I love the idea of a council of wizards who each have a puzzle golem, and when their city is under threat they voltron their golems to become the gargantuan guardian
Forget house. It can be the mountain the adventure takes place in. ..... Or the asteroid and the invading army from outer space. Tossed down to the surface of the planet. Immune to non magical damage. Slow rolling alien invasion
As someone just starting out on the dnd monster lore, I was coming into this video expecting a golem who has a set fondness for puzzles and puzzling questions/riddles because their creators had a beautifully warped sense of humor
I am not sure which is scarier, fighting a gargantuan golem that could fuck me up or fighting 32 tiny little golems that would bash me to death with pure numbers
Imagine the party finds a small puzzle golem with a key in a dungeon and it flees then later they corner it and a bunch of other puzzle golem parts run in and combine to make a large one and it starts a boss fight
Or if that particular small golem IS the key. You have to capture it, but it keeps luring the party into ambushes by trying to meet up and combine with other scattered golems, then it can try to split away and run during combat. If you capture it right away, then you can either ignore the other golems, which might follow and confront the party as a stronger enemy; or let it lead you to the other golems, so you can systematically fight weaker enemies.
@@Akavir7 A giant healing potion automaton that is surrounded by other enemies would be a pretty neat encounter. The kool-aid golem knows to bust through walls and splash healing juices on his people keeping their HP topped off but he is also a large red annoying target for the party to deal with however when he dies he shatters and soaks everyone around them not only healing but adding bonus HP. Oh yeeeea.
I like the idea of this being a non-combat thing early on, say, capture a bunch of tiny puzzle golems so you can put them together to solve a puzzle somehow. Then much later on you encounter say a terrasque, the party cannot take it on, but then remember the puzzle golem and have to gather a bunch of them to make a gargantuan one to fight the terrasque for/with them.
My immediate thought was "what if I had a group of these and the components of each were interchangeable with any others?" Imagine just a swarm of pieces that could each combine or split at will. That would be tremendously versatile in combat. P.S. I really liked your ideas about these lads using some of their own body mass as a projectile that spawns a smaller version and also the idea of combining them into a truly leviathan foe. Keep up the outstanding work, bro. ✌️🙂
Had an idea for a chimera-like.puzzle golem. The party had to find three puzzle golems that are each designed to be part of an animal. Once they are brought to the center room, they will fuse together to create a chimera puzzle golem and if the golem is made of the three wrong animals, then it will attack the party. If it makes the right combo, the golem will split into tinier forms and go behind a very small hole in a room filled with a substance that does not hurt the golem, but kills anything else that walks in. The golems will then reassemble and press a switch that opens the door to the next part of the dungeon.
Actually, hit dice in 3rd edition and derivatives is determined by creature *type* - so fey had d6, animals had d8, constructs had d10, and dragons had d12, for example.
You are a genius (perhaps an evil genius) for scaling it up to gargantuan. Fantastic idea! I love this golem and how much its size plays a role with its combat mechanics!!
So you created a Kaiju golem that can reassemble itself from even the smallest bits. You could make a campaign around trying to prevent the reassembly of a war construct that assaults cities when it is combined. Having to deal with some mad wizard's dead man switch and hunting down the threat that can persist and advance naturally throughout a party's journey.
Imagine if these guys came in small variants with different magitech weapons - you could then combine them to generate different mobile weapons platforms fit for different battles
I love the idea that there is a city called puzzle city or somthing and everyone has small puzzle golem servants and later it is revealed the entire city is just made out of inactive puzzle golems ordered to change themselves into the form of a city, mabe the party can watch people slip through doors that form in sold walls or see villains rearange entire houses around them to slowly put it together.
Puzzle Golem is super cool and I love the idea of using a couple in place of a team of butlers and maids. But can I just say: HECK YAH IRON DRAGONS! Definitely hyped to see your take on them.
Some ideas, have either the party employ the gargantuan puzzle golem to fight off the xixecal as a distraction or to just hold it off while something else is going down, or just have them be like hirelings rented out by the local spellcaster
So, just hear me out here: Remember that Sibillic Guardian plot hook, where they informed the party that a demon army would invade in five years’ time? Seems like the sort of threat that just might warrant the party tracking down the thirty-two pieces of an ancient super weapon that were sealed away in dungeons scattered all across the continent!
I was enjoying a simple night listening about golems and thinking on what to do for a golem maker's lab. But that hurl move made me rethink defense systems as a whole.
Huh didn't know 5E did creature HD by size category.. in 3e & 3.5e (that I normally play) it's by creature type for example all dragons regardless of size get d12 for HD and Fey get a d6 for HD. Though the bigger monsters tend to get more HD and Con for more HPs. Still nice work on the conversions as always.
