Your party has been moving fast across the grassy plains for two days. Some nameless evil nips at your heels. You’ve set ambushes to slow your pursuers, but they’re never where you think they should be. You see the dark shapes slipping through the grass, but your arrows have yet to strike home. You pull out quickly, lest the ambush be turned against you.

But weariness takes its inevitable toll, and now the pursuers are ahead of you. Cut off, you’ve chosen to make your stand on a small knoll, hoping to gain a slight advantage. You await the final assault with arrows nocked and swords drawn, watching what may be your last sunset. You don’t even have wood for a watch fire.

The grass starts moving just before dusk, accompanied by low growls. There only seem to be five or six, but you could have sworn you’d counted a dozen. Even so, you glimpse sleek, black hides in the remaining light. Oddly, the grass doesn’t always move with them. Either way, it’s time to fight or die.

Outraged yowls suddenly erupt from the prairie, quickly followed by large dogs barking loudly. Violent scrums ensue all around you. Big, black panther-like creatures rear and swipe with their claws and…tentacles? Tawny-colored dogs snap at the nightmarish cats, moving so fast they seem to appear from nowhere, dodging those deadly claws with equal quickness. The cats are larger, but each feline is battling three or four dogs. Even so, the dogs sometimes bite at thin air, missing the cats entirely. 

Your party stands ready, but you don’t know what’s happening, so you await the outcome. You wonder whether you’ll end up fighting tentacled, six-legged panthers or dogs that you could swear vanish into thin air. The battle rages, and several dogs go down, yelping, but numbers eventually tell. One by one, the snarling, spitting cats are pulled down and silenced. Vanishing dogs it is.

But the grass is suddenly still. There’s not even a breeze. Looking around, you see a large, yellowish dog sitting at the edge of the small clearing you hurriedly tramped down. You could have sworn nothing was there a second before. The dog’s shaggy fur is frayed from the fight, and he has what appears to be a beard. His unusually tall, upright ears are distinctly pointy. His eyes glint intelligently in the setting sun. His manner exudes no apparent threat. 

So quickly that you barely comprehend it, another dog is sitting by the first canine. It’s like he appeared from nowhere. His beard and fur are grey with age, but the light in his eyes is the same.  The first dog moves his head, almost like he’s telling you to move on. You hesitate, confused. The dog repeats the motion, this time with a friendly yip. Then he nods, for all the world as if he’s telling you that it’s alright. 

Okay, you’re game, but night is falling quickly. “It’s getting dark,” you tell the dog. “We are weary and need to rest. And we need a fire.” The dogs look at one another, softly growling and yipping curiously. The older dog vanishes. You know you saw it that time. The first dog turns and, wagging his long tail, moves into the grass. He turns and looks back, yipping. He clearly wants you to follow. Slowly, your party complies, weapons still at the ready.

The dog leads you to another rise, where he sits down. Darkness has fallen now, but you see shadows of big dogs appearing all around you. Each carries a length of wind-dried wood. The dogs drop the wood in a central pile and vanish. The first dog yips and vanishes too. 

You build your fire, wondering what in the world just happened. You hear scavengers begin to fight over the panther corpses a few hundred yards away. You, my friend, have just encountered a pack of blink dogs. Lucky you.

The Underappreciated Blink Dog

Blink dogs have been around from the beginning. The beginning being Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz’s 1975 Greyhawk supplement to the original Dungeons & Dragons rules. They are one of the few D&D creatures apparently invented from whole cloth, excepting the dog part. 

Blink dogs are medium-sized creatures, though their actual size varies between game editions, ranging from 40 to 180 pounds. Their appearance also changes by game edition with various fur lengths and colors. The description above is the one I prefer. Your mileage may vary.

But blink dogs’ salient feature is obviously their teleportation ability, hence the rather obvious moniker. They can use that ability whenever they want, making them among the most mobile creatures in the game. Actually games, since blink dogs are also found in Pathfinder, which we’ll address shortly. These good boys and girls can teleport, or blink, 10 to 40 feet at will, and 3e and 3.5e blink dogs can cast Dimension Door as a free action once per turn giving them a teleportation range of 720 feet. Edition 3-3.5 defines the dogs’ blink ability as a Blink spell, allowing them to move back and forth between the Prime Material and Ethereal Planes. This edition also gives blink dogs darkvision and low light vision capabilities.

The Dimension Door ability and the Blink spell explanation disappear (see what I did there?) in 4e, but blink dogs gain an aura that gives close companions short range blink ability too. 5e blink dog rules are sparse, so you can decide whether they retain that ability or not. 5e blink dogs only have a 50 percent chance to blink on any given turn.

Blink dogs possess human-level intelligence and a lawful good alignment, so they really are good boys and girls. They’re probably handsome and pretty too. They live and travel in packs and have developed a language of various dog sounds. They generally live in plains environments and avoid contact with other races, including humans. They are, however, known to help isolated parties or outposts against evil creatures, as in the scenario above.

Blink Dogs in Pathfinder

I’ve never played Pathfinder, but I know it’s similar to D&D, including sharing many of the same monsters, like blink dogs. While researching this article, however, I found that Pathfinder blink dogs seem better developed than D&D blink dogs. 

The appearance and powers are pretty much the same, but Pathfinder explores blink dog society and customs. They are intelligent after all, so that makes sense. Blink dogs organize themselves in packs, with each one having its own variant on a central theme. That theme is a pack Alpha, either male or female, and a Sage. 

