Here's Why The Puzzle Golem is D&D's Best Golem

hello and welcome to monster of the week the only show on the internet that thinks puzzles legally count as board games speaking of puzzles today we're taking a trip back in time to DD Third Edition to unearth one of the most puzzling creatures in D and D's history the puzzle Golem as always we're going to go over the Golem's publication history lore and ecology and then we're going to get into what this monster can do some ways we might use it in a ttrpg campaign and of course convert it into D and D fifth edition for all your Golem needs this creature is seriously one of the most unique things I've come across in a while so if you're ready to hear all about it try to pull yourself together because it's time for monster of the [Music] week the puzzle Golem first appeared in Dragon magazine issue 302 which hit store shelves in the year 2002 one of the article features was a best theary that consisted entirely of Golems as the SP flash page here illustrates five new Golems ready for your game were up for grabs I'm assuming most of you watching this know what a Golem is but on the off chance there's any confusion or you might have never encountered one of these creatures before essentially a Golem is a creature whose body is constructed out of mundane material and then granted life by Magic take the stone Golem for example it's literally just a statue that has been granted life with the casting of some spells let there be life it is of course a little bit more complicated than that but you get the general idea so back to the magazine the web Golem alchemical Golem mud Golem and rope Golem not to be confused with the hangman Golem all appear in this article with our subject the puzzle Golem closing out the bestiary the first thing I noticed when I came across this aside from the awesome artwork is that this creature has multiple stat blocks and that's because the core mechanic of this monster and what makes it so interesting thing is that it's essentially a large Stone Golem made up of smaller stone golems that can split apart or recombine at will so not only does it possess the same level of strength and brutality that your typical Golem has it can also divide that strength as it sees fit to give you a simple breakdown of how this works the puzzle Golem is by default a large construct it can split in half creating two medium constructs and then those two creatures can recombine into a large Golem or they can both split in half again creating a total of four small golems and then each of those Golems can split in half again creating eight tiny puzzle Golems obviously the creature physically gets a lot weaker proportionate to its size but you can probably start to understand how there's a lot of utility here Golems by their very nature are created by powerful spellcasters give my creation typically their creator has some sort of use in mind for the creature or intends to sell them to a client that has use for the Golem an important distinction to make here is that Golems are not sentient beings they are very sophisticated magical objects that can understand orders and carry them out but they are basically automatons a Golem commanded to guard a hallway by its Master will go and do so without question and should their Master die the Golem will literally just stand there guarding that hallway for the rest of time this is a really common type of situation to come across when you encounter a Golem locked away in a dungeon a Golem ordered to keep the castle tidy is going to still be doing chores and keeping the place clean potentially forever if something were to ever happen to its Masters before another order was given so with all of that in mind you can probably imagine why a Golem that can split into eight different pieces at will would come in handy but before we star to get into the many different ways you can use this monster let's talk about the actual abilities and mechanics of the puzzle Golem so you understand exactly how all this works let's start with the basics because this creature has a lot going on the standard puzzle Golem is a large cr11 construct it's got all the standard Golem traits like immutable form magic resistance magic weapons and Immunity to non-magic damage we've seen all that stuff before on literally every Golem printed in fifth edition I think so I don't imagine that I need to go over all of this great detail this Golem also has some mild regenerative properties that heal it for two D4 hit points at the start of each turn and that's nice for its survivability its primary attack is a pair of Slam attacks also known as the Golem hydraulic pressing the face of anyone who decides it's a good idea to get up close and personal and again that falls in line with stuff we've seen before but from here is where it starts to get really interesting as I mentioned the puzzle Golem can split into smaller pieces or reform a larger body and we have two actions that help us do that called split and rejoin respectively to sum this up in the simplest terms mechanically when this creature wants to split down creating multiple copies of itself say you have a large Golem it splits into two medium-sized