Half-Golem

Before the tragedy, Aurel Vantreaux was a striking youth with soft fern-green eyes, long sandy-brown hair tied back with a silver cord, and a ready smile and musical laugh that won him many admirers. His right side still looks that way. His left side is a horror: the face is scarred and corpse-gray, the eye a blind white ball in a puckered socket under a half-melted brow, the skin stretched so tight that veins bulge over the bone, and the left hand a shriveled, blackened claw with long curved nails like a big cat's. Few can see him without recoiling.

His voice shifts between his old gentle tone and a coarse growl from the ruined side of his throat. His only language is the tongue of his warm grassland homeland, and whether he can read and write at a given moment depends on which personality is in control.

At the start of each fight there is a 50% chance his bestial side takes over. Berserk, he gains +2 to hit and deals 2d8 per blow, but his tunnel vision gives his attackers +2 to hit him. Otherwise he fights with finesse using Whisper, his magical silver rapier (+1 to attack and damage, 1d6+2 against small or medium foes and 1d8+2 against larger ones; medium piercing, 4 pounds, speed factor 4). His left arm has Strength 19 for grappling and lifting, and when the golem half rules he likes to strangle foes or crush bones with that hand.

Whenever an attack or spell hits him, roll any die: even strikes his normal right side, odd his golem left side. A called shot can target either side. The left side behaves like a flesh golem: only magical weapons hurt it, electricity mends a hit point for every die of damage the attack carries, fire and cold do no harm but slow him for 2d6 rounds, and other spells aimed at that side do nothing. The right side is vulnerable to everything a normal person is.

He regenerates 3 hit points per round and is immune to poison, toxins and disease. Magic cannot hold, charm or sleep him, but any such attempt instantly hands his body to the inhuman side. If killed he stays dead only until someone applies electricity to his left side, which restores hit points as above and revives him, after which regeneration quickly makes him whole.

Everyone seeing his face for the first time makes a horror check, even those warned in advance. Anyone touching his mind by magical or psionic telepathy must make a madness check (or a horror check if your campaign does not use madness rules), and no one can isolate just one of his two selves.

Aurel's parents served Sir Lucan Ashby, a kind, wealthy physician in a crowded grassland city, never suspecting he was also Vargrave, the domain's dark lord. Ashby raised the boy almost as a son and trained him in medicine, then backed his practice among the city's poor, where the two became beloved for their compassion.

When a killer began butchering the city's courtesans and the domain's callous prince refused to help, Aurel hunted the murderer himself. He shot a bestial man fleeing an alley killing, found Ashby's scalpel at the scene, and followed a blood trail to Ashby's office, where the wounded killer hurled him into a rack of chemicals that turned to acid and burst into flame. As Aurel passed out, the murderer's face became his mentor's.

He woke strapped to an operating table. Ashby confessed that a serum meant to purge evil from human nature had only split his own wickedness off into Vargrave, and that he had saved Aurel's acid-eaten left side with parts from fresh cadavers, an idea secretly prompted by Vargrave. Shown a mirror, Aurel screamed and walked out into the night. He sometimes considers going back to kill Ashby but thinks the curse is the crueler punishment, and he keeps the secret, judging Ashby's good deeds a fair offset to Vargrave's evil.

Aurel now roams the domain, embittered by the disgust he meets. He sometimes protects the helpless but mostly avoids people. He eats once a day, sleeps about an hour a night, and ignores heat and cold. Living wild, he fiercely guards his land and solitude against intruders, which a druid might find sympathetic.