Slime Time

Miniature Monday seems as good a day as any to add a few more entries to our Dungeon Delve Wandering Monsters table. Let’s Go!

Like in our Wilderness table last week, we’ll again be doing entries two and three. To catch you up, DM Ben wants to make a couple of monster tables for the two classic themes, dungeons and wilderness, by populating them with cool STLs that we’ve printed and painted up for our own campaigns.

We kept the table mechanics pretty simple and followed the modern-day DnD 5e wandering rule of rolling a d20 every hour. Half of the table will include a creature throw-down, and the other half will be non-events.

If we’re talking long rest, then it’s just one roll for the entire eight-hour sleep/watch duration. If the group is taking a short rest, roll 6d6, and any roll of a six would lead to a roll on our Wandering Monster table.

We kicked off our Dungeon table with some Bunker Buster oozes, and we’re going to stay on that same slippery slope with some hungry slimers by Fantastic Plants and Rocks. Their monthly Patreon is insanely affordable at $4.20 a month for five release sets, and more importantly, their STLs are perfect for novice painters (e.g., no tiny eyeballs to paint).

We’ll share how we painted these beauties for tomorrow’s Terrain Tuesday DnD blog post, but today, we’ll focus on the slimy bastards themselves. Green slimes are the weakest but the most common in this monster subclass. They are immune to what feels like everything but are vulnerable to cold.

We’re doing five wandering slimes for our six-member fourth-level party using our handy online encounter calculator. Consequently, this will seem like a “trivial” encounter, but not so fast! Their acid damage can wreak havoc on non-magic items! Again, not every fight has to be to the death – sometimes, a simple disruption is all that’s required.

For the Green Slime stats, DM Ben will tweak the attack from +3 to +6 and place their HP at a maximum of 10. In terms of tactics, the goal is a surprise, gang-up attack on the player taking watch. Or, these baddies aren’t necessarily out for the characters but more for the tasty equipment and armor they carry.

DM Ben uses a fun house rule for weapons and armor that come in contact with this sort of acid creature. If the adventurer hits an acidy creature (like a slime) two-plus times, you have a 40% chance of losing that non-magic weapon. If you’re hit by this creature two-plus times, you run a 25% of having your armor effectiveness decrease by 1. Thus, it’s unlikely you’ll die from this wandering monster, but you could lose some important gear…and that’s not good for lower-level characters that don’t have many magic items yet!

Lastly, slime monsters also pick up stuff along the way from previous victims, as some stuff inevitably sticks to them. DM Ben allows one ard from Nord Games’ Objects of Intrigue Dungeon deck to see what’s buried among all that goop.

Later this week, we’ll fill in the Passer-By non-combat encounter row!