Gelatinous cube

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A gelatinous cube is a fictional monster from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.

1 Ecology
2 Society
3 Gallery
4 Gelatinous Cubes in other media
5 Creative origins
6 References
7 External link

[edit] Ecology

A gelatinous cube slides through dungeon corridors, absorbing everything in its path, digesting everything organic and secreting non-digestible matter in its wake. Contact with its exterior can result in a paralyzing electric shock, after which the cube will proceed to slowly digest its stunned and helpless prey.

Reproduction is through a form of hermaphroditic 'budding', in which a smaller, stub cube is left behind in a side corridor to grow into full-sized cubes, although these stub cubes run the risk of being absorbed by their own parent on its next trip down the corridor. Scholars have determined that juvenile gelatinous cubes grow to fit their own natural environment, adpating their exterior proportions to the size of the corridors they most commonly sweep.

[edit] Environment

Gelatinous cubes typically live underground.

[edit] Typical physical characteristics

A gelationous cube looks like a transparent ooze of mindless, gelatinous matter in the shape of a cube.

Some legends whisper of monstrous, "legendary" gelatinous cubes in the deep and secret places beneath the earth that have grown to several hundred cubic feet of volume.

[edit] Alignment

Gelatinous cubes are always neutral.

[edit] Society

[edit] Gallery

A wizard fights for his life against a bloodthirsty Cube.

[edit] Gelatinous Cubes in other media

In Castle of the Winds there is a "gelatinous glob."
In the virtual pet game Psypets, the gelatinous cube is one of the many monsters your pet can defeat.
On the Neopets website, there are jelly blobs named "gelatinous non-cubes."
The ASCII based game Moria features a treasure rich gelatinous cube.

[edit] Creative origins

Because of its obviously fantastic, unrealistic nature, the gelatinous cube is one of the most well-known monsters created especially for role-playing games. Although it resembles other fictional monsters, it is an invention of roleplaying game authors, rather than being lifted from outside sources and adapted to a roleplaying setting, as were many mythological monsters like the minotaur and dryad.

Like the flumph, the gelatinous cube is commonly considered one of the sillier role-playing game monsters. Being a cube that is a perfect ten feet on each side, it is specifically and perfectly adapted to its native environment, the endless standard, 10-foot by 10-foot dungeon corridors which were so ubiquitous in the earliest D&D modules, particularly the randomly-generated ones created using the rules in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Its existence is also something of a commentary on the ubiquity of treasure-laden dungeons in the Dungeons & Dragons universe itself.