Oh so very long ago, back in 2015 I made a video about oozes in general, but today, I am going to focus on the Green Slime, a classic Dungeons and Dragons monster. Fifth edition players who are not familiar with the older edition versions will only know it as a hazard, a trap creature, found in the dungeon masters guide on page 105, but many are not very happy with such a bare bones treatment for such a classic icon of the game, and yes, it is an iconic monster, absolutely.
Ask any Dwarf and they will most likely begin by spitting on the ground and glaring at you for even mentioning the gods damned creature, then curse every drip of the slime in existence, and then say something like "BURN IT, BURN IT ALL!", mainly because the slimes are a common threat to mining operations and underground communities due to their tendency to seep down through the minute cracks and fissures of rock and cling to cavern and cave, mine and chamber ceilings, waiting to sense the vibrations of movement below and drip down onto unsuspecting victims. Outbreaks of green slime can become quite severe if left unchecked and its often left up to the priesthood to employ magic to deal with it.
This is one of the creatures that have been with the game since the very beginning. About the most major change to it has been with 5th edition, where it doesn't even appear in the core monster manual, perhaps in 2025, but not in 2014, in fact, there is the statement in the DMG that green slime has no ability to move... that is not entirely true. Green slime clings to the roof, but can also be found on the walls and pools or splatters of it can be found on the floor, but careful observation will show that the pools on the floor are very slowly moving toward the walls and the stringy tendrils of it are not running down the walls, they are creeping back up to rejoin the five foot wide mass of it up above. This movement is automatic, the slime is actually a colony of tiny organisms, it has no nervous system, no organs, no brain, it can't think or reason at all, it only reacts to direct stimulation and it drawn to darkness, nutrients and movement, it can also react to heat and cold in an environment, because it stimulates all the organisms in the mass, but local attacks with fire or ice will not cause it to move away, so, throwing a flaming torch on the floor will cause it to flow around the heat, it won't drive the whole mass of it away like its scared of the flame or anything.
Green slime is very green, bright green and translucent, it has a more runny consistency than you might expect, kind of like snot, but it is sticky and not easy to cleanly scrape off a surface, so getting splashed with the stuff is a very unpleasant situation, washing yourself with water or even strong dwarven spirits is useless as only extremes of cold, heat, the touch of direct sunlight or spells create radiant damage or that cure and remove disease are very effective, ordinary weapons have no effect on it and using acid, well, that just makes the situation worse as the Green Slime dissolves organic and inorganic material alike with acid damage.
You may ask, why is cure disease so effective against this form of life? Well, its the fact that Green Slime can lie dormant for long periods of time in the form of microscopic spores, allowing them to both regrow over the course of several years after the rest of its mass has been burned away. Another good reason that dwaves hate the damned stuff, its very hard to get rid of it without divine magic, which does destroy the spores, spores which dwarves working in mines can't help but inhale, causing long term damage and lung disease. Not to mention all the other Underdark creatures that also suffer the same sort of problems and often don't have access to divine healing to prevent or cure it.
While Green slime is absolutely the poster child of the Slime sub-category of what are collectively often just called Oozes, it is in fact a form of life more closely related to plants, and its closest relative is another type of slime called the Olive Slime (you can find them in the second edition Monstrous Manual, one of my favorite monster manuals, aside from its lack of an index, so, they are on page 276, just to save you some page flipping), to quote directly from the source "more dangerous than green slime, olive slime favors moist, subterranean regions. It feeds on whatever animal, vegetable, or metallic substances happen acroos it's path. The vibrations of a creature beneath it are sufficient to cause it to release it's tendrils and drop" - so you see, tendrils both anchor and extend out from the main mass, searching for nutrients or flowing over a source of nourishment, but they are not grasping or manipulating limbs like a pseudopod sort of structure. You can float via levitation right over pool of the stuff and unless you breathe on it or otherwise disturb it, its not going to react and it certainly can't reach out and grab you like a mimic can. "Olive slime ignores armor for the purposes of determining hit probability. It also negates dexterity bonuses unless the target is aware of the presence of the slime and takes steps to avoid the stuff. Contact with Olive slime causes a numbing poison to ooze from the creature." - this is why olive slime is so much more deadly, with green slime the first sensation is a sharp itching which ramps up to a burning sensation from the acid, very quickly feeling like the area is on fire and its a natural reaction for most dungeon crawlers inexperienced in such things to try dousing themselves with a water or wine skin to try and stop it, but that has almost no effect what-so-ever. "The olive slime then spreads itself over the body of it's victim, sending out parasitic tendrils to feed upon the body fluids of the host. For humans and demihumans, the point of attachment is usually along the spinal area. The feeding process soon begins to affect the brain of the host as it changes the host's body. An unobservant victim must roll a saving throw against the poison, failure indicating that the victim has not noticed that the olive slime has dropped on them." So, its never a good idea to travel by yourself underground, keep your companions close and keep a wary eye on each other.
