Aetrimonde

I had to think on it for a while, but I’ve settled on my January theme: I’m going to be introducing some of the concepts that make Aetrimonde a unique setting. As a lead-in to this topic, and to wrap up my December theme focusing on the high elves of Caras Elvaren, I’ll be going over some of the lore surrounding golems.

Golems are a big part of Aetrimonde’s lore: the setting’s industrial revolution wouldn’t have happened (or wouldn’t have happened in such a big way) without them, and they’re now to be found in virtually every part of Aetrimonde. Unlike a lot of creatures in the Bestiary, golems get a solid couple of pages of lore setting them up before even getting into their statblocks. So without further ado…

Golems in General

The most common type of golem is the steam golem, which has been widely adopted throughout human lands. These smoke- and steam-belching animate machines possess enormous strength in their piston-driven limbs, and are used for all manner of heavy and dangerous labor.

Difficulty 10 History: Arcanists and spiritualists have long used magic to create servants from inanimate substances like clay, stone, and wood. These ancient practices are magic-intensive, however, meaning that traditional golems are expensive and rare, the mark of a powerful magician or wealthy patron. Modern golems derive motive force from purely mechanical sources like steam and clockwork, which makes them far cheaper to create and thus more widely-used.

Difficulty 10 Arcana: The high elves of Caras Elvaren still use magically-animated golems, and (because of the superior availability of magic given to them by their ley taps) use them even more extensively than steam golems elsewhere. Ley golems tend to be on the small and delicate side, but possess more magic than just what animates them.

Difficulty 10 Engineering: Clockwork golems are the second-most common variety of modern golem, and like steam golems derive motive power from mechanical sources, in their case a tightly-wound mainspring. Their springs and gears do not provide nearly the strength or endurance of steam power, however, and so they are generally built to do light work in fixed locations where they can be regularly wound back up.

Difficulty 15 Arcana: Old-style clay, stone, and wood golems are now considered an inefficient use of magic, but are still made in small numbers by very traditional magicians. They are also sometimes made for specialized purposes where steam, clockwork, and ley golems would not be practical, or to satisfy the demands of rich and eccentric patrons that are more concerned with aesthetics than practicality.

Difficulty 15 Medicine: The creation of flesh golems—made from corpses stitched together and reanimated with lightning and strange alchemies—is superficially similar to necromancy. However, a properly-made flesh golem involves no dark magics, “merely” the strange alchemies and animating lightning of the vitalist’s art. Vitalists often claim that their creations can return the dead to life—but even when a flesh golem has the memories of the brain or body used to create it, they still suffer changes to their personalities.

Noofactors

Modern golems, which derive motive power from mechanisms rather than magic, still have one magical component: their minds. The intelligence that gives a golem thought and volition is housed in a sophisticated device called a noofactor or “thinking engine.”

Difficulty 10 Engineering: A noofactor is a delicate lattice of alchemical metals that attracts and contains what designers term a “spirit of intellect” that can be trained to operate a mechanical body.

Difficulty 15 Engineering: The engineering principles underlying the noofactor are poorly understood. The first example of a noofactor was produced by a solitary, eccentric genius, and was sold to the Novan Ministry of Industry by his landlady, along with all his other possessions, in an attempt to recoup unpaid rent. The design became public knowledge during the ensuing legal battle, which is now taught to aspiring engineers as an object lesson in the importance of retaining intellectual property rights.

Difficulty 15 Arcana: The magical principles underlying the noofactor are equally poorly understood. Spirits of intellect are unknown to traditional magic: they seem to spring into being only within the confines of a sufficiently well-constructed noofactor, and studying them is difficult without breaching their casing of alchemical metals and releasing them. So far as can be determined, a spirit of intellect is, initially at least, an embodiment of curiosity and logic with no memory or personality attached to it. Through example and repetition, the spirit of intellect within a noofactor can be imprinted with certain behaviors (like triggering the relays controlling a golem body) that it performs in response to stimuli.

Difficulty 20 Engineering: Noofactors continue to adapt and grow as long as they are exposed to novel experiences. A golem used consistently for a handful of repetitive tasks will eventually grow dull and unable to opreate outside of its intended purpose—and this is considered the ideal mode of operation for a noofactor. If a golem is instead used for varied purposes, it tends to become more responsive and capable—perhaps as smart as a clever dog or a particularly stupid ape—but also more independent-minded. While this can be beneficial to a golem’s operator, there is a fine line between independent-mindedness and recalcitrance…which is why the manufacturers of noofactors build them to be periodically reset, releasing their spirit of intellect into the ether and replacing it with a blank one.

