"The sheer ridiculousness of it is impressive. Here we have yet another monster with no reason to exist in a dungeon-free ecosystem. It's genetically adapted to graph paper, for God's sake!" – www.bookofratings.com/dndmonsters2.html
The good ol' cube feature heavily in one of my favourite encounters I ever ran. The PCs were exploring a dungeon when one of them notices movement out of the corner of his eye. Casting his lantern light towards it the party sees a skeleton floating a few feet off the ground, surrounded by a slowly rotating halo of weapons, and gliding slowly towards them down the corridor.
The fighter throws a dagger which stops dead about five feet from the thing before slowly being pulled in to join the other weapons spinning around it. The wizard unleashes a volley of magic missiles which likewise seem to fizzle against some sort of invisible shield about five feet from the beast. The cleric tried turning the thing but it seemed to not even notice as the power of his god swept ineffectually around it.
An epic battle ensued as they tried to stay away from the thing while trying every spell and tactic in the book to pierce the seemingly impenetrable force field surrounding this mysterious undead abomination. It was only after they managed to slay the cube did they cotton on to what they had been fighting. At first I thought they were going to murder me, but they were so thrilled by what an amazing battle it had been, and so impressed that I had used a common creature and their own perceptions to such unexpected effect, that they ended up hailing it is probably the best session they'd ever played.
I've had a soft-spot for the cube ever since then. I've used that same encounter in a number of other games, all with pretty much the same impact. It really is amazing how you can mess with the players' expectations simply through describing the familiar in an unfamiliar way.
So tell us, what are some of your favourite D&D moments, whether as player or DM, involving the Gelatinous Cube?
So much fun!
Had the party wizard walk straight into one. I didn't give hints and just called for spot check.
The rest of the party was afraid to come closer. It always had a lot of HPs after all.
One of my colleagues still pesters me sometimes for "cubeling" stats. I'm talking a creature like this:
I probably shouldn't repeat the rest.
Our novice party is exploring a dungeon. We find a secret/concealed door leading into a circular tile walled room some 20' across & capped by a domed ceiling. The floor? It's actually a 5'ledge/rim all the way around the chamber. A deep shaft (with a built in ladder) drops into the darkness below.
{what's being described here is a slightly up-sized description of the inside of my grandfathers grain silo - a location everybody playing was familiar with}
Peering into the shaft our torches reveal small bits of stuff - coins, bits of metal, etc - floating in a slight haze way down below.
The thief (what they called rogues back then), before the rest of us can even say anything in RL, exclaims: "Oh boy! An anti-gravity room! I jump in!"
Glorp.
He dove into a triple sized "cube" & died well before the rest of us could even find a decent way down, let alone help him.
And that's how Cid was introduced to Gelatinous Cubes.
I was playing a monk. It dissolved all my clothes, so I had to finish the dungeon naked.
Only loosing one's clothing in an adventure is consiered a good day in my games, as I have no problem pulling the player's items and treasure from underthem! That, and I tend to run sword & sorcery settings that dont put much shame on casual nudity.
By the way, I found a 25 Essential Expressions Challenge meme with Geliminous Cubes, by the guy from Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic. Its so damn funny!
The Gelatinous Cube Bomb...
We discovered a GC wandering around the level below us after poking around with a spear in a pit in the floor. Our (my) brilliant plan to poke holes in the top of it and pour oil inside to light it on fire didn't quite pan out due to the cube finally getting annoyed at us brainstabbing it and wandering off in the midde of us having fun at it's expense.
Two weekly sessions later (the next day in game-time), we rediscover our polygonal friend on the lower level and come up with the brilliant idea to convince him to wander down the corridor we know the major hordes of bad guys are going to be coming at us from in a few rounds. As usual, the plans went slightly awry - the bad guys didn't open the door until just after the cube had passed the side corridor they were entering from...
Fortunately, one of our party members happened to recall, as the bad guys were filing out into the corridor for a fight that we had a good chance to lose, that they were also standing next to a gelatinous cube that had several flasks worth of oil sloshing around inside of it as well as several half-eaten home-made black powder grenades, and that there was a hollow metal tube sticking out the top with a wick in it.
One fireball and a small cave-in later...