Flesh Golem

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Flesh Golems, as their name suggests, are a kind of golem made from human flesh...

What? Alright, alright, we'll get serious. You're familiar with the story of Frankenstein's Monster? About a mad scientist trying to create life by stitching together a bunch of corpse pieces and zapping it with lightning Well, Dungeons & Dragons never met an idea they couldn't steal, and so promptly co-opted the idea for their own setting.

Flesh Golems are created by taking parts from multiple corpses - and it always has to be multiple corpses, with Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder traditionally requiring 6; 4 separate limbs, 1 for the torso, and 1 for the brain (head optional) - and melding them together before animating them as a golem. Depending on the setting, this may or may not have certain advantages over the usual golems of clay or metal. At the very least, it tends to be easier and cheaper than the standard golem, but they're also more likely to run amok.

Distinguished variants include more horrific and obviously undead forms of flesh golem (known variously as Zombie Golems and Carrion Golems) and the obvious sapient golem ala Frankenstein's Monster.

D&D

AD&D

Introduced in this edition as a "Lesser Golem", the Flesh Golem is a big, dumb, lumbering brute, mostly useful for its relative ease of construction. Hideously strong, it doesn't handle combat well, having a tendency to fly into a mindless berserk fury if forced to fight for too long (cumulative 1% chance per round). Immune to attacks from non-magical weapons, fire and cold-based spells only Slow them for a few rounds, whilst electrical attacks heal them (1 HP per damage die inflicted) instead of hurting them.

The same edition featured two variants, both native to Ravenloft.

The "Ravenloftian Flesh Golem" is a direct reference to Frankenstein's Monster, and is far more powerful than its standard cousin; it's more intelligent (sometimes to the point of true sentience, although in such cases the golem inevitably turns on its "master") and has great healing powers - it regains 1 hit point per hour and, if slain, can be resurrected by sewing up its wounds and jolting it with lightning. And those are just some of its powers. It does have a unique weakness, in that it takes significant damage from fire. Adam, Lamordia's Darklord, is the best known of these flesh golems.

The Zombie Golem is an even more grotesque version of the standard flesh golem, made from rotting flesh which later editions would specify have to be taken from bodies that had originally been animated as zombies. It's even more sluggish and stupid than a normal flesh golem, and lacks its standard magical defenses, but can't go berserk, can be healed by Animate Dead spells, and exudes a noxious stench akin to that of a Ghast.

Mystara is home to the "Drolem", which is what you get when you make a Flesh Golem out of Dragon bodyparts.

Flesh Golem PCs

The "Book of Secrets", #3 of the Books of S netbooks for Ravenloft, features an article called "Wretched Creations" which presents rules for playing a Flesh Golem PC in a game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition.

D&D 3e & PF

The D&D 3e flesh golem appears in the first Monster Manual. It is essentially the same as its AD&D counterpart, save for one new trait; zapping it with lightning fixes any Slow effect it may be under, and also heals it instead of hurting it.

A 3e update for the Zombie Golem appeared in the Ravenloft Gazetteer #2.

The 3.5 book Heroes of Horror introduced the cadaver golem, an intelligent golem that can gain new skills and abilities by attaching new body parts from other creatures to itself.

Serpent Kingdoms introduced the serpentflesh golem, a golem made out of dead snakes or other scaly creatures. They usually are made by people who really hate Serpentfolk.

Pathfinder's flesh golem appeared in its first bestiary. Its equivalent to the Zombie Golem, the foul-smelling, disease carrying Carrion Golem, appeared in the 2nd Bestiary.

D&D 4e

There are multiple kinds of flesh golem in D&D 4e.

The standard Flesh Golem appeared in the Monster Manual 1 for this edition. It's pretty much the traditional D&D flesh golem; a cheap, low-level golem that stands out by being strong, tough & stupid, with a propensity to fly into berserk rages.

