsters to provide you with new mystical allies.

Companion Compendium

While Chapters 1 and 2 give you rules for turning any monster into a bespoke heroic monster, Chapter 5 provides about 200 premade heroic monsters and variants, each with a unique set of combat abilities and heroic features specifically created for that monster. With the pets and sidekicks in this section, your cleric can train an apprentice cleric of their own; your herald can ride forth on a heroic warhorse, pegasus, unicorn, or more exotic steed; and your wizard can rock with a level 10 cat, bat, or rat familiar.