Other Golem Minds

Traditional golems derive their intelligence from a variety of sources, many of them questionable. Depending on the magician who animated them, they might contain captive spirits, fragments of the creator’s own mind, bound demons, or even the transferred soul of some unfortunate animal.

Difficulty 10 Arcana: The gold-standard golem mind for traditionally-made golems is a bound spirit. This is not like manifesting a spirit into a physical body, which evaporates if not fed a constant stream of magic. Golems are intended to be permanent, and this requires binding a spirit, often unwillingly, into a prepared body to serve as its mind (and often as motive force, too).

Difficulty 15 Arcana or Nature: Best results usually come from binding a spirit of a similar nature to the body constructed for it: earth spirits for clay and stone golems, forest spirits for wood golems, etc. This presents a problem when it comes to flesh golems, because while spirits of people do exist, they generally reject the kind of stitched-together bodies that are used to make a flesh golem.

Difficulty 20 Arcana or Religion: When a suitable spirit cannot be provided to animate a golem—and this is quite common, because spirits powerful enough to serve as the animating force for a golem are rare and difficult to subdue—creators may turn to more questionable methods. Copying their own minds into a golem is generally acceptable to the law and to society, but the process carries with it the risk of turning the creator into a drooling shell if not done properly. Binding a demon can work, but is a profoundly bad idea: not only do demons generally exact a high price from their binders, demon-inhabited golems tend to wreak havoc given the slightest loophole in their orders. And transferring an actual soul, even that of an animal, might not be strictly illegal, but it does tend to offend religious authorities to such an extent as to ignite angry mobs or actual crusades.

Golems Throughout Aetrimonde

Golems are omnipresent throughout Aetrimonde…with the exception of a few unusual societies that have purposefully outlawed them.

Difficulty 5 Society: Golems are stronger, tougher, and most importantly, untiring: a typical golem can do the work of three to six human workers, and will work round the clock without complaint. As golems become more common in a society, they increasingly replace hard labor…but thankfully for most workers, they lack the wits to do any sort of fine, skilled, or creative work…at least thus far.

Difficulty 10 Society: Steam golems are common sights in human-majority nations, most notably the Novan Imperium and the Kingdom of Waystone. In Victovy, they are rarer, but are increasingly prevalent in core provinces as the empire modernizes.

Difficulty 10 Arcana: Caras Elvaren’s ley golems have effectively replaced all grunt labor and even some fine but repetitive labor, like weaving. The high elves have worked out a system of distributing the products of golem labor, freeing their citizens to spend their time on skilled crafts, arts, and leisure.

Difficulty 10 Nature: Of the major polities, the Dwarven Federation and Tir Coetir make the least use of golems. The dwarves do create stone golems in the form of enormous statues of their honored ancestors, but these are objects of such veneration that they are seldom used for any but ceremonial purposes. The druids of Tir Coetir likewise create wood and occasionally stone golems, which they largely use to guard their sacred groves and other sites of power.

Difficulty 10 Religion: Modern golems do not offend most religious sensibilities, although traditional varieties created through shortcuts using demons or living souls to provide motive power and intelligence are treated as abominations. In the Sanctean Primarchy, the construction of even steam golems is overseen by the clergy to ensure that they are created in an acceptable manner, and as a side effect of this arrangement they are often decorated in religious iconography making them resemble ambulatory shrines.

Difficulty 10 Warfare: The military applications of golems have not gone unnoted. All of the major polities and many of the minor ones maintain a corps of heavily-armored golems used as linebreakers, gun platforms, and siege weapons.

Difficulty 15 Society: Golems are thoroughly outlawed in the Petty Kingdoms, where the knightly aristocracy rightly sees golems as a threat to their monopoly on military power. Steam golems specifically are outlawed in Caras Elvaren and Tir Coetir, due to the elves’ distaste or outright hatred for the crude, loud, smoke-belching machines, and most clans in the Dwarven Federation consider them distinctly un-dwarven (the Autonomous Clans in the west being an exception). The orcs of Urku do not seem to have actual laws against steam golems, or any other variety, but expeditions accompanied by golems have generally not returned.

Up Next

Throughout the month, I’ll be presenting statblocks for various kinds of golems. But also, keep your eyes peeled for a post on the rules for controlling, operating, and building steam golems, which while not a core option for players (something that they always have the option of doing), does have rules set out in the Game Master’s Handbook that a GM can use when suitable for a campaign!