How do we make gelatinous cubes interesting again?

They are basically zombies of your setting.
Anyone touches a cube become a cube.
There is only one cube at the beginning of your setting.

Let it spread.

Stop playing with Veeky Forums. You'll find that most real-world people enjoy things that Veeky Forums dislikes.

Awakenings.

If caught in one they melt non metal items including magical garments

>You hear something moving in the darkness

CLANK

Make them a playable race

a gelatinous cube lich.

Out of the Abyss has the best Gelatinous Cube ever written. So much so that my party adopted it and the Ranger wants it as his animal companion.

Gelatinous cubes can be attuned to different energies and act as a universal battery. Examples:
>Positive energy
Acid is neutralized and heals wounds on living things. Becomes much friendlier to living sapients but still engulfs undead and evil sapients.
>Negative energy
Same as positive, just reversed.
>Electricity
Gains shock damage and glows like a flood light. Acid damage also causes that much lightning damage.
>ETC.
Etc.

Please explain for those of us who have no knowledge of this specific gelatinous cube.

Basically, it's an awakened Gelatinous Cube named Glabbagool that speaks via telepathy and is non-hostile, but rather naive, curious, and asks the party questions about themselves and then tries to join/help them.

That sounds delightful. Too bad awakening spells are so expensive for lower level characters.

Ran a gelatinous cube encounter just last Saturday, against a group of six 1st level characters in Pathfinder. It trapped them in the end of a corridor in the sewers while they were looking for a secret door. One character got absorbed with fireworks in his hand that went off after a few rounds, it actually managed to do the last 10 or so damage to finish off the damn thing. Almost killed the character inside. I had the 5e gelatinous cube miniature that you can take apart to put absorbed character's minis inside of it.

The key is to make the most of a cube, it doesn't work in a gaint cave, it needs to ambush the PCs in a 10 foot wide corridor, preferably with a dead end. It should also be advanced in hit dice to be one or two levels higher than a standard encounter.

They were never interesting.

>Glabbagool
pls no

>inb4 slimegirl

That would actually make them less interesting.

Less interesting, but more cute.

Cute is cancer, at least what you consider to be "cute".

They're actually box Jellyfish.

Dungeons are like the ocean, with Jellies, landsharks, giant crabs.

Dawwwww

Use them like thwomps. Even better if the drop splits the party. The unlucky sob that gets insta-engulfed is going to be paranoid for the rest of the game.

Add vodka. Chop up into smaller cuves and serve to guests at parties, dances and galas as "shots". Sit back and enjoy the hilarity.

Allow me to explain my suggestion in song.
youtube.com/watch?v=W80xBX0jK-c
No seriously though, imagine a dungeon where the adventurers need to use the gelatinous cube's acidic qualities to get past something, so they need to cause it to move the way they want it to move.

Pic related is the banner I got opening this thread.

cubes*. Fuck. Also, quads.

Gelatinous Parallelepipeds.

So you find nothing imteresting?

Open a portal to the gelatinous plane

One day the oceans change in consistancy as an ooze rises from the deep. The ocean is jelly.

Swarms of mole-fish begin threatening coastal settlements.

gelatinous snake.

More polyhedra with different abilities.

I heard of a campaign where the drow put a globe of force inside a gelatinous cube with a control mechanism. a drow garbage man would sit on a cushion in the globe and drive the cube around to clean up the corridors. When he wanted to get out for a smoke break, he just gently moved the globe to the edge of the cube and slid out.

There's actually a magic item in 3.5 called the Amulet of Ooze Riding that does exactly what you describe. Whenever the wearer comes into contact with an Ooze, it projects a bubble around them, preventing them from taking damage. You can 'ride' a gelatinous cube by tapping on the side of the bubble to simulate the vibrations of prey in that direction.

in years gone by, Veeky Forums pulled rules from a variety of 3.5 sources and created a wizard with an enlarged gelatinous cube familiar that he could ride without any drawbacks.

Fucking wizards.

How about making them pyramid-shaped?

>Players manouver to drive the gelatinous snake into itself
>Its "front" merges with its own body, and the fragile conciousness of the gelatin loses all sense of direction, losing track of forwards and backwards, unable to move anymore.

I watched so many episodes of this shit and can't actually remember any of it.

Get the fuck out.

The world is not a gelatinous cube, user.

