Your Party's pets or "you weren't supposed to take that dragon egg!"

[moonfly7]

Tell us about the different crazy creatures your parties have adopted over the years.

[Yora]

My players picked up a pack goat from the first dungeon they raided, and then managed to capture one of the monkeys on a pirate ship they boarded. Now one player is making the preparations to summon a cat familiar and another is planning to get a flying sea lizard, probably very soon.
And I have a feeling this isn't going to be anywhere near the end of it.

[Esprit15]

First IRL game, the party monk kept adopting the mounts, and would carry them around since he was faster than them and didn't want the horse to get tired.

In the epilogue, he wound up opening a mount emporium that specialized in exotic mounts, like dinosaurs.

[DeTess]

In my very first IRL game we adopted a kobold from the starter dungeon. He mostly stuck along as NPC comic relief, until I took him over as a temporary PC (still providing comedy though) sorcerer when the party got split for a number of sessions, with my character getting separated from the rest of the party.

In a recent DnD 5e campaign our party one again ended up adopting some kobolds, but this time we weren't satisfied with the contents of one small lair, and by that campaign's end we where the de-facto rulers of all the kobolds in a (formerly) dragon-infested mountain range.

[Mastikator]

In my most recent session I rolled up a new character (a high elf "dragon paladin"), the DM insisted that I roll up a random "backstory event", and rolled that I got a magic animal. I thought it was going to end up being some cursed squirrel or something but it ended up as a MAGIC HORSE. Glorious!

[Cygnia]

My druid has adopted a Bag of Devouring to be her pet in our current 5th ed D&D game. She's named it Choo-Choo Bear (after the cat in Something Positive), gleefully feeding it parts of her kills. Heck, in our last game, she used Choo-Choo to surprise a corrupt mage who was asking for a bribe...

[Quertus]

Let's see what my senile mind can remember …

• 3 displacer beasts
• 6 Dragons
• Numerous (100+) "drakes"
• 2 Dark Nagas
• A slime pudding
• 2 patches of… green slime? Brown mold? The cold one.
• A Slaymate (note that the arcane caster had banned Necromancy)
• 2 demons
• 1 Beholder
• 2 dungeon mummies that "had just come in to get out of the rain"
• a dark unicorn
• An indeterminate number of "hostile to all life" giant bugs
• At least 3 gods
• a demon-possessed car
• a man-eating shag carpet
• a pack of Huptzeen arrows
• Numerous slimes and oozes
• a mutinate tiger, complete with horns and carapace
• The Lion what killed him
• a flame-headed skeleton
• Exploding zombies dodos
• Pickles and chips
• 1 chaos giraffe
• An ironwood treefolk
• a 6-headed pyrohydra
• a glow-in-the-dark giant toad skeleton (one of the party members was afraid the dark - this became her nightlight)
• a homicidal straw doll
• Numerous Griffins
• 2 Demon swords
• The dead girl in the lake
• a pack of flying skulls
• a naked dragon-girl
• a time/space rift that "spoke" by displaying scenes (usually movie quotes)
• a faerie Simulacrum
• Several mice/rats/hamsters/hamster-adjacent beings
• A troll/Hydra abomination
• a lonely void stone golem that just wants a hug
• An unfortunate invading sentience
• a pack of shadow hounds
• a unicorn
• Totally not Groot
• a thought of happiness
• Two suicidal immortals
• Several sentient bats
• 2½ BBEGs

OK, so maybe not all were "pets", exactly, but they're all non-human things that the various parties have "taken in".

[Xervous]

For the most recent campaign the total runs as follows.

A goose gryphon
A parrot that chimes in frequently on how “we’re all gonna die”
Many, many squirrels
Zebra unicorn (deceased)
A sand kite (think sand swimming flying manta ray)
A sea hound (Clydesdale size aquatic dog)
A dire snow fox (also vaguely horse size)
And they have their hearts set on a giant turtle for their base of operations but that’s just a tool for me to pluck at their heartstrings for the time being.

