The Bard's Tale Developer Diary #7

In GameSpy's seventh installment to their Bard's Tale developer diary, InXile's Sean Patton discusses the many pets and summoned creatures in the game. A snippet:
You begin the game with "the rat." He has one purpose: to seek out young innocent barmaids, scare them, and let the Bard come to the rescue. It's like having a dog on the beach, the ladies love it. As anyone who has played an RPG in the last 30 years knows, rats have low hit points and weak attacks, so as a melee fighter he's not useful. Early on in the game, you get a tune that let's you summon an electric spider. And guess what his special ability is? That's right; he can electrocute people. And it's great fun. I'm not going to go over all 16 characters in this diary, but they vary greatly in their abilities, from melee combat experts to fire-breathing dinosaur skeletons. How exactly a dinosaur-skeleton learned how to breathe fire I don't know, but you best watch out.