Strawmen

The Strawmen are a mysterious race of artificial beings, considered a variety of golemns. They are found only in the dimension of Arindell. Described as "living clay" they also include metal components. They are taller than ordinary humans, though not by much, and have human-like faces that have been described as "very expressive". They are known to speak and are believed to be fully sentient.

History

The Strawmen feature very heavily in the Rowen oral tradition, and creatures in many other such histories are believed to be Strawmen. Even the name comes from Rowen, where the sort of clay the stramen are made from was confused with the clay-rich mud, mixed with straw, that is used in building many Rowen fortifications. Hence the name "strawmen".

Numerous contemporary accounts of Strawmen survived the Mage Wars. It is difficult to conclusively prove many of these accounts, but the texts are of known provinence and they do not appear to be stories. However, because the term "strawmen" did not come into wide use until the Second Age, it is difficult to to tell with any certainty.

Based on historical evidence, the Strawmen seased activity sometime during the Second Chaotic Period, the exact date and reason is unknown.

Recreation

During the late Dynastic Period, mages all over the Agras Plain used Magic-Tech to produce their own Strawmen, based on observations and accounts of the original.

These Strawmen were used as slaves and expendable soldiers throughout the Second Chaotic Period, sometimes even fighting their own inspiration.

It is unclear exactly who created these Strawmen or when, but the making of them was lost sometime before the end of the Mage Wars. Many Strawmen survived into the Golden Age but were often treated with great hostility, or even hunted down and killed for sport(as they were not considered to have the rights of sentient creatures). By the early Golden Age, no more Strawmen of any type were known to exist.

Origin Theories

Because of their appearance in ancient oral histories(that is, stories dating back to the Age of Darkness, many historians suspect the Strawmen were created by the Empire of Roads, perhaps as warriors to fight in the Roads War. However, as the Stramen are clearly a form of magic-tech, and the Eladamrian are not believed to have had this technology, this theory is considered unsound.

Still others suspect that they were actually created much more recently. This theory has two parts. The first is that there were no original "strawmen", and that only those created by humans during the late Dynastic/early Second Chaotic periods of the Mage Wars exist, and that these were retroactively "written in" to the oral traditions of various cultures in order to make them appear more fearsome. The second part of this theory says that they were originally created, probably during the Intermediate or First Chaotic periods, then "got loose" when their original masters were annihilated, and this accounts for the wild Strawmen found in later periods.

Finally, an argument has been made that the Strawmen actually pre-date Classic Antiquity and that they were created by the enemy of the Eladamri. When the Strawmen emerged, humans were still fighting the same war as their ancestors.