Are All Golems Golems?

In Legend Quest, golems can be formed in any shape the enchanter (and his stone carver) can imagine.  Golems made of stone are not remarkably different from golems made of iron.  The important part of this is that these are created creatures and mindless on their own.  This means we are ignoring the LQ earth golems and that other game’s forged people “race”, at least for now.

So our question really comes down to how do you control a mindless creature?  This same question can be asked of most skeletons and zombies.  Why do most people (we mean players) assume that a newly risen zombie knows how to hold its sword and swing it?  Why does the spell caster who just crafted a golem think it understands commands like “go kill that warrior and bring me his helmet”?

Now some of this depends on how your created creatures are formed.  In LQ it takes a while (a day or two) to put a zombie together.  It isn’t something you just pull out of the ground.  OK, it can be with the bag of bones spell.  And maybe the zombies are animated by a style of death magic that utilizes “forgotten memories” of the corpse in the spell, allowing it knowledge of how to swing that sword.  So that’s why we’ll focus just on magical constructs, like golems, for the rest of this.

Golems don’t have memories to utilize.  OK, so games have the flesh golems, but this isn’t necromancy and they shouldn’t be able to reach back into their memories in order to use old skills.  If they do, they are going to pull out a lot more of those memories and they are going to cause a lot more trouble than they would be worth!

What can we be sure of with any magically constructed creature?  Poison immunity.  No need for sleep.  Tireless.  Limited or no brain activity (we assume none).  Are these of benefit?  Of course they are!  What else?  Expensive!  How expensive?  Well, so expensive that few GMs will allow the party members to have them, and if they do, the golem has to be treated like a figure of glass.  If the golem cost you 10,000 whatevers, don’t use it as a meat shield.  There are living creatures almost as stupid who will act as meat shields for far less.

Without trying to dig deeply into any particular set of game rules - golems are great fun for GMs.  They can stand absolutely still, resembling statues or gargoyles until they spring to life and surprise the party.  In fact, they can stand still for centuries.  Long after the guy who built it is dead and gone, the golems will still be standing there protecting whatever they were supposed to.  This makes them perfect “ruins” monsters.

But that same trait can be used for living characters as well.  Do your adventurers always wait for the bad guys to be asleep before attacking?  Fine, put some golem guards to work.  They are always awake and never tire.  String bells on them and the second the golem gets into a fight, it will serve as its own alarm bell.  That way it won’t have to stop and hit the warning gong; the noise will just start.

We know - There is a strong faction of people out there who don’t care about anything that doesn’t do damage in an actual fight, but golems can be so much more than just stone fighters.  The tireless aspect allows them to work 24 hours a day (or 21 if you’re from Fletnern).  The poison resistance and no breathing thing can be used to allow them to walk underwater, through evil forests with poisonous plants, or ignore that poison spitting dragon you thought was so tough.

So when to use them outside of combat?  Think of them as engines that never need to eat, drink or rest.  Your fantasy house doesn’t have air conditioning?  Let the golem fan you all day long - or turn the axle that fans the whole house - or maybe bellows?  Not really sure how that works, but maybe.

But that can work too.  The golem pumps the bellows on the forge with one hand and swings the hammer with the other - boom - better than an apprentice who is always bitching about being tired and he swings harder than the veteran smith.  Or pulls as strong (or stronger) than the mule.  Or carries chests filled with treasure that the party never would have been able to budge.

There are often people who try to use magic to mimic modern day conveniences - like our fanning suggestion.  Golems aren’t just engines or vehicles, they’re the fantasy era robot.  How interesting are robots?  Well, judging from the amount of sci-fi stories about them, pretty darn interesting.  But we said they were mindless?  So what?  This is high fantasy, who’s to say that a demon, ghost or something cannot take over the golem?  That would be pretty cool - needing to exorcize the golem in order to regain control of it!

Please don’t get hung up on what’s different about golems between the different games.  Recognize these things for what they are - massively strong soldiers or laborers who never tire and will never run away in fear.  That is a cool thing!

Centaurs, Minotaurs and Satyrs - Oh My!

At this point, if you are reading this blog and you are unaware of Small Bites, shame on you!  Small Bites (officially Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites) is a massive project we’ve taken on to both flesh out the World of Fletnern and share it with the world.  But here, share it really means “take direction”.  What do you want to know more about?  What are you curious to see, or see our take on?  This really is intended to be a community project!

