Drolem [Golem]

Golems are constructs, enchanted monsters made and animated by powerful wizards or priests from nearly any material, and the drolem is both the most terrifying and the hardest to build. It takes the form of a dragon: a beast of one particular hue, a patchwork of several kinds, or simply a draconic skeleton. Physically it is nearly the equal of the creatures it imitates, but it is profoundly dim, unable to talk, cast spells or scheme the way real dragons do.

A drolem in battle is as dangerous as any true dragon. Only weapons of +2 or better can harm it, and it is immune to all fire, cold and gas attacks, since it needs to breathe only when using its breath weapon. Poison, mind-affecting attacks and every spell of 4th level or lower also fail against it. It can detect invisibility out to 60 feet.

Its feeble mind is the weak point. It rarely does anything more involved than charging straight in. With extremely exact instructions from its creator it might carry out something like snatching a foe, climbing into the sky and letting go, but only after the most careful coaching. Normally it can manage an order no more complicated than 'Kill everyone who comes into this room except me.'

Most drolems like to fight from the air. Each huge foreclaw rakes for 2d6 and the bite deals 1d20+10. Three times per day it can breathe out a small cloud of poison, a cube 20 feet on a side that forms directly in front of it; everyone inside must save vs. breath weapon or die.

Like other golems, drolems answer directly to their makers and have no society or native terrain. Unlike most constructs a drolem does think, though very narrowly, and it follows every instruction with exact literalness. More than one careless wizard has phrased an order that ended up getting the wizard killed.

Being unnatural, drolems take no part in the natural order. Food and rest mean nothing to them; they last until something, usually battle, destroys them.

True dragons generally loathe drolems, either because they see them as cruel parodies of dragonkind or because they are appalled by the deeds drolems are often made to perform. A dragon hates most of all a drolem made to look like its own kind, so a red dragon is especially enraged by a red drolem and an onyx dragon by an onyx one.

Because they are so rare and mighty, drolems guard only the most precious sites and hoards. Only a wizard of 18th level or higher can make one, using a specific tome and a set of rare components found on just one world and costing about 90,000 gp. Those components are described only in the closely held books on drolem making, though rumor holds that the scales of three or more dragon varieties are required. Even with everything gathered, the work can take close to a year.