Iron Maiden
GM's Eyes Only
Spoilers. This page is written for the GM, and players who read on will learn things their characters don't know.
A clockwork body with a bound spirit inside, made by the Unbroken Chain during the Long War. Source: Iron Kingdoms Monsternomicon, p. 52.
What it is. At a glance, a finely sculpted iron statue of a young woman. In a hooded cloak and at a distance, she can pass for a living woman with a slightly stiff walk. When she or her master is threatened, her skin erupts in hooks, spikes, and razors. A spirit animates her, robbed of its will and bound to obey. It is wracked with pain whenever its master comes to harm.
Masters and names. When her master dies, an iron maiden goes dormant, sometimes for centuries, in the ruins where she served. She wakes when a new master speaks her living name aloud as part of a ritual. That name is engraved somewhere on her body, in a different place on each one. Woken, she is as loyal to the new master as she was to her maker. A metalworker can repair her, and the magic in her keeps age and rust away.
Breaking free. The bound soul is frayed, and now and then a flash of her old life comes back, which is torture. Some piece together enough of who they were to break the binding. A free iron maiden hates the living and saves her worst for her master. Free ones haunt tombs and lost places, drawn by echoes of the lives they lived.
In Tir Hathar. A wartime creation of the Unbroken Chain.
Stats¶
First draft, built from WWN's baseline stat lines.
| HD | AC | Atk | Dmg | Shock | Move | ML | Inst | Skill | Save | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iron Maiden | 6 | 16 | +7 x2 | 1d8+2 | 2/15 | 30' | 12 | 3 | +2 | 12+ |
| Free Iron Maiden | 6 | 16 | +7 x2 | 1d8+2 | 2/15 | 30' | 12 | 6 | +2 | 12+ |
- Built. She doesn't eat, sleep, or breathe, and is immune to poison, disease, and anything that only works on the living. She can't heal naturally; a week of work and a Craft check against difficulty 10 restores hit points equal to the crafter's Craft skill plus 2.
- Spike skin. Anyone who hits her with a melee attack, or grapples her, takes 1d4 damage.
- Shield. Once per round, when her master is hit by an attack while within 10 feet of her, she can take the hit instead.
- Bound by name. She obeys whoever spoke her living name in the binding ritual, and wakes from dormancy only for it.
- Unstable. When a memory stirs (the GM's call, about once a month) or her master dies, roll 1d6. On a 1 she breaks free. A master within sight can make a Mental save to hold her; on a failure she attacks the master first.
- Free. A free iron maiden adds Berserk: whenever she drops a foe, she immediately makes one more attack against another foe in reach.
Still open: playtesting the numbers, and what the binding ritual takes. Suggested, not settled: built by the Chain's Unbound wing (the Bīdārān), as a bound-soul answer to Mechanika's Warforged. Whether Warforged have souls is still argued, and the Chain says they sit outside the chain, so an iron maiden, a construct with a provable, named soul, would feed that argument every time one is found. Like Warforged, no new ones are made.