Psicrystal-Familiar Hybrid

[Crake]

I recently made an arcane/psionic theurge and came across the hassle of having both a psicrystal and familiar to worry about. So I decided to somehow combine the two.

What I decided to do was, for roleplay purposes, say that the familiar-psicrystal was an experiment and essentially I have a weasel with a crystal growing in its chest.

To the mechanical side, I basically treated the resultant creature as a gestalt psicrystal/familiar, taking the best parts from both, using the familiar's listed base int, and adding the int adjustment of the psicrystal, adding both natural armor adjustments together and stacking wizard/psion levels to determine special abilities, since they're basically the same as eachother.

Also, I added the celestial template to it using the celestial familiar feat from BoED

I figured I might put this strange solution up here incase anyone else wanted something similar. I've searched this topic several times and only ever come up with familiar vs psicrystal threads and the like, nothing about actually combining the two.

If anyone has any balance advice, I'm totally open to it, but when you consider its just a familiar/psicrystal, I dont think its such a big deal

[SaintRidley]

If you have Races of the Wild, Arcane Hierophant has the Familiar Companion feature to combine the familiar and nature's companion class features. Perhaps you could use that as something of a baseline for comparison.

It's been a while since I looked at psicrystals, so I don't have much useful advice to bring in here, but I do like your method of explaining it in-game. Very flavorful.

[Crake]

If you have Races of the Wild, Arcane Hierophant has the Familiar Companion feature to combine the familiar and nature's companion class features. Perhaps you could use that as something of a baseline for comparison.

It's been a while since I looked at psicrystals, so I don't have much useful advice to bring in here, but I do like your method of explaining it in-game. Very flavorful.

after a quick look it seems to be similar except you added each base class to the prestige class to determine its abilities rather than stacking all the classes together to determine abilities. I like the idea of having it stack all together rather than just the prestige class and base class mainly because familiars and psicrystals get such similar abilities that it just seems pointless.

On the other hand druid animal companions and wizard familiars get quite different abilities so not having it stack to character level makes more sense

[noparlpf]

Darn, I was going to suggest looking at the Familiar Companion.
I don't know much about psionics, but I would also suggest trying to work it like the Familiar Companion. If you want all levels to stack legitimately, I think there might be a feat for that. (If not, homebrew it. I know I've seen one, but it might have been third party.)