A couple ideas on how to use this monster: If you have a campaign in space, you could do a fusion between this monster and the genius loci, to make a planet/moon sized golem, that is the secret weapon of a super powerfull final boss or a really powerful organization. You could borrow some from the previous idea and make a death star that's just a bunch of puzzle golems You could make the Dr. Wondertainment's Little Misters from the SCP universe, just have a wizard craft a gargantuan golem and divide it until they are the size of a toy, maybe one category smaller than the current lower limit, and "sell" 'em to kid's parents. This wizard could be the only one who ever created a puzzle golem and now a king wants the party to collect all the tiny pieces to make the golem and use it as a weapon, or, perhaps, it is like a legend and the final boss is trying to assemble the golem back to conquer the lands. It could also be used like the hours, minutes and seconds from Alice through the looking glass My favorite one is to have a city of golems, all of the small category, and each one has its own personality, family and life, but they are part of a larger golem who is hunting them down to restore his full power and the players have to fight the larger golem to defend the city.
This is perfect. I’d already worked on a similar concept for an animated armour that combined with more suits of armour to be a mega-multi-limbed-weapon-wielding-warrior, that could fling whole animated armours from itself, like the puzzle golem!
I am totally going to have a wizard with a complete version seige my heros in their base of operations if they start to get too comfortable in one place, it splits into a few large golems to break down the walls then they split into a raiding party to clear the place out.
I love it! Imagine a big, friendly golem tossing off a piece if itself before sacrificing itself for the party/a town/etc. Party gets a little NPC friend for a bit as it recovers.
Halfway through the video, and phenomenal work as always! ...but also its now occurring to me that the term "walking army" is a weird thing to specify when you think about it lol Like most armies can do that I think
I love Monster of the Week. It’s so cool to see so many strange D&D monsters from previous editions get adapted to 5e alongside a full explanation of what the creature is and how to use it. Keep up the good work!
I'm doing a campaign where the main villain is a Shardmind and I'm definitely going to re flavor one of these guys to be a recurring enemy. Probably going to make them Crystal or something.
I love the idea of having a couple huge ones that act as separate buildings/watch towers/statue guards and that just disassemble when under attack or roam around day to day. (Not in the walls, but stationed around.) Maybe The wizards lawn ornament just disappears each morning and reappears each night as it dies daily errands.
Put this in a tech setting, like Neon Dynasty Kamigawa and you get combiners! Devastator! Menasor! Puzzle Golems attack! Edit: Blast! Dungeon Dad beat me to the idea!
For some reason I can't help but imagine an ancient wizard hell bent on revenge, and has adapted his plan and his laboratory to churn out a horde of these guys, and then utilize the combined pieces as a mobile fortress. Each gargantuan golem incorporates a portion of his fortress at it's core, each portion is accessible via linked teleportation portals, and each portal core also provides a buff that maximizes the golems healing factor until shut down. This allows for the blunt force approach but requires teamwork and prep.
This kind of golem could act as "maintenance" for an old dungeon, explaining why it isn't in ruins, why the torches are lit, etc. It could also serve as an interesting "puzzle" if you give to each of the little versions an ability (elemental affinity, magical power, some tool) and the players have to make them split or merge to achieve different effects (an electric one can power machines, merging it with a metal one you can create circuits for more complex problems, etc). Or you can use the idea of them being part of a city, add spanners and other mimics and create a magical living city where everything is being taken care of by the creatures, until it's not and the mages need help (because they are all useless in anything not magical)
Never disappointed, I've put some of your other adaptations into my campaigns but this one I'm designing a dungeon around. Makes for a dynamic fight, which I always love
I recall back in AD&D there was a stained-glass golem. I'd like to see a video covering the stained-glass golem. Some more monsters you could cover are the lion-based wemic and the lamassu.
Lammasu. All three are on the list, and added your name to them. In AD&D it was just the glass golem, but 3rd changed it to stained glass. Added both names.
absolutelly loved it. In my case i did a couple modifications to make it even scarier. I changed Split and Rejoin to be bonus actions and added a "healing ability" to the rejoining ( one hit dice of the category joining the other golem part, never exceding the HP maximum of the largest involved) That way the party may be keen to finish off the smaller ones as soon as they can and the golem has a good motive to wanting to rejoin instead of just enjoyng multiple initiative trackers. I also changed the Hurl attack to make the larger gollem decide on whichever smaller size golem it want to toss and track the number of splits made to reduce its size accordingly. (One large decides to throw a tiny golem, them later a smal one, them its reduced to medium but could throw one more tiny without having its size reduced, Apply HP changes for every throw) Much harder to track and very situational, but could sometime come in handy
Dude i’ve got limerence for you now because you worked out the gargantuan stats. You just saved me some much work for a thing i wanted to figure out. A library where if it’s damaged or attacked the rubble becomes golems.
I've always wondered what an iron dragon would be like. Living in mountains eating iron deposits and veins. Breathing rust that it clean off of itself. Might even be territorial for the usually good aligned metallic dragons. Can't wait to see how close I am or what other people thought up.
Thanks for including the CR 24 version. This is very helpful for my party of level 16 gestalt (dual classed but normal everything else) characters in a very high magic setting. Being able to include the little ones as cute roleplaying encounters, familiars, pets, and little friends for the characters as well as having them all voltron into a gigantic big boi for combat (either helpful in defending against some actually credible threat or as an adversary fight in a dungeon of some kind) is wonderful and super helpful, because a lot of CR20+ monsters are a bit too over the top to use a lot of the time, and my party is near pathologically cautious all the time (I have always warned them about potential dangers, and yet they always pick to rock the boat as little as possible, so I'm confident I didn't terribly traumatize them.
