Brass Minotaur Golem

Dormant, the brass minotaur is just a large metal statue of a bull-headed warrior gripping an axe, a big jewel set into the butt of its haft. When its trigger occurs, perhaps the defilement of the shrine it watches, it lurches to life as a dreadful engine of retribution and begins hunting, a tracker that never tires and never loses the trail.

Its axe is a +3 weapon that wounds exactly as a sword of wounding does. The jewel in the haft focuses the power of trap the soul (the 7th-level wizard spell): once a day the golem can pull its quarry into the stone, which dumps the victim into an extradimensional labyrinth like the one created by maze, the 8th-level spell. Whenever it likes, the golem may vanish after the prisoner to finish the job, disappearing completely before onlookers. After the quarry is slain or escapes as a maze victim would, the minotaur can stay inside as long as it wishes. Each visit, limited to one a day, heals 10-60% of the hit points it started with, never exceeding 80.

Only weapons enchanted to +3 or more can hurt it. Lesser weapons do nothing, and mundane ones have a 10% chance to break on contact. Find the path, the 6th-level priest spell, is the one magic that affects it. Cast where the golem vanished with a victim, it pulls both straight back to the Prime Material plane; cast on the golem, it forces a save vs. spell, and failure shatters the construct.

While hunting it fights bystanders only to defend itself and saves its maze power for its target. Badly hurt, it withdraws and spends several days slipping in and out of its maze until healed. The axe usually breaks when the golem is destroyed, though the DM may rule otherwise.

Each is created for one goal and waits with limitless patience until called. If that goal becomes impossible, say because the temple it was made to guard is gone, the golem and its weapon lose their magic entirely.

The first was made by a righteous archmage after raiders desecrated his wife's temple and killed her. He soon raised her from death, but his rage over the murdered priestesses and the plundered holy ground did not cool. Once the golem was built, he used a wish to place it outside the temple on the very night of the raid, commanding it to hunt down all sixty barbarians. Within a month, before he had properly begun its enchanting, it stood again at the temple, guarding the surviving priestesses until the shrine was rebuilt.

As a construct, it is seldom met except as a guardian, though one is occasionally made for a single act of vengeance.

The recipe is long. The maker first enchants the axe of wounding and fits its haft with a big, perfect jewel. A flawless minotaur skeleton is laid in a huge mold, and brass-making ores are melted, dusted with three handfuls of crushed diamond, and poured over it so that brass takes the place of flesh. To finish, the caster lays strength, geas and polymorph any object upon the figure, maze and trap the soul upon the axe's jewel, and a final wish over everything to bind the whole.