golems and the large Golem ceases to be each new smaller Golem has half the number of hit points as the one they are dividing from and there is a stat block for this Golem at every size so you know how much damage its attacks do because they do of course get weaker as they get smaller now if your Golem was at Max HP the two medium Golems born of a large Golem will have 84 hit points each however if say your large Golem was wounded and only had 100 hit points remaining the two medium Golems would both only have 50 hit points remaining makes sense this works in Reverse as well so say for example two medium Golems are using the rejoin action they would merge into one large Golem with a total sum hit points of the two medium creatures combined and that brings me to the topic of hit dice in fifth edition D and D the type of hit dice that creatures use is determined by their size tiny creatures use d4s small creatures use d6s and this continues all the way up to gargantuan creatures who use d20s that wasn't the case in Third Edition though you could just assign whatever hit dice you wanted to a creature and it was all good normally this doesn't matter that much when I convert a monster if say it's a huge creature using d6s for some reason as it's hit dice I can just make my conversion using d12's and adjust the numbers accordingly but in the case of the puzzle Golem because of the way its hit points work as it divides itself and reforms trying to make its HP totals make sense while also changing dice categories with each iteration was a [ __ ] nightmare going from a large Golem with 16 d10 hit dice to a medium Golem with 8 d10 hit dice is pretty simple right it's just half the amount of hit Dice from the creature that it's split from and that's how I wanted to keep it I'm not saying it isn't possible to finesse the numbers and make them work work but for the sake of making this creature as userfriendly as it can be it just makes sense for it to use a d10 hit dice at every size category so if you look at my monster stat blocks and you're wondering why the tiny puzzle Golem has 2 d10 hit dice it's not a mistake it's by Design but while you're looking at that stat block the other thing you'll notice on there which I added to give this creature a little spice is an action which I had named hurl the Golem had no ranged attacks originally and I felt like I could do something about that so when this Golem uses hurl it literally tears off a chunk of itself and hurls it at a nearby enemy this not only causes a bunch of damage if the attack connects but the Golem also deals damage to itself proportionate to the average hit points of a puzzle Golem two size categories smaller than itself and then that little Golem appears in the space next to whoever it targeted with this attack so if say you have a large puzzle Golem using this action it literally tears off a small puzzle Golem out of its body and throws it at the enemy like a weapon and then that chunk of Golem that just got thrown and used as a ranged attack stands up and becomes a small puzzle Golem rolling into the initiative this attack becomes less feasible as the Golem gets smaller of course so it has to be medium or larger in order to do this but I think it's a really fun ability the last thing on the Golem stat block I want to talk about is its reconstruction trait this is pretty straightforward but basically as long as a single piece of the Golem survives it can gradually rebuild itself until it is reconstructed into its original size this obviously takes a long time and can't be done in combat but if and when this question comes up now you have an answer I should also mention that whenever this Golem combines two of its kind into a larger size or splits down to two smaller versions of itself any effects or enchantments that are affecting the creature cease to be this meaning that splitting and rejoining can be an excellent way to avoid status effects and will also allow the creature to consolidate hit points during the fight if it wants to in combat these these Golems tend to be very tactical and will often split into optimal numbers for battle depending on who its enemy is if it's facing off against a single dangerous threat it probably wants to be fully assembled in order to deal as much damage as possible with each attack however if it's up against a group of enemies taking the divide and conquer approach is going to serve it well most of the time and that is pretty much it except for one little thing the official printing of this monster caps out the creature at large size which makes sense because most Golems across D and D are large but I couldn't help but think what if two large puzzle Golems tried to combine could we reverse engineer the stat block of this creature in order to make a larger version of this Golem well we totally can and I did my version of the puzzle Golem has not only a tiny small medium and large version but also a huge and gargantuan version which I named the complete puzzle Golem as you can imagine with the way their power scales this gets out of hand pretty quickly the huge version of this Golem ended up at a cr17 and the gargantuan version is cr24 but I do think the final