Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 173 - Monster Series - Oozes

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Oozes may seem like boring combatants at first, mindless blobs of acidic gels that don't exactly have complex motivations or rich histories but they can be so much more than that.  In this episode I talk about how DMs can use oozes and a couple of particularly nasty encounters that include them.   #dnd #pathfinder #opendnd #DMTips #oozes

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. What it does mean is that most mindless oozes don't formulate tactics. They don't set traps or substantially adjust to situations. They're not smart enough to retreat from an obviously unwinnable fight. They can't assess the threat level of a combatant, but they can react to stimulus. And if something hurts them, they will most likely recoil from that thing that made them go ouchy. Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 173, continuing the Monster Series, this time all about oozes. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Witches.

Did you know you can hear it when witches are flying around? Oh yeah, you should look up anytime you hear something going broom, broom. I'm going to put up a poll on social media, and I'm obviously taking emails on this as well, so send it to feedback at taking20podcast.com. Do you like interviews as part of the podcast, and do you want me to do more interviews in the future? There's no shortage of people out there that I would love to discuss their podcasts, products, and thoughts about RPGs, but I don't want to waste your time if that's not something you'd be interested in. So please, let me know what you think.

Also, I did get an email this week asking, Hey, why don't you do video for your podcast instead of just doing audio and putting the waveform up? The reason being, I look like this. Podcasting is my perfect medium because I never have to show this ugly face to anybody else. So all I'm going to say is I'm doing you a favor by keeping it audio only. So you may be asking, why is Jeremy going to talk about oozes? They have no brain. They're just collections of gelatinous matter, and they can be manipulated by clever adventuring parties and bad guys. So why are they an interesting monster at all?

Well, just because they're mindless doesn't mean they're any less deadly than anything else you can run into below ground. Oozes are a classic D&D monster type. Back in Basic D&D's 1986 publication AC9 called The Creature Catalog, oozes were considered part of the low-life creature type along with other mindless or nearly mindless creatures. The low-life creature type included things like jellyfish and slime worms and giant spiders and carnivorous plants like the strangle vines, siren flowers, and killer tree. Of course, with a name like lowlife, it sounds like oozes are just disreputable. I guess they disrupt high school classes or they've lost their professional

licenses or something. George ooze may have lost his license to practice law, but he can advise you when you face legal troubles. Call 1-800-PUDDING. We work hard so you don't have to. Honey, who the hell was that and why does my microphone smell like vinegar? So oozes have been around a long time. They're a creature type in 5e and all oozes have some common traits. They're semi-fluid, generally amorphous creatures. They can squish and flump and flop around, oozing under doors, through windows, cracks in the walls, and generally anywhere they want since so few places are completely air or water tight. The vast majority of oozes out there are acidic to a greater or lesser degree.

The goo that makes up their bodies is capable of dissolving material over time. How long it takes depends on the acidity of the creature, the type of the material, and how long they're exposed to the ooze's acid. Gelatinous cubes, for example, generally only destroy organic material, leaving armor, weapons, bones undigested in its body. Meanwhile, the black pudding is acidic enough to dissolve organic material, wood, and even metal. DMs, my beloved DMs out there, let me let you in on a great secret. Unless specific values are given in the creature's description, it can take as long or as short of a period of time to dissolve things as you'd like. Do you want bodies to dissolve inside of gelatinous cube in a matter of hours? Sure, that works. Do you want it to take months to fully

dissolve a body down to bones? Rule it that way. Unless it's in the description, there's no set value. And even those set values can be modified in your game world to customize your creatures. Black puddings and gray oozes specifically state that they can eat through two inch thick metal and wood, in the case of black pudding, every round. So that's a specific value that's given. For my rules lawyers out there, depending on your game system, yes, you could figure out the hardness of various materials on a dead body, how many hit points they all have, how resistant they are to acid damage, hint, generally not very, and do the math to determine how long it would take

to dissolve a creature down to its bones and metal objects. But you know what? Only do that if you really, really want to. I don't know about you, but I got shit to do, like prep for three gaming sessions this weekend, and while yes, I've had to Google some strange things that wound up being important, like how long it takes a horse to decompose

once you bury it, six to 12 months, by the way, or how multiple moons would affect tide schedules on a planet, depending on the size of the moon, there'd likely be multiple high and low tides per day. There, saved you some Googling. But how long does it take that black pudding to dissolve the ogre corpse? Up to you. Large black pudding with a large corpse? I'm gonna say it'll take a good week

to probably completely disappear. Small corpse? Maybe a couple of days. Do I have science to back me up? Fuck no. I did reach out to a DM friend of mine and I asked about this, and the silence that I received at the other end of the discord call told me that I probably should have given a little bit more prep information rather than launching directly into hey buddy long time no see how long would it take a body to dissolve inside a gelatinous cube I believe his initial response was are you okay are you disposing of corpses over at your house and of course the answer is no you don't bury a corpse on your property. That's a rookie mistake. No, no, no. If you need to get rid of a corpse, the proper way to do so is... Ugh.

