Hey everybody,
Can someone help me figure out how much it costs to make a construct? You know, your basic golem. The amounts listed in the Bestiary don't make sense to me.
Thanks!
- Stefen
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Hey everybody,
Can someone help me figure out how much it costs to make a construct? You know, your basic golem. The amounts listed in the Bestiary don't make sense to me.
Thanks!
- Stefen
Here is an example for creating a Flesh golem:
Cost: 10,500 GP (listed under Flesh golem under "Construction".Feats : Craft Construct
Spells: animate dead, bull's strength, geas/quest, limited wish
Caster Level: Minimum 8th
Skills (pick one): Craft (leather) or Heal (DC for the skill check is 13)
I have always viewed that the special things needed that are listed in the text (in this example the "Special unguents and bindings worth 500 gp") where already included in the price and cost in the section below:
Flesh Golem
CL 8th; Price 20,500 gp
Construction
Requirements Craft Construct, animate dead, bull's strength, geas/quest, limited wish, creator must be caster level 8th; Skill Craft (leather) or Heal DC 13; Cost 10,500 gp
Sorry, what you see is what you get. These amounts are what these golems cost.
Or is it the entries' meaning that elude you?
They're basically magic items: They have a price (i.e. what it would generally cost to walk into a golem shop and buy the standard model) and a construction cost (i.e. what it would generally cost to make one yourself.
The construction section also lists the other requirements, i.e. what else you need to actually make one of these, and a general "recipe" explaining briefly how you go and build one of these.
Example: Clay Golem
ConstructionA clay golem's body must be sculpted from a single block of clay weighing at least 1,000 pounds, treated with rare oils and powders worth 1,500 gp.
Clay Golem
CL 11th; Price 41,500 gp
Construction
Requirements Craft Construct, animate objects, bless, commune, prayer, resurrection, creator must be caster level 11th; Skill Craft (sculptures) or Craft (pottery) DC 16; Cost 21,500 gp
So you learn that you need a 1000-pound-block of clay to make your golem out of, and you need 1500 gp worth of rare stuff to treat the "model" with
The requirements list Craft Construct feat (of course) and the spells you need to cast (each once per day during creation) to turn this clay model of some creature into a golem that can walk and squish fleshlings.
You learn that you need at least caster level 11, and that you must make a DC Craft (sculptures) or Craft (pottery) check to make the model itself. You might end up paying more: you might need someone to sculpt the model for you, or maybe you don't know all these spells and must hire someone to cast some of them for you. But generally, you must blow 21500 gp to go from big block of clay and some other stuff to clay golem.
Note that it says 41500 as price, but the cost is 21500, which is not exactly half, as is usual for magic items. That is because the construction calls for rare materials (oils and powders) that cost 1500, that part of the construction cost carries over 1:1 into the final price.
Everything else (i.e. the other 40000) is halved, which is normal for magic items.
That also means that a golem crafter able to do everything himself (can sculpt the golem and cast all the spells himself or get them cast by someone who won't charge him for it) and sells it directly to an interested buyer can expect to earn 20000 for his efforts. He'll usually take 40 days to create that thing (unless he speeds up his work - it's possible to work twice as fast by making the magic item creation check harder).
Thanks for the answers. I think I asked the question poorly.
What I don't get is the way in which the cost was calculated. I know the price is about double the cost, but how do you arrive at the cost, which I assume is based on a crafter able to do everything himself.
Is it just the gp someone would pay to have those spells cast plus the construction materials or is it something else?
Well, for magic items, there is often a formula involved:
Magic armours cost bonus squared * 1000 gp, magic weapons bonus² * 2000 gp, wands cost caster level * spell level * 750gp, and so on.
Not all items have fixed formulae like that, there is some intuition and guesswork involved in determining the prices (and also comparison to other items).
I think the golems' prices are mostly educated guesswork.
And the prices are pretty much "what this thing costs". It's what the designers felt was the correct price for something of that power level.
As I said above, some kinds of items have a general formula, for others, and I think that includes golems, you have to play with the numbers.
The price doesn't reflect the spells that go into its creation or what materials you need (well, that's not quite true: If there are fixed material costs, like "you need 10000gp worth of iron for an iron golem", or something like that, they are figured into the price), but what you get out of it.
That means more powerful and robust golems will simply cost more than weaker ones. It doesn't matter that for that robust golem, you might only need relatively common and cheap materials combined with low-level magic while the weaker version requires precious metals and high-level spells.
All that really matters is the end result.
You could add "transmude mud to rock" as a prerequisite to the clay golem, but if everything remained the same (i.e. same number of HD, same attack and damage modifiers, same special abilities, etc.), the price would not change. But if you were to leave all the requirements intact and more or less doubled its power, you'd end up with a price twice as high as before.