Familiars

It is a pretty commonly accepted fact that the familiar background is horrible, pretty cool but outright worthless. In the past we have sort of house ruled this without making it official. I happen to be a pretty big fan of the familiar background, magical animals are critical to epic fantasy in my mind so most my characters have one. Three of the last four I think, all at varying levels of power. For the most part my familiars have simply been worked out with the storyteller to be a little more cool, and much more useful than the average familiar in the book. These have included an Simhatta immune to my dragon-blooded anima affects, an owl that can turn into an infallible messenger and store spell casts (like a scroll or potion), and a monkey that can turn into a war form (similar stats to a blood-ape). I think these are appropriate levels of coolness and power for a background of that level, I'd still say Celestial Battle Armor is better than a blood-ape but its not about making it equally powerful, just equally cool.

I was browsing the White-Wolf forums and came across a similar thread and it provided a link to an alternate system I thought was pretty cool.

http://exalted.xi.co.nz/wiki/wiki.pl?Telgar/Familiars

Thank you to Telgar for providing these suggestions and thank you to the exalted wiki for provided him a place to post them.