Deep Dive - The Blink Dog
Who's a good dog? The Blink Dog is a good dog. While you may think a wild dog from the Feywild would be a chaotic creature, the Blink Dog isn't, having more in common with its domesticated cousin. You don't even have to give them treats to behave because they are naturally good-natured.
Friendly and not trying to kill you on sight is excellent, but what makes the Blink Dog special is built right into its name. While they may not have the usual repertoire of tricks, even though we're sure they are good at rolling over and fetching sticks, you will need to keep a close eye on these dogs because if you blink, they're gone.
We’ve briefly talked before about these adorable rascals in our deep dive into the displacer beast, but they deserve their own look… even if their legacy has slowly been fading away across the editions.
Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, 2021 Wizards of the Coast / Oriana Menendez
OD&D - Blink Dog
No. Appearing: 4-16
Armor Class: 5
Move: 12
Hit Dice: 4
% in Lair: 30%
No. of Attacks: 1 bite
Damage/Attack: 1-6/bite
Treasure: C
Alignment: Law
The Blink Dog makes its debut in the supplement Greyhawk (1975) and is one of the few creatures not taken from Earth’s mythology but rather created by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. These dogs are described as looking like African wild dogs, but that doesn’t really tell us what they look like. Instead, we jump into the internet search engines and learn that African wild dogs weigh between 40 and 70 pounds, they have a colorful, patchy fur coat, comically large bat-like ears, and a fuzzy tail with a white tip. Frankly, they look ridiculously cute, and we wouldn’t mind if our table of adventurers were eaten by a pack of them.
Speaking of packs, Blink Dogs travel in packs, roaming the land and teleporting about. You heard us right, the Blink Dogs can teleport all about you, hence the ‘blink’ in their name. Their ability to teleport makes the Blink Dog more than just your average loveable pet. They can’t blink very far, and they often teleport at random times and in unexpected directions. Luckily for the Blink Dog, they have an innate instinct that prevents them from blinking into a brick wall, giant oak tree, or any other solid object.
If you end up fighting one, which probably makes you a monster of some sort, they have a 50% chance of blinking at random intervals, often appearing one to four feet from their enemies. If they do blink, they then get to attack that same turn, nipping you with a bite attack. While fighting one dog might be annoying, picture an entire pack of dogs blinking around the battlefield. This pack of dogs would be a teleporting whirlwind of fur, teeth, and cuteness.
Good thing the Blink Dog is a lawful creature and won't try to kill you the second it lays eyes on you unless you ally yourself with displacer beasts. They are kind creatures who don’t attack others on sight unless they happen to be a displacer beast, at which point they immediately go in for the kill. If you do attack these creatures, they will defend themselves, but if you are too much for them to handle, they will blink out and not reappear. Where they go is left to the imagination since the description does not tell us. We'd like to think they reappear back home, grab their favorite chew toys, and curl up on their comfy doggie bed.
Basic D&D - Blink Dog
Armor Class: 5
Hit Dice: 4*
Move: 120’ (40’)
Attacks: 1 bite
Damage: 1-6
No. Appearing: 1-6 (4-9)
Save As: Fighter (4)
Morale: 6
Treasure Type: C
Alignment: Lawful
XP Value: 125
The Bink Dog can be found in the Holmes Basic Box Set (1977), the Moldvay Expert Rules (1981), and the Mentzer Expert Set (1983). Their description is almost a complete copy and paste from before, but luckily, Mentzer stands above the rest and dares to be different by coming up with their own description that does clarify how their ability works, how they rip apart their enemies, and even makes them cuter than before… depending on your tastes we suppose.
Let’s talk about the most important thing, the changes made to the Blink Dog’s appearance. The Blink Dog now appears as an Australian wild dog, also called the dingo. Dingos have short fur coats that can be light tan, black and tan, or creamy white. They are quite fast, as their lean body gives them great agility and stamina. The perfect mix for chasing down adventurers who thought they might just be cute, innocent dogs.
