Temporal Dog

Temporal dogs live on the Demiplane of Time and clearly descend from blink dogs: short yellow-brown fur, stocky, muscular builds, though a little smaller. Whether some long-gone time mage bred them or they evolved naturally is unknown. They seem to have lost the power to teleport but gained stronger gifts in exchange, including the ability to slip into normal reality. For reasons nobody understands, they are fond of wizards.

Only a starving or threatened pack goes after adventurers. This restraint is not cowardice; they are a bit fiercer than blink dogs. Once per turn a dog can haste itself (working like the melee manager spell rather than the haste spell), gaining one extra attack per round and the related bonuses for the rest of that turn. They can also slip between their home demiplane and reality, but outside the timestream they lose their haste and fight as though they had 2 fewer Hit Dice, so they do this only to escape danger.

A pack withdraws if a third of its dogs fall or if five rounds pass without a single person brought down. A lone dog never attacks people unless guarding something, preferring to vanish at any hint of danger. Experience is earned if a dog stands and fights, or if a character wins its aid for more than two weeks. Bribes and threats never hold one that long; the character must earn the dog's loyalty within four days.

Game on the demiplane is thin, so these dogs usually live alone. There is a 15% chance any encounter is with a small pack (2d6) that has banded together to tackle prey too big for one dog.

They communicate with intricate barks and growls and know the surrounding timestream intimately. Adventurers have taught them to follow many tongues, though they may play dumb to avoid strangers, and a few friendly ones can bark out about a dozen rough words. Many travelers feed them, or even offer treasure, to win their company. A friendly dog stays for 14 days of timestream travel, never slows a group down, and barks a warning at any hostile creature.

Lairs are natural caves formed where lifelines tangle into knots of events. Dogs usually notice intruders long before they arrive and lure them away by any means. A discovered lair holds 2-8 pups 10% of the time and treasure 20% of the time. Pups can grow into loyal companions, and their sharp minds make them either a great help or a great nuisance, based on the treatment they get. The hoard might include magical arms and armor, fine trade goods, potions, scrolls, other magic, gems and coins, gathered not from travelers but from the sites of battles between time mages and hostile temporal beings. The dogs care little for such things but understand their trade value.

Their usual food is tempsynth, though packs sometimes bring down a vortex spider or temporal glider. Hunger occasionally drives them briefly into reality, but they are very rarely met there.