Salvaged Robots & Harvested Parts


Iron Gods

The Exchange

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Any DMs out there dealing with a party that is trying to sell off all the robot bodies they get or harvest parts off them?

My party has an Alchemist Construct Rider that is trying to use his 4th level bonus feat to craft constructs with the parts, or add them to his mount.

If its not him, the rest of the party is trying to get scrolls of Infuse Robot to bring all the defeated robots back to life outside of the range of the signal and have them follow them as guardians.

Rules show these robots at CR*20,000 gold in new condition, what would you price a body that had make whole casted on it to restore it new condition - sans the ability to function as a creature/robot?

any suggestions or thoughts?


Well, Infuse Robot removes all it's robot stuff. They'd then just have magical constructs of bone/stone/wood/flesh following them. It'll function the same. Not to mention those scrolls are a little over 2000gp, and the construct only followers their commands for a little over two hours.

Pretty pricey!

I don't know if Make Whole would bring a robot back from being dead. The spell just says that in can fix destroyed magic items, nothing about bringing back dead constructs.

Plus, they'd need the caster level in order to do all that.

As for salavaging robots, you could have it be a thing of "x ammount of gold per hit die". Maybe it being based on a skill check to recover.

Edit:
Also I think somewhere in book one it mentioned how bringing back a ton of broken parts (like ripping wires and such off of machines they find) won't really sell, since all that stuff is fairly common. Robot parts can fall into that too. other then maybe a few individuals who wants them for any personal reasons.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

2 people marked this as a favorite.

As with trophies harvested from monsters (including milking poison from creatures), the game doesn't work well with salvaging parts from robots. Or golems, for that matter.

If you do want to start doing something like this, the best bet is to set the harvested robot parts at a value equal to what a standard encounter of that robot's CR would suggest.

The Exchange

Sorry, meant Memory of Function:

Technology Guide wrote:
When this spell is cast upon a destroyed construct, it is restored to full functionality and full hit points, provided no significant portion of the destroyed construct (such as an entire limb) is missing

and costs 10,000g plus cost of scroll...very expensive.

James Jacobs wrote:
If you do want to start doing something like this, the best bet is to set the harvested robot parts at a value equal to what a standard encounter of that robot's CR would suggest.

I like this, I know you've suggested this before on several other APs and it still works/applies here.

I think adding in 'haunted limbs' or 'possessed limbs' that have a memory of their old killing programing ways might also detract them from doing this.

The Exchange

Oh, Nice!

Repairs Drones are a modified version of a Clockwork Servant (as listed under the encounter description).
Clockwork Servant from Bestiary 3 states that their bodies are only worth 500gp.

Which fits right in with the thought of the harvested/recovered bodies are approximate wealth of the encounter - CR 2=550gp


In my IG game, I'm letting the party have a robot cohort. The chassis is a Scrapyard Robot they defeated in LoR. Basically we are going to use the rules for creating constructs to add HD and abilities. I've tied all "add ons" to # of HD and limited that to the APL-2 like a cohort.

I like the idea of robots having CR value worth of components that can be harvested. I'll let the alchemist start harvesting parts...


1 person marked this as a favorite.

I let my characters use their engineering skill to salvage one cypher from a destroyed robot (or group of bots) using a DC 15 check. Cypher are one use technological items I copied from the Numenera RPG. I just roll on the random tables and convert them to D&D on the fly.

Adds more value to the skill and the cyphers are too valuable as adventuring tools for the group to sell off.


My DM is allowing us to collect robot corpses, deactivated robots, and robot parts. He's also allowing us to repair them if we have the correct parts, schematics, and programming discs.

For my part I intend to at least animate a couple of robot corpses as run of the mill permanent Animated Objects.

The corpse of the robot is considered a single object for the purposes of make Whole, yes? Meaning the spell won't return it to functioning as a Construct but it should put all the pieces back where they're supposed to be effectively building the body of the bot as long as all the pieces are present at the time one casts the spell.

.
We don't have access to a Robotics Laboratory yet but the Collector robots we've gathered are already online as they apparently had the solar conversion module already built in.

.
As I havn't read the Iron Gods AP myself I have no clue what of the above is houserule and what isn't. It is a whole heap of fun though.

Conveniently enough we got the flying Collector robots online just as my Alchemist attained flight through his class features and then we immediately faced off against a ghost against whom the robots were largely useless. Gotta say so far I'm really enjoying this AP.

As we have access to piles and piles of deactivated Robots I do wonder what the cost analysis is of repeated castings of Memory of Function vs paying the cost to build robots from scratch. If I'm not mistaken Memory of Function, if it works on bots, is the cheaper option.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder Adventure Path / Iron Gods / Salvaged Robots & Harvested Parts All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.