Find Familiar: Disposable Pets

Usable By: Wizard

Spell Level: 1

School: Conjuration

Casting Time: 1 Hour

Range: 10 feet

Duration: Instantaneous

Components: V, S, M (10 gp worth of charcoal, incense, and herbs that must be consumed by fire in a brass brazier)

You gain the service of a familiar, a spirit that takes an animal form you choose: bat, cat, crab, frog (toad), hawk, lizard, octopus, owl, poisonous snake, fish (quipper), rat, raven, sea horse, spider, or weasel. Appearing in an unoccupied space within range, the familiar has the statistics of the chosen form, though it is a celestial, fey, or fiend (your choice) instead of a beast.

Your familiar acts independently of you, but it always obeys your commands. In combat, it rolls its own initiative and acts on its own turn. A familiar can't attack, but it can take other actions as normal.

When the familiar drops to 0 hit points, it disappears, leaving behind no physical form. It reappears after you cast this spell again.

While your familiar is within 100 feet of you, you can communicate with it telepathically. Additionally, as an action, you can see through your familiar's eyes and hear what it hears until the start of your next turn, gaining the benefits of any special senses that the familiar has. During this time, you are deaf and blind with regard to your own senses.

As an action, you can temporarily dismiss your familiar. It disappears into a pocket dimension where it awaits your summons. Alternatively, you can dismiss it forever. As an action while it is temporarily dismissed, you can cause it to reappear in any unoccupied space within 30 feet of you.

You can't have more than one familiar at a time. If you cast this spell while you already have a familiar, you instead cause it to adopt a new form. Choose one of the forms from the above list. Your familiar transforms into the chosen creature.

Finally, when you cast a spell with a range of touch, your familiar can deliver the spell as if it had cast the spell. Your familiar must be within 100 feet of you, and it must use its reaction to deliver the spell when you cast it. If the spell requires an attack roll, you use your attack modifier for the roll.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

It's hard to believe a tiny little lizard can single handedly derail a whole campaign. What could a itty bitty pet owl do, bring their owner roadkill presents or deliver letters from a magical school? Turns out when you get it through Find Familiar, the entire nature of exploring, espionage, and combat changes by offering an insane resource advantage tied to ludicrously powerful tools for observation and subtlety you normally don’t have access to otherwise till levels 5+.

Find Familiar feels like it was designed to give anyone who wanted a pet access to one. Any 4th level character with access to feats can take either Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster and get access to this; it is my personal go to feat when I’m outside of warlock and Wizard. To ensure you can always have your pet on you, the spell lets you dismiss your pet from anywhere to a pocket dimension, and resummon it to your side from said pocket dimension. All this does is ensure you can keep your cute little toad friend on you at all times, right?

Turns out having access to long distance instantaneous teleportation is quite handy, especially when you can at will perceive from that location. This can be as simple as keeping watch in two places at once, but also makes information gathering and listening into conversations you’d otherwise be excluded from easy peasy. Leave your familiar where a shady meeting is going to be and listen in from inside the walls as a rat. Need to know who’s breaking in the dead of night and stealing jewels? Leave a bat hanging in a dark corner!

Sure, the prior application is fairly niche; what isn’t is your ability to have a tiny flying creature with the ability to survey any upcoming environments. Sending in your familiar first to scout things out with superior senses to your own can give you a perfect picture of upcoming danger, and give you and your allies the ability to strategize before an encounter can begin. Many of these animals have advantage on sight and hearing based perception rolls, and typically are faster than you. Bats, hawks, ravens, and owls all can fly, making ground based traps or hurdles like giant pits or raging rivers no barrier to information gathering. Even should your familiar get shot down or mutilated in a spike trap, you now know the exact nature of the danger and can account for it, all without having to even spend a spell slot. In the case where they don’t die, they can just keep going up until a large door or other physical barrier stops them.

This is all just out of initiative stuff your DM now has to deal with. In combat, you functionally get an extra turn. At minimum, every turn your familiar can take the Help action, giving whoever you want advantage on something they’re trying to do. At lower levels, advantage is a MASSIVE boon to have at will, and you don’t actually need to spend any of your own actions to do it. You have telepathic communication as long as you’re within shouting distance of your pet, and can tell it exactly what to do short of pecking somebody's eyes out. Again, even if your familiar goes down, this isn’t costing you any resources; even if they stab your owl friend, next short rest spend and hour and pop! It's back! Add ten minutes and it's not even costing you a spell slot! As a DM, I tend to have a player’s familiar act immediately after them to reduce confusion and bookkeeping, and would recommend taking that approach if you’re DMing at a table with one or more familiars.

As for the touch spell element, this will rarely come up, but is still nice to have. It works particularly well at delivering Invisibility or Fly to characters in mortal peril without you needing to risk your own life.

If you can take Find Familiar, you should. The spell is bonkers; it breaks so many rules of the game. As a ritual, it costs you no resource to cast. You gain access to a second entity to take turns with in combat, and have access to any of their senses. You can swap it around to get access to a list of neat features like a raven’s mimicry, and owl’s keen hearing and sight and flyby, and a bat’s 60 ft. blindsight. I don’t think you can find a spell for its level that offers this massive array of features, all of which just feel so good to use. If you can, take Find Familiar.

5e Spells

Find Familiar: Disposable Pets