Odogaron
Image © Capcom, accessed at Monster Hunter Wiki here
[Commissioned by @werebear95. Odogaron appears to be a fan favorite among the MH fanbase–it has lots of fanart, and I’ve seen it in memes. There’s also an idea that it’s somehow friendly, and lots of the fanart involves odogaron pets or mounts. Pathfinder is not a system that handles pets of all creature types super robustly. I feel like the need to make all animals suitable for animal companions is what makes PF1e’s animals boring, and the various feats and archetypes to make other creature types into companions are typically unbalanced or un-fun, and mutually exclusive to each other. Take the Drake Companion feat, which kind of sucks. The drake doesn’t get Large until 15th level and actively resents the PC. If you want an odogaron as a pet, my advice is to build an eidolon to look like it, or take an animal companion and describe it as an odogaron with your GM’s help (a tiger or allosaur would be a pretty good match, given its pounce-heavy fighting style)]
Odogaron CR 12 CN Dragon This reptilian beast moves swiftly on all fours, its legs ending in paws with two layers of scythe-like claws. Red scales cover its entire body, except along the tail, which is grayish in color and covered in bony studs. Its head is long and lean, bearing oversized canine teeth.
An odogaron is an apex predator of rocky hills and valleys. They hunt through speed and strength, making hit and run attacks and leaving deep bleeding wounds with their multiple layers of claws. They are intelligent enough only to be capricious, and true dragons view them with pity tinged with disgust. That doesn’t prevent those great beasts from having to be wary in odogaron territory—an odogaron prides itself on its strength, and often goes out of its way to challenge powerful predators to either kill them or force them to submit.
An odogaron behaves more like a wild beast than a mighty dragon, but they do have one frightening supernatural skill. They can overclock their metabolisms, pushing them to extreme acts of speed and giving off so much extra heat they sear creatures with a touch. Doing so exhausts an odogaron after a few rounds, and so the monsters typically attempt to fight normally for a while and enter their blazing frenzy only if it looks like they are losing a confrontation. Odogarons do not like to retreat from combat, and do so only grudgingly.
Ebony Odogaron
Larger, stronger and even more vicious than the usual odogarons are the ebony odogarons. They are blue-black in color instead of red, and smoke pours from their mouths when they are in combat. An ebony odogaron is an odogaron with the advanced simple template. Any creature bitten by an ebony odogaron must succeed a DC 25 Fortitude save or become exhausted. An ebony odogaron is a CR 13 monster.
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My apologies, in advance, for going on a bit of a rant here.
Drake Companion is, without a doubt, one of the worst offenders out of the 'non-animal companion' feats. You just get a weird-looking lizard for most of the campaign, and it despises you.
Then there's the feat whose name I can't even be bothered to remember from Cohorts & Companions. It's basically just Leadership but worse. You get a cohort, and it has to be a magical beast. Also, no followers.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. Craft Construct is part of the core rules, and is one of the most well-known and straightforward ways of gaining a non-animal minion. But there are also two feats that riff off of this one, those being Grow Plant Creature (also from Cohorts & Companions) and Craft Ooze (from Alchemy Manual).
Grow Plant Creature is far from perfect, but it does its job. Using rules similar to those for growing leshies, the feat allows a PC of sufficient skill to grow plant creatures. Exactly what it says on the tin. The plants possess no inherent loyalty to their creator, but are also inclined to hear them out. So, you can use Diplomacy on intelligent plants like treants. But what about plants of animal-like Intelligence? Not to worry, this feat has the Train Plants feat, introduced in the same book, as a prerequisite. Which, again, does exactly what it says on the tin, and allows PCs to use Handle Animal on plants.
