Glyph

Character Concept

Glyph is a living golem in the Orn D&D campaign setting fashioned after the warforged of the Eberron campaign setting. The result of a lich’s early attempts at immortality, Glyph struggles with his artificial nature, tormented that he might be nothing more than a soulless construct. In his quest to understand himself, Glyph has taken up the path of the artificer, though only his villainous creator knows the truth of his origins.

Backstory

Time is a merciless killer that not even the most potent magics can abate forever. Long had the wizard Valedir hidden from it, mustering sorcery and alchemy in an attempt to deny his own mortality. As the years pressed on, however, his methods ceased to have effect. With growing trepidation, Valedir began to realize that time was finally catching up with him.

The great wizard, however, was unwilling to accept defeat. Turning his back on two lifetimes in service to the greater good, Valedir began to experiment in secret. He sought the most ancient texts and delved into the blackest of forbidden magics, obsessed with the secrets of immortality.

It was during his research that Valedir happened upon an ancient arcane process whereby he could transfer his soul into the artificial body of a golem. The possibility intrigued him. Eternity in a tireless, armored shell certainly had its advantages, after all. The process, however, was incomplete and dangerous.

Thus did Valedir, his thoughts poisoned by desperation, elect to send another in his stead. He constructed the golem body and armored it with the finest adamantine, sparing no expense for the vessel that was to house his soul for eternity. Upon its completion, however, the soul invested within was not Valedir’s but that of his unwitting apprentice.

Valedir watched greedily to see if the spell had worked, for surely it would be an easy matter to repeat the process himself. That the apprentice’s soul would then be released to eternity was, of course, a triviality. The wizard was dismayed, however, to find that his apprentice’s mind was now blank. Though the golem lived, it had no memory of its former life.

Consigning the experiment to failure, Valedir sold the newborn golem to salvage the cost of its construction. The body of his apprentice was buried and forgotten, lamented as the tragic victim of a laboratory accident. As Valedir turned his mind to even darker experiments, his golem lay in a crate, destined for its new owner far across the sea.

The Secret of the Warforged

In the world of Orn, the secret of creating warforged had been forgotten since the time of Kreilos himself. As the Age of Wonders came to its peak, many powerful wizards, including several prominent members of the Silver Council, began experimenting with artificial life. For some, this was merely an academic exercise, while others craved the power and immortality of a construct body.

For the most part, the experiments were a success, giving rise to golems, homunculi, shield guardians, and the like. Still, attempts to blend living subjects with constructs met with repeated failure. Often, the resulting creations would go on a berserk rampage, although all eventually succumbed to madness of one sort or another. It seemed that the mortal mind was simply unable to cope with such an existence.

The answer to this problem came when one enterprising wizard decided to remove the causal factor. By wiping away the memories of the living being, it became possible to successfully implant the soul within a modified construct. Naturally, this posed several disadvantages. The resulting creature was, after all, a blank slate, retaining only minimal memory of its former life. Still, the goal had been achieved; it was now possible to safely contain a living essence within an artificial body.

In the experiments that followed this breakthrough, the procedure was refined to a science. The act of wiping the subject’s memories became the first step in the animation process, indistinguishable from the rest of the ritual. It was further discovered that the closer the facsimile of real life, the lower the risk of insanity. Thus, the construction of the body was scaled down, incorporating living materials such as darkwood, including a form of alchemical blood, and adhering to a strictly humanoid form. In the end, a new race of living constructs was born.

This creatures, however, never gained wide acceptance. Many feared the ramifications of the warforged ever being produced en masse. It was questioned whether the problem of insanity had really been solved, or if the warforged might one day go on a rampage as their predecessors had. Thus did the Silver Council elect to keep the process a secret, locking the ritual away for safekeeping. There it languished for many centuries, even outlasting the Silver Council itself. With no one still alive to remember that it existed, the knowledge of warforged creation was forgotten.

Only in the past few decades has the hidden library been uncovered, revealing the long-lost secret. Copies of the ritual have trickled out into the world, slowly but surely finding their way into the hands of capable wizards. Only time will tell what may come as new warforged are sent out into the world.