Animal Spirit Guides

Animal Spirit guides

One of the Tertiary abilities of the Bright Desert Barbarians is to acquire a Spirit Guide.

The guild must be a small natural animal common to the Bright Desert: Hawks, snakes, gazelle, dogs, lizards, scorpions, spiders, and desert mice are all common spirit guides.

It is uncertain how a guide is determined. Some barbarians have guides that are obvious matches for their personality while others have guides that seem to balance some lack in their personality and yet others don’t seem to have any correlation to their personality. Still what guide someone has is a very important and personal thing for them.

While it is not required to keep your guide secret, and indeed some like to flaunt their guide, most barbarians keep their guide to themselves or to just close family and friends.  Even though the guide doesn’t always correlate to the barbarian’s personality and doesn’t have any influence over the barbarian’s behavior that the barbarian doesn’t give them, there are some spirit guilds like snakes and spiders, and especially scorpions that are considered ill aspected by others and are much more likely to not be discussed by those that have those guides.

Bright Desert Barbarians go through several rituals regarding their animal spirit guide: At around the age of six a barbarian child undergoes a ritual of fasting, meditation, and hallucinogens during which they discover what their animal is. Later in life they may undergo other rituals that strengthen that bond.

Ritual of Discovery

This ritual is performed around the age of six. The child undergoes a period of fasting, meditation and instruction with a shaman that ends in a ritual involving chanting and hallucinogens during which they discover what their animal is. The totem animal becomes a occasional but signifigant part of childs life; it may appear in dreams to offer guidance or in person to warn of danger or lead to safety. The child will have a deep fondness for this type of animal and will almost never hurt, or be hurt, by natural specimans.

Ritual of Communion

At anytime after they have earned their right as a warrior or woman of the clan the barbarian may undergo this ritual. It is a painful process involving a tattoo made with the blood of the totem animal and causes the permanent loss of 1d4 hit points (later removal of the tattoo does not negate the ability or restore the hit points). The ritual creates an ability in the barbarian to form empathic bonds with their totem creature. This does not allow them to control or speak with the creature but better understand them and with experience allows some limited communication between them through sharing feelings through this empathic link. It functions as a ranger's animal empathy, but only with the totem animal type.

Ritual of Presence   

It involves the sacrifice of 100gp of rare herbs to attract, appease, and bind the guide. This ritual mimics the wizard spell find familiar although the barbarians do not consider it magic. The 'familiar' will always be the totem animal.