Friday, March 25, 2011

Item: Ghostly Servant

Ghostly servants are the exclusive property of the great Tayke Mages. They can be found in ruins of Tayke east of the Tsalagi Mountains and in a few places in Empire. No one in the modern era has been able to duplicate them, but if they are found they are highly prized, though hard to move from their location.

A ghostly servant is just that, a specter which can cook, clean, sew, chop wood, play music, etc. They have to be relatively simple tasks (no making a banquet for three hundred or creating a sonnet) but ones they can do well once programmed. The Tayke used them for outposts so they didn't need as many people and in their libraries and places of learning for the same reason.

A ghostly servant is bound to an object, usually a small statue of a person doing the said task (so a cook stirring something, a man with a wood hatchet, a weaver at her loom). They are porcelain in most cases, though jade versions have been found, so few have survived into the current age. Some thought a soul was bound to the item, but the Tayke mages would never do such a thing. They were peaceful people and so some scholars believe the Tayke mages shaped the servants from the very weave of magic itself. This is a feat that none can duplicate (or think of how to duplicate) now.

Ghostly servants must stay within fifty feet of their statue or simply disappear to reappear near their statue some hours later. As long as the servant has supplies in an area they will continue to create/make/do what ever they are tasked to do, on what ever time table they are on forever.

Finding one is a rare find and worth a small fortune to some richer nobles or collectors, depending on what the servant does. Let me caution you, as a Gamemaster, to not put one of these in unless you have a good reason. The PC's have to find a Tayke ruin that hasn't been picked over and then find an intact statue. I would perhaps use this as flavor text when the party visits somewhere, as if they owner of such place has been lucky enough to find one.

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