What's wrong with your dog?

1. It emits bursts of radioactivity at random.
2. It swears allegiance to no master but Belphegor, Lord of Hogs.
3. It sometimes no-clips into the walls and floor, jittering, whining, and looking at you in panic. You cannot help it.
4. It compulsively eats parts of itself which regrow overnight.
5. It knows everything there is about late 18th century moon-man architecture and constantly attempts to apply this knowledge in inapplicable situations.
6. It watches you at all times. Even as it eats, or fetches sticks, or attacks an enemy, its head is always contorted at an awkward angle to gaze only at you. It does not sleep.
7. Instead of barking, it just whispers the word "Bark". 
8. For reasons of its own, it is conditioning you to ring a bell every time you feed it.
9. In motion, it looks normal. When at rest, it loses it's internal consistency, slowly oozing and melting into a puddle until it moves again and re-solidifies. 
10. Whenever it's surprised it explodes into a dozen round miniature dogs that roll around barking helplessly, only reforming once it's calmed down. 
11. It stalks you online and creates dozens of sock-puppet accounts that bombard you with false perspectives, slowly warping your world-view to coincide with it's pro-dog agenda.
12. While you're at work it goes into the basement and excretes a noxious saliva that solidifies on contact with the air. It is slowly creating a coccoon. When it is complete, it will wait until you fall asleep and drag you inside.
13. It endlessly vomits up lost relics from the future and the past, then eats them again.
14. It has long conversations with your mother on the phone. She doesn't want to talk to you anymore. "Can you put the dog on?" They laugh about you behind your back. 
15. Flickering dog after-images follow it wherever it goes, like its form has been burned into your retinas.
16. When you look directly at it, you can't see it. You have to unfocus your vision or look at it out of the corners of your eyes.
17. It has lost a fortune of your money gambling on the stock exchange and swears it just needs a small loan to get back on top.
18. Its tail is long, thin, and pulsating. It connects the dog's body to something you can't see in the earth. When it opens its mouth, the barking comes from somewhere deep underground.
19. Every year another family members dies, and every year the dog digs up the graves and buries it somewhere underneath your house. The bone hoard grows. 
20. Whenever you try to warn someone about it, you can't get the words out. Instead, you find yourself talking endlessly about how much you love your dog. Your eyes look terrified, but your mouth says He Is A Good Boy. You notice the same frightened look in the eyes of your friends and family. Look At Him. What A Good Boy, they say. He Deserves A Treat, they say, as it slowly absorbs their hand.
    

Dogs and Magic

I've made these spell cards to use instead of rolling on a table and writing down the result. At level 1 you draw Read Magic and 3 other spells at random from the deck. This means that all the level 1 wizards in the same group will have different spells.

(I added some spells to the traditional LOTFP list, but realized too late that Ventriloquism is actually pretty much identical to a second-level LOTFP spell, Audible Glamour. Throw it out if that worries you.) 

I also made cards out of the entries in Zak's Available Dog Table.

 I printed them out, cut them up, and put them in card sleeves like these. Put a handful of them on the table at the beginning of the session, haggle for the price of each on an individual basis. "This dog dragged my grandmother from the ruins of our burning village! I couldn't accept less than 10 gold."

It worked really well. The spell cards were perfect for functionality, cutting down on character creation time and making it obvious what spells were available and memorized. The Dog cards were lovely as a ridiculous frippery. It's great how much dog descriptions can add to the world.

(eg.: "Why is the Carcassian Hoghunter trained to disarm enemies with a bite to the hand?"

"Clearly you've never seen a Carcassian hog.")

What I love most is that you can have an enormous world of possibilities, but your players only need to choose from a tiny amount of them at one time. So first, the world is bigger and stranger and more mysterious: you know this shop doesn't sell every dog in the world, and that you may never even see every dog in the world. Every shop is surprising and new. Second, it reduces the amount of time people spend staring down at pieces of paper, deciding what to buy.*

(The original table and this random generator version did both these things, but I never had easy access to the internet to get to it, and I like how instantaneous it is to just give people a card. No writing down, no rubbing out when the dogs die in waves.)

The only problem I found is that dogs can't really replace Hirelings: you can't play as your dog after you die. I wonder how far I should take this. A deck of hirelings? A deck of weapons, instead of using the equipment list? I'm very tempted to splurge even further and have decks for Weapons, Magic, Dogs and Men.