A Summoner's Background [Pathfinder]

[SanguinePenguin]

Since seeing the summoner class, I have been intrigued whether it is possible to create a summoner with a really fleshed out background that makes any sense at all. I was wondering if anyone has seen or created a really multidimensional summoner with a realistic background that successfully explains the following:
1) what is the eidolon?
2) what is the nature of the bond between eidolon and summoner?
3) how was the bond between the eidolon and summoner created?
4) how was the eidolon or summoner chosen by the other?
5) what does the eidolon get out of the relationship? if nothing, what binds it there?
6) what is the actual relationship like? friends? master and servant?

My experiences with other players using summoners (or applying to be in a game) never seem to address any of this. When being played, the eidolon seems generally treated like a completely agreeable talking magic sword or, at best, a druid's animal companion. As a DM, I don't mind too much when a familiar is neglected in role-playing until needed, but something intelligent that is mauling your enemies left and right can't be sidelined. Honestly, the only fully successful summoner background that I have come up with basically mirrors the plot of black butler. I was wondering if anyone has a background for their summoner (or can think of one) that successfully addresses the questions above?

[Ajadea]

I've never heard of Black Butler, and I've never played a summoner. But I'll give this a shot anyways.

1) What is the eidolon?
According to fluff text, I would assume the 'shadow' of an outsider made real through the will of the summoner, a being created through the will of the summoner, an outsider that has decided 'this mortal is mine, I give you the power to call on me', or a mortal who decided 'I want an eidolon, I want that power'.

Which gives me the crazy idea of a summoner and eidolon pair involving deep friendship, reincarnation (not the spell), and mostly-dead outsider soul-not-soul shenanigans.

2) What is the nature of the bond between eidolon and summoner?
The summoner casts off Charisma, the stat that lets you impose your will on others. I would therefore categorize the bond as a creation of desire and willpower. Primarily that of the summoner's. Considering that the eidolon automatically disappears if the summoner falls unconscious, it is also safe to assume that only the summoner needs to be a willing participant in the bond. An enslaved eidolon could bring up some interesting moral questions.

3) How was the bond between the eidolon and summoner created?
In a consensual bond, either member of the bond can take the first step and offer to join with the other, but the summoner seems to get final say over whether or not the bond happens. Creating this bond takes a large amount of willpower and raw magic, though I would imagine that making a consensual bond is much easier than making a nonconsensual bond.

In a nonconsensual bond, the eidolon is created or captured through raw magic and bound to the summoner's will. The majority of the summoner's power is hereafter diverted towards keeping the eidolon bound into its service.

4) How was the eidolon or summoner chosen by the other?
An eidolon is probably powerful enough to stick its head into the Material Plane and find a promising summoner.

A summoner probably did a ritual and grabbed a random eidolon, or else did a lot of research to get the eidolon they wanted.

5) What does the eidolon get out of the relationship? If nothing, what binds it there?
The eidolon gains only the ability to come to the Material Plane, and powerful augmentations which, depending on the way you fluff it, they might not get to choose. They are basically treated like power sources and meat shields in return.

So the eidolon is probably either incredibly desperate for a ticket onto the Material Plane (ulterior motives may or may not be involved), wants to be with the summoner, or there against their will. The summoner's will is probably sufficient to keep the eidolon in his/her service.

6) What is the actual relationship like? Friends? Master and servant?
They can be friends, but in the end, according to mechanics, the Summoner has most of the power. So, master and servant, with the Summoner as master.

[SanguinePenguin]

Interesting... I was completely neglecting the possibility of a bond of friendship or love so strong that it transcends the planes. Like a mother's determination to protect her only living child or an older sibling with charisma so great to exert his identity among the abyssal sludge and answer his/her relations plea in his/her moment of need. That is on par with the BB eidolon as comparably convincing.

The Black Butler Summoner (spoilers are moderately necessary, no detail about the BB plot specifics are really given, but I'd hate to ruin anything for anyone who intends to read or watch it).

Basically, a pact is made with a powerful devil, who will serve the summoner unquestioningly through myriad tasks, menial to mass murder, toward the completion of the summoner's ultimate goal - specified at the initial summoning. The prize for the outsider is the succulent soul of mortal so driven with fiery determination to knowingly compromise their very soul to attain their ends. This is entirely a contractual summoning.

This summoning is perfect for villain summoners, but it leads to a distressing climax for the summoner PC who completes his/her task.

[CN the Logos]

Depends on how much the DM's willing to work with you to realize your character concept , but I just had an idea. How about an exalted PC who's reflavored the Nymph's Kiss feat* to grant himself an angelic girlfriend? Outside of battle, she looks like an ordinary, albeit attractive woman in her mid 20s. In battle, she reveals her true, angelic form and murders the forces of darkness with her ultra fine and also triple sharp teeth.