results were kind of awesome because now we have this Golem with challenge ratings that range from cr1 all the way up to cr24 meaning that literally any group can use this creature if you're a bunch of wouldbe adventurers just starting out maybe you face off against a couple tiny guys that turn into a small Golem and if you're a group of epic level heroes maybe you have to face off against a literal Colossus that can sh shift its form into a small army if need be there are so many ways an encounter with this creature can pan out so let's put the pieces together and talk about a few so just to get this out of the way any of your typical Golem plot points are going to work with this creature they make fantastic dungeon Denis Left Behind to guard an ancient tomb and they're also likely to be body guards assigned to a powerful wizard one way I think you could put a bit of a Twist on this is If instead of having just the Golem be a singular encounter you had a massive puzzle Golem in a dungeon whose parts were scattered throughout the entire area maybe in order to open up a secret vault the players have to track down and destroy all 32 tiny pieces of a complete puzzle Golem some tiny Golems could be combat encounters others could be hiding behind puzzles or traps and others could simply be hiding in plain sight amongst ancient statues and the like if you don't want to go the simple combat route and have the players destroy the little Golems maybe you have to find and set them all free so that they can assemble in the middle of the dungeon and push a giant boulder out of the way or something and if you want to mix up the other Trope of a Golem serving a wizard maybe you have a puzzle Golem owned by a wizard that acts as a Wizard's House staff instead of a butler and a bunch of employees you can just have a dozen puzzle Golems running around tending to chores cooking meals chopping firewood whatever this could make for a fun little bit of World building for a wizardly NPC and if combat ever does break out it's bound to make things a bit more interesting speaking of combat I think the idea of a puzzle Golem being used used in Warfare is very compelling a singular complete puzzle Golem can split into 16 small Golems so if you have a dozen complete puzzle golems in the service of your villain that's literally an army having a puzzle Golem Squad of soldiers going on raiding missions on behalf of the game's villain could be a great replacement for your average orc or goblin war band and who knows maybe there are even larger puzzle Golem configurations that combine two gargantuan specimens into something much more terrifying I'm just now realizing izing that Me growing up as a Transformers kid probably has a lot to do with why I like this monster so much I'm not saying you should make a Golem that is literally just Metroplex but you could make a Golem that's literally just Metroplex for the uninitiated Metroplex is a Transformer that can change between a giant robot in the shape of a city so maybe you've got a city where the whole thing is just modular and it can become a bunch of dudes if need be at any given moment but however you choose to use this Golem I think it can be a nice way to change up the Golem tropes that we're used to seeing in D and D and I just just think it's a lot of fun as always if you do want to use this monster at your game table Link in the description down below are its fifth edition stats in the form of a Google Document and if you are one of my lovely patrons over on the dungeon dad patreon page you can find the puzzle Golem PDF high resolution stat block all laid out beautifully by Indestructible with the new artwork and all that fancy schmancy Stuff Plus Patron support helps me do what I do here on this channel so thank you so much to all my patrons who are watching and support what I do here and special thank you goes out to our patron of the week this week's randomly selected Patron is fits of Rage thank you for seeing fit to throw some extra support my way I truly appreciate it and thank you for watching as always if there's a monster in the future you'd like to see me cover on this channel whether it's from DND D or a different tabletop role playing game let me know in the comments down below or let me know in the monster suggestion Channel over on the dungeon dad Discord it will be added to the master list of monster suggestions and who knows you might just see it show up on an episode of Monster of the week I loved talking about this monster it was just a creature I came across in one of the old magazines and was instantly like yep we're talking about that for sure so again thank you so much for watching consider subscribing dropping a like if you haven't already and stick around to the end because we've got a preview of something highly anticipated coming next week [Music] something Ferris is turning in the mountains one of the largest creatures of its kind prepares for battle but can you pay the iron [Music] price next episode Iron Dragon tune in next time for lots more fan service

Channel: Dungeon Dad

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Id: xCOMwXx1e68

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023