Blink Dogs remain very smart and can teleport, or blink, around the battlefield, driving their opponents crazy. If those opponents are displacer beasts, they will attack them on sight as they still hate them with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Between their big dog brains and natural instincts, the Blink Dogs will never teleport itself into a solid object.
We also get a bit more information on their blinking powers and how they can ruin your day if you get caught fighting one. On its turn, it teleports close to an enemy, bites them, and then blinks ten to forty feet away. This can be really problematic for you since most adventurers can only move up to thirty feet, making it difficult to keep up with these dogs who keep teleporting in and out, biting and nipping at you.
Of course, if you are too powerful, the entire pack will blink out and not reappear. While we aren’t sure why you are attacking a group of lawful, teleporting dogs, we can say that that sounds like a really bad idea.
AD&D (1e) - Blink Dog
Frequency: Rare
No. Appearing: 4-16
Armor Class: 5
Move: 12”
Hit Dice: 4
% in Lair: 20%
Treasure Type: C
No. of Attacks: 1
Damage/Attack: 1-6
Special Attacks: From rear 75% of time
Special Defenses: Teleporting
Magic Resistance: Standard
Intelligence: Average
Alignment: Lawful good
Size: M (3’ at shoulder
Psionic Ability: Nil
Monster Manual, 1978 TSR Inc.
Found in the Monster Manual (1978), the Blink Dog does not undergo any major changes, but there are a few items of note. The most important thing, obviously, is that the Blink Dog has a new appearance. They are now described as brown and yellowish creatures. It’s a pretty limited description, luckily we do finally get a picture of them. They appear to be short-fur canines with sharp teeth, a short snout, small ears, and a short, thin tail that ends with a poof of fur. It’s kind of cute, but we miss the African wild dogs, those were heartbreakers.
For those of you who like to talk to your dogs, the good news is the Blink Dog is now listed as intelligent as humans and even has their own language consisting of barks, yips, whining, and, we assume, lots of compliments about how they are handsome boys.
Blinking is also given a bit more information, making it much less confusing to run. On a Blink Dog’s turn, you roll a d12, if you roll 7 or higher, then the Blink Dog ‘blinks’, a lower number means that they don’t, and they have to physically move themselves to chomp on you, like some sort of sad, non-blinking dog. If they do blink, you then roll that d12 again to determine where they blink to. On a 1, they teleport directly in front of their opponent, a 2 means they appear on the left side, 3 indicates they teleport to the right side, and 4 or higher means they teleport to the back of the target and get to make their attack against a lower armor class.
One new piece of information discusses what happens when encountering a Blink Dog in its lair. There's a 50% chance the Blink Dogs will have a litter of puppies with them, and we are pretty confident that they look adorable like all puppies do. Blink Dog puppies have a maximum of 2 hit dice, instead of the 4 of an adult, and deal 1-2 or 1-3 damage from their bite based on their age. If you're a horrible person and kidnap a puppy, it can be sold for up to 2,000 gold since you can train a young Blink Dog to be your pet. We beg of you not to be that person because there is a special place in hell for people that are mean to puppies.
If you were wondering how the war between cat and dog, we mean displacer beast and Blink Dog, is going, well… it’s not going well. The two still despise each other and will attack each other on sight. In Dragon #109 (May 1986), you can read the article Ecology of the Displacer Beast by Bill Mickelson, sadly the Blink Dog is never given their own article, and we can dive into their relationship just a bit more. The two creatures, even when blinded, restrained, and completely unaware that the other creature is near them, can somehow sense the presence of each other when their special abilities activate.
In the article, a displacer beast has its eyes covered, a sheet placed over its cage, and in the aura of a silence spell, yet is still very much aware when a nearby Blink Dog teleports about it. The same is true for the Blink Dog. Even if it is completely unaware that there is a displacer beast nearby, has its nose and eyes covered under the effects of a silence spell, and still freaks out when the displacer beast’s special ability activates. Apparently, there is some sort of psychic connection between the two that causes mental anguish whenever one of their nearby enemies activates their special powers, which is probably why they attack each other on sight. This even extends to those wearing a cloak of displacement, instead of thanking you for killing its hated enemies, the Blink Dog attacks the wearer with terrible ferocity.
