D&D General Simulacrum - uses, not abuses

[saviirkad]

I didn't necessarily endeavor to stay wholly within the spell's remit as RAW, but I had a major wizard NPC that my players had a strong connection with and eventually became a patron of sorts and ally. The wizard was a dragonborn who spent much of his time reading and re-reading the several tomes within his library, and who willingly traded access to it should someone have something new to add to his collection. Very Candlekeep in style, but much, much smaller in scale.

Eventually it was revealed that the wizard was the simulacrum of an ancient dragon, that had been created while within humanoid form. The original dragon was deceased, and the wizard lived a relatively low profile in a distant land from where the dragon fell largely due to fear of meeting the same fate.

I took the fact that a simulacrum can't gain levels or regain resources to inform certain characteristics. I took it to mean that the simulacrum could not retain well new information, or expand upon his capabilities beyond where he began. His library that he read and re-read was to assist with retention of new information, and he relied heavily upon scrolls and rituals because his resources were finite and could not be replenished.

However, his wisdom and intellect were at a very high baseline, and he could make due by using his reasoning and logic to quickly close the gap whenever he encountered an instance where his lack of memory would otherwise cause problems. This made him appear distracted and lost in thought at first but would build up steam into a powerhouse as the interaction would stretch on.

When Frostmaiden released, there was a particularly pertinent part of it that I did lift wholesale for this NPC's benefit.

 

[DragonLancer]

In my Sunday night campaign, one of the campaign villains never appears in person. Every encounter with him has been with a Simulacrum. Now the party is 14th, they have the means when they choose to, to track down the real one and get their revenge.

In the Tuesday night campaign, the party located an ancient library of an extinct civilisation from hundreds of thousands of years ago. The party Wizard has created a Simulacrum to stay behind and study the library for him, while the rest of the party goes out to track down the evil survivour of that civilisations' fall. The idea being they can contact magically the simulacrum to look up specific information.