Gearsman

If you’re a Pathfinder Adventure Path reader, you’ve probably received the last installment of the Iron Gods Adventure Path.  Along the way, you’ve been introduced to a shipload of robots (literally).  But the gearsman, statted up by Russ Taylor for the Inner Sea Bestiary, is pretty much the default robot for the Golarion setting—the silent symbol of the Technic League’s power in Numeria. 

But in your home campaign, these robots might be otherworldly encounters, rare artifacts, or as common as gnomes.  With their intelligence and adaptive learning abilities, they can be surprisingly resourceful opponents, and their ability to heal themselves and other robots (particularly the devastating annihilators and myrmidons) make them highly dangerous as part of a larger force.

Merfolk have declared war on the Duchy of Trent!  The duke’s shipmages predict an easy victory over the nomadic and fractious sea people.  But when bronze gearsmen begin marching up from the shoreline wielding electrified tridents it becomes clear that there is much about the merfolk that the shipmages do not know.

Junkdock is famous for its sentinel gearsmen.  The brass-helmed robots patrol the spaceport in silent pairs at all hours of the asteroid’s 26-hour day, and only the witchwyrds seem to have any ability to treat with them.  But when adventurers try to find a sage to examine the strange puzzle box they have found, the gearsmen’s eye orbs flash red and every robot in the station mobilizes to attack the box’s bearer.

A young farm boy dreams of one day escaping his desert world and soaring among the stars.  Instead, he’s stuck accompanying his uncle on trips to buy beaten-up droids from wayang scavengers.  He and his friends are cleaning one of the droids when they trigger a hidden holographic message left by a princess.  Which is when the other droid grabs a nearby spear, electrifies it, and attempts to kill the farm boy and his friends for having seen too much.

—Inner Sea Bestiary 44

Since you all liked my riff on Bilbo’s birthday party, I decided to ruin—er, I mean, make better—another classic tale.

Given that I left my last radio show in a panicked dash to ER, I was pretty stoked to actually make it through all two hours this week.  Click here for the first show of the spring semester!  We finished up our look at the Bush’s Sixteen Stone’s 20th anniversary, danced to 10 years of LCD Soundsystem, and caught up with the Decemberists’ new track.  Download and enjoy!