Running a Conjuration Wizard Familiar Fight Club Campaign for 5E D&D

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted dicuss the potential for indulging fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons players and the all too familiar scenario of creature collection. Anything from a cute and cuddly critter to a fearsome monstrosity appeals to lots of players interest in taming beasts, raising their own monsters or otherwise gathering pets. They start by wondering what a 5E D&D Conjuration Wizard Fight Club might entail and proceed to break all the rules by talking about it — in front of a camera no less! When it comes to organized conjured creature combat Nerdarchy advocates ethical and nonviolent treatment of any and all summoned, conjured, created, fabricated, imagined or regular real world creatures.

Make your familiar the fight club champion

In the video Dave and Ted lay down the ground rules of Conjuration Wizard Fight Club and a tense back and forth magical battle between two wizards and their familiars sounds exciting and fun. Creating an atmosphere for these events could add levity to a game session but still provide plenty of action. I particularly dig the notion of champion familiars — not their wizard masters — becoming the celebrities of the Conjuration Wizard Fight Club world.

It’s the world, or more specifically the campaign theme and tone captivating my imagination. Much like the spell duelist campaign concept a campaign spotlighting a subculture of familiar battles appears to favor spellcasters but only at a glance. There’s plenty of engagement for the whole adventuring party. The simplest way is the find familiar spell itself, which definitely is not exclusive to wizards. Literally any character can acquire the spell in a variety of ways, and a Dungeon Master might even give all the characters in the campaign the Magic Initiate feat, or simply the ability to cast find familiar by itself. Now everyone can develop their own unique familiar fighting styles.

You can just as easily create an adventuring party designed specifically for navigating the Conjuration Wizard Fight Club circuit. The wizard may be the one conjuring the familiar and coordinating combat with the creature but there’s no shortage of opportunities for everyone else. Top athletes surround themselves with trainers, publicists, agents, managers and so on to manage their careers and maintain their performance level. Could a champion familiar get a better hype person than a bard? A firbolg monk might make a phenomenal trainer while the druid makes sure the familiar eats a healthy diet. Meanwhile the rogue scouts out competition (and maybe places some bets here and there?) while the paladin represents the familiar and ensures their best interests are kept.

Creating campaigns with strong themes and tones like this for 5E D&D gives players a chance to add another dimension to their characters. A barbarian can still be an outlander, carry a big weapon and Hulk out in a fight, and in addition they’re a bodyguard for the team’s familiar. Maybe their familiar likes to go out on the town and get into trouble. It couldn’t hurt to have a half-orc barbarian watching their back out there.

A 5E D&D Conjuration Wizard Fight Club campaign can still have all the trappings of the game too — the dungeons and the dragons. A party still needs to travel from place to place, and the world is more than likely just as overpopulated with monsters and world threatening evils as the next one. Finding adventures won’t be difficult. In fact, getting caught up in one adds tension to this campaign because there’s always pressure to make it to the next event on time.

In Fibble’s Fantastic Familiars, adventurers can peruse a selection of unusual creatures to potentially bond with in an magical relationship. [Art by Kim Van Deun]

When it comes time for the Conjuration Wizard Fight Club event I’m going to lean on a couple of existing parts of Nerdarchy material. First up is the scenario. In a post called Don’t Use 5E Elementals Use This D&D Monster Instead, Nerdarchist Ted comes up with an idea for a dao who runs a sort of adventurer challenge. Contenders can enter a dungeon maze to win fabulous treasure and prizes, but something much more sinister is going on. The maze is a trap, filled with all manner of ways to petrify those inside. For a price, the dao offers scrying so people can watch the action. Later, the dao sells the best petrified contenders as art to wealthy collectors. For a Conjuration Wizard Fight Club campaign I’d do something similar, at least in terms of an unethical event promoter and why not a dao? They’re greedy and malicious, and even an organization with a good public facing image could have dirty secrets. I’d argue it would be a shame not to for a 5E D&D campaign.

The other thing I’d look at is Tool Wars in Taking Chances. If an entire campaign centered around a Conjuration Wizard Fight Club doesn’t strike the fancy of your group it can still be a fun activity once in a while and Tool Wars gives characters without familiars a minigame to participate in too, using their tool proficiencies against constructs and oozes. In Conflict Constructs and Goop Games a DM chooses any construct or ooze for two contenders to engage each other in battle. On a players turn they can use an action and their tool proficiency check to cause various status effects to the opponent’s creature. Check out Taking Chances here.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, if your adventuring party is serious about the Conjuration Wizard Fight Club circuit and grooming a champion, it couldn’t hurt to check out Stibbles Codex of Companions. Nerdarchist Ted wrote a great overview of the 5E D&D supplement here. There’s all sorts of new familiars and rules for improving and enhancing them. This sounds like just what a champion familiar needs. However you approach the Conjuration Wizard Fight Club in your 5E D&D games, keep your wits about you because of course, if this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight. (There’s your campaign starter adventure hook right there, you’re welcome.)