Slime Time

Well. Sorry for the long posting delay (not that anyone but a couple of my friends are reading this right now, but D&D is about pretend). Since my last post, I've put Mictlan, my Aztec-Mythos hexcrawl, on the backburner, to focus on the Crater of Termination - partly because it just got a bit too ambitious, and partly because the Crater was a lot closer to being something I could run, and I have a group now. We play for a handful of hours every Sunday over Roll20; at this point, there's just two regular players, although there's a couple more potential ones for whom the timing just hasn't worked out. We've had three sessions so far, and it's been fun and instructive for me as a DM. I'll be posting play reports over the next little while, assuming none of the players object to me sharing their antics.

But in the meantime, I'm left with a conundrum: this blog was primarily intended for me to share the stuff I'm working on, but at this point most of what I'm working on is stuff I plan to use in a game I'm currently running, and thus not exactly anything I want to post publicly. Aside from play reports and maybe the occasional bit of background fluff, I can't keep this thing going on Crater-related posts alone.

Which leads me to yet another setting idea, but one which predates both the Crater and Mictlan. I've already thought a lot about this one, though it's still kind of an amorphous mess in my head - which hopefully means I can generate a bunch of blog posts through the process of working it out. I guess we'll see!

Anyway, the core of the idea is really simple: a D&D campaign in which almost all of the monsters are slimes, oozes, jellies, etc. (as far as I'm concerned, these can all be collectively referred to as "slimes," regardless of whatever "subtypes" or "templates" they got divided into in the later, classification-obsessed Monster Manuals).

It's a solely mechanical idea, at core, in that whatever emerges from it in terms of "setting" is essentially just an excuse to have slimes everywhere. It's also edition-neutral (since there have been slimes in every iteration of D&D since the beginning), and "style"-neutral, by which I mean that there's no reason to think the idea of a Slime World is at bottom more amenable to an old-school hex crawl or dungeon crawl, vs. something more post-Hickman story-oriented, vs. whatever the kids are playing these days.

There is, however, something of the old-school to the very idea of the slime as a monster in itself. They've always been some of the weirder, more alien (dare I say: Lovecraftian) things in the monster listings, and as such seem a bit more at home in the context of a more pulpy, less Tolkienesque (dare I say: gonzo) D&D game than what some of the later iterations seem to encourage by default. Certainly the OSR seems to have a love of slimes (all the monsters in Carcosa, as an example, are either slimes or slimy). That weird, alien quality has always been my attraction to slimes, and seems to be something best-emphasized in a more old-school game.

Given this, the logical first step toward developing the idea seems to be to analyze how slimes work, as monsters, in the context of old-school D&D: this means both mechanically (i.e. what kind of obstacle or encounter do slimes present the players, and what sort of play-decisions and tactics do they present them with), and in terms of setting (i.e. what kind of world seems to follow from assuming that these monsters are way more common than they are in the average D&D game). Play-style (sandbox, dungeon crawl, or something else) would seem to be something that can emerge organically from these initial considerations, and will likely just end up being a matter of whatever I feel like focusing on.

To that end, I'm going to embark upon a series of blog posts where I review and discuss every slime which appears in an official D&D product (including Judges Guild stuff, if it ends up being relevant) from its inception, up to and including 1e AD&D. The idea is both to get a sense of, as I said, the mechanics and setting suggested by this group of monsters - but also to get a sense of the gaps that might have to be filled with new slimes, since I'm assuming that I'm going to wind up with, at best, a dozen or so "official" monsters. I may look forward to some stuff from 2e, since there are probably some cool ideas in one of the gajillion Monstrous Appendices, but I don't want to commit myself to going through all the 2e material.

So, look forward to the first installment of "Slime Review." In the meantime, uh, stay slimy I guess.