Weird idea for this monster The puzzle golem is the holder and key to a powerful item The 8 tiny golem each hold a part of an item in their body The item is highly complex taking a 21 intelligence check and 2 days to put it together right without some thing happening .(evil LOL) The golems can put the item together flawlessly as long as one is still whole. From here you can play it many ways but for a long haul campaign. This would be fun. Each golem/item is a magic item together along with a "key" to control them. The golems have modes which the hold of the key can choose. The modes are ,run and hid , magic items ,seeker, unite, command . Run and hide is the base mode in which the golem goal is not to be found by anyone. So it will hide or fight off any one that come near it. Magic item mode in which it turns into a magic item that can't move on it own and anyone can used without the "key". Seeker mode is a mode in which it becomes a compass to find it's other parts. It can only point to the way it nearest part. Unite modes is the mode which the combine the pieces of the item together. Set requirements for this one or be derailed real quick . Range ,number of users needed and or any thing to keep one person with just one key from doing it ease. Command mode is them working like normal golems. Now this is where it can get wild you can choose to combine the golems into larger golem to get a more powerful magic item. So you can start with +1 one dagger then combine into a +1dagger that shoot fire-bolt. Next a +2sword that shoot fire-bolt and so forth till you get an item that would level a city
I have to say I appreciate these videos so much because I had an idea for a Golem type encounter for a campaign I'm running and this guy fits in perfectly for it! I'm super hyped to run this now thank you so much!
I like the idea of the golem but I think we could do something really fun with this guy that I thought was missing. As stated in the video The puzzle golem is capable of tearing itself apart to make more golems. But it still reforms to look the exact same but with less mass. So to me it seems like the golem is made of wet clay or some malleable material that can easily be reshaped. So what I'm imagining is a more intelligent version of this golem that utilizes this ability and as a result can end up just as dangerous as the bbeg. If you haven't caught on yet, what I'm getting at is that the golem could reshaped itself to look like anyone or almost anything. Like imagine if you see a house that has tons of small golems pretending to be potted plants. Or what about a golem that painted itself to look like another creature. I mean on a close inspection it should be obvious or if something damages the paint it should give them away. Or what about a gargantuan golem pretending to be a mountain. Maybe one that's infested the city and started replacing people with itself. Maybe one is a merchant in every city (like nurse joy in Pokemon. They're almost all the exact same but different) I can see this being used in so many ways with how versatile it is. I mean it was versatile before this would make it insanely versatile.
It’s 3:52 am in Orlando Florida. I just got to the Airbnb from a music festival. It’s a 3 day event and I’m ending day one with Dungeon Daddy. Life is good
I would keep splitting for 1d10 Mini and even 1d5 Micro sizes. And if you have multiple puzzle golems, if they share a creator and orders, they can merge. Heck, having a bunch of the littlest ones as runners to carry orders to the half sized ones, merging which allows the most complex instructions to be passed in a turn. Of course, a bunch of them from the same creator, and they each have a pierce of the others, they could gestalt. The Complete size could just due to cube-square limits, if you got 6 (or 8) of these, and they swap the parts.... they'll feel the pain of damage from when when they are merged, but they are still a group mind.
3.5 hit dice was not just "whatever" for all of them, some of specific types (notably undead and constructs) always had d12s, which were the highest, but that was technically a balancing mechanic against their lack of a Constitution score (they literally had a "-" instead of a number)
Ok, An age ago during a long forgotten war, a golem factory was made as able bodied wizards grew fewer by the day. Victorious however, the wizards shut it down when it was no longer needed. One day, a nameless tomb raider delves in and reactivates it, causing war ready golems to scour the lands looking for enemies of their forgotten masters, be that every race besides one or whatever.
An underground vault guarded by a puzzle golem, with kobold-sized tunnels it can easily navigate, and bigger hub rooms where it can assemble to confront intruders if need be. The final obstacle is a giant vault door - most creatures strong enough to pull it open won't fit through the passages, and the chamber has countermeasures against polymorph.
a plothook i instantly thought of when you mentioned going up to maximum megasize is that the people of a city buy small puzzle golems as personal assistants... but the puzzle golems have a hidden underlying instruction to merge on a given date and destroy the city, with the players having to find out when and what the threat to the city actually is, and somehow deal with it before the golems can merge into a city-ending threat, since it'd probably be easier to deal with smaller bunches of small golems rather than one, two or three cr24s...
This is definitely a cool monster and I'm glad you highlighted it. For simplicity, I probably would have given it a variation of the ooze split ability and scaled down the damage dice on the monster's slam attacks depending on its size.
I'm so happy to see all this, I am creating a defense system of one of the cities in my world that I knew would utilize magic for it. Puzzle golems are perfect!
6:13 Actually, I believe the hit die type was dependant on creature's Type or class levels (if applicable), and thus all Constructs (i.e. golems) would always get the same HD type of d10, all Undead got d12, all Outsiders got d8, etc. It was even written in guidelines for creating new monsters as "A creature's type determines the size of its Hit Dice". The only exception was humanoids without racial hit dice, but with class levels (in a PC or NPC class).