And we’ve just released the latest edition:  The Centaur Warlord of Lockney and Other Tales of the Beast Men aka All About Centaurs.  We think that’s our longest title yet, and most of them are pretty long!  So what’s this one about?  Well centaurs and the other beast men, silly.  We’ve laid out the six centaur cultures from the World of Fletnern, along with the way the satyrs and minotaurs live.  But we know not everyone is into the societies and world building pieces of this, so don’t worry!  There’s a lot of stuff in there about how to fight with and against centaurs, including how we think you can make them player character races as well.

Board Enterprises is an “old school” style of publisher.  You’re not going to get glossy pages and two-thirds of the page covered in art, but then again, you’re not going to pay $50 for a 15 pages of content in a 48 page book.  We’re all about the content!  Curious or just not trusting us?  You’re in luck, because the World Walker edition is FREE!!  Now you have to try it!  We dare you!

It’s Not Every Day You see a Golem Horse (or is it?) - Part Two

OK, so we needed a Part 2 because Part 1 got off on a tangent that wasn’t supposed to happen.  Part 1 became all about game balance and magic items.  This was supposed to be about how magic is viewed by the “commoners”.

But it is important to know how common magic is in your world before you can figure out what people’s reaction to it is going to be.  Most low fantasy worlds employ witch hunters, mainly because rare things, like magic, are to be feared.

But what about in high fantasy worlds?  Do the farmers just watch golem horses march past their farms and think, gee, don’t see that every day?  Or do they gather their children and hide in the root cellar?  Well, if your world has the large amount of magic Fletnern has, it’s probably somewhere in-between.

All of this really does depend on the amount of magic you have in your world and whether it is seen as being evil, or dangerous, or just a normal part of life.  For me, the “commoners’ (I don’t know what else to call all of the regular people) recognize magic most often when they see it.  If they see certain types of magic, they probably react with a “Gee that’s interesting” kind of an attitude.  Things like healing magic or healing potions probably get this type of reaction.  Though a full resuscitation from the dead should get a stronger reaction.

But if the farmers are out in the fields and a fireball goes of whizzing by their heads, they do grab the children and head for the root cellars.  They know enough to afraid of battle magic, even if they aren’t terrified of healing magic or golems or even a necromantic skeleton.  This most likely comes from some level of familiarity with magic.  If they were completely ignorant of magic, they might not know to be afraid if some sort of colorful fog cloud killer came rolling over the fields towards them.  Those poisonous fog attack spells can be pretty devastating, but if they’ve never heard of this before, they might mistake a poisonous cloud for a normal cloud.  OK, they may still do this, but ...

So the point is really this:  You need to know how commonplace and unexceptional magic is in order to figure out how people will react to it.  This is yet another of the “you really need to do some of the world building” things.

But does it matter to the players what the commoners think?  It should.  There are magical items that show themselves clearly:  golem horses, flaming swords, lighted staves, armor etched with glowing sigils, etc.  What happens when the party comes to town looking for a room at the inn?  Does the innkeeper tell them all the rooms are full?  Does the sheriff show up to walk them to the other end of the town?  Are the witch hunters brought out to interrogate them?

The reaction to magic in general should be the reaction to the party, at least once they become successful.  In most places (low population density places) all strangers are suspect.  This goes triple for the ones carrying weapons and looking like they are ready to kill something (i.e. adventurers).

But the stories and myths matter too.  If there are stories of foolish adventurers opening old crypts and letting all the evil creatures out, then the people are going to be that much more concerned about strangers.  If every myth is about heroes gloriously conquering all evil, well, then maybe not so much.  Yeah, it’s almost always somewhere in the middle, isn’t it?

The commoners’ reaction to magic should also be a regional issue.  The plantation folks are going to be a lot less trustful of mages then the folks who’s town is centered around a magical university, or probably any university for that matter.  But those closer to universities and other centers of young, untrained folks making relatively big mistakes would be those who know the stories of what happens when things go wrong.  It is complicated and that’s OK!

One of the better ways to handle it is to make the reaction different for different people, even in the same town, but that puts a lot more stress on you as the GM.  Unquestionably, stereo-types are easier to GM than individual.

Still - presentation means a lot.  A hero who flies his white pegasi into town for lunch and tips well is not going to be feared as much as the dark and sinister looking wagon driver who has two skeletal oxen pulling his wagon.  It may be silly, but simply wearing a black hat or a white hat matters.

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It’s Not Every Day You see a Golem Horse (or is it?) - Part One

So the question has been asked in this blog before:  How Much Magic Is There?  For a GM and world builder, I think that is probably the most vital question.  Seriously, that is THE question that must be asked when you are setting up your world.  Once you decide, you can tweak your answer, but you cannot change it too much, maybe with a huge global event, but not “just because”.

