Make Ooze Formidable in Your 5e Campaign! | Grim Hollow | DnD | Horror | Gelatinous Cube

Make Ooze Formidable in Your 5e Campaign! | Grim Hollow | DnD | Horror | Gelatinous Cube | D&D

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Күн бұрын

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@jakemarsh8967 10 ай бұрын

I equate oozes with creatures like the Flood from Halo or the Tyranids from 40k, a hivemind of biomass which could devour galaxies if united, but as of right now they are just feral monsters which devour and absorb in hopes of constructing their great hive once more. I like the idea of a great ooze-like creature talking to the players in cryptic poems like the gravemind or primordial from Halo lore.

@norfemignissius4936 10 ай бұрын

Me before the video : Ooze are scary ? Why ? Me after the video : WHY DID I ASK WHYYYYYYYYYY ?!

@lukekebell3146 7 ай бұрын

My headcannon (books be damned) is that an Ooze is essentially a microbe-colony that exists as a single unit (like the Portuguese Man-O-War is a colony not a single entity), so when you slice one or parts break off the colony offshoot just continues to exist as their own group. When they feed they grow because they are able to proclduce more micro-colony members. A great example for real world potential is is the third season of The Future Is Wild. Where strange slime creatures hunt flish (literally flying fish) in the rainforest. I like the idea that Oozes are at their core just something that evolved alongside everything else. Its kind if terrifying if they are natural i think.

@kylelind6239 10 ай бұрын

the Oblex did not first appear in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes: it was dreamed up by an 8-year-old, who won a monster-creating-contest in 3rd edition. personally, I think that makes it even more terrifying!

@elderforgeling7578 10 ай бұрын

I once used an ooze against my low level pc’s that had some town guards helping them. (I think it was an ocher jelly, but you could easily give the jelly ability to any ooze) and everyone kept hitting it with swords and each time it took damage it would split into multiple oozes

@cloudeon3468 10 ай бұрын

I think the draconic slime would be cool as some sort of alchemists horribly failed attempt at creating a black dragon

@sarcthesheep8348 10 ай бұрын

OH, wow, this was just the final puzzle piece i needed for my campaign. There is a god of corruption trying to escape from his prison, and needs to sap away the magic from the realm by overlaying it with some curse effects. His goal is to eventually destroy the land to an amorphous goo and rob the old gods from their followers & subsequently their power.

@GhostfireGaming 10 ай бұрын

Glad to be of service! 😄

@Kiwinator159 10 ай бұрын

Now thanks for making me hate mozzarella after watching this vid Ben :D btw. Great job as always :)

@spellelf 10 ай бұрын

Day 2 of asking for a video on making disease formidable. I feel like it’s not that big of a threat in most D&D games due to the mere presence of paladins and clerics.

@twilightgardenspresentatio6384 10 ай бұрын

People don’t like being diseased, they like causing disease. Players tend to reject games where they take on the suffering of a persistent disease any more than perpetually lingering injuries.

@InternetMadnez 10 ай бұрын

Out off homebrewing (like: paladins are immuned but cannot heal it, clerc can heal it but not themselves etc...) you could also make the disease assymptomatic before it's too late or even make one that takeover the mind of the host. Making him escaping the healers or even ploting to spread the disease. Nonetheless I am sure they will also have ideas. I love the creativity of these guys (I wish I could work with them someday).

@PyrotechNick77 10 ай бұрын

Also the amount of victims outnumber sole clerics and paladins. PC classes and spellcaster NPCs are supposed to be uncommon or even rare, the same goes for potioneers and alchemists or herbalists who would know how to treat the disease let alone cure it all together. A disease or plague would run rampant. I think disease and plague needs to works like exhaustion with levels of sickness but also easily increased due to bad fails like a Medusa's stone gaze.

@gregorygreenwood-nimmo4954 10 ай бұрын

I love the idea of an Ooze as a fragment of some greater cosmic horror, or as a manifested side effect of the corruption or instability of reality.

@Fnorder23 10 ай бұрын

I'm currently running a Five Torches Deep megadungeon of my own design, which my players have taken to call "the Blob Dungeon" and I have to say, an unrelenting, amorphous, unstoppable enemy with which negotiation's not an option is really a thing of pure horror in an otherwise classic/OSR game.

@Southpaw_Blue 10 ай бұрын

Would love to hear your take on making the @DungeonDudes Drakkenheim formidable. They do a good job, but I’d love to hear your take on the contaminated city.

@Southpaw_Blue 10 ай бұрын

New Ben video - immediate watch. But seriously, this is valuable. I tend not to take oozes seriously, so I appreciate the change in perspective.