I love the idea of a powerful benefactor of the party requesting retrieval of an ancient form of Golem who's creation process has been lost to the ages, but the recurring villain is after it too. The players could get to the end of a dungeon, only to see the main antagonist plucking another puzzle golem fragment, leaving them with an activated trap or a slowly growing enemy puzzle golem while they poof away time and again.
I've used a similar gimmick with elementals in my homebrew setting. Only the main four types, and only the generic ones, not oddities like mephits and so on. This was in 3e/3.5 when there were stats for elementals of all sizes, so it was easy to implement them being able to merge or divide as needed.
Imagine you're a party off to fight the "Construct King", a tyrant who rules with an iron fist and a golem army. You encounter various types of golems as you adventure to the capital city on a mountain, only for an old man to tell you the mountain appeared overnight, the city the next day, and all the golems managing the city look the same. Nothing like the big bad hiding in a castle made from a Complete Puzzle Golem turned into the city, policed and maintained by another complete puzzle golem split into medium or small sizes, on the back of another complete Puzzle Golem as the mountain. A good way to dissuade murder-hoboing and finally getting the party to play along on a stealth-based campaign.
Once again you come out with a creature the exact moment I needed one and I intend to use this tomorrow for my first ever one shot. Thank you. Also gonna ask for ethergaunts once again. Keep it up
I've played a ttrpg puzel board game. Basically D&D but before the movement phase of your turn you also get to add a tile to the map and roll a D4 and D100 to see what's on it. It could be a monster, treasure, a puzzle/trap, or nothing.
An idea for regularly "encountering" them is maybe a guild or some organization uses them as training dummies. Say the fighter learned a new feat or the wizard has a new evocation spell and they want to test them out, they can use the puzzle golems to test their effectiveness on single, large targets or on many smaller ones.
Hi! I recently used this monster with a small amount of reflavour for a Jelly Golem (Jell-o for americans) My players had been them running through this willy wonka style dungeon, having fought some chocolate golems, a few candy floss spiders and a jelly golem as a boss fight (using these stats) thanks so much for the help, not having to properly make my own!
Puzzle golem: my new standard maintenance golem. Small enough to re-mortar the bricks in the drain pipes and big enough to replace a rotting beam in the great hall without scaffolding.
Thanks for watching! Let me know what you want to see next time!
I would love to see you take some of your previous Monsters of the week and design an Encounter around them. I think that would be really interesting.
Please please please the Tsochar from Lords of Madness. We need more tentacle body horror in our lives
I would like to see the wingless wonder converted to 5e it's a goofy critter on the level of a flumph with some special powers
Ok hold on I need to hear more about this alchemical golem now
could you talk about more para-elementals? I find those interesting
I love the idea of a council of wizards who each have a puzzle golem, and when their city is under threat they voltron their golems to become the gargantuan guardian
This is a great idea lol someone needs to put this in their campaign
Dude, that's a great idea! I kinda wanna try that one day
Love it
With your powers combined!
So- so- this could be a voltron for fairies?
If your puzzle golem gets big enough, it can be your house staff AND your house.
Forget house.
It can be the mountain the adventure takes place in.
.....
Or the asteroid and the invading army from outer space.
Tossed down to the surface of the planet.
Immune to non magical damage.
Slow rolling alien invasion
All I am imagining now is the start of combat the roof of the house becoming a fist and punching someone.
One wizard makes a house out of a mimic, his friend makes one out of a golem.
howls moving castle
🙂I'm a fan of forest-magic style, with woodland creatures cleaning up the place, and living in a big grown-hollow tree.
Creating the puzzle golems stat block was a puzzle in itself.
As someone just starting out on the dnd monster lore, I was coming into this video expecting a golem who has a set fondness for puzzles and puzzling questions/riddles because their creators had a beautifully warped sense of humor
I am not sure which is scarier, fighting a gargantuan golem that could fuck me up or fighting 32 tiny little golems that would bash me to death with pure numbers
Imagine the party finds a small puzzle golem with a key in a dungeon and it flees then later they corner it and a bunch of other puzzle golem parts run in and combine to make a large one and it starts a boss fight
Or if that particular small golem IS the key. You have to capture it, but it keeps luring the party into ambushes by trying to meet up and combine with other scattered golems, then it can try to split away and run during combat. If you capture it right away, then you can either ignore the other golems, which might follow and confront the party as a stronger enemy; or let it lead you to the other golems, so you can systematically fight weaker enemies.
@@PhoenicopterusR Oh that's also great
Please do the alchemical golem at some point, that sounds cool
I already suspect the Kool-aid Man is an alchemical golem created to advertise an alchemist's potions to the masses!
@@Akavir7 A giant healing potion automaton that is surrounded by other enemies would be a pretty neat encounter. The kool-aid golem knows to bust through walls and splash healing juices on his people keeping their HP topped off but he is also a large red annoying target for the party to deal with however when he dies he shatters and soaks everyone around them not only healing but adding bonus HP. Oh yeeeea.
