Iron Golem

A titan of pure iron and magic, the Iron Golem packs a wicked punch (and halitosis to boot). I love golems and constructs of all kinds. If you haven't gathered that yet, you will.

I'm conflicted when it comes to the use of golems, though. On the one hand, I love surprising players with these mindless guardians (also I just love them a lot in general okay).

On the other hand, they're immune to an awful lot. Their vulnerabilities always seem to be something seldom available. In the case of the iron golem, being able to deactivate its breath weapon for 1 minute (basically the entire fight) is huge! However, that vulnerability is tied to neutralize poison, which I've never had anyone prepare or learn. It's also vulnerable to rust, which, outside of waving a rust monster antenna at it or having a primal caster for rusting grasp, isn't easy to accomplish RAW.

These are by no means reasons to not use the iron golem. It's the perfect monster to complement a mad wizard, a secret laboratory, or a ruin lost since the Iron Age. A merchant selling scrolls of neutralize poison outside of an iron golem's locale would be interesting if the party was too low of a level to properly fight it. Disable its breath weapon and run! It's not very fast, I'm sure your party can probably make it!

I mean, come on, it's a golem! You should use it in any instance that you can. Lucky for you, you've come to Beastfinder, and providing instances to use monsters is exactly what we do.

-TJ

Hook 1 (Max) - Iron Maiden

The small mining town of Coalsmine has been seeing a lot of commerce and travelers in the last couple of years. The reason? A discovery their workers made underground that has been since maintained by the local wizard, an ancient construct of considerable power.

"Come test your mettle against Iron Maiden!" all sorts of mercenaries and vagabonds are urged. The townsfolk, being clever as they are, charge a hefty sum for everyone who passes through that wants to try their hand in single combat against the golem. This has worked out surprisingly well for the people of Coalsmine, as they've seen a great upturn in their profits. Not many combatants manage to win and if they do, repairing the contraption proves an easy matter.

Rules of the challenge are simple—one combatant at a time, no single-use items, the one who manages to walk off the arena wins. The possibility of death is high and the town does not cover any recovery costs.

The arena is quite big for one-on-one combat, approximately one hundred by one hundred feet, laden with sand and barren. Once the challenger enters it, comes forth the Iron Maiden. One could mistakenly take her for a normal golem, though that would be a great miscalculation, as with each failure she had been modified and upgraded to become the ultimate killing machine beyond her original capabilities.

Hook 2 (TJ) - Haywire Handlers

The smog of the smokebelchers is getting to be a real problem. Each of the Utheni guilds has suggested various solutions to said problem. The air-purifying automatons wandering the streets of Dren are a pet project of the Golemancers Guild; this doubles as their bid to solve the smog problem and as their submission to the Contest of the Steel Kings. If this iron golem schematic is approved for entry and subsequently wins the contest, the election of the Golemancers Guild to the Forgeseat will mark the first time in 74 cycles that a fledgling guild has succeeded.

The Machinists Guild does not recognize the Golemancers Guild as an independent entity. While their reasoning is not official, the general consensus is that—considering the Golemancers are an offshoot of the Machinists—the Machinists tentatively have the rights to Golemancer developments. When one of the iron golems goes haywire and begins spewing the toxins back into the Dren atmosphere, Jarmek Shattermace, the current Forgeseat, doesn't care whom the golem belongs to, he just wants it stopped. The ramifications for the Golemancers' Forgeseat application will have to wait.

Hook 3 (Reece) - To Sink or Swim

A new piece of dwarven technology has proven particularly deadly in the conflict between the Relendish Isles and The Grand Tyranny. So far, only one ship of its kind has been fielded, and it was a genuine terror during the fight at sea.

The dwarves are particularly recalcitrant when it comes to sharing the secrets of their forging techniques, so no one really understands how exactly they got it to work, though it has most assuredly been their finest contribution to the war effort, at least since the advent of cannons.

The warship—known simply as The Iron Lady—is a floating monstrosity of iron, bristling with cannons and twice the size of any normal galleon. The hull of the thing was so impenetrable that The Tyranny had only one choice—boarding.

Unfortunately for those involved, this was their greatest error. The forecastle of The Iron Lady is ostentatiously adorned with the iron reliefs of two dwarven women, or so the Tyrannymen thought. Upon boarding the ship the two statues lept to life, tearing through the boarding party before pulling down the boarding ship's mast using massive rune-laden chains. Now, each ship that attempts to board the unbreakable hulk is rebuffed and similarly struck down. One report notes that a ship was entirely overturned in the water, killing everyone on board.

The Tyranny has a plan, though, to destroy the weapon before it turns the tide of the war.

Why try to destroy the golems, when you can simply shove them overboard where they will sink into the deepest depths of the ocean?