Poppet
Child-Safe Constructs
Small, affordable and fun for the whole family! Everyone can use a Poppet in their lives, so why don't you? Buy one today!
Poppets are doll constructs built to serve for smaller tasks. Easy to produce and cheap to make, they act as familiars to the mages of Fabulae and servants for daily household tasks. Ideal for those who cannot afford greater and more expensive constructs.
cloth & Strings
Manufacturing Progress
Most Poppets are quite cheap to make, using materials such as wood, cloth and cotton to make their bodies. Even those with no arcane knowledge can make one, as its production requires little to no magic. Only upon activation is some magic required.
More advanced models go for a clockwork interior, working in hundreds of moving parts to allow precision movement. Such designs can take hundreds of hours to make, making them some of the most expensive Poppets one can buy. As a result, most end up custom-made for their client.
To activate a poppet, an activation key is added to their body. This can range anywhere from a rune carved into their wood to an keystone put between their stuffings, often with an accompanying activation phrase. Without it, they are no different to a common doll.
Simple Constructs
Poppets are very simple constructs, often too small for anything larger than a householding chores. Most exist to help with simple tasks such as cleaning or carrying things around, as anything more is unfeasible for most models to do by themselves.
Instead, many show impressive teamwork and coordination, making up for one another's shortcomings. What only one might lack, a dozen of them can organise entire plans and form hierarchies to fullfil their duties. One can describe it akin to an ant colony, working together in such an orderly manner one could mistake it for a hivemind.
However, their individual intelligence is lacking. Most are not made for more than one simple task at a time, requiring other Poppets to fill in their shortcomings. They do make up for it with being inventive with their solutions, being adept at using their environment to their advantage.
Poppets are also dedicated to their duties, often to the point of completing them even at their own cost. While this can make them garantueed to do their tasks without questioning, it leads to stories of some lacking any sense of self-preservation. Luckily enough, fixing a broken Poppet requires only some stitching and new parts that even non-magic users can do by themselves.
Poppet Players
Poppets that gain sentience often wish to know more of the world or achieve something greater. Adventurers often come from those designed to be heroes or protectors, but all of them have that will to learn more. One might find Poppet explorers join adventurers to discover the greater world.
Such a cute little thing, and a lovely picture to!, great work! Is there any drawback to them gaining sentience? And how does society feel about sentient Poppets?
The biggest drawback is mostly disobedience, as they are more prone to independent thought rather than any programmed duty or tasks. Sentient ones tend to be also so rare that they're more a surprise than anything. So when one does show up, it's often a massive surprise over something people would actually know.