Battle Familiar!

 I thought I'd go into a deep dive on Battle Familiar, an interesting new spell in Arcana Unleashed.

Between backgrounds, origin feats, and general feats, Arcana Unleashed is going to make anyone who really wants to have a familiar happy. Indeed, I think we'll need to go over some of the frankly crazy feats that have been added, but for now, let's talk about this spell.

Battle Familiar is similar to, but different from, the Summon Spells that first appeared in Tasha's and then got revised and reprinted in the 2024 PHB. There are actually two new Summon spells for "primal" spellcasters (sadly, my Wizard can't summon a dinosaur, as that's Druid-only) but Battle Familiar uses a similar format while being, well, again, quite different.

Ok, here's how it works:

This is a 2nd level conjuration spell available to Druids, Warlocks, and Wizards. It takes an action to cast, requires a 25+ gold diamond (which is actually quite cheap - consider that the component for Summon Beast at the same level is 200 gold) and lasts one hour.

No concentration.

You can summon a brand-new creature with this, but if you have a familiar already via Find Familiar, your regular familiar transforms into this one, but with the template's HP as temp HP on top of your familiar's regular HP. Given that most familiars have 1 HP, it's more or less the same, and Battle Familiar ends if the creature's Temp HP goes away, so it's honestly kind of just flavor. The usual restrictions on its actions are lifted, so the familiar can now attack. It also retains its creature type.

This last bit, I think, is mainly for necromancers. While we can pick Celestial, Fiend, or Fey for the Battle Familiar similar to how we can for Find Familiar, Necromancers can pick Skeletons or Zombies for their familiar, and can let them retain their undead creature type, which helps with some of their other subclass features.

Like the Summon spells, we can pick one of three kinds of battle familiar (in addition to picking their creature type, which doesn't have any inherent alterations to the battle familiar's abilities). These choicse are Brute, Flyer, and Stalker.

By default, the Battle Familiar has an AC of 11 + the spell's level, 20 HP, a 40 foot movement speed and 30 foot swim speed. They add 5 HP for each level beyond 2nd that the spell is cast at.

They have a feature called Talented, where they can add half the spell's level (rounded down) to their ability checks and saving throws. They have the standard Summon multiattack, where it's also a number of Rend attacks equal to half the spell's level rounded down.

Rend deals 1d8 + 3 + the spell's level in Force damage, using your spell attack modifier.

Brutes add 10 HP and 2 to their AC.

Flyers get a 30 foot fly speed with hover, as well as Flyby.

And Stalkers get to replace one of their attacks with Prowl, where they can move up to half their speed without provoking opportunity attacks and hide at the end of that movement.

In terms of damage, this is, I think, on the low end compared to Summon spells, but it is Force damage, which is the most reliable in the game. The HP scaling is also a little worse, as most of those spells get 10 extra HP per spell level (this is closer to Summon Beast).

Notably, like the Familiar, officially, the Battle Familiar rolls its own initiative, at least officially. If you're at my table, that thing is going immediately after your turn.

Ok, so why is this different from the Summon spells? Why would we use this over, say, Summon Fey, Summon Undead, or any of the other ones?

Did I mention it's non-concentration?

That, in a word, is huge. While we can't cast this multiple times, given that we can only have one familiar at a time, this pairs really well with, well, any other concentration spell. But, for example, let's say that you want to put more creatures on the board. Well, use this spell in conjunction with a Summon spell.

Like, say you cast this at 4th level and then cast Summon Fey at 4th level as well. Now, between the two of them, they're making 4 attacks that are dealing 11.5 and 14 per hit. While the familiar can still get knocked out of the fight, you never have to worry about getting some crap roll on concentration and losing this.

Now, how is the Familiar as a, you know, Familiar? Well, the stat block doesn't actually have any skills, so you might want to keep your familiar untransformed if you want to make use of their Stealth or Perception when sending them to spy.

I'll be curious to look into the various Familiar-focused feats and see how they play with this. But it does seem like a pretty solid option.