@edouardmaurice2817 5 ай бұрын

I know it’s not the title of the video, but I accidentally made an Ochre Jelly terrifying for my player last session ! xD I described in detail all the slime mouvements, the separation, and reconstruction, but I also added an aspect of force of nature, the Jelly kept on stalking in them on narrow corridor, climbing on the walls and getting throw even the door knob after they, terrified, juste close a massive barricaded door

@HazzardousEco 10 ай бұрын

I would absolutely make slimes behave like Shoggoths from HP Lovecraft's universe; and if they gain accidental intelligence, which could lead to sapient intelligence, it can make them far more dangerous given the evolved slimes can take advantage of their reputation as joke monsters to lay waste to an adventurer's party

@TheOverconfidentGamer 10 ай бұрын

Treating Oozes as ambush predators is perfect for making a scary encounter. Drop them from the dungeon ceiling, or that dead end becomes a death trap as a ooze blocks the exit. Oozes are slow, take the speed your players enjoy away and watch the panic, all great advice from this video.

@JedediahCyrus 10 ай бұрын

That's a fun concept to mix elements of the "Color out of Space" with oozes even though the Color itself was more of a sentient light entity. But as for it's "goals", that could be a fun corruption concept in a game.

@jordancabe732 10 ай бұрын

Great advice for making oozes scary! The Blob terrified me as a child but for some reason I never thought to use it as a basis for oozes (though, that may be because that movie scared the bejeezus out of 6 year old me). I think it is hard to make a "vacuum" monster scary, but one story I read did a good job of it. Richard Kadrey's novella "Pale House Devil" had something like an ooze in that the floors of the abandoned house were spotless, and it talks about long baleen like what we see in whales going between the boards. We never get a clear description of the monster, and a couple chapters from its perspective, but how the author depicted the unease of a too clean abandoned house was really solid especially when everything around the house is covered with verdigris and grime. Edited to include the author.

@peterwheeler4928 9 ай бұрын

This is one of your best vids yet, great imagery to make oozes disgustingly cool

@GhostfireGaming 9 ай бұрын

Thanks, Peter! Appreciated. 🙂

@chefboycc5448 10 ай бұрын

I used gelatinous cubes as the cleaning crew for sewers under the city and while they where underground looking for a den of rat folk they got trapped in a hallway with one in each end that slowly closed in on them

@flikersprigs5641 10 ай бұрын

"its victims are melded together" oh god its a proto-gravemind also want to make your players mechanically scared of an ooze? give it old masonry where the mortar has disintegrated giving it lots of 1 inch cracks to move through.

@cloudeon3468 10 ай бұрын

Ayy you actually made it!

@ananaville1503 9 ай бұрын

I just ran a really fun graveyard combat that was sort of a cross between a zombie horde and a massive ooze, there were patches of slime on the ground that the characters could make a dex save on to determine whether they slid to the other end on their desired trajectory (saving some movement) or slid randomly and went prone, the different clumps of the horde would try to surround and encase the PCs in slime to consume and incorporate them (via acid damage), if they took too long the slime would ooze through the cracks in unopened tombs and pull new bodies in to regain hitpoints, and they had to keep track of the kids they were trying to save the whole time! I used the Zombie Clot stat block as a base but added a pseudopod attack and changed damage types to be more ooze-like, as well as emphasizing the yucky goopiness in narration. (They hated it when I called it things like "delicious corpse soup mucus" in a far too cheerful tone) Never underestimate the horror potential of using the grossest descriptions you can, or letting them do some of the work by just setting the scene and then waiting for openings like someone going to burn the gross enemy and going "it bubbles and pops with the heat... I wonder what that smells like :)" or when they're encased in slime asking if their mouth was open and how it tastes, stuff like that I find a mixture of yucky terms plus familiar, especially this that are normally pleasant or appetizing, like "when you touch it you find that it's the consistency of soft scrambled eggs with upsetting pockets of mucus" or "it would bring to mind thick, decadent pudding, if not for the chunks of half-dissolved undead flesh" and such (I've got six high level players so combat can get pretty chaotic and I'm trying to keep it interesting by mixing stage hazards with unusual enemies and extra goals in each combat, and oozes offer quite a lot when it comes to all three of those if you get creative with them!)

@gregorygreenwood-nimmo4954 10 ай бұрын

How about a Blood Ooze being the last physical remnant of a vampire slain years earlier by a group of adventurers or vampire hunters that was trapped in some tomb or magical prison or other, but has now escaped, and is hunting down those that slew its former self, exsanguinating them one by one as it reconstitutes the vampire it once was. The adventure starts as a murder mystery almost as the adventurers become involved in trying to solve a series of seemingly impossible killings of prominent figures in a given community, finding strange crime scenes with desiccated bodies of victims, perhaps in locked rooms with no obvious way in or out for the killer or with guards and security devices bypassed by a means that is not immediately obvious. You could play up the horror of the idea of never really being safe from an attacker that can squeeze through even the tiniest gap. Maybe the Blood Ooze could even replace the blood inside a victim's body as a form of more physical, visceral possession to help it hide in plain sight. Ultimately, the Blood Ooze might succeed in devouring all those it needs to to being back the vampire it once was as a foe for the party, perhaps with a new ability to spawn a Blood Ooze from its body to attack victims and heal the vampire as it drains its victims. The party would need to find a way to put this bloodsucker down permanently lest it return as Blood Ooze again, this time to hunt them down.

