D&D 5E A freely-aligned NPC race who bind their elder's souls to constructs when they die - how would you do this?

Hi, thanks for reading!

Here's the deal - I like this idea and think that (though it's probably been done a thousand times before) my players will enjoy it, but I don't know enough about... anything really... in D&D lore to know how to implement it; I'm fairly new to the whole thing to be honest.

I want to have a race of unusually short lived Dwarves who, upon the death of their king or queen bind that monarch's soul to a lovingly forged and constructed, articulated sculpture of that ruler. The ruler then lives on for generations more to provide guidance to the next ruler and their people. A previous ruler once tried to use this power to save a lover, dividing his people and causing a civil war in which he died and a small group of his supporters escaped the kingdom with his body and soul, never to be seen again.

These dwarves aren't evil (they will cover the full spectrum of alignments as any large society would) but particularly pious nearby settlements may consider them so. I'm thinking that extremely rare magical gems beneath their mountain can be painstakingly searched for and mined to make this process possible, and that this is essentially a non-evil use of necromancy, but I don't know if this fits in with the way souls and necromancy work in D&D.

How would you go about implementing this?
Thanks for reading and happy RPing!
kagayaku

In 3.5Ed, I just tweaked Warforged for my dwarves cyborgs.

Quoting myself quoting myself from elsewhere:

Dannyalcatraz said:

Copying myself from elsewhere:

Dwarves: I made them into sentient stone in one campaign, and they reproduced by carving new ones. The type of stone determined their exact stats and favored class. Tougher minerals were better at being the warrior types. Gemstones were better at being the spellcasters.

In another one, I killed them all off...sort of. I made the dwarven survivors of an apocalyptic war into a fantasy version of Dr Who's Cybermen or Daleks. Psionically active dwarves transferred their consciousnesses into the bodies their slain bretheren constructed- Warforged. They had the physical attributes of Warforged (but with darkvision added), but the mental and cultural attributes of dwarves. They called themselves "Inheritors."

Elves: In one campaign, I combined elements of the Minbari (from Bab5) with making them sentient plants). This latter twist is one of my most common.

Another common twist for me- making them true "fey" and using the "Drift" rules from the Geomancer PrCl to warp them as they age.

In another campaign, they were sci-fi "Greys" who had crashlanded on a fantasy world. They used their high tech stasis devices and tesseract generators to create what humans called "Underhill" to give them a nearly timeless and quite vast space in which to live while awaiting either rescue or for native tech/magic to be up to the task of repairing them.

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Another old post, with some other reflavorings of note:

Dannyalcatraz said:

I do this a lot...my Bugbears taste like Watermelons.




What?

OH!

I do re-imagine races quite frequently, but I seldom get to use them to the fullest. I've mentioned several on these boards:

1. Elves who are actually alien Greys (you know- the skinny, big headed, pupil-less eyed guys from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, X-files, etc.). Their ship crashed hundreds of thousands of years ago, becoming covered by a mounded clearing in a forest. Their stasis fields (keeping them alive all those centuries) teleporters, image scramblers and account for legends of Underhill, how they dissapear in the woods, and how they are mighty enchanters...
2. Elves who are part plant, truly one with The Green. I basically applied the Woodling template and took a few hints from Dragonstar's Galactic Races. I also made them true Fey.
3. Dwarves who are elementals. They carve each other from stone, and the kind of stone they are made from determines their favored class.
4. Warforged who are essentially D&D versions of the Daleks or Cyber-Men: their metal bodies house the brains of psionically active dwarves (minimum 1PP).
5. The Nephilim are my reworked Planetouched. "They were the hybrid offspring of fallen angels and human women." says one definition...but mine are the hybrid offspring of any sentient race and any extraplanar being. To pull that off, the Nephilim were designed as a racial character class, a la Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Arcana Evolved RPG.
6. A size S, flying version of the Thri-Kreen. They are ultra-high dex, and favor spears/javelins rather than the gythka, etc., and can communicate by bioluminescence.

