Tophet

Tophet

(Creature)

Type

Construct

CR

CR 10

Environment

Any

Alignment

LG	NG	CG
LN	N	CN
LE	NE	CE

Source: The Jackal's Price, pg(s). 86-87

Created as a mobile prison for the most valuable or dangerous of prisoner tophets have been used in the past as mobile torture chambers when filled with burning hot coals or poisonous vermin.

Appearance

Tophets have the forms of huge iron statues, the top halves of which look like the bodies of corpulent kings, their heads often sculpted to resemble a dethroned monarch or dishonoured noble. They possess vast mouths, yawning and filled with teeth (although by an adventurer's standards the teeth are neither particularly big, nor particularly sharp). Their mouths drop straight into the cavernous lower half of the tophets, which resemble giant enclosed cauldrons. Tophets have no legs, instead walking (or, more appropriately, madly waddling) on four small nubs that support their massive bellies. The front of a tophet's cauldron-like belly contains a large hatch with a lock embedded in the front—the only means of releasing someone imprisoned inside.

Habitat and ecology

As constructs, tophets are found wherever their masters want them to be, but unlike many constructs, they rarely follow their masters around. Tophets are designed to serve as prisons and as such make poor warriors or bodyguards. Normally created by tyrannical rulers or mighty and imperious wizards, tophets seem to be far more common in Garund than in Avistan. It is believed they were created in ancient Katapesh but in modern times they are most commonly found in Rahadoum and Thuvia. Being constructs, tophets do not have any real impact on the surrounding environment, though they often utilise that environment to make their interior prisons more inhospitable. One of the most feared uses of tophets is as a 'hot box', a practice during which evil and sadistic masters imprison someone within a tophet and order it to walk into the scorching hot desert, sometimes for days at a time. Within a metal tophet, the temperature soon rises to an unbearable level, leading to the technique's use as either cruel torture or the cause of an agonizingly slow death. There are reports of cruel masters making their tophets (with helpless prisoner inside) climb to the top of freezing cold mountains and stay there or walk across the bottom of a lake, causing hyperthermia and drowning, respectively.

Abilities

Conductivity

While a tophet is immune to damage from fire it conducts heat meaning those within still suffer.

Swallow Whole

Tophets were designed to swallow smaller creatures whole and when inside a tophet's belly it is very hard to escape, even harder than cutting ones way out of a dragon's stomach.