The alchemical golem is definitely on the list. There's multiple publications of it so there's going to be a few unique abilities.
I like the idea of this being a non-combat thing early on, say, capture a bunch of tiny puzzle golems so you can put them together to solve a puzzle somehow. Then much later on you encounter say a terrasque, the party cannot take it on, but then remember the puzzle golem and have to gather a bunch of them to make a gargantuan one to fight the terrasque for/with them.
Didn't know about the Transformer Metroplex. Learned something new today!
puzzle golems sound like they could make a very fun reoccurring enemy for a long-term campaign, just scale them to part level with their sizes!
That Alchemical Gollum looked wild! I want to see an episode on that!
My immediate thought was "what if I had a group of these and the components of each were interchangeable with any others?" Imagine just a swarm of pieces that could each combine or split at will. That would be tremendously versatile in combat.
P.S. I really liked your ideas about these lads using some of their own body mass as a projectile that spawns a smaller version and also the idea of combining them into a truly leviathan foe. Keep up the outstanding work, bro. ✌️🙂
I was curious where that one puzzle piece that is always missing from every box went. Good to know.
Had an idea for a chimera-like.puzzle golem. The party had to find three puzzle golems that are each designed to be part of an animal. Once they are brought to the center room, they will fuse together to create a chimera puzzle golem and if the golem is made of the three wrong animals, then it will attack the party. If it makes the right combo, the golem will split into tinier forms and go behind a very small hole in a room filled with a substance that does not hurt the golem, but kills anything else that walks in. The golems will then reassemble and press a switch that opens the door to the next part of the dungeon.
I simply can't not see this as a megazord-like monster. Having specialized mini golems that combine into massive powered golem would be so awesome.
Actually, hit dice in 3rd edition and derivatives is determined by creature *type* - so fey had d6, animals had d8, constructs had d10, and dragons had d12, for example.
Definitely starting the golem as a bunch of tiny ones that build into each other as “waves” of combat ending with a massive one
With the way 5e works that gargantuan golem making an army is terrifying in character and in a meta sense.
You are a genius (perhaps an evil genius) for scaling it up to gargantuan. Fantastic idea! I love this golem and how much its size plays a role with its combat mechanics!!
Building off the Metroplex gargantuan puzzle golem concept, it could act as a great walking dungeon, sort of like the one in Earthbound.
16 Metroplex golems combine to make a Cybertron Golem
Ogre 1: Which do you like better, my good looks or my good smile?
Ogre 2: Your good sense of humor
So you created a Kaiju golem that can reassemble itself from even the smallest bits. You could make a campaign around trying to prevent the reassembly of a war construct that assaults cities when it is combined. Having to deal with some mad wizard's dead man switch and hunting down the threat that can persist and advance naturally throughout a party's journey.
Imagine if these guys came in small variants with different magitech weapons - you could then combine them to generate different mobile weapons platforms fit for different battles
I imagine you could probably make a Puzzle Golem variant that does something similar by incorporating other (types of) Golems
@@TheIdealofGreed Ohoho
I love the idea that there is a city called puzzle city or somthing and everyone has small puzzle golem servants and later it is revealed the entire city is just made out of inactive puzzle golems ordered to change themselves into the form of a city, mabe the party can watch people slip through doors that form in sold walls or see villains rearange entire houses around them to slowly put it together.
Puzzle Golem is super cool and I love the idea of using a couple in place of a team of butlers and maids.
But can I just say: HECK YAH IRON DRAGONS! Definitely hyped to see your take on them.
Some ideas, have either the party employ the gargantuan puzzle golem to fight off the xixecal as a distraction or to just hold it off while something else is going down, or just have them be like hirelings rented out by the local spellcaster
For a future monster episode, could you make a video on the Island Giants or the Wang Liang?
There isnt enough info on them but I think they look cool
So, just hear me out here:
Remember that Sibillic Guardian plot hook, where they informed the party that a demon army would invade in five years’ time?
Seems like the sort of threat that just might warrant the party tracking down the thirty-two pieces of an ancient super weapon that were sealed away in dungeons scattered all across the continent!
I was enjoying a simple night listening about golems and thinking on what to do for a golem maker's lab. But that hurl move made me rethink defense systems as a whole.
As someone who didn’t play older editions of D&D, I appreciate this a lot. It’s super cool to hear about the older edition stuff I missed.
Huh didn't know 5E did creature HD by size category.. in 3e & 3.5e (that I normally play) it's by creature type for example all dragons regardless of size get d12 for HD and Fey get a d6 for HD. Though the bigger monsters tend to get more HD and Con for more HPs. Still nice work on the conversions as always.
Thanks for including my art again dude! Definitely including these bois in my games ASAP
I think of Castlevania's Legion as it's multiple clay humanoids which fuses into a giant sphere of humanoid golems with a laser shooting core
A couple ideas on how to use this monster:
If you have a campaign in space, you could do a fusion between this monster and the genius loci, to make a planet/moon sized golem, that is the secret weapon of a super powerfull final boss or a really powerful organization.