@SandyTaylor-tv6fc 10 ай бұрын

Oozes can also represent the lack of autonomy. You could have the local militia became tyrannical to blur the line between the ooze and the "heroes"

@michaeljpastor 10 ай бұрын

You really don't like melted mozzarella, do you? ;-) Here's a suggestion for your next one: How to Make Your Plants Formidable! Mostly I just want to see you say "vegetable" a lot.

@TradePrinceNodnarb 10 ай бұрын

This, along side the vampire and undead video inspired a story arc in me. The players explore a segment of the sewers, trying to find missing people; coming across viscera and sludgy remains outside of a few skeletons (undead) coated is a viscose slime that burns them when touched (small amount of life drain) The big bad is revealed to not just be a slime, but an unfortunate accident of a vampire falling to his alchemical project; so their magical natures mixed and became an unholy mix of ooze and vampire. His skeleton reaches out and crawls toward his victims after an ambush encounter Prefering to grapple and bite, while the ooze is dragged behind him and envelopes who ever the skeletonize vampire grabs. Animalistic cunning, hardy nature, and it allows me to hint that not everything is being caused by what the players are typically facing

@B455O 22 сағат бұрын

In my Out of the Abyss Campaign, Juiblex consumed most of the other Demon Lords (I ran a Demon Lord Free-for-all with experimental war game mechanics for a bunch of friends. Lord of Lies : Fraz-Urb'luu used Modify Memory on Juiblex to make the Ooze Lord their ally, and then won the game.) Empowered by the energies of other Demon Lord avatars, Juiblex has become the Demonic Sea after first dissolving an entire continent. This was the design of my Dwarven party, who intentionally summoned the demon Lords to the capital city of a hostile Human empire. That empire is no more. Their ritual worked a little too well. Juiblex remains even after the Campaign, and the Merfolk are desperately containing the Demonic Ocean with magical Abjuration storms. A new Level 20 oneshot will be all about the greatest heroes of the World plunging into the Demonic Ocean's heart to kill Juiblex.

@MarxMayhem 9 ай бұрын

Wanna make an "cleaning" gelatinous cube disturbing? Make it a see-through garbage bag, where "trash" is also the remains of any unfortunate creatures caught by it and the cube has not disposed of them yet.

@badgerburns521 10 ай бұрын

That was really great. Thank you

@GhostfireGaming 10 ай бұрын

Glad you liked it! 😄

@FirstLast-wk3kc 10 ай бұрын

Oozes if applied logic => would be super scary. Not just because it's mindless force of nature. But because it is THE mindless force of nature. Why would your physical weapon even do harm to it? Only slow it down. It seems like only fire and magic would be logical to cause ANY harm to it. They are already super scary if you don't use statblock.

@TacticalReaper56 10 ай бұрын

I kmow some people dont like the Crit crew which is fine. Spoilers ahead. I just wanted to highlight the trap Matt Mercer used for the first encounter/ mission of the campaign. Dude had a drop door that traps a player in a hole with a cube in it. It was most def a PD trap. Travis was tanking so much damage he popped his little "Spicy Trait" as his character will attack the party after a certain health mark. I was terrified for him. New found fear of Ooze that day.

@basementmadetapes 10 ай бұрын

Just say it’s moist. 1/2 the players just be tapping out for that

@WhatsUpGazpacho 10 ай бұрын

nice one Ben

@GhostfireGaming 10 ай бұрын

Thanks!

@tysondennis1016 4 ай бұрын

Honestly, I like the idea of oozes working like ambush predators.

@mikelundun 10 ай бұрын

Was going to suggest an episode on myconids, but then I saw some episodes of The Last of Us.

@GhostfireGaming 10 ай бұрын

Hahaha, yeah do that!

@wbbartlett 10 ай бұрын

What armour class is your hair?

@GhostfireGaming 10 ай бұрын

About AC 18, but my barber luckily keeps a pair of magic scissors of +2.

@victoraugusto6526 10 ай бұрын

Make goblins formidable when?

@InternetMadnez 10 ай бұрын

I am sure rule34 goblins are formidable. ^^

@GhostfireGaming 10 ай бұрын

Been on the list for a while!

@MarkoSeldo 10 ай бұрын

See Lord of the Rings. Goblins are formidable as a horde. Thousands of them, and a lair filled with traps, pets (oozes?), specific defensive fortifications like murder holes and narrow tunnels that prevent the adventurers from seeing past one another or fighting as a unit. The tunnels could be a maze. Goblins never fight fair. Nets are good for goblins. Restrain a party member and then attack them with hundreds of attacks. Pull out every dirty trick. :D