You really need to stop. Because now there's DNA evidence all over your wood chipper. What? I'm sorry, everyone. Sometimes he gets like this. Further, most oozes are mindless. That doesn't mean they don't react to stimulus and just sit there like puddles of nothing. Oozes consume and they move with alarming speed when a potential food source is nearby.

Being mindless just means that they have no intelligence score and aren't affected by mind-affecting abilities like charms and compulsions. What it does mean is that most mindless oozes don't formulate tactics, they don't set traps, or substantially adjust to situations. They're not smart enough to retreat from an obviously unwinnable fight. They can't assess the threat level of a combatant, but they can react to stimulus, and if something hurts them, they will most likely recoil from that thing that made them go ouchy. There are exceptions to this intelligence rule, by the way. Oblexes, which are detailed starting on page 217 in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, are intelligent combatants. They have an

intelligence of 14. Adult versions of them, by the way, an intelligence of 19, and elder Obelixes have an intelligence of 22, all of which well above the average humanoid. They can feed on enemies' thoughts and even form a facsimile of the creature they just consumed. Psychic Grey Oozes have an intelligence of 6, which is nowhere near as high as the Obelix, but they're much smarter than your average animal. With a 6 intelligence, they can evaluate their environment, at least on a rudimentary level, and make plans. Plus, they're smart enough to try to run away from things that make them hurt, you know, like PCs can.

Thankfully for adventurers, intelligent oozes are the exception rather than the rule, and unintelligent ones, while dangerous, are less so. For example, suppose you have an unintelligent ooze that somehow senses a food source across a 20-foot cliff. They may very well just slither off the edge of the cliff and fall to the bottom. Of course, if they survive, a lot of oozes have a climb speed, meaning they'll eventually get to the other side, so that food source better go ahead and start running.

Most oozes also have no real discernible anatomy. They don't have soft or sensitive spots or critical organs or anything similar. They're just amorphous sludge. Most don't even have eyes. Oh yeah, Jeremy, if they don't have eyes, how do they find prey? I'm glad you asked. Most oozes in 5e have blind sight. That means they can perceive their surroundings within a certain range without relying on sight as a sense to do so. They can feel the air or water vibrations, perhaps discern heat, or have some other method of seeing around themselves. Many oozes are amorphous, as I mentioned, and can squeeze through openings

as small as one inch wide. Good luck sealing them behind a door because they can either squeeze through the gap, or as I mentioned, some of the oozes will just start dissolving the door and get through given enough time. A lot of oozes can blend in with their surroundings really, really well. The gray ooze is probably the best example. It has the same color as wet stone, so at first glance, as you're walking down this hallway, it looks like a shallow puddle until you step in it, and it attacks you, and your boots and armor begin to dissolve from the acid,

and ow, that's starting to hurt. I do want to call special attention to my favorite ooze, though. The gelatinous cube. Cubes are a nearly invisible cube-shaped creature that slither along dungeons looking for objects to consume. In 5e, they are minimally dangerous until you get engulfed by one, and then they are lethal. You start drowning while taking acid damage. They're difficult to escape, and anyone beside the cube who tries to help you out takes damage as well. The same is true of cubes in Pathfinder 2nd Edition, but with one serious addition. In Pathfinder 2e, gelatinous cubes not only can drown you, but they paralyze you when they touch you.

So imagine, you're wandering down the hallway of an abandoned castle dungeon. Round the corner and see a bunch of coins and maybe a shield hovering in this weird translucent gel. Before you can ask yourself what the heck is that, it reaches out a pseudopod and touches your arm, rendering you completely immobile. You can do nothing as this cube slowly moves into your square, engulfing you, making your skin feel like it's on fire as you're coated in the creature's acidic slime. Not the way I want to go. You'll never convince me that the original design for these creatures was anything more than underground cleaning service. They were designed to move from room to room, getting rid of dead

bodies, spare arrows, loose gold left lying around. They're cube-shaped, originally 10 feet on a side, which, as it happens, was the width and height of a typical wide corridor. Plus, given their gelatinous body, they could squeeze into the narrower 5-foot corridors. They tend to absorb whatever they come into contact with, scouring the dungeon clean of organic material and cleaning up any metal left behind by those pesky adventurers who may miss a copper piece or two along the way. They're the perfect cleaning unit for any dungeon. Mechanically, in 5th edition, oozes can't be knocked prone.

