i’ve always found slime monsters in general fascinating. what are their cultural antecedents? why does dnd have a Giant Cube of Jello as one of its main monster types
Funnily enough, we actually know the answer to that one.
As part of its dungeoneering-as-wilderness-survival conceit, old-school D&D distributed responsibilities for keeping track of what was going on much more equitably than most modern tabletop RPGs do, and one of the responsibilities that fell to the players was drawing maps. The GM would simply make observations, and it was up to the players – typically the party would have a designated “mapper” – to figure out how to draw it.
In order to make the mapper’s job feasible, dungeons were generally treated as being composed of stacks of ten-foot cubes. Rooms and passages might notionally have more irregular shapes, but for mapping purposes, getting it to the nearest ten feet was considered good enough. Predictably, this led to most groups treating hallways – the basic unit of dungeon construction – as though they were literally exactly ten feet wide, ten feet high, and some multiple of ten feet long, unless there was a specific reason to presume otherwise, since that’s how they’d be mapped anyway.
So: why is all this relevant? Well, the other contributing factor is that D&D has always had a love affair with cryptic monsters: monsters that pretend to be something else. You might have a monster that masquerades as a statue, or a treasure chest, or even the ground under your feet; I made a post hitting some of the highlights a few years back, for the curious. Slime monsters in particular would frequently leverage the transparency of their bodies for mimicry purposes, appearing as water or smoke or some other innocuous substance.
The slime monster that would become the gelatinous cube had, as its central gimmick, the ability to mimic empty space – that is, its body was sufficiently transparent and had a refractive index sufficiently close to that of air that, if you were looking at it dead on, it would appear as though there was nothing there at all. Of course, if you could see the edges of such a creature it would give the game away, so it was additionally supposed that this slime could conform to the shape of its environment, expanding itself to fill passages from edge to edge and presenting a uniform, flat surface to approaching prey.
And guess what you get if a slime monster that conforms to the shape of its environment inhabits a dungeon that, by convention, is treated as consisting of twisty passages all exactly ten feet wide by ten feet high?
That’s right: a ten-foot cube.
Or, to TL;DR it: the gelatinous cube is a monster that mimics a map square.
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