Dragon penis / Shambling mound
Adam Dray:
Quote from: Moreno R. on November 27, 2010, 01:03:18 PM
1) a jelly organism who is a PERFECT cube. No sign of deformation or any effect from his own weight.
2) a perfect adaptation to a PRECISE 10'x10' environment. OK, but... how OLD are these damn dungeons, to have organisms evolved to their exact measures? And how good were the original builders, making HUNDRED OF MILES of perfect 10'x10' tunnels, without any variation or reduction of passage?
Moreno, you have it backward! The dungeons weren't carved in perfect 10'x10' tunnels originally. They were carved out that way by the cubes, which scrape and dissolve the material of the walls, floor, and ceiling until it's perfectly smooth.
Ron Edwards:
Hey Callan,
I can't read your post. The grammar, spelling, and sentence organization are so wacky that it's hardly language. Can you re-write it?
Hi Moreno and Adam!
My first point is to beware of phrases like "perfectly adapted." This is the language of nature shows on TV but not of evolutionary biology. Adaptation, or its better name, selection, results in adequacy, not excellence. Things only get called "perfect" or "optimal" or "beautiful" because they outperform humans in some way, which has nothing to do with any actual process or outcome. Also, although I don't have the books in front of me and am willing to be corrected, I think that phrasing is Wikipedia, not from the books. I'm sticking only to the descriptions in the books themselves. Given that, I don't see any reason to accept that the gelatinous cube is flawlessly cuboidal.
So ...
Can a creature formed of jelly maintain a shape? The answer is, yes it can, even if it's quite big. It's all a matter of the proteins that form the thing's extracellular structure, whether in a generalized matrix or in membranes or both. Given that the G.C. is notorious for absorbing rather big prey, and that internal compartments aren't apparent from simple observation, its structural component is probably the former, a generalized matrix. The tricky thing is how that matrix can support so much weight in so recognizable a shape (even if not perfect) and still be gooshy enough to absorb prey fully into the body, before reducing the prey into dead spongy food. Most things like the G.C. pre-digest what they absorb.
H'mm, that raises a question that Adam's idea also supports - perhaps the cube shape is maintained and supported primarily because it roams tunnels of a particular size? In other words, can the G.C. maintain its shape indefinitely when not in an 10' by 10' space on at least four of six sides? It does seem likely that the G.C.'s prefer these passages, using them for their primary hunting territory when not in water.
It'd be easier to understand if the damned thing were fully aquatic, because water supports body weight much better than air. Is it possible as well that the G.C. is not necessarily fully cuboidal in water? Might it not flatten out and be able to move by flapping? As far as I know, this has not been addressed; most eyewitnesses to gelatinous cube movement and activity in water are not available for comment, or profess to have been too distracted at the time to make such observations in a reliable way, with good field notes.
But back to the cubes-make-tunnels idea. Clearly not all tunnels in dungeons are 10' by 10', but a very great many of them are, and clearly G.C.s are not encountered only in those tunnels, but a great deal of the time, they are. Is it in fact possible that the tunnels were formed by the cubes? Or at least that the basic excavation was cube-driven, and only then did the dwarves come along and install the bricks and drains and groined arches, as well as taking all the credit?
Some circumstantial evidence for this idea arises from the curious pattern observed in the layout of such tunnels. Aside from some fully humanoid-derived instances, the routes and layouts correspond to very little that we can identify as important or desirable from the standpoint of humanoid inhabitants or users. They seem more designed to confuse and befuddle those who enter them.
I wanted to mention as well that the cube's basic biology isn't so crazy as to require magical support. Can a creature be hacked into chunks and either re-combine into its original form or re-form into a lot of smaller versions? Yes, it can. Many protistan organisms are colonial rather than truly "organismal" (although we use the term organism broadly, technically it means something with organ systems), or rather, metazoan. A colonial creature is composed of cooperating cells, but the cells are not locked into their current functions. So if you lightly blend a sponge, it'll disperse into cells, but can then re-form into a sponge again, and a given cell's job in the prior form doesn't have to be where it is or what it's doing in the new one. And any number of ancestral-type animal species can be cut in half, then grow a new half for each half to become two creatures.
Is there evidence that the G.C. actually hunts in terms of long-distance perception? I can't recall any text to that effect, but given that it's squeezed up against dungeon walls a lot of the time, there's reason to hypothesize that it perceives vibrations and can orient toward their source. As far as more specific perception is concerned, maybe it doesn't have to. If you're filling the corridor and simply gooshing along, then whatever you hit and can absorb becomes food.
Best, Ron
Adam Dray:
Gelatinous cubes ("gelatinous planar solid" doesn't have the same ring to it) are essentially blind, having no sight organs (hell, probably no organs at all) and living in the darkness most of the time, anyway. Thus, they're forced to scour tunnels and "accidentally" find food. By filling a corridor, they maximize the opportunity of finding organic material to digest. This must also include non-animal (plant, fungal, molds, etc.) that grows on the ceiling and walls. Otherwise, the creatures would be about as efficient by filling just the lower section of the passage (most animals walk on the floor).
I suspect that the cubes expand in two dimensions (up-down and left-right) to fill the passage they are in, and then use contact with all four surfaces to propel themselves along using a shimmering "wave" motion or a push-pull movement like a worm. In a 5'x5' corridor, they'd be more (square) tube-shaped (and 8x5' = 40' long). In a 20' wide by 10' high passage, they'd be only 5' thick.
It may be that the gelatinous cube conforms to passages it finds, perhaps rasping them clean over time. I think this is probably true to some extent, as it is biologically more efficient to use an existing tunnel.
However, I am more convinced that the cube creates the passages. Ron has supplied some evidence for this theory: the passages seem to have been built without principles of engineering that make sense to any bipedal creature. Also, consider this: gelatinous oozes that produced round tunnels might not compete as well with those that produced flat, rectilinear tunnels, which attract and keep bipedal creatures much better. An ooze that sweeps out 10x10 tunnels and even little rooms and alcoves would create a "dungeon" that would lure in orcs, kobolds, and adventurers, decade after decade. Evolved gelatinous oozes would learn to leave one species alone and stay out of its way and attack all the rest, thus making itself of use to the current inhabitants of the dungeon. In lean times, the cube can get by on rats and other parasites of bipedal life. In the leanest times, the cube can pick off one or more of the "host" species, or even all of it.
Killing a cube doesn't do much, as it leaves enough of its cells all over its lair to reproduce eventually. It keeps its own species in check (to prevent overpopulation) by killing its own competition regularly as it sweeps. To truly cleanse a lair of a gelatinous cube, one must take a torch to every surface in a dungeon. I recommend the largest fireballs you have.
Marshall Burns:
I would pay money for a whole book of this crap.
I've got an AD&D 2nd edition Monstrous Manual (that I got for $2) that has ecological notes on all the monsters, and it's boring. This is a much better use of my time.
Marshall Burns:
You know Borges' Book of Imaginary Creatures or whatever it was called? It could be like that, except with more science and more pervasive humor.
(As a side note, I was shocked to discover from Borges' book that a few of the more bizarre D&D creatures -- such as the catoblepas and leucrotta -- actually have origins in myth and legend. Weird.)
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