The Open Grave sourcebook features the Blaspheme, a direct reference to Frankenstein's Monster in the form of a unique undead created from multiple body parts, and the Cadaver Golem, a rare outcome where an attempt to create a flesh golem imbues it with its own sentience, which typically hates its creator. This version of the cadaver golem has very different abilities than the one from the previous edition, as it doesn't gain new abilities from assimilated flesh.

D&D 5e

Appearing in the Monster Manual, the 5e Flesh Golem mostly preserves its tradition of being a shambling, destructive, unstable brute, but with a few tweaks for the new edition. This is the first edition where the standard flesh golem had some kind of pyrophobia, in the form of suffering Disadvantage on its attack rolls and ability checks until the end of its next turn if it takes fire damage.

World of Darkness

Rules for crafting flesh golems as adversaries appeared in the New World of Darkness 1e sourcebook "Antagonists". This idea was then expanded upon to create the game-line Promethean: The Created, in which you basically play as different lineages of flesh golems.

Monstergirls?

What better bride than one you built yourself?

Now, you might think that in comparison to standard golems, flesh golems would never get the monstergirls treatment. After all, they're pretty much the necromancer version of the golem, right? Well, you're wrong: beside the fact that monstergirl zombies and ghouls are things, it does make a morbid sense. If you're crazy enough to gather corpse-bits, stitch them all together and bring them to life, why not try and do it with bits taken from dead women and make yourself a girlfriend out of it? Heck, there's even some actual movies along this theme, from the legendary Universal film "Bride of Frankenstein" to the infamous horror-comedy "Frankenhooker", in which a hapless mad scientist ends up building a strangely sexy super-slut female flesh golem from the bodies of dead whores.

The Book of Erotic Fantasy takes this to its conclusion with the Pleasure Golem, made from "extremely fresh" humanoid flesh and wax. Normally it looks like a bunch of stitched-together bodies but it can use Disguise Self at-will to look like anyone within the limits of the spell (this means on average in the 5'-7' range), so those who like them some shortstacks but also the more amazonian physique might be better off with two Pleasure Golems instead of one. Pleasure Golems have no minds of their own; instead they have a drive to deliver pleasure and have a semblance of life thanks to an infusion with a fire elemental. They cannot speak, but they can produce sexual noises. And it's worth noting that they always sound and feel the same (it's up in the air if this means that you'll be able to feel the stitchings), RAW Disguise Self can make them look, smell and taste differently. Certain Pleasure Golems are built with extreme docility in mind for the more... harsh of owners, so there's a rough 5% chance that a threatened Pleasure Golem will not fight back when attacked. When it is attacked however it can clumsily defend itself with its fist, and has the standard Construct immunities. The Pleasure Golem does have one crippling flaw: its Intoxicating Pheromones Extraordinary Ability. All creatures (but the text specifies this as mammalian) within 30' of a Pleasure Golem have to roll a DC15 Will save or come under effect of the Vision of Exquisite Pleasure spell. This flat-out STUNS the target for the spell's duration, and since you have to save every turn in the presence of a Pleasure Golem... well, you better hope your Will save lasts longer than you do.

If this isn't enough for you, the Scarred Lands sourcebook for "Shelzar, City of Sins" has a sidebar on page 63 introducing "Sex Constructs"; flesh golem-like entities engineered by perverse wizards in pursuit of the wealth of the most hedonistic and debauched nobles of this infamous city of carnal pleasures. The two specific types mentioned are the Sintaur, resembling a centaur whose lower body is made of two human lower torsos melded together, with each "foot" replaced by a dextrous, long-fingered human hand and each pair of leg-arms having its own set of attendant genitals, and female sintaurs having two to three pairs of "huge" breasts; and the Slavering Orificer, which is basically described as a Gibbering Mouther made out of vaginas instead of mouths and which is associated with revels of such debauchery that the construct often doesn't survive the orgy that centers on it. Truly, creations worthy of a Slaaneshii necromancer.