D&D: Five Slimes That Will Kill You in Half the Times
Slimes and oozes and the like are a fantasy adventure trope, and these five will absolutely dissolve you if they get the chance.
Slimes and oozes and the occasional cube are a fantasy anime and JRPG trope extraordinaire. From games like Slime Rancher and Dragon Quest to shows like That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, these little oozes have come a long way.
And they have been a part of D&D since the beginning. That makes them part of the fantasy trope inspiration ouroboros that goes back to the 70s. And just like in their accompanying media, slimes and oozes in D&D are often lower-level threats. Until you come across the one that isn’t.
And then you usually die.
Black Pudding
Black Pudding is, in real life, a kind of blood sausage that inserts itself onto breakfast plates throughout the UK and Ireland. But in D&D, a Black Pudding is a heaving mound of sticky black sludge that is, probably, a scattered fragment of the demon lord Jubilex.
Not only are Black Puddings extremely corrosive, dealing acid damage to anyone who touches or hits them with a melee attack within 5 feet, they also start to eat away any nonmagical weapon that hits them. Also, they deal fairly sizable damage, dissolving any nonmagical armor you happen to be wearing.
This would be bad enough, except, when they take lightning and slashing damage, a Black Pudding splits into two. Making it even easier for them to swarm and dissolve your quickly overwhelmed form.
Dragonblood Ooze
Dragonblood Oozes are slimes given life from the congealed blood of a dragon, given mobility and hunger. The dragon’s blood knows it is supposed to be a dragon, and the blood often tries to shape itself into a draconic form — which is EXACTLY WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE AND NOTHING ELSE, NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT — manifesting brief shapes before collapsing into an amorphous heap.
These slims not only deal scads of damage, they can grapple targets and slowly dissolve them, and can even “expel a spray of gelatinous mass in a 30-foot cone” which not only damages targets but pulls everyone 30 feet closer to the ooze. Frightening against an unprepared, lower-level party.
Huge Gray Ooze
As the name suggests, this is a Gray Ooze, but it’s Huge. Because size matters in D&D. Like the Black Pudding it is intensely corrosive and will corrode weapons and armor. However, a Huge Gray Ooze (as seen in Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage) has magical properties that make it even deadlier than your typical Gray Ooze.
In addition to being bigger and hitting harder, a Huge Gray Ooze is a particularly deadly D&D slime because it can turn Invisible, once per rest, allowing it to sneak up undetected on an unsuspecting foe. And on top of that, it can also magically increase in size, becoming a Gargantuan Gray Ooze for up to a minute, and while enlarged, it DOUBLES its damage, allowing it to make short work of most foes.
White Maw
Gray Ooze gets a lot of screen time here. And that’s because everyone knows that slimes are hilarious and also evil. In Tales from the Yawning Portal, we see exactly how in the form of White Maw, a sentient, intelligent Gray Ooze that is capable of taunting its prey. White Maw can disguise itself completely as a chunk of white stone without any effort.
On top of that, it’s a telepathic ooze and can speak mentally with any creature within 50 feet of it, even if they don’t share a language. White Maw is Gargantuan, which is important, because it takes up a 20 ft. by 20 ft. area, and because it’s an Ooze, it can occupy other creatures’ spaces, and vice versa. This matters, because White Maw can also attack any creature that starts its turn in one of its squares, meaning that it can engulf and pseudopod attack whole parties to death at once.
Elder Oblex
Finally, there’s the Oblex. These slimes are specially created, capable of assaulting and devouring the minds and memories of other creatures. They feed on your personality, essentially. The bigger the brain, the tastier the meal. Following this principle, Oblexes tend to go after spellcasters and the like.
Elder Oblexes are especially terrifying because they’ve consumed so many memories that they can extrude a duplicate of a devoured creature, which is indistinguishable from their originating creature except for a faint sulfurous smell. These goo duplicates, or gooplicates, can help the Oblex lure in prey as well as control wide areas of the battlefield, allowing an Elder Oblex to devour the memories of multiple creatures at once adding ever more personalities to its gooey center.
What’s your favorite D&D slime?
