Alchemical Oozes
I'm jumping on the elements bandwagon, we're doing alchemy! Specifically with oozes and acids. It's a little puzzle monster for players to interact with. You'll need your own stat block for an ooze, most of this is about behavior.
Thank you Dungeons of Dredmor for making me love alchemy.
Colors of Oozes
Oozes come in three colors: clear, yellow, and red. Their color is based on what acid they're made of: acidium salis, aqua fortis, and aqua regia respectively. Their color also determines how they behave and what they like to eat.
All oozes are blind and deaf. They grope about making pseudopods to taste their surroundings for suitable meals. When it comes into contact with a potential meal, it thrusts its body onto it swallowing its prey whole. All oozes will hurt you, but oozes will only pursue prey they have a taste for. When oozes make contact with each other, they combine into one ooze with the total HD of both oozes. Oozes split into two oozes if it senses two sources of food on opposite sides, splitting their HD between them.
Clear oozes are made of acidium salis. Acidium salis is the same acid as the one in your stomach and so a clear ooze gropes for food and meat. Clear oozes are aggressive, they will swallow you whole if they taste you. You can distract clear oozes with food. Clear oozes are quite useful if controlled properly, they polish any steel that enters them. A sated clear ooze is exceptionally dangerous, nearly transparent. You will smell a clear ooze before you see it.
Yellow oozes are made of aqua fortis. It is the alchemist's intent when using aqua fortis to dissolve away silver impurities from gold, therefore a yellow ooze hungers for silver. When eating silver, it fumes a smoke and its yellow color slowly gets lighter. Yellow oozes bore through rock to find silver veins, creating an intricate series of very narrow tunnels.
Red oozes are made of aqua regia. The water of kings alone can dissolve gold and platinum, and so red oozes hunger for gold. Like aqua regia, red oozes are made of a mixture of aqua fortis and acidium salis. That means that if a clear ooze and a yellow ooze combine, poof, they become a single larger red ooze! Red oozes bore through rock to find a meal like yellow oozes do.
Using Alchemical Oozes
Hopefully the use cases are clear, but here are the ones that excite me:
- Red and yellow oozes will only attack players if they're wearing or carrying a lot of gold or silver. With empty packs, they're docile. But when your bags are laden with treasure, it's time to run.
- You can intentionally combine yellow and clear oozes in order to get a clear ooze to stop attacking you.
- Using coins, you can divide an ooze over and over again until its trivial to deal with each ooze.