[Raijinken]

If I remember right, with all the campaigns I have been before:

Dragon (hatchling - female)
- purchased from 2 Orcs who were about to kill it for being "unacceptable" (dragon roost reject)

Fairy (female - 4 inches high - flying - provides Regeneration: heals 1-3 points of damage per round)
- gamble purchase (mystery bottle) from a (non-human) merchant who pretty much zeroed me.

Cacodaemon (just like the game Doom; 6 of them in various sizes)
- they somehow took a liking to my character and followed me home (from whatever plane they were from)

Alicorn (female)
- aptly named Twilight Sparkle (session was in a mall, DM asked me to name her, queue little girl passing by with an MLP backpack), not really a pet but more of a "forced" companion/mount. later reveals was able to transform into a human, and became my character's travel companion and somewhat love interest. And no! I am not a brony.... yet.

[Khedrac]

I ran a non-Glorantha RuneQuest game where the party (or more accurately the barbarian) adopted (as a mount) a brontosaurus they met...

In the end, due to some spectacularly bad rolls scouting for a campsite they managed to wake a hungry dragon that decided that the brontosaurus would make a nice meal - it was then my turn to fumble as the dragon demonstrated how not to dive on prey - the brontosauraus was last seen running off into the distance.

[AntiAuthority]

Hm, it was a few years ago, but when I was GMing Pathfinder 1E, one of my players decided to try to tame an Akata. I think it was killed because its new master ended up pissing off a dragon by stealing from said dragon's treasure horde.

As a player, I tried to take a baby Beholder to raise as an attack dog but the DM said it would just grow up to kill me or something and the little thing definitely would have died with the area we were in (my character was barely surviving as it was), along with my character not being in a position to have someone to look after it, so I just left it... To be fair, I did just kill a bunch of its siblings in front of it, so that might not have been the best idea.

(Not sure if this counts) Another character of mine tried to adopt some Goblins as part of a pirate crew as henchmen after killing their former boss... They joined out of fear that my character would murder them, then they began specifying they didn't take orders from my character but the crew... Yeah, they were dead men walking at that point, but the campaign ended some time after that.

[Kaptin Keen]

Dire ape. Best mount ever. The insane goblin in question had the most wonderful time, until the GM decided he hadn't really thought the concept through, and asked me - politely - if I might conceivably enjoy playing something else.

[LordCdrMilitant]

not all from the same game, not in any particular order:
Owlbears. 4 of them. The GM made the best animal noises.
Flesh Abomination. Sort of. AEthelwyn put them in flasks, and observed and took notes as they mutated and one mutated into a miniature version of her. Eventually they got out and had to be destroyed.
Mimic-in-a-Barrel. Stuffed into the barrel by the party and carted around for the rest of the campaign.
Tarrasque. Adopted by Morbad the Limb Rending/Morgood the Cuddly, who named him fluffy.
Rainbow-painted Sheep. Players decided to buy a sheep. Then they died it rainbow colored because they could.
Magma Rock Monster. That thing from a lego set about a decade ago.
Giant Rat. Was a mount for a Kobold Commoner character.

[farothel]

In a Star Wars game, one of the characters had a 'dog' on the ship, to help him track down people (he was a bounty hunter). It was actually the size of a pony, but it was quite ok since it could guard the ship when we were all out. And it was quite nice to the people in the party.

Unfortunately, when we tried to escape from a planet, me, the pilot, did a few tricky manouvres in order not to get shot. This made that everyone not strapped in went flying through the ship, including the dog. It got angry and charged the cockpit. I closed the door between the cockpit and the rest of the ship (rated to keep the vacuum of space out and also to take some blaster damage without being destroyed). The dog simply charged into the door and after a massively good roll on its part it actually made a dent in the door, preventing it from opening all the way. We had to get a new door in.