You could borrow some from the previous idea and make a death star that's just a bunch of puzzle golems
You could make the Dr. Wondertainment's Little Misters from the SCP universe, just have a wizard craft a gargantuan golem and divide it until they are the size of a toy, maybe one category smaller than the current lower limit, and "sell" 'em to kid's parents. This wizard could be the only one who ever created a puzzle golem and now a king wants the party to collect all the tiny pieces to make the golem and use it as a weapon, or, perhaps, it is like a legend and the final boss is trying to assemble the golem back to conquer the lands.
It could also be used like the hours, minutes and seconds from Alice through the looking glass
My favorite one is to have a city of golems, all of the small category, and each one has its own personality, family and life, but they are part of a larger golem who is hunting them down to restore his full power and the players have to fight the larger golem to defend the city.
I love this golem! This thing is so fun. You can modify this to be Soundwave. Flinging pieces of itself is the cassettes!
This thing is quite a PUZZLING creature, i love it and puns
This is perfect. I’d already worked on a similar concept for an animated armour that combined with more suits of armour to be a mega-multi-limbed-weapon-wielding-warrior, that could fling whole animated armours from itself, like the puzzle golem!
I am totally going to have a wizard with a complete version seige my heros in their base of operations if they start to get too comfortable in one place, it splits into a few large golems to break down the walls then they split into a raiding party to clear the place out.
I love it! Imagine a big, friendly golem tossing off a piece if itself before sacrificing itself for the party/a town/etc. Party gets a little NPC friend for a bit as it recovers.
Halfway through the video, and phenomenal work as always!
...but also its now occurring to me that the term "walking army" is a weird thing to specify when you think about it lol
Like most armies can do that I think
I love Monster of the Week. It’s so cool to see so many strange D&D monsters from previous editions get adapted to 5e alongside a full explanation of what the creature is and how to use it. Keep up the good work!
I'm doing a campaign where the main villain is a Shardmind and I'm definitely going to re flavor one of these guys to be a recurring enemy. Probably going to make them Crystal or something.
Ooh sick
I love the idea of having a couple huge ones that act as separate buildings/watch towers/statue guards and that just disassemble when under attack or roam around day to day. (Not in the walls, but stationed around.)
Maybe The wizards lawn ornament just disappears each morning and reappears each night as it dies daily errands.
Put this in a tech setting, like Neon Dynasty Kamigawa and you get combiners! Devastator! Menasor! Puzzle Golems attack!
Edit: Blast! Dungeon Dad beat me to the idea!
For some reason I can't help but imagine an ancient wizard hell bent on revenge, and has adapted his plan and his laboratory to churn out a horde of these guys, and then utilize the combined pieces as a mobile fortress.
Each gargantuan golem incorporates a portion of his fortress at it's core, each portion is accessible via linked teleportation portals, and each portal core also provides a buff that maximizes the golems healing factor until shut down. This allows for the blunt force approach but requires teamwork and prep.
Golems are one of my favorite monster groups (can’t call them a Type)
One of my favorite homebrewed monsters I designed is a Lock Golem
This kind of golem could act as "maintenance" for an old dungeon, explaining why it isn't in ruins, why the torches are lit, etc. It could also serve as an interesting "puzzle" if you give to each of the little versions an ability (elemental affinity, magical power, some tool) and the players have to make them split or merge to achieve different effects (an electric one can power machines, merging it with a metal one you can create circuits for more complex problems, etc).
Or you can use the idea of them being part of a city, add spanners and other mimics and create a magical living city where everything is being taken care of by the creatures, until it's not and the mages need help (because they are all useless in anything not magical)
I like this spin of the idea. It can add depth to the story element.
Never disappointed, I've put some of your other adaptations into my campaigns but this one I'm designing a dungeon around. Makes for a dynamic fight, which I always love
I recall back in AD&D there was a stained-glass golem. I'd like to see a video covering the stained-glass golem. Some more monsters you could cover are the lion-based wemic and the lamassu.
Lammasu. All three are on the list, and added your name to them. In AD&D it was just the glass golem, but 3rd changed it to stained glass. Added both names.
You're amazing Dungeon Dad! Always excited for another monster when I see you drop a new video!
absolutelly loved it.
In my case i did a couple modifications to make it even scarier.
I changed Split and Rejoin to be bonus actions and added a "healing ability" to the rejoining ( one hit dice of the category joining the other golem part, never exceding the HP maximum of the largest involved)
That way the party may be keen to finish off the smaller ones as soon as they can and the golem has a good motive to wanting to rejoin instead of just enjoyng multiple initiative trackers.
I also changed the Hurl attack to make the larger gollem decide on whichever smaller size golem it want to toss and track the number of splits made to reduce its size accordingly.
(One large decides to throw a tiny golem, them later a smal one, them its reduced to medium but could throw one more tiny without having its size reduced, Apply HP changes for every throw)
Much harder to track and very situational, but could sometime come in handy
Dude i’ve got limerence for you now because you worked out the gargantuan stats. You just saved me some much work for a thing i wanted to figure out.
A library where if it’s damaged or attacked the rubble becomes golems.