So what do you do?  For me, it has always been easy.  I play High Fantasy.  In fact, I even played a game called “High Fantasy”, which always confused me because they allowed for guns.  Anyway, in a high fantasy setting, there is a lot of magic.  Lots of magic comes with huge concerns for maintaining game balance.  Let the party acquire too many magical long swords and you could make them unstoppable.  Nowhere is this risk bigger than when you let your PCs purchase magical items.

In Fletnern, you can bring in nearly any item and have it enchanted.  This makes the game balance risk huge, because as the GM you get the party enchanting weapons, armor, rings, shoes, horseshoes (you want a flying horse, don’t you?), and so on beyond your ability to predict.  So how do you counter this?  OK, how you counter magic unbalancing your game is a topic for a 300 page book, but we’ll hit a few of the highlights here.

First, enchanters and alchemists need to be expensive!  By keeping magic costly and watching how much treasure you hand out, you can restrict what they are able to buy.

But second, and I think more importantly, actually make up the enchanters in the party’s home town.  If you say, “There is an enchanter in town and he will enchant anything you can afford to buy” you have already lost the campaign.  Maybe it’s easier in Legend Quest because enchanting is a defined form of magic, but if I recall correctly that other huge game required the enchanters to know a whole bunch of spells if they were going to try and craft anything.  The point is - don’t let them know every one of those other spells.

Let’s use LQ as an example:  The enchanter in this smaller city knows the following spells:  animated parry, hardened-steel, and flight.  He has three power levels (journeyman enchanter).  So what does that mean?  Well first off, it means that he cannot make your sword hit more often, in fact he’s pretty much focused on defensive magics.  Why would someone do that?  Well, mainly so his customers don’t kill him.  If some barbarian who hates mages orders a battle axe with vorpal sharpness, what are the chances that he cleaves the enchanter in order to avoid paying him or to recover his payment?  Too high for the enchanter.  This guy avoided that possibility by not knowing and therefore not offering vorpal sharpness as a service.

But what can he do?  Actually quite a lot.  By putting animated parry on both sword and shield, he can make the PC a lot harder to hit in battle.  With hardened-steel, he can allow mages to carry glass swords that will function just as well as steel ones but not interfere with their magic. (Steel and magic don’t mix in LQ.)  With flight, he can allow people to move faster and gain other advantage normally not allowed.  Or he could cast it on a spear and allow the spear to have ranges more like a bow.  These are not small things.

But he is also limited by the power level 3.  He’s not crafting the most powerful magical items in the world.  This allows the GM to put in a couple of juicy magical items (anything Power level 4 or better) into the adventures and still have the players get excited.

One of my better uses for this specific “details as restrictions” is the Ivory and the Amber Enchanters.  These two guys are active in the city of Rhum.  They are friends and rivals.  One always etches his protection amulets on ivory while the other always uses amber.  (Being formerly living things they both make enchanting easier.)  If you want fire wards, frost wards, or “shield spells” (defense-magical), you go to the Ivory Enchanter.  If you want defense-physical, defense-magical or charm wards, you go to the Amber Enchanter.  Other than protecting people from spells (defense-magical) they don’t even compete, and are happy enough to send clients to each other.  Because they are so limited in what they sell, they actually have protection amulets on hand and can sell them to a party ready to head out on an adventure right now.  No need to wait while he crafts the thing.

There is an underlying thought here that may not yet be obvious:  I allow magical items to be sold in every major city in Fletnern, BUT only the lesser items.  This gives adventurers something to save up for, but the truly game unbalancing things come only from me as the GM or seen another way, from looting the corpses of the big nasty evil guys at the end of the dungeons.

When Slavery Works

With the full expectation of pissing off just about everyone - Let’s talk about slavery.  Worse yet, let’s talk about the morality of slavery.

Forget what you might think about the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the Age of Discovery.  You have to think farther back, because slavery is not as easy as a racial issue in most fantasy worlds.  Anyone can become a slave regardless of race or ethnicity.

In Fletnern, slaves typically come from war.  But they can also come from other origins.  The most obvious right now is the earthquakes on Hughijen.  Massive earthquakes in the desert region near Lympeid have been causing the wells in the villages to collapse.  This in turn forced refugees to go to other places where the resources were already spread too thin.  Those with the money to escape chose to escape.  The problem is that they chose the wrong folks to help them escape.

