Topiary Golem

These rare constructs look like huge animals of trimmed shrubbery, usually dogs, great cats, elephants or dragons. In spring and summer their fresh green leaves blend into the garden, granting a +3 bonus to surprise. In autumn and winter they shrink to a brown frame of bare twigs, still enough camouflage in woodland to give +1.

Each golem fights like the creature it depicts. A hedge hound charges in and bites, while a hedge lion stalks before it pounces.

They appear only in lands with a Renaissance-style culture, guarding their maker's house and grounds, often stationed beside the beds where a wizard raises his spell components. They can follow simple orders of up to 15 words. In the misty dread realm, the earliest known examples were the work of an obscure wizard in a gloomy forested domain, who wanted them more to frighten superstitious locals than to stop raiders. He is said to be long dead, yet his hedges still roam his grounds and kill anyone who tries to reach the manor.

They also exist on a gaslight-era Earth. First seen in a few sculpted European gardens of the 1500s and 1600s, they are rumored in the late nineteenth century to be returning. Paranormal investigators suspect new ones lurk in gardens copied from the old Renaissance designs, on the estates of rich American industrialists and the grounds of new resort hotels. Their makers may be adepts working from a reanimation treatise, said to be written in Latin by the original European creators.

A wizard of 15th level or higher can create one using wish, plant growth and polymorph any object. The plants take four years to grow, followed by three weeks of shaping and spellcasting. At 3,000 gp per Hit Die they are cheap by golem standards. A slain topiary golem crumbles into dust that is useless for spell components.