Golems
Type: Arcane
Golems are magically-animated constructs. They are often created by mages as servants or guardians. The Hermetic Order uses special clockwork golems as laborers in their headquarters.
- Abilities: Golems are not living creatures. They are animated by magical forces. That means they don’t need to eat, drink, breathe, or sleep. As long as their core remains intact, they’ll never die, as any damage to their bodies can simply be repaired. They’re also immune to poison and disease, and have no vulnerable vital organs. Needless to say, golems are formidably tough. Golems can also be created with additional magical abilities, and augmented with built-in weapons. The most sophisticated golems are made with clockwork-style mechanical bodies, allowing for the greatest ease of motion.
- Origin: All golems have a core, a magical nexus that serves as the creature’s animating force. The core can take many forms: in simpler golems, it is merely a dense point near the creature’s center, but in more advanced golems it will often be a specially-crafted item such as a glyph-inscribed gem or metal plate. From the core, an invisible network of arcane energy spreads throughout the golem’s body, like a magical nervous system, allowing it to animate. Golems can either be created deliberately by a magus, or may emerge naturally in areas with strong magical energy. The latter origin is nearly exclusive to Arcadia.
- Varieties: The original golem of folklore was made out of clay, but golems can be made of virtually any material. That includes liquids and nonphysical substances like fire, in addition to more durable materials like metal or stone. Golems can even be created from flesh — a grisly alternative to true necromancy. While many golems are created with humanoid bodies, they are by no means limited to that form; animated objects are also a type of golem, for instance. Spontaneously-occurring golems are sometimes called “elementals”, as they usually take the form of animated elements, but that term has fallen out of use to avoid confusion.
- Personality: Woven from raw magic, a golem will often have little more sentience than what is needed to animate it. But some are more sophisticated. In certain cases, the soul of a mortal becomes the animating force of a golem, though this often causes the mortal to lose their memories in the process — at least initially. Golems are often created with command glyphs that control their behavior, restricting what actions they can take regardless of their sentience.
- Visibility: Secret. Most people don’t know about the existence of magic, let alone something as advanced as a golem.
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