Animerge Hybrid

Animerge hybrids are one-of-a-kind creatures made with Tamsel's animerge, a narrow form of polymorph other that blends two creatures into a single new body in which traits from each remain dominant. The hybrid inherits its basic features from both parents, including body plan, size, how and how fast it moves, and how it attacks and defends. A transmuter caster may pick which traits carry over and even invent new ones; otherwise the DM determines the result at random. Every creature made this way is called an animerge hybrid after the spell.

A hybrid fights with whatever its two source animals bring: choose specific attacks from each, and those become its attack modes. Body shape can alter or limit some of these, as the wolveraven shows.

Behavior follows whichever animal mind dominates. Fuse a bear with an eagle, for instance, and the result might be a hibernating bird fiercely protective of its range. Unlike most polymorph results, hybrids can breed, either with their own kind or with a source animal. Crossing a hybrid with a source animal, for instance pairing a wolveraven and a giant raven, gives a 25% chance of a viable hybrid, 50% of an ordinary raven and 25% of a stillbirth. Two matching hybrids produce live young only 50% of the time.

The spell's inventor, Ovric Tamsel, was long fascinated by chimeras, hippogriffs, owlbears and perytons. Such illogical creatures, he reasoned, must once have been made by transmutation and later learned to breed true. He dreams of bigger livestock to end famines or war horses with armored hides, and he keeps testing his spell to study what it produces. Many attempts fail. His first try at combining a warm-blooded mammal with an insect, a cat and a cricket, yielded a feline so absurdly strong in the legs that it leapt into his tower's ceiling and stuck there. Others are stable, such as the badgeram, an omnivore with a ram's horns and a badger's claws, grit and temper that guards sheep from wolves without ever threatening the flock.

One of Tamsel's first successes blends a giant raven with a wolverine. He made four and bred six more from them, and he presented one to a famed archmage of the city as a mark of respect. Though created as a curiosity, he believes it could thrive on the peaks to the city's north, culling the excess mountain goats and checking the dangerous perytons that nest there in alarming numbers.

Its wings span 7 feet, and its hind talons can carry off a small halfling or rake twice for 1d4+1 each, the wolverine's claw improved by the raven's powerful legs. Its bite equals a wolverine's. Its deadliest weapons are bony spurs along the leading edge of each wing: in a swooping pass it slashes a target for 2d6, and the strike can impale prey no taller than 1 foot.