Centaurs sail the open seas in huge ships, trading whatever they can or even venturing into piracy.  They were some of the first on the scene in Lympeid, and they made all sorts of offers to the refugees.  New homes, new careers, in a safe and water lush new homeland.  But they didn’t mention the chains that went along with all of that.  The centaur warlords were in need of workers for their sweat shops, and they were happy to use the Dethebs.

Now one of the accepted principles of sea travel through the Anglic Straits (where the centaurs had to sail) is that if you are transporting slaves, the Myork Navy will sail up and sink you.  They might be able to save the slaves (or not), but they are not going to let the slavers through.  So why did the Navy let all those centaur ships through when they knew they were hauling Detheb slaves?

Now we’re into the morality of it all.  The current powers in Myork had a decision to make.  What to do about all the Detheb refugees?  If they brought that many Dethebs into their lands, there would be major cultural issues.  While they could absorb the refugees and even produce enough food to feed them, they couldn’t do it without giving up some of who they are.  The resulting culture would be an amalgamation of the two.  They were not willing to do that.

The other option was to sink the centaur ships and stop people from carrying Detheb slaves.  But that would doom the Dethebs to death, and in fact doom more than the number of slaves.  It had all happened before.  Problems in the desert lead to people overwhelming the resources and all the people die, not just the refugees.  So if it’s a numbers game, then Detheb slaves survive, the people of Lympeid survive, that’s a win-win, right?

That’s where the morality of slavery often comes to:  death or slavery, which is worse.  If the centaurs did not move large populations of people to where the resources could handle them, then a larger number of people would die.  What happens to the slaves, even if they all died, would be a greater “good” than an even larger number of people dying.  Granted this messed up “logic” also justifies slaughtering people during a famine, but we’re really not going there right now.

Let us please be clear:  Slavery is never morally right.  We are not arguing that slavery would be morally right, ever!  But in the minds of people pushed into really bad places, it might seem better than the alternative, especially if you expect the alternative to be death.

Let’s switch examples:  The elves of the Slyvanian Forest believe that death is better than slavery.  They are one of the few legal systems in Fletnern that allow for abortion.  The nearby Rhorics are absolutely against abortion.  They are so against it that if a poor couple winds up pregnant, they will often sell the baby to the plantation slavers.  Their morality tells them that selling (and really, it’s far more like giving) their child to the slavers means the child will have a chance to grow up on a large farm doing hard work, but living.  They see that as the far better outcome.  They couldn’t feed their baby, but the plantation will.

Let’s go back to the Dethebs escaping Lympeid.  While the greater good could be served by the Anglics of Myork allowing the refugees into their lands to work as low paid agricultural workers who could earn their keep, they are not willing to do that.  Their sense of patriotism (that is how they see it) tells them that doing so would weaken who they are as a people and this would endanger the world.  It doesn’t help that the Dethebs are stereo-typed as being lazy and willing to cheat anyone in order to make their lives easier - and there is a nugget of truth in that broad cultural stereo-type.

It would also be the greater good if the centaurs would pay the Dethebs a living wage and allow them to leave if they so choose.  But then why would they be willing to ship them across the sea?  Where’s the profit in that?  Without question, the centaurs who are running Detheb slaves are not moral people.  They are immoral people, and they like profiting by the easiest means.  So they know they are the bad guys, but they are OK with it.

So let’s sum up:  The Dethebs want to live.  Many of them, given the choice of slavery or death would choose slavery.  There should be other choices open to them, but right now there are not.  The Angles have chosen to allow the Dethebs to be sold into slavery in order to avoid a massive death toll in Lympeid.  There are other options open to them, but they believe those options to be more dangerous.  The centaurs are the bad guys, and they don’t care that slavery is immoral.

But what about the rest of the world?  Let’s just focus on the governments of Drentae for a minute.  While they don’t think about it, they have been relying on cheap fabrics made in the centaur sweat shops for a generation now.  Publicly they are against slavery, but they aren’t willing to do anything it.  Trying to “rescue” the new slaves would put a strain on their resources and dramatically increase the cost of certain fabrics.  Just to leave you with one point here - If you think these other governments are evil for allowing slavery and in a way profiting from it by getting cheaper goods, you might want to think about what’s happening in the world today.  There is a direct parallel!

This post was written as part of the soon to be released The Centaur Warlord of Lockney and Other Tales of the Beast Men aka All About Centaurs, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details all sorts of centaur cultures, including the centaur warlords who have been running slaves.

To get the full forty page Game Masters’ edition right now, subscribe to our Patreon project.  Otherwise, in a few weeks, we will release the shorter, but free World Walker edition