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 wit 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 seperate 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 amuck.

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.

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 fully sentient 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's terrified of fire.

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.

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.

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 is a reference to the Ravenloft Flesh Golem of

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?

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 bis 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.