ט
I love using these guys as a final test for the party’s cooperation skills.
Feels like it is an golem with an elemental from a para-elemental plane of ooze enchanted inside.
I've always wondered what an iron dragon would be like. Living in mountains eating iron deposits and veins. Breathing rust that it clean off of itself. Might even be territorial for the usually good aligned metallic dragons. Can't wait to see how close I am or what other people thought up.
What I am hearing is Puzzle "Giant!"
Thanks for including the CR 24 version. This is very helpful for my party of level 16 gestalt (dual classed but normal everything else) characters in a very high magic setting. Being able to include the little ones as cute roleplaying encounters, familiars, pets, and little friends for the characters as well as having them all voltron into a gigantic big boi for combat (either helpful in defending against some actually credible threat or as an adversary fight in a dungeon of some kind) is wonderful and super helpful, because a lot of CR20+ monsters are a bit too over the top to use a lot of the time, and my party is near pathologically cautious all the time (I have always warned them about potential dangers, and yet they always pick to rock the boat as little as possible, so I'm confident I didn't terribly traumatize them.
Weird idea for this monster
The puzzle golem is the holder and key to a powerful item
The 8 tiny golem each hold a part of an item in their body
The item is highly complex taking a 21 intelligence check and 2 days to put it together right without some thing happening .(evil LOL)
The golems can put the item together flawlessly as long as one is still whole.
From here you can play it many ways but for a long haul campaign. This would be fun.
Each golem/item is a magic item together along with a "key" to control them.
The golems have modes which the hold of the key can choose.
The modes are ,run and hid , magic items ,seeker, unite, command .
Run and hide is the base mode in which the golem goal is not to be found by anyone. So it will hide or fight off any one that come near it.
Magic item mode in which it turns into a magic item that can't move on it own and anyone can used without the "key".
Seeker mode is a mode in which it becomes a compass to find it's other parts. It can only point to the way it nearest part.
Unite modes is the mode which the combine the pieces of the item together. Set requirements for this one or be derailed real quick . Range ,number of users needed and or any thing to keep one person with just one key from doing it ease.
Command mode is them working like normal golems.
Now this is where it can get wild you can choose to combine the golems into larger golem to get a more powerful magic item.
So you can start with +1 one dagger then combine into a +1dagger that shoot fire-bolt. Next a +2sword that shoot fire-bolt
and so forth till you get an item that would level a city
I have to say I appreciate these videos so much because I had an idea for a Golem type encounter for a campaign I'm running and this guy fits in perfectly for it! I'm super hyped to run this now thank you so much!
I like the idea of the golem but I think we could do something really fun with this guy that I thought was missing. As stated in the video The puzzle golem is capable of tearing itself apart to make more golems. But it still reforms to look the exact same but with less mass. So to me it seems like the golem is made of wet clay or some malleable material that can easily be reshaped.
So what I'm imagining is a more intelligent version of this golem that utilizes this ability and as a result can end up just as dangerous as the bbeg.
If you haven't caught on yet, what I'm getting at is that the golem could reshaped itself to look like anyone or almost anything. Like imagine if you see a house that has tons of small golems pretending to be potted plants. Or what about a golem that painted itself to look like another creature. I mean on a close inspection it should be obvious or if something damages the paint it should give them away. Or what about a gargantuan golem pretending to be a mountain. Maybe one that's infested the city and started replacing people with itself.
Maybe one is a merchant in every city (like nurse joy in Pokemon. They're almost all the exact same but different)
I can see this being used in so many ways with how versatile it is. I mean it was versatile before this would make it insanely versatile.
I love the idea of an evil wizard having a bunch of puzzle golems and basically becoming the villian from big hero six
Campaign idea; the players must collect tiny puzzle golems to assemble them into a gargantuan golem to confront some sort of threat
It’s 3:52 am in Orlando Florida. I just got to the Airbnb from a music festival. It’s a 3 day event and I’m ending day one with Dungeon Daddy. Life is good
I would keep splitting for 1d10 Mini and even 1d5 Micro sizes. And if you have multiple puzzle golems, if they share a creator and orders, they can merge. Heck, having a bunch of the littlest ones as runners to carry orders to the half sized ones, merging which allows the most complex instructions to be passed in a turn. Of course, a bunch of them from the same creator, and they each have a pierce of the others, they could gestalt. The Complete size could just due to cube-square limits, if you got 6 (or 8) of these, and they swap the parts.... they'll feel the pain of damage from when when they are merged, but they are still a group mind.
3.5 hit dice was not just "whatever" for all of them, some of specific types (notably undead and constructs) always had d12s, which were the highest, but that was technically a balancing mechanic against their lack of a Constitution score (they literally had a "-" instead of a number)
Ty for including a monster that works for basically any level group dungeon daddy
This is one of my favorite channels, keep going!
Ok,
An age ago during a long forgotten war, a golem factory was made as able bodied wizards grew fewer by the day. Victorious however, the wizards shut it down when it was no longer needed. One day, a nameless tomb raider delves in and reactivates it, causing war ready golems to scour the lands looking for enemies of their forgotten masters, be that every race besides one or whatever.