An odd, or should we say interesting, concept of playing a Blink Dog as a character is addressed in White Dwarf #17 (February/March 1980) with the article My Life as a Werebear by Lew Pulsipher. It is an interesting concept for a character because you are playing a pack of Blink Dogs rather than a single character for the entire campaign. At the start, you play a single young Blink Dog, and as you gain experience points, you become an adult Blink Dog and then start adding Blink Dogs to your pack. You can eventually reach up to sixteen Blink Dogs in your pack, and you go about blinking and teleporting as a group, tearing down your enemies and teleporting away to safety.
Just as you might suspect, if you, as the Blink Dog pack, see a displacer beast, the pack flies into a berserk rage and won’t back down unless one of you is killed, a few of you are wounded, or your enemy is dead. It’s an interesting concept for a class, though we can imagine it might be hard to roleplay with the rest of the party who are trying to build castles and kill Orcus, while your pack is more interested in sniffing each other’s butts and playing fetch.
2e - Blink Dog
Climate/Terrain: Temperate plains
Frequency: Rare
Organization: Pack
Activity Cycle: Any
Diet: Omnivorous
Intelligence: Average (8-10)
Treasure: C in lair
Alignment: Lawful good
No. Appearing: 4-14 (4d4)
Armor Class: 5
Movement: 12
Hit Dice: 4
THAC0: 17
No. of Attacks: 1
Damage/Attack: 1-6
Special Attacks: From the rear 75% of the time
Special Defenses: Teleportation
Magic Resistance: Nil
Size: M (4’ long)
Morale: Steady (11-12)
XP Value: 270
Monstrous Manual, 1993 TSR Inc.
Lumped together with the wild, war, and death dog, the Blink Dog can be found in Monstrous Compendium Volume 1 (1989) and is reprinted in Monstrous Manual (1993). Their description is quite concise since they have to share a single page with three other dog types, and it leaves little room for the designers to fully explore the Blink Dog and the war it wages with displacer beasts.
What is new, though, is that we do learn that they stick to temperate plains, blinking across the grasslands as they hunt down prey. They are known as noble and good, rarely interacting with humanoid settlements, and are just generally aloof in nature. It makes sense, they are just as smart as humans and can probably tell that humans are way more trouble than they are worth, no matter how good of friends they might be.
While there might be little to say in this edition about the Blink Dog, we are going to take the chance to talk about a similar creature, and no, we aren’t talking about a blink cat. Found in Dragon #156 (April 1990) within the pages of the Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium, which is an article that compiles all of the really weird monsters that had been sent to Dragon Magazine over the years. The editor even talks about how these monsters are even weirder than creatures like the flumph, the giant space hamster, and others.
Dragon #156, April 1990 TSR Inc.
Created by Sharon Jenkins, the Blink Wooly Mammoth is enormous, terrifying, and deadly. Besides the fact that they are massive Wooly Mammoths, what makes them deadly is that they have all the random teleportation abilities of a Blink Dog but do a lot more damage. To start with, the mammoth has five attacks. Its two tusk attacks each deal 2-16 damage, the one trunk deals 2-12 as it squeezes you till you can't breathe, and its two-foot attacks deal 2-12 damage.
Because we are talking about Blink Dogs, it’s obvious that any mention of a Blink Wooly Mammoth will have the power of Blink Dogs. Though, there is a slight difference. When a Blink Wooly Mammoth blinks in and out, there is a 25% chance of it teleporting on top of you… and crushing you for up to 36 points of damage. You also have to make a saving throw vs. wands, yeah seems weird to us too, or be knocked unconscious for 2-12 rounds. The damage is terrible, but being on the ground means you'll get stomped, resulting in more damage. Not only do you get smushed, but all you're equipment is too.