Craft Ooze, on the other hand, is a real mixed bag. With Craft Construct, you need to pay for materials and spend countless hours labouring away, and you need to be a powerful spellcaster, but you gain a devoted and often fairly powerful (or at least somewhat useful) construct servant. With Grow Plant Creature, you gain a potential ally, provided you're a good owner (is the ownership of a sapient plant slavery? This is never addressed. As an aside, it's worth noting that the ownership of creatures like pseudodragons, who are good, and griffons, who are neutral, is explicitly called out in their flavour text as slavery. But hieracosphinxes, who are evil, are given rules for training and riding, and there is no 'this is slavery' disclaimer. Is the idea that evil creatures deserve to be enslaved? Interesting to think about...). With Craft Ooze, you spend thousands of gold pieces on a massive vat, then spend days brewing a squishy little buddy... that's mindless, has no affinity for you, and is basically just a living weapon. Why the fuck would I take this feat? It's basically just the Alchemist's Bottled Ooze discovery, but worse! Even intelligent oozes made this way are mindless (and bottled intelligent oozes aren't, which is fucked up, since they melt into ash soon after birth, which can't be pleasant), so what's the point of making an intelligent ooze? Does an apallie made this way turn into a non-sapient humanoid during the night? That would be so disturbing! Anyway, all that to say, I'd rule that this feat allows you to make some sort of alchemist's equivalent of wild empathy (or maybe just straight-up wild empathy) on oozes. If that's a bit much, then maybe only your created oozes. Also, let the intelligent oozes retain their Intelligence scores, dammit! If the intelligent constructs and plants can, why not the oozes? What have you got against the Goop Troop?
Ahem. Moving on.
One of the better feats (if only marginally) is Monstrous Mount from Inner Sea Combat, which somewhat understood the assignment. You get animal companion-style stats for a few magical beasts. But you can't fly until later. Because your mount can't carry you. It's not strong enough yet. Like, okay, sure, I guess that makes sense. Still feels like a cop-out. Paizo... you do realize you ALREADY gave PCs the ability to fly at 1st level, right? You've got at least four flying races (and unlike 2e, they don't have to go through a fucking feat chain to fly). We've got the gathlain, the strix, the syrinx, the wyvaran. Hell, even tengu can glide with an alternate racial trait. If you really want to avoid flight being game-breaking, give the mount clumsy or poor maneuverability that improves with time. It's worth noting that a dire bat companion starts out as Medium, and thus can be ridden by a Small character. It has a fly speed of 40 ft. (good). Precedent is there, in the very first Bestiary! Just because it's not an animal, a vermin, or a plant, doesn't mean it's inherently overpowered. A hippogriff is just a horse with wings and a beak! Why the fuck would I want one if I can't fly?! Then it's just an ugly horse!
I'm terribly sorry, the more I think about this, the more pissed off I get.
I plan to (eventually, when I get around to it) homebrew my own version of the Monstrous Mount feat, mixing it with Drake Companion. Taking the best parts of both, adding my own fixes, and discarding all the bullshit. Craft Ooze's bullshit aspects are pretty simple to just ignore, and Grow Plant Creature is more or less alright as is, so I won't do my own takes on those, though I probably will come up with prices, DCs, and durations for monsters not covered in the feat's examples. I mean, I've already got a document in the works determining prices for animals, magical beasts, and various other creatures not covered in Animal Archive or Ultimate Equipment, so I'll probably include those there. I might even cover some of your homebrew creatures. I intend to be thorough. It will be painful, going through every single Bestiary, every single module, every single AP, every single Campaign Setting, every single Player Companion, and for what? 5 notes? Ah, well. Also, I'm planning to add synergy between the Technologist and Craft Construct feats. We've had canonical NPCs who can tinker with Numerian robots. High time we give the PCs a taste!
TL;DR
I'm homebrewing a feat that'll allow any PC with mount, hunter's bond, divine bond, or nature bond to have a magical beast, aberration, or dragon as their 'animal' companion, with scaling advancements far more frequently than animal companions. I'll try to make it balanced, but no promises.
Also, I'm homebrewing rules for ooze and plant creation (specifically for the species not covered in the respective feat's entries), as well as prices for almost every low to mid-CR Material Plane and First World creature in the game, and rules for creating and repairing/modifying robots using Craft Construct and Technologist.
