Sym-kin: symbiotic people for TTRPGs

09 Aug, 2026

Be a symbiont, it's imperative.

Brilliant work by Roberta Carvalho. More here.

What is symbiosis

It's a bond with a beast, a non-playable one, usually one considered irrational, wild. It could be a bear, a dinosaur or a wyvern, for instance.

What it entails

When you're a symbiont, you'll experience benefits with costs. The specific benefits and costs will highly depend on the beast you're symbiotic with. Common manifestations of these traits are listed below.

Common benefits:

• shared specific trait, with limitations: if your sym-beast flies, you might be able to jump unusually high or glide instead of falling. If it lives underwater, you'll have an unusually long breath and improved swim speed and accuracy.
• shared senses, with limitations: you may feel what they're feeling, see what they're seeing, hear what they're hearing, even if for a limited time or with limited range, accuracy or definition.
• limbs: if they have more limbs than you, you may develop ghost limbs which you may use within certain limits.
• converse: you'll be able to speak to them, even if they're language is limited in vocabulary and scope.

Common costs:

• exhaustion: using your symbiont skills is a high gear activity. You're not the beast you're performing.
• practice: you'll need to perform your symbiont skills routinely to maintain them sharp and alive.
• remember: you'll need to keep your relationship in mind, and keep the memory of your beast alive.
• preserve: you'll need to work towards preserving your beast species, either by improving their living conditions, avoiding their harm or preventing their demise.
• commune: you'll need to commune with your beast with some regularity, in order to keep the connection alive. Talk to them, dance with them, spend time with them, rest with them, work with them. If they're not around any longer (e.g., extinct, banned, lost), you'll need to commune with the elders of your symbiotic order, with their once inhabited environment, realize their rituals, meditate on their existence and mourn their absence.

How to achieve symbiosis

It requires either being born or being accepted into a symbiotic-promoting community. This means there'll be a village, at least, dedicating efforts to make people who have the requirements (be them what they may) to achieve symbiosis.

Once part of this community, it requires that you either grow into a symbiotic relationship with the community protected animal, or that you grow into this relationship with other symbiont.

How to maintain symbiosis

As mentioned above, to maintain your connection you'll need to satisfy the costs of having it. Above all you'll need to cherish and exercise the connection with the beast.

This is done in two ways. Both are individually sufficient, but only one is able to maintain a true connection alive.

A. [BEST] Spending time with or in service of

• Long rest with your symbiotic other
• Significant downtime in their community, helping it
• Questing on behalf your symbiotic other, returning to them
• Averting danger that befalls them
• Having fun with them
• Copying their ways with them, learning from it
• Talking to them

B. [SUFFICIENT] Remembering

• Visit a similar environment to that of your symbiotic other
• Practice their movement and ways of being
• Preparing an environment as if for their arrival and habitation
• Chant their chants
• Medidate on their emotion
• Mourn their absence
• Practice your skill
• Commune with an elder symbiont of the same kind

Doing A strengthens the bond, improves your skills and improves the beast's community, likelihood of survival and reproduction, overall increasing their quality of life. It is the ideal approach, needed in small frequency for the symbiont to maintain and strengthen the bond.

Doing B maintains the bond, but not forever. If there's no communion with the beast, the quality of the bond is eroded. As the modes of being of your symbiotic other are only experienced through ritual, tradition and thought, via your practice and communion with other symbionts, on empty suitable environments, the connection weakens. Memory becomes fiction, and fiction may be corrupted.

Nonetheless, in the absence of your beast and their community for whatever reason (dwindling, extinction, banishment), only through remembering them you'll be able to create a convenient presence, and a convenient environment, for when they return. Only with a convenient environment and a convenient presence, you'll have a convenient re-encounter.

Mechanics

To create a sym-character, introduce the symbiosis as a background characteristic or have it be developed in game with the character spending at least one year in a symbiosis-promoting community.

Then, define characteristics for the symbiosis. Below, the octopus is an example.

Environment: sea Core Features: senses light through skin, multiple limbs, distributed cognition

Symbiosis levels:

Level 0 - baseline: character has a myopic view of the environment where they were trained, when there are animals there Level 1: skin camouflages, reacting to environment. Character feels their community's dwellers feelings. Level 2: character control skin's color and texture at will. Character talks to their others. Level 3: 2 ghost limbs, character needs to concentrate to use them, stopping usage of others. Character see's through their symbiotic-other eyes. Level 4: 2 more, with the same limitations as above, but now allowing usage of the 4 ghost limbs. Character is able to send messages telepathically, but not receive. Level 5: willingly using limbs along their original body. Character may listen to their other. Character communicates telepathically with their other, when at 1km from them. Level 6: limbs act independently in favor of the character, reacting to the environment. Character communicates telepathically with their other from wherever.

Progression requires practice and communion:

• level 0 is the baseline of symbiosis
• level 1 is usually where your character starts using their skills, take it for granted now
• to go from level 1 to level 2, you must've used your skills effectively 3 times, and commune with your beast in some way. If in presence, a week there will suffice. If through memory, it should be a dedicated month
• to go from level 2 to 3, you'll need to have used your skills at least 10 times successfully, and either commune in presence for a month, or through memory for a season
• to go from level 3 to 4, you'll have used your skills successfully multiple times, through a year. You'll need to commune in presence for a season, or through memory for a dedicated year.
• to go from level 4 to 5, you'll have used your skills being successfully used for a few years. You'll need to commune in presence for a year. There's no way to reach level 5 by communing through memory.
• to go from level 5 to 6, you'll have used your skills successfully for the past decade, having spent at least half of it in some sort of communion with the beast and your community.

Symbiosis are diverse

Symbiosis may be mutual, commensal or parasitic. I wrote about mutualistic relationships. Nonetheless, this may be adapted to commensal (maybe the beast folk require protection and aren't able to provide improvements to the character), or even parasitic (a character found that if they exploit their beast folk, they're able to evolve faster, at a cost for the community). It's easy to twist and turn this idea.

Be symbionts.