I've also enjoyed helping others at ENWorld reflavor or shuffle races for their campaigns, most notably suggesting:

1. Anthropomorphic Snapping Turtles, an amalgam of river-dwelling Halflings, the powerful physique of Dwarves, certain reptilian characteristics from Lizardmen and the business acumen of Ferengi. They are the master tradesmen of the lakes, rivers and freshwater wetlands.
   
2. Humans who ride Giant Flightless Birds- like axebeaks or real-world Moas- and have a culture analogous to those of the Plains Indians.
   
3. Reworked Kobolds who are arboreal, and have gliding membranes.
   
4. Using Alternity/D20 Modern Sesheyans as rulers of an Underdark empire- possibly as replacements for the Drow.

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You would just say, 'this is what they do'. That's it. Unless it's a player thing, you don't really need any mechanical implementation.
There are a 101 ways that D&D games explain death and the afterlife, and all are equally valid or false.
What you need to figure out is if you want your players to ever fight these constructs. In which case you probably want to look at golems or constructs in a bestiary.
More interesting... How many of these 'old' monarchs do they have? Do they construct eventually wear out or are they effectively Immortal? What sort of politics exist between these different Immortals all of them presumably think they're fit to rule them people?

Will this lead to conflict or change? You need either or both to drive adventures.

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Thanks Danny, thanks satbunny!

That's a lot of cool homebrew - I particularly like the snapping turtle halflings, inheritors and elemental dwarves. I hope you wouldn't be offended if my players come accross those guys some day? Alien greys are awesome too, looove the xfiles! xD

'This is what they do' it is! Haha. Good to know it is so flexible, means me and my players are free to go mad with it. I've thought about some of those things but not all of them. I figured the status quo is that the 'living' nonarch reigns but is expected to seek council from the previous rulers. They do die eventually and lose their mental faculties over time, so the oldest surviving may not speak and be very disconnected. Some of them were also destroyed in the beforementioned war, and in defending their lands from those who would seek the 'immortality' for themselves. I think there's plenty of room for conflict and change, I'll just have to wait and see if my players go toward these dwarves or are more interested in something else

This has been really helpful thank you. Somehow I feel like I understand the game far better just from these two answers. xD

I can see that one would take a classic Doctor Who approach, so some of the ex-rulers form a council that advise the current ruler. Some simply withdraw and take up the hobbies that they had to abandon when busy as ruler, so some might be craftsmen, archivists, researchers. I bet one or two lift their new mechanical-magical legs and go out and see the world, perhaps for hundreds of years of wandering, maybe the PCs meet one very early in as a 'foreshadowing' of later encounters. Some will just get bored and go silent, or maybe even withdraw into a meditative state. Perhaps some will despair of life and leap into chasms to try and truly die (and fail?).

But.. and of course, one will be so very sure that the youngsters are doing it all wrong, and that they could do it so much better.. and will start a conspiracy.. and plot..

So, one question, can these constructs ever really be turned off, and how? It would be kind of cool if they can't, since living forever can be quite scary.. plus beating one to submission, striking off it's head and placing it in a very dark cave would be such a creepy punishment..

Have fun..

Feel free to use what you want. If I were concerned about copying, I wouldn't have posted them in the first place.

On the "turning off", eternity etc., there 's a lot to play with there.

In Star Trek's "Who Mourns for Adonais?", a being claiming to be Apollo stops the Enterprise and demands their worship, at the end, lamenting the loss of his fellow Olympians.

In the Being Human, vampires punished their own by defanging them and- in certain cases- burying them.

In one campaign, I had the party fighting against an "Army of Darkness", only to find out the Lich King who raised it in the first place was senile, and was reduced mainly to puttering around in his library, researching magic...much of which he had researched or even created before and simply forgot. The Army itself was, at this point, mainly run by his former second in command.

I'm afraid you spelled Eldar wrong sir

Sorry I'm unsure what your asking, it seems like it's not to difficult to write in a bit of lore about another race it's not like low level characters tend to start their campaign careers with "What are all the races I know about and what do I know about them?". Seems to me you have to make a choice was this something that happened a long time ago or something that's happening now. If it was a long time ago has the splinter faction spread or is it contained to the dwarven area? How or why do the players know of it? Will they actually be interacting with it or will it just be some esoteric knowledge? If they will be visiting with the faction what stops the rest of the dwarves from coming in and killing off this hated faction? Beyond that it's a story right? So write them in however you want as long as you find it interesting and so do they who cares about the minutia?

