I’ve recently began a saga whom one of my players is a Guernicus heavily specced into Terram and has the strong desire to create golems of earth (and possibly metal) as a long term project idea. I’m all for this, yet we are both wondering how would be the best way to go about this?
They desire them to perform different fuctions such as acting as servants at the covenant and possibly as surrogate grogs to send out on missions.
I’m all for this, yet what would be required for this? I imagine creating the ‘shell’ or ‘body’ for the golem would be straightforward yet would a considerable amount of rego and mentem also be required? They have also suggested possibly being able to control or see through the golems vision from a distance - how could this be achieved?
Would something to do with binding earth spirits be easier instead? I’m also aware of the jewish golem in the Divine sourcebook, yet this is something they are not interested and wish to keep it hermetic.
You would need a combination of a spell to hold the Spirit within the vessel, a spell to move the golem around, and finally, passing the control of the spell to the bound spirit.
So for an invested item, with the three following effects:
Animation of the Unbreakable Body, ReTe 14 (base 3: Control or move dirt in an unnatural fashion, +1 for stone, +2 Sun, Self, Ind for a ReTe 10 +1 2 uses/day, +3 env. trigger)
Passing the Reign of Terram Spell MuVi 15 (5 (affect a spell 5 +2 magnitude), +2 Voice, Mom, Ind, 1/day)
Holding the Spirit of Terram ReTe 29 (Base 5, +2 Voice, +2 Sun for a ReTe 25, +1 2 uses/day, +3 env, trigger)
You might want to add Penetration effect for the 3rd effect, but if you negociate with a Spirit that is accepting to serve you, you won’t need it - an immaterial spirit might be keen to have way to interact with the physical world.
(Those spells are variants taken from Hermetic project, p 97-98).
That’s the bare minimum, so you can add a magnitude for a finer control of the animation spell, Holding the Spirit can be tweaked to Mentem to allow a ghost to have a physical body animating the golem, you might want to add ways to interrupt the control or expel the possessing spirit, etc…
Binding a spirit to a statue as Ezechiel suggests is one approach.
Another would be to try to awaken the consciousness of the rock, similar to the corebook guideline to awaken the consciousness of a plant (MuTe(Me) rather than MuHe(Me)). I don't think there's a canon guideline for doing it in Terram, but it's probably at least theoretically possible - I'd make it harder than the Herbam version, though, as plants are more alive than rocks are.
Some Merinita have a Virtue which would allow them to create a spell to turn a statue into a faerie, but that's unlikely to be of much use to your Guernicus. Some Guernicus do have the ability to summon creatures with Terram aligned Magic Might (see The Sundered Eagle pg 67), although elementals (one of the classic such creatures other than Terram spirits) aren't much use for your purposes due to being unintelligent and prone to violence. Unless you find a way to grant them intelligence and control them.
It is worth pointing out that the concept of a golem is fundamentally that of a religious rite (specific to Judaism, though I do not know if it is grounded in history or only in lore), and as such may require divine magic.
A statue coming to life is a very old idea, with Pygmalion creating Galatea being an ancient Greek myth (most famous from the Latin version of the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and Daedalus creating speaking statues, and Talos the moving metal statue is mentioned in The Sundered Eagle - there are plenty of sources of inspiration for magi. You could bring them up as sources for stories for the Guernicus to go looking into ancient moving statues, or he could invent his own.
The other comment is that I think you are right to call this a long term project. Artificial obedient servants in telepathic contact with you with superhuman bodies is a big project. Three points in its favour: (1) I think it is within the bounds of Hermetic magic, or maybe a little beyond if you bind spirits. (2) unlike many large projects, you get useful results as you go along. E.g. a version commanded within voice range still has a lot of value. (3) The end result should be very useful, as long as you have enough vis to make your army.
Once you've got that far, an obviously useful bolt-on is MuIm to make them look human. Probably big beefy humans.