We persuaded the bounty hunter player to bring his dog back to his family on his home planet, as such manouvres would happen more often and it would become costly on blast doors.

[Alcore]

First game ever i had a spider for a mount. The goblin worshipped its mother (who was the size of a large building) and the DM either didn't know or didn't care that it was invalid. I didn't notice until it was time to use handle animal skill.

Another game i kinda was the pet. Party needed a replacement and i was the replacement player. I made an orc (DM kept mentally adding 'half' on) and the game thus far had been vanilla with a capital V. He finally noticed when i started giving myself penalties for bright light (thus far it had been a dungeon crawl) and we collectively shrugged and... kept killing orcs... (not mine, most of the party knew. Not like i kept it a secret.)

[Spore]

- The last remaining chaotic evil goblin.
- a griffon to ride on
- a disgruntled half-orc butler to an inept halfling professor
- a parrot that we said the word 'parrot' too often to, so he repeated THAT off all things
- a rat (not a familiar) that got injected with celestial, fiendish, fey, orc and elf blood, to test the theory that if enough "half-x" templates are stacked it can defeat the villain. (spoiler: it died)

[Draconi Redfir]

near the end of one campaign, my paladin's party was attacked by some baddies riding Spider-eater wasps.

after removing the rider, my Paladin was able to calm down one of the wasps and take it in as his own mount.

[mucat]

In our pseudo-Victorian-era Pathfinder steampunk campaign, nearly every PC eventually ended up caring for an unplanned menagerie.

The pirate wench (and PhD in mycology) once had a string of luck where she would "critically pet" just about every random alley cat we met. (The GM let us roll to confirm crits on pretty much ANY d20 roll, including the animal handling rolls the lady was making to convince the cats to stay quiet. So they followed her home, and became the core of her growing army of feline minions.)

Our first airship captain, Sienna Zadra, had no interest in pets, and especially hated horses...so she was roped into representing her entire nation in a huge international horse race. She had an abysmal riding skill, and the whole thing was gonna be comic relief...until she triple-crit the riding roll. Natural 20, a second nat-20 to confirm, and a third nat-20 to confirm THAT one. The GM ruled that the horse, realizing that Capt. Zadra was an idiot in matters equine, ran the race of a lifetime all on its own intiative, with the PC handing on for dear life and trailing behind like a comet's tail. (I hope I still have the picture one of the other players drew!)

The pseudo-Mongolians were, as you would expect, huge fans of horsemanship, and Sienna's victory left her not only with lifetime custody of that crazy-fast horse, but also so wealthy that she purchased a much nicer airship of her own and retired from the campaign, while her player rolled a new character...a Summoner refluffed as a roboticist, who therefore DID have pets from the beginning.

Dizzy O'Reilly, our ship's mechanic, never had pets, though he did end up unexpectedly married to a rain forest tribeswoman after an instance of that "She doesn't speak your language, but it turns out that dance she pulled you into constituted a marriage proposal" trope. (Somewhere, Mal Reynolds is wincing and doesn't know why.) I think the GM expected us to have to squirm out of the mess without offending the girl or her tribe (crucial allies of ours)...but instead, Dizzy said, "All right. She's a good dancer." My stern psuedo-Prussian surgeon, Ludwig Krauss, tried to read him the riot act, thinking he was going to string the lady along, break her heart, and leave her stranded halfway around the world...but O'Reilly matched Krauss glare-for-glare, and repeated, "I said, she's a good dancer." And from that moment on, Dizzy and Nneka were the happiest, best-adjusted couple in our whole dysfunctional bunch. (They also partied up an almost-literal storm, and landed us in all kinds of trouble, but they enjoyed every moment to the hilt.)