If you manage to survive an encounter with a herd of blink mammoths, your prize is their massive tusks. While they weigh 150% more than typical tusks, they sell for a lot more, but it feels pretty scummy to kill these creatures to sell their tusk. Though, if they attacked you first, and you didn’t get smooshed, we won’t blame you for claiming your reward.
Dragon #269, March 2000 Wizards of the Coast
The final mention of Blink Dogs appears in Dragon #269 (March 2000), at the tail end of the 2nd edition, in the article Animal Henchmen by James Wyatt. This article features several new animal-themed followers that might join your party as henchmen, a type of NPC that you gain access to as you level up. These creatures include a giant lynx, a winged cat, dolphins, giant eagles, and many other options, including the Blink Dog.
Within their few paragraphs, we do learn that Blink Dogs are incredibly loyal, probably because they are dogs at heart and have high ideals of justice and good. Their loyalty is not for sale, as they only willingly join those who have earned their trust and companionship. If you do try to force one of them to join you, good luck with that since they are notoriously hard to keep in one place.
3e/3.5e - Blink Dog
Medium Magical Beast
Hit Dice: 4d10 (22)
Initiative: +3
Speed: 40 ft. (8 squares)
Armor Class: 16 (+3 Dex, +3 natural), touch 13, flat footed 13
Base Attack: +4/+4
Attacks: Bite +4 melee (1d6)
Full Attack: Bite +4 melee (1d6)
Space/Reach: 5 ft./5 ft.
Special Attacks: -
Special Qualities: Blink, darkvision 60 ft., dimension door, low light vision
Saves: Fort +4, Ref +7, Will +4
Abilities: Str 10, Dex 17, Con 10, Int 10, Wis 13, Cha 11
Skills: Hide +3, Listen +5, Sense Motive +3, Spot +7, Survival +4
Feats: Iron Will, Run, Track
Climate/Terrain: Temperate plains
Organization: Solitary, pair, or pack (7-16)
Challenge Rating: 2
Treasure: None
Alignment: Usually lawful good
Advancement: 5-7 HD (Medium); 8-12 HD (Large)
Level Adjustment: +2 (cohort)
Monster Manual, 2000 Wizards of the Coast
Found in the Monster Manual (2000/2003), the Blink Dog, once again, does not undergo any significant changes, but there is a bit of additional information mostly focused on their ecology.
Blink Dogs maintain a balanced diet, eating an equal amount of plants and meat. When they aren’t off hunting for food and tracking down every single displacer beast they can find and ending them rightfully, you can find them back at their home, which is typically a burrow. They typically spend that time enjoying each other’s company, watching over their little puppies, and we assume just being all-around good bois.
Monster Manual, 2003 Wizards of the Coast
While most Blink Dogs will avoid contact with humanoids, instead preferring to stick to their territories where such creatures don’t dwell. If you are evil-aligned, they have no problem going after you, either running you off or killing you. If you are good-aligned, or even just neutral, so long as you don’t mess with them, they aren’t going to mess with you.
In this edition, the Blink Dog’s teleportation ability is split into two distinct types. They gain the benefits of the blink spell, which they can activate or deactivate as a free action on their turn. This spell allows you to move back and forth between the material plane and the Ethereal, keeping you quite safe and sound from attacks as all physical attacks against you have a 50% chance of just missing, and you only take half damage from area of effect attacks.
In addition, they can also cast dimension door at will and as a free action, once per turn. This finally gives us a general idea as to how far a Blink Dog can blink, which turns out to be 720 feet, which is quite a distance. While we can’t imagine that they often teleport their maximum distance, we could imagine that if a fight is going against them, they have no problem blinking the maximum range. This means we have now figured out the answer to where packs of Blink Dogs disappear too when they are in a tough position. They go very far away.
4e - Blink Dog Companion
Fey Beast Companion
Medium fey beast
Initiative equal to yours
Senses equal to yours +2; low-light vision
HP your bloodied value
AC 15; Fortitude 13, Reflex 13, Will 13 (add your level to each defense)
Speed 7
TRAITS
Blinking Pack (teleportation) - Aura 1; The blink dog or any ally in the aura can use a move action to teleport to another square in the aura.
