Other than aesthetics, what advantages do clockwork constructs offer over their regular counterparts? I didn't see anything stand-out in the template.



Had quite another thought on a use for a Trompe L'oeil. Take your spellbook. Enchant it as an intelligent item (making it an animated object is optional). It is now a creature with an intelligence score. Make a Trompe L'oeil of your (intelligent construct) spellbook. Now, even if your spellbook is destroyed, you have a backup copy, and it will reform in the painting you keep in a safe location. You'll still have to keep the darned thing updated, of course.

It makes it easier to store them, though. The ability to enter image means that all you need is the crudest of inexpensive paint-works on a surface to make it into "a painting" that the spellbook can enter. Buy some tarot cards for it to lurk in. Do the same with all your spellbooks, if you like. Store whole libraries this way. Heck, your Trompe L'oeil canvass for them might be a large mural of bookshelves. You could even fake up a tablet reader by having a bunch of Trompe L'oeil books enter a single reasonably-sized painting and bring forth only the one you want to read, having it turn its pages for you within the painting itself.


Additionally, you can use the enter image property to slip these constructs under a door. If you want to strain the rules, nothing says the paintings they enter must be sufficiently large for them to fit through, so again, playing cards can store a Trompe L'oeil of any size and be slid under doors or through cracks. Creative use of mirage arcana might place murals wrapping around walls in useful ways for the Trompe L'oeils to slide anywhere they need to in the images.