Homebrew Garden Golem Species Details

Overview

Golems are construct creatures made by the hands of mortals. They are all anthropogenic and shape in size, almost like an unfinished human. Usually, somewhere on their body, typically across their forehead or on their tongue, is a rune which contains the inscriptions from their creator and/or master.

Garden Golems are a variety of Clay Golem made to care for a selection of plants and herbs cultivated in their bodies. Garden Golems differ in appearance by being made mostly of fertilized dirt, gravel and clay rather than the usual purely clay composition of their more common counterparts.

Creation

Garden Golems are often created by wizards and druids to care for their rarer magical components such as dragontails, shiveroot and death caps. They are crafted from a single mound of fertile soil, clay, gravel and sometimes fertilizers weighing around 1,000 lb (450kg) in a process that typically took around a month. Though less common, they are also employed by flower collectors and conventional healers, as their magically active soil can keep even the most sensitive of medicinal plants and flowers comfortable.

Behaviour

They tend to speak in a mechanical or objective manner, avoiding subjective terms like "I feel." Golems do not feel pain and are therefore very curious when confronted with human or soft-fleshed emotions stemming from harm. They also might find things like entertainment and beauty superfluous, focused only on the practical and efficient ways of life. For all intents and purposes, golems are usually not very aware of their own living or death. They simply exist, which gives them a stunted sense of self-preservation. Some aware of what is the nature of a construct may come to abhor those with "true life." Or may appreciate plant life more than others, as they might relate to their state of unaware living.

Garden Golem Names

Golems are named based on their creator's fancies, if at all. Golems made by those with divine connections will have names of religious importance. Meanwhile Golems made by Wizards or merchants might be named after the plants they cultivate. Though Golems have no real sexual organs to delineate gender, their creator usually fashions them after one of the two sexes.

Names: Pan, Phytos, Gaia, Flora, Dragontail, Wolfsbane, Aloe.

 

Garden Golem Traits

As a Garden Golem, you gain the following traits:

Ability Score Increase

Your Constitution Score increases by 1 and your Strength Score increases by 2.

Living Earth

You are the soil made living. Your creature type is Construct instead of Humanoid. As such, spells like Cure Wounds don't affect you, and you are immune to spells like Crown Of Madness or Dominate Person because they specifically target Humanoids. You are resistant to Acid and Poison damage, as well as immune to being poisoned, and diseases.

Although you do not need to eat or breathe, you can still do so if you so choose and any food you eat will feed the plants growing on you  Rather than sleeping, you enter an inactive state for 6 hours each day. You do not dream in this state; you are fully aware of your surroundings and notice approaching enemies and other events as normal.

Moldable

Nonliving as you are, you can be repaired like an object. When the Mending or Mold Earth spells are cast on you, they have the following alterations: It has a casting time of 1 action. If you have 0 hit points you become stable. As part of the casting the caster may expend any level of spell slot to cause you to regain a number of hit points equal to 1d8, plus their spellcasting ability modifier. For each level of the spell slot expended you regain an additional 1d8 hit points.

Green Thumb

You have proficiency in the Nature skill. You can also ignore any and all plant-based material components for spells, potions and food, as you have amassed a large variety of plants on yourself.

Strengthened Soil

Your body is riddled from head to toe with various types of roots and branches. These make you all around tougher, giving you the following traits:

• You gain a +1 to your AC while unarmored and cannot wear armor unless it has been specially made for you.
• Your Unarmed attacks deal 1d6 bludgeoning damage on a hit.