Dead Gelatinous Cubes

[Chaldfont]

Its questions like this that make it fun to be a DM!

This thread makes me want to use more gelatinous cubes in my campaign.

 

[D+1]

Well, since nothing is mentioned in their description about remaining as an impediment to movement after they're dead I think it's reasonable to assume that they must in some way collapse, liquify, or evaporate at least to a point where they aren't any more of an impediment than any other very large corpse in a hallway. But where's the fun in that?

I like the idea that although they DO stop moving once their thicker, outer membrane is sufficiently damaged that the interior substance is less like jello and more like a thick liquid - the cottage cheese analagy is good. So their insides will leak out when cut up - but it takes a fair amount of cutting up simply by virtue of being 1000 cubic feet of critter, and that goo gets EVERYWHERE.

Don't forget that while it's alive a cube has to "swallow" stuff like coins and metal weapons and doesn't excrete or digest things like skeletons. It's a dungeon-cleaning monster after all. And those things don't sink to the bottom - they "float". That suggests that they don't just have watery insides.

 

[snarfoogle]

They obviously collapse into a puddle of disgusting sludge. How else would the PCs get through the 10' corridor to the next room?

 

[D-rock]

I go by the turning into a pile a goo method to. Then they slowly crystalize into powder, that then can be collected to create your own gelatin.


mmmm gelatin

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Hmmmm. I wonder if one can bottle-up the goo and store it for later use. Free poisonous-acid, anyone? It'd be a better treasure gleaned from the thing than any random thingy stuck within it, methinks.

This was done in that Ecology article, BTW. To nasty effect.

I picture Gelatinous Cubes as being one really, really large single-celled organism (something like The Blob from those old B movies). So in killing it what you're doing is rupturing the membrane beyond its ability to repair. The insides--the cytoplasm--starts pouring out faster than the membrane can be regenerated. Since the acidic poison is contained in lysosomes in the cytoplasm, which much continually be produced, the goo stops being dangerous after about a minute or so. Eventually it just dries out into something like what you see in the bottom of a pot after you boil a clear broth down to nothing.

 

[Graf]

Monty cook used a dead gelatinous cube in some particularly dangerous 2nd ed dungeon. Like step through door teleport fall 5 stories into a gelatinous cube that is stuck in the middle of some shaft and still is acidic.
Then the cube broke or something after the third person hit it and you fell some more.

Why I think this is true... I couldn't tell you.