Flesh Golem

Thematically, flesh golems are…oh wait, Rob McCreary beat me to it in Classic Horrors Revisited: a sign of science gone wrong, things man was not meant to know, fear of the other, the taboo of corpse-robbing.  In terms of campaign role and tactics…no, McCreary has me there, too: a flesh golem might be a lone murderer, a surprise amid a horde of undead, or a Frankenstein’s monster-like scapegoat.  Fine, you all go read CHR, and I’ll be over here thinking up adventure seeds…just like McCreary did.  But remember two things as you go: You cannot construct a flesh golem without spells of the evil descriptor.  And eventually, those spells will fail…

Most serpentfolk devour human slaves who have outlived their usefulness.  Parleck saves his, using them to construct flesh golem guardians.  The tropical sun causes them to bloat horribly (and smell worse) so he usually stations them to guard his underground lab or rents them to serpentfolk mine overseers as muscle.

There is no death penalty in Chalkton per se.  Instead, the verdict rendered is the Rendering.  Murderers, rapists, and more than a few rebels, bards, and political prisoners find themselves sent to the golemworks for processing.  Of course, the flesh golems created from still-twitching flesh (not to mention very reluctant spirits) are notoriously unstable.  Pointing that out, though, makes you a rumormongering journalist, which is even worse than a bard…

Farmer Smythens’s freshly buried youngest brother was one of many corpses used in a flesh golem.  When it finally went berserk and killed the thaumaturge, the brother’s consciousness miraculously came to the fore.  Now Smythens protects and hides his strange brother, even though the boy-thing sometimes tries to sew pieces of other people’s bodies onto himself.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 160

I’m not much of a miniatures guy.  And even if I was, I love all things Paizo, so I’d naturally lean toward Paizo miniatures.  But if you want truly evil stitched-together monstrosities, you want Games Workshop’s Warhammer figs.  Especially their ogres…