To defy some stereotypes, instead of having him be affiliated with a church as clergy or a holy warrior, his backstory is that he was an ordinary (albeit virtuous) farmer/sailor/carpenter/blacksmith/whatever works for the campaign before his charisma and virtue attracted the attention of his lady friend, and he was pretty shaken up when he was informed that his one level of expert was being upgraded to a spellcasting class. He's pragmatic in the way he goes about using his powers to make the world a better place, is proud of the fact that he's skilled in a useful trade (not like those madmen who only know how to destroy everything and create undead from the corpses). and is still getting used to the fact that he now makes more money in a month of adventuring than he did in a year at his old job.

...And now I actually want to play this character. Preferably in a gestalt game where the other side can be focused on something thematically appropriate to his prior skillset. When will I learn to stop talking myself into interesting character ideas? I have too many already. :smallannoyed:



*You technically don't need this if the DM insists on Pathfinder-only. It's just appropriate and useful. Who doesn't like skill points?

[mikau013]

For some reason after reading this thread I am thinking off a backstory like this:
2 Boys lost their mother and use some kind of alchemist ritual to revive her. After which the main pc loses a leg, hand and his brother. And some kind of horrible monster comes out which he calls an eiddolon.

And they lived happily ever after.

[balistafreak]

My experiences with other players using summoners (or applying to be in a game) never seem to address any of this. When being played, the eidolon seems generally treated like a completely agreeable talking magic sword or, at best, a druid's animal companion.

Boooooooooooooooooooo. :smallyuk:

Ajadea has done an excellent job in responding already, I won't try to reanswer them. I'll just chip in that I'm playing a Summoner myself in a PbP game, and make summoner/eidolon interaction very, very, prominent. The trick is getting others to participate in it - no one really cares to watch you play out an interaction by yourself. Contrast the two with their relationships with other party members, or perhaps even start minor arguments (probably not best for major philosophical schisms, that might not end well) where they take different opinions and drag other party members in: what to do with the loot, perhaps. Take it all and upgrade your equipment to do your job better, or donate a little bit to the orphanage down the road?

As for... ahem, intimate relationships between summoner and eidolon, one note: technically, you can't ever sleep with it, because unconsciousness = dismissal. :smalltongue:

CN the Logos, that idea is awesome. I must shameless steal it sometime. :smallbiggrin:

I'll note that ALL the Pathfinder class says about the issue is this, in the introductory blurb:


While many who dabble in the arcane become adept at beckoning monsters from the farthest reaches of the planes, none are more skilled at it than the summoner. This practitioner of the arcane arts forms a close bond with one particular outsider, known as an eidolon, who gains power as the summoner becomes more proficient at his summoning. Over time, the two become linked, eventually even sharing a shard of the same soul. But this power comes with a price: the summoner’s spells and abilities are limited due to his time spent enhancing the power and exploring the nature of his eidolon.

So yeah, Pathfinder is great, because it didn't try to force fluff upon you. Of course, Pathfinder is bad, because they didn't even offer any suggestions (not with the class as originally printed, anyways - if someone has direct quotes of them discussing the summoner/eidolon relationship elsewhere in Paizo material, please give!).

In this light, maybe I'll write a treatise about the different summoner/eidolon relationships, branching off of what's already been said.

[Reverent-One]

My experiences with other players using summoners (or applying to be in a game) never seem to address any of this. When being played, the eidolon seems generally treated like a completely agreeable talking magic sword or, at best, a druid's animal companion. As a DM, I don't mind too much when a familiar is neglected in role-playing until needed, but something intelligent that is mauling your enemies left and right can't be sidelined. Honestly, the only fully successful summoner background that I have come up with basically mirrors the plot of black butler. I was wondering if anyone has a background for their summoner (or can think of one) that successfully addresses the questions above?

I'm currently playing a summoner in a PF game myself, and I am somewhat guilty of what you mention at the first couple sentences there. Though in my defense, that's mainly because I really don't feel like holding conversations with myself and the other party members haven't asked about it/interacted with it in any detail. I do honestly have a backstory though. We're playing in the PF world of Golarion, and I play an elf who worships Desna, and as such, am very much the wandering type, disliking staying in one place for long and prefering to travel and explore. Through arcane rituals, I made contact with an outsider native to Sovyrian that shares my temperment and befriended him. The eidolon gets to travel to the material world and see the sights with me, in addition to the physical upgrades, and I get a travelling companion and bodyguard.


For some reason after reading this thread I am thinking off a backstory like this:
2 Boys lost their mother and use some kind of alchemist ritual to revive her. After which the main pc loses a leg, hand and his brother. And some kind of horrible monster comes out which he calls an eiddolon.

