Craft Golem

[4BR4]

Hi Ground,

starting from level 15 I'll take craft construct and want to create a golem. It can be priced about 70% of the WBL for the appropriate level and I plan to be able to update it up to level 18.

At level 15 I was thinking to create a Huge Advanced Clay Golem Shield Guardian Fiend-Infused with 6 additional HDs, fly movement of 25ft., couple of runes of shielding and weps mods for elven curve blade and composite longbow.

10 feats for a Huge Advanced Clay Golem Fiend-Infused Shield Guardian:

Blind-Fight
Toughness
Improved Initiative
Power Attack
Combat Reflexes
Weapon Focus
Intimidating Prowless
Skill Focus Intimidate
Cornugon Smash
Hurtful

So you have any other suggestion for a golem to be used between levels 15 and 18?

Thank you,

4BR4

[Psyren]

unseenmage is our resident golem guru, you may want to try PMing him if he doesn't see this

[Septimus]

At these levels, I might recommend to look at the Crystal Golem, with the Advanced, Shield Guardian, Commando, and Enlightened templates, with increase of size and HD accordingly. The fact to be able to greater possession them is nice.

[4BR4]

I like a lot the Commando template, what do you think are the best special attackes? I could select three of them with my 19HDs golem.

I should in fact increase the HDs to 20, so that I can have an additional feat from the Commando template for a total of 6 combat feats.

Then, considering that the HDs are changed to d12, and that the bonus hit points are increased by half, I could change Toughness for a different feat.

I looked at the Crystal golem and Greater Possession, if only the BAB used was the one of the golem I could like it more.

[4BR4]

Hi Ground,

So far I'm thinking to create a Huge Advanced Clay Golem Shield Guardian Fiend-Infused Commndo with 7 additional HDs, fly movement of 25ft., couple of runes of shielding and weps mods for elven curve blade and composite longbow.

I have 10 feats from Fiend-Infused and 6 Combat feats from Commando, and I selected the below:

Blind-Fight
Combat Reflexes
Cornugon Smash
Dazzling Display*
Disheartening Display*
Dreadful Carnage*
Furious Focus*
Hurtful
Improved Initiative
Intimidating Prowess
Persuasive
Power Attack
Shatter Defense*
Skill Focus Intimidate
Toughness
Weapon Focus

Alternatively I could change the feats with (*) with the below:

Dirty Fightning
Fury's Fall
Greater Trip
Improved Critical
Improved Trip

As Commando special attacks:

Brutal Attacks
Extra Attack
Retaliatory Strike

What do you think?

4BR4

[unseenmage]

While I'm less good for feat choice advice I can speak to general Constructs adadvice.

First off, Construct pricing is a crapshoot, and this is especially true for the pricing of golems.
Without a predictable rubric the prices tend to fluctuate wildly from creature to creature.

In the beginning of the Building and Modifying Constructs (https://aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Building%20New%20Constructs&Category=Building%20and%20Modifying%20Constructs)s ection of the PRD there are guidelines for pricing a new Construct.
Our table just uses these to price ALL Constructs, golems included. It simplified things greatly and as a bonus now when our PCs find a destroyed golem in a ruin somewhere we have a base price with which to sell it for salvage.
The Function of Memory spell means that any destroyed Construct is repairable and its nice to have a price for that; we just treat it like a broken magic item and reduce the gp accordingly.

CR*CR*500 is the base market price of any Construct.
÷2 For the price to craft it.
*0.1 for the price of the body.
The Craft DC is calculated just like.it would be for crafting a custom magic item.

Thus method does not provide an appropriate price for the Artificial Intelligence, Trompe L'oeil, or Alter Ego Constructs as those all allow one to basically craft part members which gets out of hand real fast.
Additionally, this method makes robots more accessible to craft as the printed prices were inflated. Using it with Clockworks can work IF you ignore the price hike baked into the clockwork subtype.


Another house rule we employ is to give Constructs hp based on Str just like undead get hp from Cha. With the caveat that this ability cannot give negative hp because otherwise any little Constructs just become xp ballons.

I also highly recommend playing around with the Amalgam template from the 3rd party book by Green Ronin named Advanced Bestiary. It's very complex but the key takeaways are that it let's one combine any two creatures and no matter what creature is combined with a Construct the end result is a Construct.
It's a lot of fun and I explore it's use in my Clockwork Spacewhales (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?470947-Madness-Such-As-This-Clockwork-Spacewhales) thread from some years back. We simply employed a flat +3 CR and adjusted when necessary, it was only ever necessary like twice.

I'm my experience Golems do not scale well on power as the player character who made them advances in level. That and the massive investment of money and time is all lost as soon as your big material friend-o hits zero hp. That said be sure your GM is amenable to your character having access to the Memory of Function spell or similar so you can potentially recoup those losses.

[4BR4]

Hi unseenmage,

thank you for your comments.

Unluckily, no 3PP at the table.

On the pricing of golems, I have found that all the modifications are priced, so it's not hard to calculate the final cost. As per your formula, my CR24 golem should have a market cost of 288K gp and a crafting cost of 144K gp.

Price of all the modifications that increase the CR: 21500gp golem, 25000gp huge size, 15000gp advanced template, 17500gp +7HDs, 45000 Shield Guardian, 25000 Fiend-Infused, 10000 Commando. Total is 159K.

I agree that golems do not scale well on power as the players advance in level, for this reason I'd like to stack templates on it so that its starting CR is way higher than the players.