The Golem
A downloadable game
Some people live their whole lives without ever finding their purpose. You're not like them. You know exactly why you're here. You're here to serve. People have goals, and you help them find success. There's something comforting about that. The simplicity; the certainty. Being needed brings you joy.
You have a job to do, Golem. So get to work.
Devoted, obedient, easily influenced, and expendable. The Golem of Jewish folklore is a clay guardian, created by a rabbi to serve his community and defend it from persecution. In Monsterhearts, the Golem explores the relationship between identity and labor, and the precarity of deriving self-worth solely from utility.
The Golem is a Monsterhearts 2 skin with great power and a need to please. They're at their strongest when following Commands given by others, but it literally hurts to say "no". If they can learn to distinguish selflessness from self-martyrdom, they'll grow into a powerful ally and loyal friend. If not, they might get trapped in toxic dynamics, burn themselves out, or lose themselves entirely.
Credits
Image is adapted from "Golem" by nefasth, licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0.
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Honestly, I don't think golems are good in monsterhearts, but in comparison to some of the *other* homebrew of them I've seen... this gets the thumbs up from me.
You know what, I'll take it.
Out of curiosity, though, what makes you feel like Golems aren't a good fit for Monsterhearts? And what do you feel that I got right that the other homebrews you've seen were missing?
It's the focus on being a teenager/relationships. From what I understand -- and I'm not an expert by any means, very new to being observant -- the golem isn't really a... person? Well, they are, but not in the teenaged way. Closer to Baymax from Big Hero Six, or, hell, Superman, if you focus on the superhuman strength, the protecting, as well as the investigative journalism as Clark Kent, since golems are as much investigators as they are physical protectors. They're a response to blood libel-- accusations that the Jewish people are doing human sacrifice of good Christian children-- and part of that means being a physical boundary between us and those who seek to persecute, but another, equally important part, is finding the true perpetrators of the crimes. That dual purpose is why I think they'd be a better fit for a game like Monster of the Week.
It's less that you had something the others were missing as much as you had the wisdom to take out the sex move and not make it a weird BDSM thing. If this sounds like the bar is literally on the floor... yeah. Yeah, it kind of is.
Totally valid critique.
I grew up with the golem as a bedtime story, and those stories tended to focus more on the guardian aspect than the investigator aspect. So for me, the iconic depiction of the golem is "indestructible protector of the powerless". The PC who inspired this Skin was a golem who skewed so far towards guardian that his guiding philosophy was "every life is precious except for mine".
That said, "golem as investigator" is definitely a core element of the folklore, and I would absolutely *love* to see someone create a MotW or Urban Shadows playbook that explored that angle.
And, yeah, for a Skin whose sense of self and ability to consent are so heavily compromised, I would have felt *really* uncomfortable including a Sex Move.
Honestly I'm probably a pretty bad source for this stuff. I've only been observant starting recently.
I only saw the first page of a really bad one, but, yeah, they did worse than just happen to include a sex move. It was orientated around having a "master" and it was this whole BDSM thing.