Yeah, they're amorphous blobs, no kidding. They can't be blinded. They don't have eyes. They can't be charmed. Okay, yeah, they don't have a brain. They can't be deafened or made exhausted. In Pathfinder 2nd edition, they're immune to mental brain, they can't be deafened or made exhausted. In Pathfinder 2nd Edition, they're immune to mental effects and precision damage as well. Pathfinder 2e, by the way, has a lot more variety when it comes to ooze types compared to 5th Edition. Pulling some of my favorites out, there's the blood ooze, which is exactly what it sounds like, the tar ooze, the

yeast ooze, the mind moppet, the slithering pit. And of course, one of my favorite asides of gelatinous cube is the tallow ooze. It's an ooze made of rendered animal fat and it smells like meat. It can solidify when it doesn't eat enough and can reliquify when exposed to heat. Which as an aside, by the way, do you want a couple of particularly nasty traps? Oozes are perfect for traps that can be really lethal if the party wanders into them. Here are two of my favorites that I've used through the years and had oozes as part of them. One. The party enters a room and finds empty meat hooks hanging from the ceiling and a few barrels full of tallow scattered around the room.

After a couple of rounds, the doors slam shut and the room begins heating up, making the barrels full of tallow oozes liquefy and emerge to attack the party. Now there's an environmental danger of increasing heat, which can lead to exhaustion, and tallow oozes that want to absorb the characters' bodies into themselves. The wizard who designed the trap turns off the heaters, waits a few days for the room to cool back down to ambient temperature, shovels the oozes and remains back into barrels, resets the trap for the next group of hapless adventurers who want to try to break in and steal her stuff.

Two. This will take some visualization, so imagine a 10 foot by 10 foot pit, 50 foot deep. There's a trap door at the top that triggers when someone steps on the middle of it. So character walking tra-la-la down the hallway, steps on it, fails their save, and down into the pit they go. Classic pit trap, right? We all know and love them. Now, put a black pudding at the bottom of that pit, and it moves to engulf anything that hits the bottom. What was an annoying trap just became extremely deadly for any

character that happens to fall in. Okay, I want to give you one more that's not really viable, but it was one of my favorite ones I ever read. A long time ago, I was reading a book of traps, and there was this lethal trap, but stretched the limits of believability. It involved a 10-foot pit trap, like I mentioned earlier, but 15 foot down, there was a gelatinous cube that waited on a thin ledge around the rim of the trap. It took up the entire space, so anyone falling into the pit would first land in a gelatinous cube, fall through it, and then fall the remaining distance of the pit. Your Pathfinder group would have to make a saving throw against the paralysis as they fell through, and even if they passed that,

the cube would just simply drop off its ledge down onto the probably paralyzed character at the bottom of the pit. You can include a trap like that, but then you gotta answer questions like, how did the cube get there, and why does it stay on the ledge, and more importantly, how does it get back? That's one of my first pieces of advice for oozes. Use them like trap encounters. By their nature, they are opportunistic hunters and will go after potential food that they detect around themselves. Secondly, oozes tend to like dark indoor environments, especially underground. Chances are you're not going to find oozes cavorting in the treetops on a sunny day. Of course, there are also sources that talk about how adaptable oozes

are, so maybe there are some oozes that swing treetop to treetop eating birds. Third, the oozes given in the books are just examples. Do you want to make an ooze that consumes wood, looks like a rolling mass of bark, and can use this absorbed wood to send out cellulose bludgeoning attacks? Maybe that's stun on a critical hit? Boy, that sounds fun as hell. Stat that monster up and send it after your party. Finally, a word of caution about oozes. Oozes, especially the ones that can consume wood and metal,

tend to destroy weapons that are used against them. Gray oozes and black puddings in 5e explicitly state that melee weapons are damaged every time they strike an ooze. Metal weapons against gray oozes and either wood or metal weapons against black puddings take a cumulative minus one penalty to damage rolls, and if that ever reaches minus five, the weapon's completely destroyed. Similarly, in Pathfinder 2e, anytime a metal or wooden melee weapon strikes a black pudding, the wielder must make a reflex

save or the weapon becomes damaged. In a minor difference between the systems, the 2e gray ooze doesn't have that ability, but the black pudding does. So why should this matter? Because oozes can destroy weapons and armor and items that the character, or more importantly the player, may be attached to. It's not that the halberd they were using was destroyed, it's their family heirloom halberd that has now all but melted inside of the black pudding. It's the same caution that we DMs should use when using things like rust monsters. Any creature that can potentially destroy PC equipment has a chance of creating hurt feelings around the table,

so use them with that caution in mind. Oozes make great adversaries to your games. Having them run across the occasional ooze that can, for lack of a better term, surprise them with an attack from an area that they didn't expect can really help keep your party on their toes. Sprinkle in the occasional ooze, don't make them a big bad because they're really bad at that, unless they are oblexes or something similar. And I'll bet you and your players would have fun doing it. If you like the podcast, please consider helping spread the word on social media. Please like and follow my pages on Insta and Facebook and share

episodes that you find funny or thought-provoking. Tune in next week when I'm going to use a French book, oh yeah, written in 1895 to draw inspiration for designing games in 2023. The 36 Dramatic Situations by George Pulte. Don't worry, there will be an inappropriate joke or two, so it's not going to be all highbrow. Before I go, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Witches. Did you know that witches don't fart? Nope. All they do is cast smells. This has been episode 173, continuing the monster series all about oozes. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2023. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.