Buying pets

[Jeff the Green]

How would you go about buying animals? I keep seeing prices for e.g. rhinos and elephants, but I can't find rules for animal purchase prices (except the obvious horse/pony/riding dogs).

[Darrin]

How would you go about buying animals? I keep seeing prices for e.g. rhinos and elephants, but I can't find rules for animal purchase prices (except the obvious horse/pony/riding dogs).

Check the Warbeast template in MMII, which makes it stupendously cheap to buy any animal trained for combat: 50 GP per HD up to 3 HD, or 100 GP + 75 GP per HD for 4+ HD. While the template itself is often regarded as quite nifty, the pricing is somewhat widely considered as "What the *bleep* were they smoking?!?!" material.

The Arms & Equipment Guide was published a year later, and gives details for quite a few prospective mounts, including prices for purchase and training. Either the designers were unaware of the Warbeast template or were trying to over-correct the price discrepancy, because the prices in the A&EG tend to be in the thousands rather than hundreds. This puts them outside of the price range for beginning/low-level PCs, but totally bling-able once a PC can afford to buy a magic weapon +2 or a gloves/belt/amulet stat-booster +4.