I don't know the Eldar reference I'm afraid, Obeliske. I googled it and found Warhammer websites, but I've never played. Is that what the Eldar do? I was looking for any insight on how similar things fit into D&D lore so that my use of souls etc. would be consistent with anything I pulled out of the books later, but it sounds like everything has been left very open and I can do whatever I want, so I probably will. Haha.

All these ideas coming in are great though - thank you, all! I was thinking that it isn't really immortality; they can still be destroyed (thus releasing their soul and effectively killing them) and eventually the magical McGuffin binding their soul would burn out on its own, resulting in many years of gradually declining faculties and eventually death. It's a great honour to be granted this additional life however, and most would take their responsibilities seriously. You made a good point though, satbunny; no one could keep up their duties for hundreds of years without taking time to themselves, so I imagine they would move in and out of retirement sometimes. I really like the idea of the players finding out about the dwarves upon meeting one of them on their travels, but I doubt the players will meet them for a long time yet - I've just gotten a bit too into my first world building and gone ahead of myself. It'll no doubt all change entirely when the players start shaping the world. Haha.

As far as the perils of eternity themes go, I think I may save that for another race or being in the world as I feel this one has plenty of story points available already. Also potentially the players may have to kill one of these things eventually, and given this is a new campaign starting at level 1 I can't imagine they'll be high levelled enough to take on immortals.

Death, in D&D - and more specifically what happens afterward - isn't particularly well-defined in the general game as far as lore or mechanics go. Some of the published campaign worlds give a minor bit of exposition on what happens in that particular world, narratively, but the actual rules mechanics of those processes are usually fairly vague and subject to wide interpretation.

You'll find that, in general, in most of the published campaign worlds things like the mechanical or narrative specifics of what's actually possible are pretty sparse...
You may find that there's something written about what usually happens or what generally happens (i.e., in the Forgotten Realms, souls of people who didn't worship the gods in life end up eternally stuck in the Wall of Souls rather than heading to their deity's afterlife), but there's almost always gigantic swathes of unused idea space in which to tweak or adjust aspects of what already exists or to slot in nearly any crazy new thing you could come up with.
In particular, the list of spells and magic items in the game is merely the list of what's commonly known and used, rather than the be-all and end-all of magic in the universe. So "A wizard did it... by accident" (or god, or magical cataclysm, or misfired spell, or completely random glitch in reality, etc.) is a perfectly viable reason for damn near anything, and how they did it or how it happened doesn't necessarily need to be repeatable or fully explained, particularly if the required circumstances are unique or near impossible to attain. Finding "lost knowledge" or discovering "secrets of the cosmos" are staples of the genre.

The actual mechanics of placing the souls of their dead rulers into stone bodies is a much simpler thing to flesh out than the above-mentioned social ramifications of it.
My personal thought would be that perhaps in order to cut down on the number of gazillion-year-old chefs all trying to stir the soup you might do one or more of the following:

The process doesn't always work - it requires a particularly strong personality and someone who's willing to undergo the process rather than pass on peacefully and someone who's willing to serve their society and their current king without trying to use their new semi-immortal status to extend their reign.

The transformation process is a bit variable, and not all of them come fully back as their original personalities, or some may choose to simply begin again as simple folk and serve rather than lead...
Thus, the "children of stone" are considered a particular caste of dwarven society, and are required to elect or appoint a certain number of well-respected members of their caste to form the Voice of Stone, the council of advisors to the living king. Council membership is of a finite duration (perhaps 100, 300, or 500 years), so some individuals may end up serving multiple times before they fade away.

When a ruler reaches the end of its original life it can instead choose to directly place it's accumulated knowledge (but not it's personality) in the Book of Stone, which is essentially the racial collective memory of the people, which can be accessed through divination magic by the dwarves' priests and wizards. A stone child who has reached the end of it's second life, whether through time or choice, can also choose to do so.