The named treasure experience rules are a little vague. It's been a while since I wrote them, but I believe I intended that you can use them to reward players for going to odd parts of the dungeon in ways the xp system doesn't directly incentivize (there's no xp for puzzles or traps). In that light, 5-10 is probably appropriate for a little interesting tangent or the goal of a low-level quest, and 15+ is more appropriate for the goal of a much more involved adventure. Note that not all magic items are named.
As for golems, golems at first were added to the game's bestiary because I wanted to make stats for all the miniatures I owned- it's why the bestiary more or less one-to-one maps to the creatures in the Descent board games.
Around the time of Vaiant Quest's release, there were some great online discussions about the history of antisemitism in the fantasy pastiches Valiant Quest is affectionately nostalgic of and only occasionally critical of. The association of the word phylactery with an unspeakably evil object a lich makes to become immortal was definitely the thing most people online were talking about, but I was curious about the golem.
In most fantasy games, the golem, originally a protector of the Jewish ghetto in Prague, was turned into a stooge of evil wizards. Typically, the fantasy 'golem' guarded an ill-gotten treasure hoard. That transformation felt a little perverse to me, both in the ways that it turned a protector of people into a protector of property and the association of a heroic Jewish figure with evil wizards and hordes of secreted away wealth.
I added golems as player species in the sidequests partly out of a fondness for the mechanical uniqueness of a construct PC, but also because I really liked the idea of the golem being a heroic figure once again as a PC in a fantasy milieu. It seems only natural that a golem in the mould of the golem of Prague would take offence at the evil 'false golems' of fantasy cliché.
I'm not sure the PC golem works without drawing direct attention to that line of inspiration from Jewish folklore to the genre conventions laid out by an egregiously antisemitic game designer from Chicago to modern reevaluations of that history. You could argue it's not my place to subvert these things on identity grounds, and I couldn't dispute that. I am a gentile. I'm just making my case as to why I did it the way I did.