An underground vault guarded by a puzzle golem, with kobold-sized tunnels it can easily navigate, and bigger hub rooms where it can assemble to confront intruders if need be. The final obstacle is a giant vault door - most creatures strong enough to pull it open won't fit through the passages, and the chamber has countermeasures against polymorph.
a plothook i instantly thought of when you mentioned going up to maximum megasize is that the people of a city buy small puzzle golems as personal assistants... but the puzzle golems have a hidden underlying instruction to merge on a given date and destroy the city, with the players having to find out when and what the threat to the city actually is, and somehow deal with it before the golems can merge into a city-ending threat, since it'd probably be easier to deal with smaller bunches of small golems rather than one, two or three cr24s...
This is a very fun concept, love it when monsters combine
This is definitely a cool monster and I'm glad you highlighted it. For simplicity, I probably would have given it a variation of the ooze split ability and scaled down the damage dice on the monster's slam attacks depending on its size.
@DungeonDad Complete Puzzle Golem has the "Rejoin" & "Split" actions from Huge Puzzle Golem and Huge has the "Split" action from Complete.
I'm so happy to see all this, I am creating a defense system of one of the cities in my world that I knew would utilize magic for it. Puzzle golems are perfect!
6:13 Actually, I believe the hit die type was dependant on creature's Type or class levels (if applicable), and thus all Constructs (i.e. golems) would always get the same HD type of d10, all Undead got d12, all Outsiders got d8, etc. It was even written in guidelines for creating new monsters as "A creature's type determines the size of its Hit Dice". The only exception was humanoids without racial hit dice, but with class levels (in a PC or NPC class).
Bless the Dungeon Dad
*Cups my hands and shouts* "Suel Lich, the coolest Lich"
all I hear in my head is, "and I'll form the head"😂😂😂❤
i LOVE this idea, it has SO much potential in the hands of a creative DM, and im totally using this or some variation of this monster in my game!
The pieces should have pack tactics with itself
I love the idea of a powerful benefactor of the party requesting retrieval of an ancient form of Golem who's creation process has been lost to the ages, but the recurring villain is after it too. The players could get to the end of a dungeon, only to see the main antagonist plucking another puzzle golem fragment, leaving them with an activated trap or a slowly growing enemy puzzle golem while they poof away time and again.
Player character origin idea: They're a Warforged that's a 'lost piece' of the larger puzzle golem. Family wants them back.
I've used a similar gimmick with elementals in my homebrew setting. Only the main four types, and only the generic ones, not oddities like mephits and so on. This was in 3e/3.5 when there were stats for elementals of all sizes, so it was easy to implement them being able to merge or divide as needed.
Imagine you're a party off to fight the "Construct King", a tyrant who rules with an iron fist and a golem army. You encounter various types of golems as you adventure to the capital city on a mountain, only for an old man to tell you the mountain appeared overnight, the city the next day, and all the golems managing the city look the same.
Nothing like the big bad hiding in a castle made from a Complete Puzzle Golem turned into the city, policed and maintained by another complete puzzle golem split into medium or small sizes, on the back of another complete Puzzle Golem as the mountain. A good way to dissuade murder-hoboing and finally getting the party to play along on a stealth-based campaign.
I love seeing all the dragon age pics, always nice seeing my favorite get even just the most bare attention lol
Plus Shale best companion for the whole series fight me!
Thank You for the idea of the guards in my dwarven Goliath cities. I appreciate it!
Once again you come out with a creature the exact moment I needed one and I intend to use this tomorrow for my first ever one shot. Thank you. Also gonna ask for ethergaunts once again. Keep it up
I've played a ttrpg puzel board game. Basically D&D but before the movement phase of your turn you also get to add a tile to the map and roll a D4 and D100 to see what's on it. It could be a monster, treasure, a puzzle/trap, or nothing.
An idea for regularly "encountering" them is maybe a guild or some organization uses them as training dummies. Say the fighter learned a new feat or the wizard has a new evocation spell and they want to test them out, they can use the puzzle golems to test their effectiveness on single, large targets or on many smaller ones.
Hi! I recently used this monster with a small amount of reflavour for a Jelly Golem (Jell-o for americans) My players had been them running through this willy wonka style dungeon, having fought some chocolate golems, a few candy floss spiders and a jelly golem as a boss fight (using these stats) thanks so much for the help, not having to properly make my own!
Seeing a conglomerate of a few golems with a similar premise would be cool ;)
nice vid. excited about the iron dragon... but not as much as i would be excited for the NIGHTMARE DRAGON
Hit dice size in 3.5 is based on a monster's type (or class, if it has class levels)
Dude the hurl attack is perfect
This should have a grapple. Imagine being grappled by a smaller iteration, then it reforms and you're stuck inside the larger golem!
Yikes! I remember buying that issue of Dragon.
I miss a print D&D magazine like Dragon.
This is fantastic, thanks for all the monster sizes
Puzzle golem: my new standard maintenance golem. Small enough to re-mortar the bricks in the drain pipes and big enough to replace a rotting beam in the great hall without scaffolding.
I would love to try this golem with my play group. Quite an interesting one.