The Eidolon Pact: Summoners Enter the Realm

Some mages prepare a spell. Some pray. A Summoner calls across the boundary between selves and asks something impossible to answer.

The Summoner class entered player testing in April 2023 with its defining companion intact: the Eidolon, a persistent outsider shaped by evolutions rather than selected from a fixed bestiary. The class was built around the bond, not merely around another pet command.

A companion you author

Evolutions let a player decide what the Eidolon becomes. Natural attacks, movement modes, defensive traits, ability-score growth, magical talents, and specialized forms turn the companion into a personal build alongside the character’s own. Summoner feats and class abilities support that relationship instead of treating it as a disposable summon.

The first implementation pass also included starting equipment, a premade build, spell preparation, and the experience rules needed to make companion damage count without letting it overwhelm ordinary progression.

The hard part: coming back

A persistent companion is only meaningful if it returns as the same creature. A series of save-and-load fixes made Eidolon evolutions, ability-score bonuses, custom descriptions, attacks, and other derived traits reapply after quitting, rebooting, crashing, or copyover. Pet attributes stopped snapping back to prototype defaults. Evolution attacks gained the correct combat messages, and Eidolon damage began scaling with size as intended.

That persistence work mattered as much as any spectacular ability. It turned the Eidolon from a clever combat effect into a character in its own right—one that could grow beside its Summoner rather than being rebuilt every session.

A new kind of party

The class also forced older systems to become more companion-aware: concealment, encumbrance, spell duration, experience credit, target selection, and pet saving all received scrutiny. Those repairs later benefited Necromancers, mounts, charmies, and other systems built on the same foundations.

The pact is simple: you shape the Eidolon, and the Eidolon changes the way you cross the world.