You mean like a gelatinous... pyramid?

Not yet, at least.

Not with that attitude.

All I remember is that is was about a group of children with a robot made out of blocks fighting other robots.

It's be a pretty strange attitude for a gelatinous cube world to adopt.

Sexualization

You new at this, son?

Make them cute girls

This. Sometimes Veeky Forums (and other rpg forums, too, to be fair!) is way up its own ass about hating this, subverting that, reinventing every other thing. It's kinda weird. I play with a group that would kind of be normies by Veeky Forums standards and they're enthusiastic, fun, and they don't spend so much time on negativity.

Maybe try that, OP. Either try to embrace or rekindle a sense of wonder and imagination yourself, or replace your group if they're the ones with the issue.

Guise guise, here me out....what if....gelatinous cubes were waste byproducts of another creature....crazy right.

You mean like if something shat jelly?

Yeah...exactly like that...,,you can track the bigger threat by following them...as they try to kill you...

I think that for once "magical realm" is actually descriptive of a scenario on Veeky Forums, which is not to say that I disapprove.

Slime girls can read minds?

That one can.

>Before you stands a great, wet cube, sliding slowly through the dungeon passages.
>It has a distinctly offwhite colour, though transparent, and smells strongly of unspoiled, wet pussy.
>You realize it is possible this gelatinous cube is a geleatinous cube of pussy juice.
Now step into my magical realm.

Gelatinous cube has been experimented on by a wizard to create a gelatinous Hypercube. It's like a normal cube, but it exists in the same place in 10 different planes at once and when you get engulfed by it (and once every round spent engulfed)you are transported to a random plane it exists on, though you are still engulfed.

In my megadungeon there is an infamous gelatinous cube called Treasure Death that roams the eastern section. It has grown and aged through the years, filling the corridors it has slowly eroded to match its size. It is completely silent, and very translucent - it is nearly impossible to notice its there unless you happen to see a light source behind it distort or something. As it proceeds on it's rounds through the dungeon, it collects the treasure and items from victims and corpses alike, so adventurers would a fine golden chalice or a gleaming sword and helm silently sloshing through the air. It then drags its bulk through an electrified pool into its layer, a long hallway protected by an ancient malformed iron golem named Pig Iron, who stands guard over the trove they have amassed.

So far no one has managed to get to the hoard, and everyone is scheming on how to get past Treasure Death and Pig Iron before being trapped between the two of them. Not to mention someone casually walking into Treasure Death by mistake. The party's current tactic is to roll a cheese wheel with a rope through it down long hallways to see if the coast is clear.

:(

Slimes suck up nutrients from the soil, hobble around, and then release the nutrients into the soil around where they die. If lots of slimes die in the same area the nutritious soil will spawn an evil plant monster!

>interesting again
>interesting
>again
Wat

...

>the lich, in desperation, decides to put his phylcantery into a truly enormous gelatinous cube.
>the cube actually absorbs some of the soul, awakening it with the liches past personality
>the man before the lich was an adventurer, who watched his entire company slaughtered beneath the might of (insert here)
>cube becomes a sort of revenant, seeking endlessly to end the (insert threat)
>meets party, who adventure to slay the lich
>the cube joins them, unaware of his origin
>upon confronting the lich, the cube realises that he is the key to fighting the lich, and this hacked to peices by the only people he knew

>Cubes absorb the conscience of every creature they devour

>BBEG shows up with world ending McGuffin
>the only one who knows how to defeat the BBEG died centuries ago
>retrace his steps using his journal detective style
>discover that he was devoured by a cube
>find less evil McGuffin/spell that lets you interact with his intelligence via interaction with the cube

Why do people keep trying to reinvent the wheel?...

>campaign set in !Europe
>fight a werewolf in a city, it's critically injured and darts down into the sewers
>follow the blood trail through the old !Roman sewer system
>fight a violet fungus feeding on the filth and refuse
>gelatinous cube sitting under a waterfall of grime and muck
>it's floating in a pool of pure, perfectly transparent water: the cube digests the filth and excretes filtered water
>one player almost jumps on top of it
>it lets everyone pass since it's already in a comfy spot

This was one of the best "traditional D&D" sessions I've had the pleasure of playing in recently. Oozes and such suck when they're arbitrarily inserted into the game. But if you put them in a place where they make ecological sense, or do something like they can be really cool. It's something you don't have to think about with skellingtons in a crypt or bears in a forest, so not all GMs learn to do it.

