Ask The Dudes Round Up: April

Our Discord gives you direct access to ask us questions about the game, rules, content, structure, and just our opinion on how we would run things. Each month, we highlight a question from our "Ask The Dudes" Discord channel to share here on Patreon with you. If you haven't joined our Patreon yet, we hope to see you there soon.

Midnight Skye on Discord asked:

Hey Dudes. How would you handle familiars gaining contamination? The familiar in the Drakkenheim game I'm in regularly gains temporary hit points. And so actually survives the effects that give her contamination. How would you handle resolving contamination on familiars? Is casting Find Familiar again and resummoning them good enough, or should they need to be purged?

Kelly McLaughlin answered: 

Monty may have a different opinion on this than I do. Still, because familiars are a spell that summons a spirit, which is usually pretty squishy, I might have to make contamination rolls in deep haze or things like that. I would make summoning it again solve any issues. The only real reason I would even use contamination on a familiar would be that having the familiar monstrously transform to cause a random encounter would be hilarious. Still, I would likely forget or hand-wave it altogether most of the time. That’s just me as a DM, though.

Monty Martin answered: 

Familiars gain contamination just like anything else. Typically, contamination effects happen on saving throws that also deal necrotic damage on a failed save (such as the deep haze). So, if the familiar is killed and re-summoned, it can probably return without contamination. If the players are taking advantage of using familiars as scouts/ etc in contaminated regions, you might decide the contamination sticks around with resummoning.