The Sand Golem

[Exen Trik]

A Dispel Magic or similar spell causes the Sand Golem to collapse into a pile of inert sand for as long as the effect lasts and 2d4 rounds afterwards. While a pile of sand, they are considered prone, helpless, and stunned, while their damage reduction changes from DR 10/bludgeoning to DR 20/-.
Vulnerability: Whenever a Sand Golem takes damage from a nonmagical Acid attack, it takes an additional 2d6 damage.

I see you reduced the duration of the dispel, but it's still a long time for a golem to be helpless. And the increase in acid damage is abusable as written, even 1 point of damage from a splash of acid would trigger a massive increase in damage. Taken together, a wizard could cast dispel magic and take out the sand golem for almost 10 rounds on average, while the fighter uses full attacks with a weapon that has energy damage and another person drips acid on the pile of sand until it melts away. The 1d4 round duration of dispel magic is plenty, and +50% damage is the standard for elemental weaknesses.

Otherwise it looks good... I'd comment on CR or whatnot but I've never been any good at that sort of thing

 

[The Vorpal Tribble]

Heyas, just thought I might mention that there is a Sand Golem in Sandstorm. Don't recall enough about it to make a comparison however.

 

[Sigurd]

Personally I think that as its very easy to make it have should more obvious weaknesses.


Sigurd


I think it would be really useful if you could arrange it to be a DR 5 goon.

 

[Thondor]

Weaknesses

Well there's been a bunch of discussion of what element should affect a sand golem. . . So far I havn't agreed with any of them. I encourage everyone to make the link between Sandman (from Spider-man) and The Sand Golem. The only thing that has ever effected him is water, and rarely wind.


Fire: the argument for fire is that it slows the Golem by turning it into glass. The temperature needed to turn Sand to glass is 1700̊C (3090̊F) ! There are very few spells that I can think of that would feasibly get any amount of the golem to this temperature. If this were so then the the Iron Golem should begin being turned to slag by any of these attacks, iron has a melting point of 1538 °C, 2800 °F. It is also counter intuaitive as people frequently use sand to extiguish fire.
However to throw in an interesting effect. Fire- based spells heat up the Golem causing his slam attacks to deal 1d6 fire damage for a number of rounds equal to the spell-level.

Water: Water changes the very nature of the Golem, making it harder for it to stay together, it's body and limbs heavier and leaden. Water spells and even Clever PC's hitting the Sand Golem with (at least 6 gallons?) of water causes the Golem to be slowed as the spell. This also ends the effects caused by Fire spells.

Sunlight: Any light spell capable of dealing damage to an individual immediately dries the Golem and removes the slowed affect.

Dispel: Scratch this. No other Golem suffers from being dispelled see, wind below.

Wind: Wind spells may disperse the Golem as the Dispel function that was previously discribed. The caster must succeed on a caster level check. However the spell must be focused on the Golem and will have no effect besides dispersing it for 1d4+1 rounds. Being dispersed ends all effects previously on the Golem. Note the Golem does heal during the dispersal if in a sandy environment.

Hiding: in a sandy environment the Sand golem gains +10 to it's hide check.


of course you could have fire spells dry the Golem to.

 

[Aleolus]

Good suggestions, but you need heat to evaporate water, so I would say that fire got rid of the slow effect from water, not light. And in fact, originally fire spells would haste it, with water slowing it. I hadn't considered adding in dealing extra damage to their attacks from them, though. And as for the Dispel effect, every other golem has a physical, formed body which never looses its shape. The sand golem can only take shape through magic, so removing magic from the ambient environment removes their ability to animate. Other golems have the magic that animates them deep inside, where effects such as Dispel Magic or AMF can't reach. Not so with the Sand Golem.