#If we'd pulled it off Avelwyn would have gotten Cleric levels

[kyanve]

That Time I Became A Familiar In D&D/Signed On To Help My Familiar Become A God

So one of the campaigns I was in that ended up with a large number of stories was the one where I was playing Avelwyn, the LG Sorcerer (3.5 ed, Ice Elemental Savant prestige class).  When I pitched the character idea to the DM, the DM was absolutely gleeful about it and lit up.

I know, I know, that’s a warning sign, but given the kind of plots that ends up with, it’s a fish-hook I swallow every time.  

See, it was a Forgotten Realms campaign, and while I grew up on D&D, my familiarity with the Realms was scattershot; I was way more familiar with Dragonlance and Greyhawk, and to add to it, my knowledge of the Realms was also back around early AD&D 2.0.  Needless to say, I did not remember jack or shit about a lot of the less well known gods in the Realms.  

The DM had planned the campaign around capitalizing on how meddlesome gods can get in Faerun.  

I was an ICE ELEMENTAL SAVANT.  

The character was from the Aglarondan border, right by the death swamp, and had grown up in a small keep that was basically watching for any Thayan forces that decided it was a good idea to brave the edges of the swamp; this did limit his knowledge base starting out.  And I, out of character, was completely oblivious to the fact that the Goddess Of Ice in Faerun 

Is

Chaotic Evil.  

And Avelwyn had started working with Numestra, our specialty cleric of the Red Knight (LN), on tactics that involved liberal use of summoning spells.  

Aka, a great way to potentially get attention of the CHAOTIC EVIL goddess of the realm your LAWFUL GOOD ass is summoning shit from.  

This was in college, so while I was doing some reading up on stuff relevant, I was also a College Student and focusing on things I thought were most relevant and not reading things like the book on Gods Of The Forgotten Realms.  

I was still oblivious when I pondered the idea of taking Improved Familiar as a feat to get an Ice Mephit, something with the DM happily encouraged the Hell out of.

I am That Player who sees the neon signs of a trap and walks right in.

Shortly AFTER that, Avelwyn gained access to a library and was doing research, and rolled VERY WELL studying elemental planes, and the DM handed me the book with a wide grin pointing to the entry on Auril, and as I remember I had a few very interesting swear words and my forehead hit the table.

But, I already had my ice mephit who was a perfectly helpful familiar even if it seemed a little too clever sometimes (and the DM ran the familiar completely).  

The first sign something was Not Quite Right was when we were in camp, and our CN drunken halfling barbarian, Aunderall, was poking the mephit with a stick....

And got levitated and left there, floating in mid air, by the mephit.  

This is not an ability Ice Mephits have.

The second sign something was Not Quite Right was when a priest of Bane was trying to kidnap one of the party to get information out of and got Avelwyn cornered....

And the Mephit cast Dimension Door.  

On the other side, back with the party, Avelwyn stared at his familiar with a lot of “...the fuck?”, as Dimension Door was a spell he himself was too low level to cast.

“What the Hell is with Avelwyn’s Familiar” became a running question through the campaign and all the other plots; the “mephit” was generally pretty quiet and didn’t do anything that noticeable unless Avelwyn was in severe danger, besides occasional reactions to Aunderall, but trolling Aunderall was pretty much a party hobby.  

Eventually, we were getting up there in levels, and we ended up in the Underdark, as often happens in higher level FR campaigns.  We ended up in a cavern facing off against a Drow Blackguard with a displacer beast companion; someone had done something to put the displacer beast out of the fight (not permanently) that I do not remember.  We managed to trap the Blackguard in an Otiluke’s Resilient Sphere, and Avelwyn, very grouchy after the amount of havoc the Blackguard had wrought on his friends, was waiting outside the sphere with a wand of petrification.

The DM had been counting turns until the Displacer Beast was back in play.

So, a thing to understand here is that I’d sorta intentionally built Avelwyn to be the “frail sharp minded mage that got utterly dismissed as a kid for being stuck in a Soldier Household”, and 3.5 sorcs had sucky HP to begin with.

So, when the Displacer Beast with multiple attacks ambushed him with Smite Good AND the extra bonuses for Protecting Its Master, Avelwyn pretty much got OMGWTFPWN’ed to “DEAD” in that one turn.  

There was a moment of panic from the party, who had to fight off the displacer beast; once it was down, before Numestra could even start trying to tally options, the mephit landed on Avelwyn’s corpse and Plane Shifted with it.  

At this point, the DM took me out of the room.

Avelwyn woke up in the Elemental Plane of Ice, with a creature waiting that was Most Definitely Not A Mephit despite being able to sense the familiar bond.  Turns out the familiar was a LG Ice Elemental Noble who was looking for a way to do something about Auril’s reign, but had been short on options that she wouldn’t notice; Avelwyn had gotten lucky the few times he’d summoned ice elementals before he found out that was A Bad Idea, and had drawn this noble’s attention before Auril noticed.  When he did the Improved Familiar ritual, the noble had the idea that nurturing and cultivating a like-minded mortal would be a good way to find allies who would be able to help in overthrowing Auril without her realizing what they were doing and quashing it before anything could be a threat to her.  

The noble apologized for the deception over the time they’d been serving as a familiar, and asked if Avelwyn would be willing, when the time came, to help with that overthrow; if he said no, he’d be returned to his plane and the noble would keep looking and stay quiet until another opportunity presented itself.

Avelwyn, of course, said yes.

There was a little more discussion about the risk of Auril realizing and that the safest way to go about it was for Avelwyn to allow a wipe of his memory of the conversation until a later date, which Avelwyn agreed to.

At this point, we returned to the room with everyone else, as the mephit and Avelwyn Plane Shifted back to the party, Avelwyn whole and fine.

Numestra was not high enough level to cast True Resurrection, but was more than savvy enough to realize that’s what had been used; she also wasn’t able to cast Plane Shift yet.

The mephit set about casting Guards And Wards on the cavern so the party could rest after the grueling fight, and Avelwyn was dazed and confessed that he had no idea what had just happened either, prompting Numestra to sit and watch the Mephit work and ask, “What the Hell are you, really?”

The mephit turned around and wordlessly conjured a smiley face made of ice in mid air, and went back to setting defenses.  

The campaign ended up being cut short before we got into the Epic Levels, and when we wound down for the summer, the DM acquiesced to answering what the plan would’ve been for the epic level campaign - by going “Tell them what happened in the cave”.  

And That is the saga of how I ended up signing on to help my familiar become a god.  (Or honestly, becoming the familiar of an Ice Elemental noble.)