Gloom golem

A gloom golem was a planar golem powered by woe and despair.

Description
It had a crude and misshapen, ogreish body, some in height and around  in weight. Its gray flesh was taut and had a clay-like feel under a membranous hide. Disturbingly, faces in torment pushed out of this hide, as if trapped and struggling to escape. Stranger still, it had no head or face of its own, but rather a swirling black void that howled constantly in pain. It exuded a foul stink.

Behavior
True to their name and nature, the evil gloom golems inflicted despair and misery on their victims and absorbed their feelings of misery, sadness, and woe. They throve on such feelings, which appeared as the suffering faces beneath their hides; gloom golems did not absorb the bodies of their victims as might appear. They were otherwise mindless things.

They did not speak or communicate—they could only howl unceasingly.

As planar golems, they were incredibly difficult to control and carried the traits of their plane. Solitary, they roamed the Gray Waste of Hades in the Great Wheel cosmology or the Barrens of Doom and Despair in the World Tree cosmology.

Combat
A gloom golem typically attacked with its two claws, which were tainted by evil and could damage the morale of their victims. But they could also wield weapons, favoring mundane spiked chains, even able to use them to disarm and trip their foes.

Abilities
The unending howl of the gloom golem induced devastating despair in those who heard it. Within, those who lacked the will to resist were demoralized and impacted in all areas, their despair only alleviated when the gloom golem was slain. This could be counted by a good hope spell.

The touch of a gloom golem's claws inflicted a permanent loss of happiness and hope in its victims. Those who couldn't resist grew despondent and withdrawn, ultimately falling into a coma wracked with nightmares.

Howling constantly, a gloom golem found it hard to be quiet when needed.

Like other golems, they had total resistance to many kinds of magic and spells. Their evil clay flesh reduced damage inflicted on them, except from weapons of goodness.

Creation
The maker of a gloom golem needed moderate ability in spellcasting, deep knowledge of planar lore, a mastery of planar essences, great skill in sculpting, and, most of all, an evil heart.

First, clay was dug out of the banks of the River Styx where it flowed through any of the three layers of Hades or the Barrens of Doom and Despair. The clay had to comprise a single block, over in mass and valued at 10,000 gold pieces. The planar matter was difficult to shape and work had to be done on the plane itself.

Animating it involved trapping a spirit of the plane with a powerful magical item and binding it to the maker's will. The difficult of working with planar matter meant the magical item was inevitably destroyed in the process. The necessary spells for this were crushing despair, limited wish, planar binding, and polymorph any object. The total cost of this stage was 25,000 gp.

A whole gloom golem was worth 40,000 gp to a very specific buyer.