The Alpha is obviously the leader and is usually the strongest or most capable pack member. The Sage can be the Alpha’s mate, but is most often an older, experienced blink dog who is counted wisest among the pack. Perhaps even a former Alpha. This seems perfectly natural since Pathfinder blink dogs can live up to 75 years. The Sage can be male or female, just like the Alpha, and is the Alpha’s chief advisor. The Sage may also be entrusted with the pack’s history and maintaining the pack’s customs, including adulthood rituals for pups. Each blink dog pack will have an Alpha and a Sage along these general guidelines.

Pathfinder blink dogs are also stargazers, looking for omens among the constellations. Their folklore and customs are closely intertwined with the heavenly bodies, and they have their own Zodiac. Their names may be determined by the star or constellation under which they were born. They remind me of centaurs that way. The Pathfinder Bestiary also says that “a faint blue nimbus seems to dance upon (the blink dog’s) fur.”

Blink dogs also appear in Magic: The Gathering but I have zero experience with that kind of game, so I can’t comment on how they work within that game’s mechanics.

Displacer Beasts: The Hated Enemy

Blink dogs and displacer beasts are mortal enemies, and each species will attack the other on sight or smell. It’s actually more than that. Dragon Magazine #109 features an article titled “Ecology of the Displacer Beast,” which explains the mutual enmity. It seems that each creature’s natural abilities interfere with the other’s central nervous system, drawing an immediate hostile response. My opening sequence took advantage of that attraction and reaction, placing the event in the blink dogs’ natural habitat. So, yes, the tentacled, panther-like creatures were indeed displacer beasts. 

The Dragon article continues:

I have seen a blindfolded displacer beast jump and yowl when a blink dog was allowed to teleport itself within several feet of the formers cage. The blink dog, in turn, began to snarl and bark in the direction of the displacer even though it, too, was blindfolded, had its sensitive nose covered, and was within the area of a spell of silence. Detection of the other is automatic for each and appears to trigger hate, ferocity, and violence in both animals, especially the displacer beast, whose special nerves are spread throughout its entire body. This occurs whenever the creatures are within 150 feet of one another. 

So, displacer beasts also attack blink dogs on sight, which makes sense, considering they cause the other intense physical and mental pain. Displacer beasts are only semi-intelligent, so alignment probably isn’t a factor in hating blink dogs. But the intelligent blink dogs know that displacer beasts are evil, and the dogs’ innate sense of honor may influence their drive to kill them on sight. On a side note, displacer beasts have a Neutral alignment in Advanced D&D 1e rules, but later editions have them as Lawful Evil. 

Playing Blink Dogs

I found references to blink dog packs being played as player characters. That sounds like fun, but I think it would also be a headache for the Dungeon Master. As a longtime DM, I think blink dogs have much potential as NPCs, rather than player characters. I’m already thinking of how to place Pathfinder blink dogs into my D&D campaign. I like the social and cultural work Pathfinder has done, but I’m not changing games at this point. But the Pathfinder material can integrate pretty seamlessly, I think. I combined blink dogs from both games for my opening sequence.

I think blink dogs also have great potential in martial encounters. I mentioned earlier that they appear to be among the game’s most mobile creatures. Their natural intelligence and advanced language will add to that, meaning they can plan their attacks instead of randomly blinking in and out of a battle. Dedicated pairs of blink dogs who train together could be very formidable in any melee action. Working those pairs into squads could be deadly. Opponents’ flanks would be perpetually exposed, creating opportunities for multiple attacks.

Blink dog packs would also be the ultimate recon unit, combining speed, mobility, and dog senses to scout and report back to any higher authority, assuming they could communicate. But that’s not an original idea on my part. It seems that the Feywild’s Seelie Court beat me to it.

The Fey and Blink Dogs

In case you didn’t know, the Fey inhabit the Faerie Realm, also known as the Feywild. Like most gaming realms, the Feywild has its share of good and evil forces. Among these are the Seelie Court, a collection of generally good, or at least neutral, deities. Their opposites are the evil creatures of the Unseelie Court. You can look up more about these creatures if you’re interested.

For our purposes, it’s enough to say that the Unseelie Court sometimes kept displacer beasts for their own nefarious ends. Many of these displacer beasts escaped and roam freely throughout the Feywild. The Seelie Court then allied themselves with blink dog packs to hunt them down. The blink dogs took to the task with a will, killing many displacer beasts and driving the survivors into the fringes of the Feywild, as well as the Prime Material Plane. Some say this is another reason for their mutual hatred.

Bring on the Blink Dogs!

I have never encountered blink dogs as a player. Nor have I ever employed blink dogs as a DM. I can say with certainty, however, that the latter will change. I’d always seen them as cool, but minor creatures that I looked past in the Monster Manual. No more of that. Researching and writing this article woke me up to the blink dog’s potential, and I like what I see. 

I also ran across some info on Blink Woolly Mammoths, which have a 25 percent chance of actually landing on their target when they blink into an encounter. They also do ferocious damage. Do with that what you will.

I think blink dogs can add flavor to an encounter or campaign, or they could even be major factors, depending on the approach and the environment. Either way, I want to explore that. I hope that this article might awaken an idea or two with you as well. And we all know that adding a few more good boys and girls to our campaigns will make them inherently better, don’t we? Because dogs are just like that. Especially dogs that can teleport.