From LSWiki

Contents 1 Known Abilities 1.1 Madness Effect 1.2 Attribute Modifications 1.3 Specialty Bonuses and Access 1.3.1 Tier 1 1.3.2 Tier 2 1.3.3 Tier 3 1.3.4 Tier 4 1.3.5 Tier 5 1.3.6 Tier 6 1.4 Charms 1.5 Traits 1.6 Additional Powers 1.7 Skills Buffed 1.8 Completed Bond 1.9 Breaking Bond

Known Abilities

Sunfish are small, potent creatures made out of golden plasma, which will damage those who attack them bare-handed. They have a special attack which does photonic and possibly heat. They attack normally with a body slam-like attack, dealing plasma damage. They are almost completely immune to physical damage, and are healed by fire, plasma, photonic and possibly heat. The contact damage effect that occurs when the familiar is struck will expend some of its vital humor, so while the sunfish may seem a good choice to "tank" in combat, it cannot do it indefinitely.

You imagine what it would be like to have a deep bond with the sunfish, and you feel a distinct echo from within it.
You experience feelings of instability, torment, rapture, clarity, madness, and intense heat.
You experience visions of a blindingly bright, crystalline surface and the sun.

You approach the sunfish calmly and deliberately.
You reach out and blend the periphery of your perceptive and emotive sensitivities with a sunfish's mind.
The sunfish flies to your side.
You feel spiritually exhausted but deeply contented, as though you have been made more complete.
You will now trust a sunfish.
You are now a first-degree specialist in heat affinity, introspection, light affinity, lightning affinity, and somatesthesia. [event logged]
Your hair turns golden fire.

Madness Effect

Samples:

A panoply of unintelligible emotions rushes over you, and you oscillate between feelings of
fear and empowerment -- until these two things merge and become one apophatic sensation of
overwhelming anguish that consumes your consciousness.

You feel your own mind uncontrollably teetering and jittering across bizarre thoughts, settle
into a pattern of of unintelligible concepts, and blur into a sensation of overflowing joy that
consumes your consciousness.

This applies a highly random set of modifications to attributes and skills. The attribute modifications are always positive and large, and scale with bond strength. The skill modifications vary greatly, and appear to have some relation to the type of madness effect applied. The madness effect type also varies greatly.

Attribute Modifications

They seem to give the same bonuses as a Sunray. Essentially, a large semi-random bonus is applied to all attributes; the more madnesses the familiar shares with its consort, the larger these bonuses will be. This bonus greatly increases with bond strength. These bonuses are only applied when your familiar is in your current environment - currently this does not include when the familiar is carried, but probably this will change in the near future.

NB: The mental bonuses will be somewhat offset by penalties inflicted by the madnesses themselves.

Specialty Bonuses and Access

Tier 1

• Biofeedback +2 bonus
• Heat Affinity +1 bonus, +4 access
• Introspection +3 initial bonus
• Light Affinity +1 bonus, +4 access
• Lightning Affinity +1 bonus +4 access
• Fire Affinity +3 access

Tier 2

• First Aid
• Manipulation
• Pain Tolerance
• Psychology
• Redaction
• Torture

Tier 3

• Fire Affinity NB: This skill is forcibly specialized to 1 on bonding with a constitution specialty point, but a bonus spec is applied at this tier.

Tier 4

At the middle of "fairly healthy" bond strength:

• Cosmology
• Diplomacy
• Empathy
• Fast Talk
• Intimidation
• Metacreativity
• Telepathy

At "very healthy" bond strength, the Tier 1 bonus specialties are increased to 2.

At "Deep" bond strength:

• Fire Affinity +2 bonus spec.

In the middle of "Deep" bond strength:

• Biofeedback +3 bonus spec
• Heat Affinity +3 bonus spec
• Light Affinity +3 bonus spec
• Lightning Affinity +3 bonus spec
• Introspection +3 bonus spec

Tier 5

Slightly after "intimate":

• Flight

At "nearly complete", tier 4 bonuses are increased by 1.

In the middle of "nearly complete", tier 2 bonuses are increased by 1.

Toward the end of "nearly complete", tier 1 bonuses are increased by 1.

Tier 6

At "complete":

• Introspection +1

Charms

• Standard Charms
• Social Charms

Traits

In mid-late "somewhat frail" bond strength, the consort is turned into a photovore.

Also, in late "very frail", the consort gains one luminescence which increases with bond strength, albeit slowly.

At full bond luminescence = +6

Additional Powers

Sunfish give madnesses much like a sunray, all of them are temporary, which in turn grant you massive boosts to stats as long as you're near your familiar. They also enhance possibly random skills in extreme amounts. Note that the sunfish boosts are greater than the sunray boosts, but they can still put some of your skills into negatives and lower your stats, whether it's a madness or the actual bond doing this or not is unknown. Overall, the boosts are related to how insane you are, the more madnesses you have, the bigger your bonuses get.

Skills Buffed

It would seem that the skill buff is not entirely random. The ammount of buff is generally random based on some huge underling multiplier (yet to be determined but probably [bond strength * $rnd], where bond strength range is 0 to 1000).

The range of skills buffed is also composed of a small subset. Those identified so far are massive exertion, Killer Instinct, resilience, steadiness, centering, channeling, courage imagination, hardiness, recuperation, stamina, pain tolerance, psychology, empathy, fast talk, intimidation, torture, supernal durability

Completed Bond

at complete Bond

• Cosmology +3 bonus (29 max)
• Diplomacy +2 bonus (8 max)
• Empathy +2 bonus (25 max)
• Fast Talk +2 bonus (8 max)
• Fire Affinity +2 bonus (11 max)
• First Aid +3 bonus (22 max)
• Flight +1 bonus (8 max)
• Heat Affinity +4 bonus (16 max)
• Intimidation +2 bonus (8 max)
• Light Affinity +4 bonus (16 max)
• Lightning Affinity +4 bonus (16 max)
• Manipulation +3 bonus (12 max)
• Metacreativity +2 bonus (10 max)
• Pain Tolerance +3 bonus (14 max)
• Psychology +3 bonus (14 max)
• Redaction +3 bonus (16 max)
• Somatesthesia +4 bonus (17 max)
• Telepathy +2 bonus (11 max)

Breaking Bond

You stare at Sunfish long and hard.
You withdraw your mind from that of Sunfish, attempting to preserve as much of your sanity as possible.  Seconds seem to stretch 
into  hours, and the emotional pain intensifies, becoming indistinguishable from physical pain.
Sunfish looks horribly stricken.
The diminutive faintly shimmering golden dweomer aura around meg sizzles angrily, and then fades.
You can no longer specialize in heat affinity and lightning affinity to the degree required, and so have lost all use of these 
abilities. [event logged]
You no longer specialize in diplomacy, fast talk, first aid, metacreativity, pain tolerance, somatesthesia, or telepathy. [event 
logged]
You are now a first-degree specialist in flight, manipulation, and psychology. [event logged]
You are now a second-degree specialist in cosmology and intimidation. [event logged]
You are now a third-degree specialist in empathy, introspection, light affinity, and redaction. [event logged]
You are now a fifth-degree specialist in fire affinity. [event logged]

Nemesys 02:55, 24 April 2011 (EDT)