Red Box Workshop: The Living Statue PC

LIVING STATUES

Living statues are among the more common varieties of magical constructs. While most lack volition, a rare few have wills and personalities of their own. Some serve as vessels for bound ghosts, demons or other spirits; others are constructed to house synthetic, artificial intellects. Whatever their nature, these sapient sculptures come into being fully formed, and they require time and experience to master their innate physical talents.

The prime requisites for a living statue are Strength and Constitution. A living statue character whose Strength or Constitution score is 13 or higher will receive a 5% bonus on earned experience. Living statues whose Strength and Constitution scores are 13 or higher will receive a 10% bonus to earned experience.

RESTRICTIONS: Living statues use eight-sided dice (d8) to determine their hit points. They may advance to a maximum of 8th level of experience. Living statues may use any type of weapon or shield. Their durable construction—whether it be bronze, crystal or stone—grants them a base AC of 4, but they may not wear armor. Living statues must have a minimum score of 9 in Strength and Constitution.

SPECIAL ABILITIES: Living statues do not need to eat, drink, breathe or sleep. As such, they are unaffected by sleep spells and are immune to paralyzation, poison, disease, nausea, fatigue, starvation, dehydration, suffocation, drowning and the like. All living statues speak Common and the alignment language or dialect of the character.

SAVING THROWS: As dwarves.

ATTACK PROGRESSION: As fighters.

ADVANCEMENT: As per the magic-user advancement table.

Let Me Tell You About My Character

I just learned that my PC in Eric’s Glantri game is not a ten-year-old orc, as previously suspected, but in fact a 5 year old one. This fills me with delight, and I wanted to post about it quickly before she dies; the fact that I already played her for an entire session means she is already pushing the outer limits of my average character lifespan.

This is actually Scott LeMien's drawing of James' character, who you've already been told about. The story of that chicken will have to wait for another day. Click on the picture for Scott's site!

Fun facts about my PC:

• We found her hiding under a bed in a tower that was occupied by a scary hell-mastiff. We think she’s an orphan; certainly the rest of her tribe abandoned her there, and we later fought and killed some of them, so if she wasn’t before maybe she is now.
• She was adopted by my previous PC, Gael, a cleric of the Boss. Gael’s nanny was an orc, so his ability to speak  Orcish made him the obvious candidate to take her as his apprentice and fellow pupil of the legend of the Boss.
• The orcs apparently didn’t give girls this age names, so Gael named her Gael Jr.
• Gael Sr. lived to the ripe old age of 2nd level before being consumed by ghouls, at which point I was prevailed upon by Lord Bodacious to play Gael Jr. as my next PCs. This did not require much persuading.
• Gael Jr. rolled no ability scores over 12, which is widely believed to mean she will live forever. (She did avail herself of an ability-score swap, reducing her Intelligence by two to bump Wisdom by 1, the first time I’ve ever used that rule.)
• After meeting an orc cleric named Ur-Ignem, which she learnt “slave of the god of fire”, Gael Jr. decided to change her name to Ur-Boss. It might be that she’ll keep Gael as her first name and use Ur-Boss as her patronym, something I believe Gael Senior lacked altogether.
• Ur-Boss is likely to become a devotee of this god of fire, because a) her all-too-brief training in theology causes her to think “I am a cleric of the god who is the boss of all other gods” and b) clearly that god is someone who sets dudes on fire, not someone who gets turned to stone by a wand.
• Ur-Boss’s holy symbol is a cloth dolly that represents the baby that the Boss took hostage as his last act pre-petrification. I intend to keep this symbol whatever may come, but will carouse for something that wreathes it in continual flame. She may be a five-year-old girl, but she’s got an orc’s taste in heavy metal iconography.
• I blame Eric’s practice of keeping character sheets at the end of the session for the many inaccuracies in the above: it has nothing to do with my refusal to look stuff up in his carefully crafted summaries.

With that established, here is Eric’s message that I am specifically celebrating:

A quick clarification about Ur-Boss: When I described her as looking about 10 years old, I noted that orcs age much more quickly than humans, and that she was in actuality closer to half that age. (This is how the aggressive humanoid races keep their numbers up despite constant losses.) Not that this matters too much, as she’s probably as mature as a human ten-year-old, but I wanted to avoid confusion. She should hit puberty in just a few years — maybe during the course of play!

Rock on.