STANDARD ACTIONS
Blinking Bite (teleportation) - At-Will; Attack: Melee 1 (one creature); your level + 5 vs. AC; Hit: 1d8 + one-half your level damage, and the blink dog teleports up to 2 squares. Level 21: 2d8 + one-half your level damage.
Str 14 Dex 20 Wis 14 Con 17 Int 2 Cha 6
It’s a rough edition for the Blink Dog as they only appear in Player’s Options - Heroes of the Feywild (2010), and only as an animal companion for the Fey Beast Tamer. The Fey Beast Tamer is a ‘theme’ which is different from a class or a race, and can sometimes modify a background, changing out some skill proficiencies or giving you better, more niche features.
The Fey Beast Tamer gets to choose what type of fey companion travels with them and you are given four options, Blink Dog, displacer beast, fey panther, or a young owlbear. While we don’t have a problem with the last two, we have a serious problem with you having a displacer beast companion, mostly because this is a deep dive about the Blink Dog and, as we all know, those two don’t get along… even if this edition doesn’t say anything about their enmity.
In addition to a companion stat block that levels up as you do, we also get a short paragraph that lets us know that a Blink Dog is a strong, yellow-coated canine that can teleport short distances and often works in a pack. Since the Blink Dog is your companion, you and your allies become the Blink Dog’s pack, which nets you a nice little benefit! If you, or an ally, is adjacent to the Blink Dog, you can utilize some of its teleportation magic and teleport a short distance, though you have to stay within five feet of the Blink Dog. While it is limited, it is a very useful ability that allows you to escape attacks of opportunity or even flit around a door.
5e - Blink Dog
Medium fey, lawful good
Armor Class 13
Hit Points 22 (4d8 + 4)
Speed 40 ft.
Str 12 (+1) Dex 17 (+3) Con 12 (+1) Int 10 (+0) Wis 13 (+1) Cha 11 (+0)
Skills Perception +3, Stealth +5
Senses passive Perception 13
Languages Blink Dog, understands Sylvan but can’t speak it
Challenge 1/4 (50 XP)
Keen Hearing and Smell. The dog has advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on hearing or smell.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +3 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d6 + 1) piercing damage.
Teleport (Recharge 4–6). The dog magically teleports, along with any equipment it is wearing or carrying, up to 40 feet to an unoccupied space it can see. Before or after teleporting, the dog can make one bite attack.
Monster Manual, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
Barely making its way into the Monster Manual (2014) as an entry in Appendix A: Miscellaneous Creatures, we are lucky to have the Blink Dog teleport in. It only gets two sentences to its name, so you already know there isn’t much to say about it for this edition, but we at least get an illustration of the dog.
With so little information, we guess we can’t meander too much here. They can blink in and out of existence, though this ability is only for teleporting, and they don’t gain the benefits of a blink spell like they did back in the 3rd edition. They only have a 50% chance each turn to teleport, but if they do, they get to make a free bite attack either before or after they teleport.
Weirdly enough, we get more Blink Dog information, but it’s only after you read about their most hated enemy, the displacer beast. Blink Dogs are the stalwart companions of the Seelie Court and they hunt alongside fey hunters to bring down the ferocious displacer beasts who roam the Feywild freely. Between the Blink Dogs and the fey hunters, they drove the displacer beasts to the edges of the Feywild and off into the material plane, which is apparently why the two hate each other so much. They have a deep hatred that has stuck around for generations.
Pathfinder Bestiary 2, 2020 Paizo Publishing
While it has largely been overshadowed by its most hated enemy, the Blink Dog is a lovable pup. They are smart creatures and their natural teleporting ability makes them quite a dangerous foe, capable of escaping most traps and avoiding danger where ever they might find it. Just remember to take your cloak of displacement off before you try to befriend one of these dogs.
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