Soulbound Doll

These small, sentient dolls contain a fragment of another creature's soul. The binding process strips most of the individuality from the soul, making a new soulbound doll an almost blank slate. Despite this process, fragments of the original creature's personality remain.

Soulbound dolls can serve as companions, surrogate children, servants, guards, and sentries, as desired by their creators. Creators of soulbound dolls typically take care to take soul fragments from people whose personality traits the crafters wish to see in their dolls.

A soulbound doll's body is made from wood, stone, or porcelain, with one exquisite item worth at least 300 gp to serve as the soul focus. Creation requires a soul fragment from a deceased creature that must die at some point during the creation of the doll—as a result, most soulbound dolls are created by evil spellcasters. Other spellcasters can create soulbound dolls, but if the donor soul is unwilling, they may have alignment repercussions. An unwilling soul can resist the procedure with a DC 20 Will save. Stripping a soul fragment from the dead does not prevent the rest of the soul from continuing on to the afterlife, nor does it prevent the body from later being resurrected or raised from the dead.

Alignment Variation — Soulbound dolls are at least partially neutral in alignment, although they can also be chaotic, evil, good, or lawful. They have an alignment-dependent spell-like ability usable once per day as listed below.

• Chaotic Neutral: rage
• Lawful Neutral: suggestion (DC 12)
• Neutral: deep slumber (DC 12)
• Neutral Evil: inflict serious wounds (DC 12)
• Neutral Good: heroism

Soul Focus — The soul bound to the doll lives within a focus integrated into the doll or its apparel, typically one of the doll's eyes or a gem embedded into its neck or chest. As long as this soul focus remains intact, it can be used to animate another doll, using the same cost as creating a new construct. Once bound into the soul focus, the soul continues to learn, and so if later it is put into a new doll body, the soul retains its personality and memories from its previous body or bodies. A soul focus has hardness 8, 12 hit points, and a break DC of 20.

Improved Initiative, Toughness

Perception +3, Stealth +13