Salt Golem [Dark Sun]

Mighty defilers and sorcerer tyrants make these golems, and they are especially popular with those who live near the salt flats. A salt golem stands 8 feet tall, weighs about 600 pounds and looks like a smaller rock golem with a cloudy, opaque surface. Its face is almost recognizable, with milky white eyes and a mouth that never speaks; it makes no noise except when moving.

What most unnerves people is the way it walks: slowly, steadily, as if it neither knows nor cares that nearly everything else is faster. It is barely intelligent, yet its unhurried pace hints at certainty that its prey will tire long before it does.

Salt golems fight with plodding method, hammering foes with stony fists for 2d8. A creature hit must save vs. poison or have its skin split open and dusted with fine salt crystals, causing such agony that it can only roll on the ground for 1d4 rounds. While down it counts as prone, so attackers gain +4 to hit it.

Once every 5 rounds the golem can try to dry out a single foe by hugging it for a round. This needs a normal attack roll; if the roll beats the needed number by 2 or more, the target is caught, and the burning salt deals 6d6 damage to its skin. The golem uses this sparingly because the moisture it soaks up costs it 2d8 damage.

Electricity, cold and fire cannot harm it. Fire actually helps, fusing the salt grains and drying out absorbed moisture, so any fire, magical or mundane, heals 1 hit point per die of damage it would have done. Water, however, dissolves salt golems: water-based attacks deal double damage, and merely wading through water or being surrounded by a create water spell inflicts 1d10 per round of exposure. Rock to mud harms them as it would any rock, for 3d10, but the caster must first land a barehanded touch attack.

A salt golem stands perfectly still guarding whatever area its maker assigned until it is called into action. Because they are more fragile than most golems, fewer are built.

As magically crafted beings, they play no role in the desert world's ecology.