"Within 24 hours, the host's main concern becomes how to feed, protect, and sustain the growth of the olive slime. Naturally, this includes keeping the slime's presence a secret from any companions." - and here is where you start to send private notes to the player, informing them what is going on secretly with their character, prompting severe temptation to metagame from the other players, who suddenly get VERY curious about their fellow adventurer for no obvious, in-game reason. I recommend promising the host of the slime some special rewards the longer they can keep the other players ignorant of what is going on with them.
"If the other characters become legitimately suspicious, or if they demonstrate any desire to destroy the olive slime, the affected character will escape at the first opportunity." - yep, they run off on their own, dividing the party, probably running right into something bloody terrible which lands everyone in a world of hurt, with one member of the group out of action. From there, the host becomes ravenously hungry and they must consume twice as much food as they normally would otherwise they start to waste away rapidly from severe starvation, a kind of damage that healing magic can do nothing about, as they lose up to 10% of their hit points per day. After seven to twelve days the host erupts in staggering agony and physically transforms into a vegetable creature, with the olive slime gradually replacing skin, muscle tissue and forms a symbiotic link to their brain. From that point, the host is no longer the person they once were, they fail to recognize their friends and have no interest in things like tools, clothing, equipment or other humanoid concerns, it exists as a new species more like a plant than another form of life and it converts to feeding via photosynthesis and converting other life forms, feeding on their fluids. In many ways, the Olive slime acts like the complete opposite of the green slime, as it can only be harmed by Acid, freezing cold, fire or disease curing magic, it is also, unlike the green slime, vulnerable to magic that withers and kills, or controls plants. If olive slime and green slime encounter each other, the attack of one completely neutralizes the attack of the other, rendering them both quite safe, however, this is no cure for a fully converted Olive slime creature, only something like a wish spell can restore them completely.
Slime creatures of all kinds have a kind of telepathic bond with each other that extends up to 200 yards or 180 meters (thats 180 regular strides by a six foot tall human, if that helps picture the distance), clearly this is not mental in nature, it's a chemical or vibration thing, probably the latter, in either case it allows the slimes to gather together for mutual assistance while feeding or for defense. Slime converted creatures that are killed will dissolve and become a pool of the living slime, so be ready to exterminate them with fire the moment they drop.
Probably the most horrific outbreak of olive slime infection, now sadly lost to history, occured in the empire of Netheril, when some immoral idiot used the spores as a component in some exfoliating salve that has a wondrously restorative effect on wrinkled and damaged skin, imparting a more and more youthful appearance, and even worse, it was quite stable and safe at first, unless exposed to sunlight for more than a six hours, at which point, it became fully active Olive Slime. You can imagine the absolute mayhem and horror that ensued, a lot of people died, the perpetrators, having sold a lot of it to quite powerful and vain magic users, were subject to extremely unpleasant forms of execution that I will not repeat here, there is a place in the Anuaroch desert, down a hidden chasm and among some very dangerous ruins, where the spirits of those criminals still linger, if you want to go ask them yourself.
I don't advise you do that, I'm just saying, they are there... what's left of them.
Green, olive and other slime creatures are generally fine with living in damp areas, underground mostly, but also dark forests, swamps and fens. The slimes are also totally comfortable living in or moving through shallow bodies of water, in which case they tend to kill off a lot of other water hazards like leeches and stonefish, coral snails and the like, but, they are very difficult to detect in the water and the numbing olive slime is far more dangeous than a bunch of leeches.
We have some slightly more accurate details on just how potent the acid of the Green slime is, in 2nd edition D&D it states that the slime can completely devour a creature within one to four rounds with no resurrection possible, it would also eat through one inch of solid oak an hour but can go through metal much faster, dissolving plate armor in three melee rounds. The horrid growth can be scraped off quickly, cut away, frozen or burned and a cure disease will kill it, but other attacks from weapons and spells have no effect. Green slime hates light and feeds on animal, vegetable and metallic substances in dark places, since it can't move around and hunt, it only grows when food comes to it. Oh, I should mention, sunlight doesn't immolate the stuff like it was a vampire, it just dries it out and eventually kills it, but will leave a lot of dormant spores behind. Its rare to find really huge collections of green slime outside of places like the slime pits of the 22nd layer of the abyss, but there is a lot of it in the haunted halls of Evenstar, a dungeon located in Cormyr in the forgotten realms, up near the border with the dangerous, goblin infested stonelands. I know Green slimes could be kept for garbage and waste disposal. In the House of the Moon in Waterdeep, a well-looked-after green slime was kept in a large stone tub in the kitchen; a senior priest stood by with a staff of curing in case it got out of control. Other green slimes were kept in the cesspits below the privies, according to the sourcebook Powers and Pantheons, written by the legendary Eric L. Boyd.
Oh yes, shoutout to MrRhexx here, What they don't tell you about Green Slime, according to Ed Greenwood in the Swords of Eveningstar, When the acidic ooze touched its next meal, it started to emit foul-smelling smoke, reminiscent of swamp, earthly decay and eels.
So, there you go.
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