Pets

Pets are your only companions and friends in the hostile dungeons of IVAN. By default, each character starts with a puppy named Kenny, though the name of your starting dog can be easily changed in the Options.

Pets can bring a number of advantages to you, mostly being a great help in combat or used as a beast of burden so you can run around with many items yet none of the encumbrance. On the other hand, carnivorous pets will eat any corpse they can find or kill, potentially depriving you of sustenance, they may block your movement (especially stronger pets tend not to let you switch places with them) and be a general nuisance when they get lost chasing a harmless monster and you have to search the whole floor for them. Also, keeping more than a few pets can get annoyingly tedious, though this problem is greatly reduced if you have a magic whistle.

Kenny and Other Unique Pets

Kenny

Kenny the puppy is your starting pet. He's not very strong, has a tendency to get lost and drools everywhere.
Regardless, he is quite handy at the start of the game as he can help you take down many of the starting enemies, especially hedgehogs who can hurt you if you attempt to fight them bare-handed.
He has an annoying tendency to eat corpses, which you will be needing to eat yourself for sustenance. If you catch him eating a corpse you want to eat, simply push him out of the way by walking into him and begin eating the corpse yourself.

Kenny can be made significantly stronger if you can find and feed him an item made of ommel bone.
However, he will never grow up into a full-fledged dog.

Slave

The slave is a unique NPC found in the shop in Attnam. He is functionally identical to the player, and even uses the same code. You can purchase him for 50 gold and equip him with whatever you'd like.
Being a slave he is also a masochist which means that he won't turn against you if you hit him by accident or kick him.

Taming

Taming is the act of turning a hostile or neutral monster into your new pet. It can be accomplished in several ways:

• Reading a scroll of taming
• Applying a Lyre of Charm
• Praying to Dulcis
• Zapping a wand of necromancy or ressurection on a monster corpse

In v0.50 taming was scarce yet always successful, but CVS introduces taming difficulty of individual monsters and attribute checks to determine the success of your taming. The checks are as follows:

For Dulcis prayer:

3*TamingDifficulty vs (CHA+WIS)+(DulcisRelation/20)

For the scroll:

5*TamingDifficulty vs (4*INT)+CHA

For the lyre:

TamingDifficulty vs CHA