And they lived happily ever after.

+1 Internet to you, my good sir.

[Cieyrin]

Depends on how much the DM's willing to work with you to realize your character concept , but I just had an idea. How about an exalted PC who's reflavored the Nymph's Kiss feat* to grant himself an angelic girlfriend? Outside of battle, she looks like an ordinary, albeit attractive woman in her mid 20s. In battle, she reveals her true, angelic form and murders the forces of darkness with her ultra fine and also triple sharp teeth.

To defy some stereotypes, instead of having him be affiliated with a church as clergy or a holy warrior, his backstory is that he was an ordinary (albeit virtuous) farmer/sailor/carpenter/blacksmith/whatever works for the campaign before his charisma and virtue attracted the attention of his lady friend, and he was pretty shaken up when he was informed that his one level of expert was being upgraded to a spellcasting class. He's pragmatic in the way he goes about using his powers to make the world a better place, is proud of the fact that he's skilled in a useful trade (not like those madmen who only know how to destroy everything and create undead from the corpses). and is still getting used to the fact that he now makes more money in a month of adventuring than he did in a year at his old job.

...And now I actually want to play this character. Preferably in a gestalt game where the other side can be focused on something thematically appropriate to his prior skillset. When will I learn to stop talking myself into interesting character ideas? I have too many already. :smallannoyed:



*You technically don't need this if the DM insists on Pathfinder-only. It's just appropriate and useful. Who doesn't like skill points?

...You just gave the basic premise to Oh My Goddess (normal guy suddenly has a magic girlfriend to help him/defend him). Of course, Belldandy (the Goddess/Magic Girlfriend) is more a spellcaster than a beatstick, so slight difference.

I've been bouncing around the thought of playing a Summoner, with the premise of that the Eidilon is the soul of the character's dead younger sister and the issues that come of that (letting the dead rest, is this really his sister or something that looks just like it, etc.).

[SanguinePenguin]

@balistafreak: I'm curious what are the *specific* answers to questions 1-6 for your summoner? Adajea spanned a wide berth of possible origins, but didn't attempt to construct a single consistent character. I am very curious about specific designs that seem... well, I'll use the word "natural", but what that means in high fantasy is a bit ambiguous... and not overly contrived. A wholly consistent personality.

[CN the Logos]

...You just gave the basic premise to Oh My Goddess (normal guy suddenly has a magic girlfriend to help him/defend him). Of course, Belldandy (the Goddess/Magic Girlfriend) is more a spellcaster than a beatstick, so slight difference.

Never watched/read that particular series, and the extent of my knowledge about it is that it's a bastardization of Norse mythology that turns the Norns into fanservice. The concept of the magical girlfriend dates back to Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie though, I'm aware of that. No story is totally original, it's all about the details and execution (of course, plagiarism is another story, but common themes do occur in fiction, and that's just a fact of writing).

If anything, though, I'd play up the Judeo side of Judeo-Christian and emphasize the angel as possessing an inhuman psychology. Not an evil or cold personality, but as an incarnation of the force behind creation made to serve a specific purpose, she's going to have a vastly different perspective on life, the universe, and everything than the average human. Maybe model her behavior at least partly on what an intelligent snake might be like, since the word "seraph" originally meant a venomous snake (lit. "burning one," referring to the effect of the venom). Just throwing ideas out there, the basic point is that there's all sorts of ways to play around with the psychology involved to create an interesting set of characters. And really, that's what a well roleplayed summoner should be: less a single PC than two PCs and the relationship between them.

[balistafreak]

@balistafreak: I'm curious what are the *specific* answers to questions 1-6 for your summoner? Adajea spanned a wide berth of possible origins, but didn't attempt to construct a single consistent character. I am very curious about specific designs that seem... well, I'll use the word "natural", but what that means in high fantasy is a bit ambiguous... and not overly contrived. A wholly consistent personality.

Alright then! :smallbiggrin:

Thousands of years ago, when the campaign world was still unformed (alternatively, you can fit this into the campaign's world with little trouble) the eidolon was once an adventurer herself (and completely stereotypical). Kick in the door, kill the dungeon inhabitants, take their stuff, repeat. In between, her goal was to spread her name, to become famous and "live forever in the memory of legend". Her feats reached epic levels - innate magic powers galore, angelic wings, the works. This all changed when she decided to join in a war effort in conquering some untamed lands, occupied by tribes other "druidic" humans.

Note: slaughtering entire tribes indiscriminately tends to make you disliked by said tribes. Upon confronting the head chieftain, she was asked just what she expected to accomplish. She wanted to be famous? Fine, he would curse her so that "no one except the peoples of our tribes would remember her".

She killed him easily, and chuckled to herself over the curse. She was alive - they were dead. No one would remember them, except as a footnote underneath her conquests. But as the days passed, things... changed.