One of our alchemists found herself burning with outrage at her nation's oppressive treatment of "the Scorn" (that is, zombies, who in this Jules-Verne-and-Mary-Shelly-inspired setting, were closer to the original Frankenstein's monster than to mindless shambling husks. Some of them had been badly brain-damaged by their creators' reckless experiments, but others retained their full intellect. Even the smart ones did tend to lurch around and break things, but we were working on regrowing their motor nerves.) Ms. Chesterfield took a determined, "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" stance toward every last one of her metabolically-challenged friends...unless she caught them conspiring with the oppressors, in which case her wrath was a terrible thing to behold. I still sometimes wonder how one particularly loathsome traitor-to-zombiekind is progressing on his hike back from the setting's equivalent of the Mariana Trench...

(In turn, one of the Scorn, an addled but very sweet lady named Beatrice, made it her duty to recognize and name every single rat in the sewers of Ostley, quite a large city. Given the inherent nature of that project, the rest of us had no real way to measure her progress.)

The other alchemist, the aforementioned Ludwig Krauss, had no patience for lower animals, beyond his ubiquitous (and, as his research progressed, horribly changed) cages of lab rats. He knew better than to experiment on Beatrice's rats, of course.

What he did have was a glass-and-steel alchemical life-support canister containing the suspended but (he insisted) living brain of his beloved wife Leah. We had all agreed in advance that in this setting, some abilities in the Pathfinder rules were still undiscovered "science", and others might be simply impossible. So both IC and OOC, we had no idea whether it was possible at all to clone Leah a new body and reattach her brain, or what she might be experiencing in her alchemical coma. (Nightmare fuel from the GM: "Anyone ever read the Jaunt?") Doktor Krauss had been trying for years before the campaign opened to retreive and rebuild Leah, leaving his own career and reputation in ruins. But we were living in that pseudo-Victorian (pseudo-Lovecraftian?) age of miracles, and the quickest way to enrage the good (well, 'good') Doktor was for even his oldest friends to suggest that Leah may be Beyond the Reach of Science.

The Doctor's Wife, by the Clockwork Quartet is far from an exact match to their story -- pre-disaster Leah had been a much more active partner in their research than the lady in the song -- but the Doctor's slow, meticulously documented descent into isolation and madness is perfect.

Ironically, the problem was closer to Leah's old research specialty than to Krauss's own...so the one person most likely to figure out how to rebuild a patient from the brain up, was the one person we had no way of consulting, throughout most of the campaign. What happened when she did wake up, though, is a story for another time...

[Mr.Sandman]

Most recently a Ramoraz that could pretty much take on the dungeon itself, but they are super protective of it.

[Avista]

Our DM tried to spook us during a long rest with perception checks picking up strange sounds, scruff marks, and glowing eyes. Surprise! It was just a dog.

We promptly adopted the dog and named it Bacon.

[SimonMoon6]

I don't know if this counts but...

In a very strange campaign, the PCs found themselves in a very strange universe (among many universes that they traveled between). It was a fairly surreal dream-like place. While there, they encountered "The Chicken". Possibly this was supposed to be that very same chicken who crossed the road (but this has been about 30 years ago, so I don't recall very well). Basically, it was a talking chicken who was just supposed to be a weird encounter and that was the end of it. (The chicken was looking for a Tory because one day, the chicken had asked The Farmer what his (the chicken's) fate would be and the farmer told him "chicken cacciatore" which the chicken misheard as "Chicken, catch a Tory".)

But anyway, one of the (underachieving) PCs took a liking to the chicken, so the chicken followed him around. The chicken was of course totally useless at pretty much everything but at least he was always there, ready to help.

[Lord Torath]

near the end of one campaign, my paladin's party was attacked by some baddies riding Spider-eater wasps.

after removing the rider, my Paladin was able to calm down one of the wasps and take it in as his own mount.

Did it happen to look something like this?

The fighter in one of the games I was in adopted a bugbear. Said bugbear then shook down my wizard when left alone with me (but he only got my decoy pouch, which held a bar of soap - which he then attempted to eat - that poor wizard couldn't roll higher than a 10, but it was still fun to imagine the bugbear "flaunting" his steal at me before biting down into a 'delicious' bar of soap).