Hello again, I checked the clock last night and realized I needed to go to sleep immediately, even though I forgot to post on Sunday. I think it might have been because I got to do another test run of my game system, so I was pretty out of gas and running catch up the rest of the weekend. So you’re getting a post today, hopefully it makes up for it. This is another post in the Fictional Science title, which provides fictional books or other texts with worldbuilding information that can be read for fun or placed for PCs to discover in libraries or forgotten troves in your tabletop roleplaying game. I experimented with this also as a strategy advice doc that’s delivered in universe, which is something I think might ought to come up a bit more often than it does. I’m thinking, for example, of Captain Bill Seacaster’s review of the Bad Kids’ fight in Dimension 20: Fantasy High, Season 1. I’ve still got more of these on the way, especially if it’s something that people enjoy.
The Homunculus: Recommendation and Methods
Dr. Christine Lautrec
Many mages who reach the upper tiers of magical casting begin to compare spells and are mystified by Create Homunculus. They argue that the spell is inefficient and requires a great deal more energy, investment, and preparation than Find Familiar for a relatively similar outcome. They argue that it looks unusable compared to the feats of magical prowess that casters of a similarly vaunted ability are capable of. One might point out that such a dismissive attitude is simply the marker of a mage that has just enough power to begin to believe that a multitude of things are beneath them. While this is true, the closed-minded view that describes the uselessness of the homunculus is held by the ambitious and experienced alike.
I, however, am placed in a unique position to comment on the spell’s usefulness, and argue that, like many of the most useful spells, its usefulness is bound not by its potency, but by its versatility. These spells create controversy because they are bound by the caster’s ingenuity, creativity, and open-mindedness rather than their efficiency.
I’ll begin with an anecdote explaining why I say I am in a unique position to comment. Unlike most mages, I have achieved an actually incredibly long life. This is because I spent much of that time trapped in suspended animation, a method of life extension I do not recommend. While the circumstances are for another piece, it is important to know that I was unexpectedly out of my office for a minimum of three hundred years, quite likely many times longer.
Before this had occurred, my primary place of business was staffed by my current homunculus, a diligent little fellow named Garmlin, who I grew in a bottle. I will discuss different methods for creating a homunculus later on. Garmlin’s primary job was maintaining and retrieving records and storing important items. I must admit, when I returned so many years later, a logical part of my mind suspected that I would see my workplace razed to the ground when I returned. It’s worth noting that I was surprised to even see it still standing, much less running at the same sets of professions it had when I had left it. Of course, no one working there was anyone I had known beforehand. I was even more surprised to see Garmlin behind the records desk, and more surprised still when he remembered me, and easily retrieved the documents that indicated that I was, yes, still the owner of the place, which I hardly remembered myself. It’s truly an impressive thing to have an employee that happily allows you to resume your old life after a thousand year coma. I’d like to see a normal familiar accomplish such a feat.
I hear already, the scratching of quills by those who argue that this is far too specific and unlikely circumstance to say that this makes homunculi useful.
I’ll quickly go over several much more germane uses for such a creature. While I had roamed throughout the universe, Garmlin stayed behind and took care of administrative tasks. He could instantly learn and catalog any of my experiences, compare them to acquired research, and could do so on any plane of existence. If he needed clarification, or to communicate with anyone while I was away, I could communicate with them directly.
While this is my preferred usage of a homunculus, I have also employed them in what one might consider a much more direct context. Provided you don’t mind sending your little friend into potential danger, you can use the principle of “wherever you go, they go” in reverse to use them as surveillance. Scrying, for example, is one method of gaining valuable intelligence, but it has a wide variety of restrictions or ways of failing. Not so much for your homunculus, who, I ought to have mentioned in the previous section, doesn’t have to sleep, never gets tired, and can burn the midnight oil on whatever task you give it as much as you need it to so you can get your beauty sleep. The common objection to this is that a surveillance homunculus is maybe a little clumsy most of the time, so sending one into a dangerous situation is essentially throwing away all the material costs of an expensive spell. Or, at the very least, whomever you want to spy on will see them, and immediately stop whatever thing that they were doing. And, while you can supply your homunculus with a truly incredible ability to withstand punishment, it comes at the cost of weakening one’s self. First of all, I would argue, better the homunculus than you if it means sending something headfirst into danger unprepared, but again, this is not dissimilar to the benefits of a standard familiar. Although, again, the range component is often-overlooked. One solution to this problem is to give your homunculus time with a ring of invisibility or whatever other magic item that will help it accomplish its task. Then you can send it on an extended surveillance mission and you’ll be completely ready for whatever waits in store when you get there.