People forgot her name first, then that they had known her at all. Things that she had done were attributed to other people. Eventually, it was as if no one in the world could see her - and more horrifying, she wasn't aging or changing, only able to watch the world go by and unable to affect it, completely detached from the world's flow. Committing suicide only had her wake up the next day, in pain but still alive. Eventually, she couldn't even touch anything, sliding over objects as if weightless, then passing through her completely. She was trapped in an eternity of torture.

Centuries passed. Her powers atrophied, with no capability to use them anymore. She went insane, then not insane, then - aimless drifting around the cities of the continent, attempting to amuse oneself by watching history play out, but it was hard to remember anything without a reason to.

Then one day, a man lunching in an alleyway raised an eyebrow and asked what she thought she was doing floating in the air like that - and then she crashed into the cobbles of the street, flattened by both gravity and surprise.

Turns out, extremely distant descendants from bastard children, shipped across an ocean to another continent, who only filter back millennia later, are included underneath the term "peoples of our tribes". He was in poverty, not knowing what to do with his life, and had been... drifting. Doing serious drifting, it seemed, crossing the ocean to bring the blood of the tribes back once again.

In retrospect, she should have tried floating over the ocean earlier. Like, thousands of years earlier.

Desperate for human contact, she all but threw herself at his feet. Bemused, he declined subservience, but she stuck around anyways, unwilling to leave the first person she had talked to in literally forever. And thus, summoner and eidolon came together.

Insert in an appropriate number of years for the two to become familiar with each other and level up to the power level of the campaign. Begin adventure.

What is the eidolon? The eidolon was once an adventurer, cursed to be separated from the flow of the world.

What is the nature of the bond between eidolon and summoner? Mutual friendship/companionship is the first priority, although at its most basic level, the eidolon is completely reliant on the summoner's presence. See below.

How was the bond between eidolon and summoner created? The "bond" is that with the blood of the tribes, the summoner is the only one who can perceive and realize what the eidolon is doing. This realization, it seems, affects the rest of reality to do the same, allowing her to interact with the world like a regular mortal.

How was the eidolon and summoner chosen by the other? Random chance/contrived backstory.

What does the eidolon get out of the relationship? The ability to live life again.

What is the actual relationship like? They're friends and companions, treated as equals. I play them with equal import in the party - the physical quirks being nothing more than physical, although the occasional offer to "run down the hallway and set off the traps because I'll be back tomorrow" does raise eyebrows.

Perhaps not a "realistic" background :smalltongue: but a compelling one, I hope.

[mikau013]

Since seeing the summoner class, I have been intrigued whether it is possible to create a summoner with a really fleshed out background that makes any sense at all. I was wondering if anyone has seen or created a really multidimensional summoner with a realistic background that successfully explains the following:
1) what is the eidolon?
2) what is the nature of the bond between eidolon and summoner?
3) how was the bond between the eidolon and summoner created?
4) how was the eidolon or summoner chosen by the other?
5) what does the eidolon get out of the relationship? if nothing, what binds it there?
6) what is the actual relationship like? friends? master and servant?

My experiences with other players using summoners (or applying to be in a game) never seem to address any of this. When being played, the eidolon seems generally treated like a completely agreeable talking magic sword or, at best, a druid's animal companion. As a DM, I don't mind too much when a familiar is neglected in role-playing until needed, but something intelligent that is mauling your enemies left and right can't be sidelined. Honestly, the only fully successful summoner background that I have come up with basically mirrors the plot of black butler. I was wondering if anyone has a background for their summoner (or can think of one) that successfully addresses the questions above?

Hmm right now, I just think I got a nice idea for a summoner's backgroud if I wanted to make on that is really on the good side of things :smalleek:

I do have to think about it some more and work it out though :smallbiggrin:

1) what is the eidolon?
The manifestation of the soul of the damned. For example someone who made a bargain with a devil

2) what is the nature of the bond between eidolon and summoner?
The summoner is trying to save the poor soul and redeem it/him/her and by doing that weaken the infernal powers! So no real bond before they met

3) how was the bond between the eidolon and summoner created?
The summoner uses a magic ritual to find a soul in pain in the abyss / layers of hell, and calls out to it and offers it a chance to redeem itself.

4) how was the eidolon or summoner chosen by the other?
see 3.

5) what does the eidolon get out of the relationship? if nothing, what binds it there?
The eidolon gets a chance to redeem itself and perhaps even go to one of the good afterlifes or neutral depending on what happens

6) what is the actual relationship like? friends? master and servant?
Mutual dependency, the eidolon depends on the summoner for salvation, while the summoner depends on the eidolon to protect her/him.
The summoner will always treat the eidolon as an equal and try to learn it to be good