Gelatinous cubes for dungeons, gelatinous hexagonal prisms for outdoors.

\thread

I think a lot of them fundamentally don't understand what makes a good campaign work. They start off playing beyond basic D&D style campaigns because it's all they or the poor schmuck who got roped into being the GM is familiar with. When then gets stale they try to make all these superficial changes because it's all they know how to do. They don't understand how to make dungeons exciting so they try to figure out what gimmicks they can hot glue onto existing monsters in order to "shake things up.: They don't know how to worldbuild (and more importantly how to present a fictional world) in a way that feels fleshed out and alive, so they swap fantasy race cliches for theme park versions of real world cultures. Basically if you asked Veeky Forums how to change a spark plug at least half the responses would be telling you what color to paint your car or arguing about different brands of tire.

Make them Slavs.

The villain's lair is filled with what appears to be acid pitfalls.

He's actually enslaved a bunch of gelatinous cubes. For reasons.

>wheel
>gelatinous cube

Is that glabbagool? Ovaaa heaaa!!

make em sentient

Something like pic related. First trap triggers dropping the PCs down into a deep (50 ft) 10x10 pit that has GC at the bottom. After first trap has sprung, second trap in ceiling opens up dropping a second GC onto the PCs and the first GC. Good luck!

Make them the favorite treat of some gods.

>One bored douchey deity is bored and douchey
>Not to mention sort of hungry
>Brainwash a random mortal into thinking they're an incarnation of Bored Douche God
>But leave the brainwashing weak enough that they could see through the bs if they really took the time to think about it or had some self-awareness
>Mortal still thinks he's Bored Douche God but does have some misgivings which grow over time
>But not enough for him to do potentially shitty things
>he's hungry as fuck
>welp I'm a god, I fucking eat jelly murder cubes
>all of them
>Orchestrates a string of events that end in lots of destruction, but more importantly, lots of jelly murder cubes
>Most of them are filled with debris and people in varying stages of aliveness
>You can bet spells and shit got cast all over them, altering them a bit further
>Mortal-who-thinks-he's-a-god charges in headlong despite common sense making him fear for his life a bit
>"Even if I'm not really an avatar of Bored Douchey God, I've amassed enough power to lay waste to the world. I can lay waste to these cubes too and then I might actually get a divine promotion or something"
>The cubes get him, though his upper body is free to move around
>The Bored Douchey God's hand descends from the heavens and plucks the cube containing the mortal away from the earth
>Brings it to eye level, watching the mortal stare back in trepidation
>Pops the cube, flailing betrayed mortal and all into his mouth
>Passes the dead, cube filled world around to his fellow gods like a bowl of Turkish delights
>Another god gets mad that the orc filled cubes got eaten up first before he got any
>Creates another world and begins to convince a mortal that he's an avatar of himself
>And there, the divine snack off begins
>Mortals eventually cotton on and start trying to find ways to fuck the gods up or kill anyone who believes their horseshit

Have a large area of (Epic level?) Magical Darkness or some such that is not (easily) overcome by Darkvision,etc. Sprinkle darkened area with Cubes until desired number reached. Give/force incentive for PC's to enter said darkness. Giggling optional.

Pretty neat

Take any standard D&D/Pathfinder trap and add Gelatinous Cubes!
Trapped chest shoots out arrows? Nope, shoots out tiny (baby) Gelatinous Cubes!

Open door, trigger trap. Guillotine falls? Nope, Gelatinous Cube again!

Greased/oiled-up inclined plane? Check!
Barrels, treasure chests, etc. at the bottom ready to trigger trap if messed with? Check!
Gelatinous Cubes? Double Check!

Sphere of Annihilation in the statue's mouth? Not this time! Gelatinous Cube!

Gelatinous hypercubes.

upon absorbtion, exterior time is frozen and you only have yourself to rely on. Can also act as a conduit to to the past if you exit a different surface.

berserk did it right

...

Geez

Ooze has ring of sentience slowly dissolving in it. Asks party to somehow save it before the gift of knowledge leaves it

>not gelatinous men
Gelatinous cubes having a form of mimicry. If they are around sapients they can assume form like them and gain intelligence.

bimp

You can't solve everything with rape, Veeky Forums