You can also apply this same set of principles to a homunculus you have staying at home while you go galavanting around (a preferable option, in my opinion). You do all the important work while the homunculus acts as an all in one surveillance/alarm system for your wizard’s tower or whatever less conspicuous method you have of putting incalculably valuable knowledge in one place for people to try to steal. With no small amount of planning and magical devices, you can set so that your homunculus can pull you back home and out of a tight situation, or that those idiots I mentioned trying to steal from you end up in a bad situation with much more than they bargained for. Bonus if you find yourself of questionable faculties and have hungry magical creatures to feed would-be-thieves to, or, for example, a magical curse that requires you to consume mortal flesh or go insane. It’s more common than you would think.
All that being said, the possibilities of essentially having your consciousness in two different places at once is too much to fully explore here without even more time to test it. Attentive and knowledgeable readers will also remark that you can almost literally be in two places at once via a simulacrum. Again, this is an even greater investment than conjuring a homunculus, for an understandably better and more difficult to execute option. In the comparison of homunculi to scrying, familiars, and simulacra, I would ask an exceedingly paranoid caster, “why not all of the above?” You can send your simulacrum out with your invisible homunculus and monitor your immediate area with a familiar, spending your downtime scrying on where you want to send your team next. If knowledge is power, this is a way to start accruing a lot of it. Additionally, if you have any nemeses, which seems to be a habit of eccentric and ambitious mages everywhere, it’s easy to start to confuse the hell out of them and convince them that you’re omniscient. This can even be accomplished through effective transportation methods, scrying, and modifying memories, so extra investment in this can make it a true terror to anyone you want to convince not to talk to you or your homunculus ever again.
While there’s not a major difference in the functionality of the homunculus based on how it is created, appearance and personality (or what exists of one) can be a matter of particular preference for some, especially when that some is me. I did not come by the ability to create homunculi, simulacra, or other similar constructs by normal means, which may come into play for someone seeking to reverse engineer any of my particular processes or methods. Every homunculus has to be created given a certain criteria, but there are still very different ways to accomplish it.
My preferred method of creating a homunculus is inside a bottle or other glassware that can be closed during the gestation process. If you’re extremely dedicated, you can contract a glassblower to create a bottle with the exact size and shape that you want, which will produce some delightfully weird and curious little creatures. My later experiments in creating homunculi created Garmlin, who I adore for his huge, lumpy head and tiny body. I find that such contexts of creation also tend to make the most diligent and intellectually minded homunculi. While any creature made with the correct process will be completely loyal to you, I prefer ones that do so with a sense of personality, even if it is one that obeys all commands.
One variation of the bottle method involves depriving the homunculus of important nourishment during key parts of the process, which created a creature that looked disturbingly like me, but much smaller. I did not appreciate this, and do not encourage you to attempt a similar process.
The above method has also become more common with the advent of modern arcane sciences, which were not always the method I had available for creating homunculi. Unfortunately, my first homunculus was created as part of an extremely regrettable Abyssal pact. It came out as a creature that was significantly less affable, wholly composed of the ash, brimstone, and blood from which it was made, instead of a careful and considerate gestation. (All Abyssal pacts are, by definition, regrettable, I have found.) It was this experience that seemed to suggest to me that the homunculus mimics the circumstances and methods which created it.
I’ve heard of other methods of creating homunculi, such as using casts or molds, but this is a little different in spirit from the glassware option, and, I imagine, therefore likely to produce a very different creature.
I’ve also heard of others experimenting with adding new materials to alter the practical traits of the creature produced. I have yet to see any scientific documentation describing the mechanics or dynamics of such experiments.
Whatever method you choose or create for yourself, it is important to know that the variety of homunculus is determined primarily by the state of the blood used to create it. If you ever, as some fools believe, think that you can create a homunculus and circumvent the cost of blood to make one, at best, you will find yourself with an unruly creature with a direct psychic link to whoever you stole from. At worst, you may find yourself with a much bigger problem on your hands. All this being said, even if you find it within your capability to cast this spell, I do not recommend it for those who do not have the experience and creativity necessary to use it effectively. You would be better off choosing something much more direct.
Goblin Brains 