If I were to tell you to guess a young wizard with rich but emotionally destructive parents who had a frog for a familiar, Adaine Abernant would likely be the first to pop to the forefront of your mind. You’d think of her familiar Boggie the Froggie, round and wonderfully comforting.
If I were then to introduce you instead to a camper at Veth’s Wildemount Wildlings camp, you might just be hit with a sense of déjà vu. Padmond Pondhop has all the pun-tastic glory that would leave the Intrepid Heroes groaning and cackling, but this bullywug wizard from the Menagerie Coast hit all the same pressure relieving points as our favorite spherical familiar.
More obsessed with the card game he’s inventing than with adventuring, he’s not yet the source of profound comfort as Boggie, giving the solidly unhelpful advice for his fellow camper, Jessep, to simply try feeling a different emotion when her anxiety mess up her magic.
But by the end of the Wildemount Wildlings campaign, Padmond proves a source of encouragement in the face of pressure and especially unreliable adult authority, threatening Veth with a lawsuit if she doesn’t capitulate to his and his friends’ terms. Between the game deal he negotiates and his family’s “comfortable” state, it isn’t outside the bounds of reason to believe an older, more emotionally mature Padmond would be thrilling in the wondrous luxury of his success and perhaps taking the form of a certain familiar to gain inspiration for new character for his cards by visiting other realms. Perhaps even Spyre?
But maybe you’d argue that this can’t possibly be the same character. Sure, they’re both frogs of a sort, and both participate in wizardry, but one is a round familiar and the other is a wizard with a belt of Hill Giant Strength. Boggie merely has an emotional support frog collar which totally looks nothing like a belt and has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of strength.
And it isn’t like they both share common core visual characteristics with the la gruta morph of the strawberry poison-dart frog.
I mean, Brennan Lee Mulligan drawing on his camp experience at the Wayfinder Experience and creating a Wizard of the (Menagerie) Coast who also happened to be a frog-based creator of a in a multi-verse card game that implied bringing heroes from other realms couldn’t have possibly had a certain beloved frog familiar in mind when creating his character.
Maybe Padmond Pondhop being Bogariel Frogariel opens up a strange new question of what it means to be a familiar and exactly where they come from, but it also offers a way to tie Exandria and Spyre together, offering an interesting in for the two RPG streaming groups to potentially crossover.
What do you think? Is Padmond Boggie the Froggie? If so, what does this mean about other familiars? Share your thoughts and join the conversation on Boss Rush Network’s Discord and Facebook.
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