5e Character Concept: An Aberrant Ooze
Right. So. The thing I wanted here was a character who did primarily acid damage. Or, since primarily acid damage is asking a bit much, at least regular acid damage. Because every so often I pick one of the weirder damage types and try to play around with it.
And acid … see, the reason I picked acid is that oozes are probably my favourite creature type in all of D&D. So I want something on a theme of a schlorpy little dude. Or gal. So for race, we’re going to be picking plasmoid, whatever else we do.
For class, I’m pretty sure we’re mostly looking at spells to do acid damage, and most of the acid dealing spells are on the sorcerer/wizard lists. There aren’t that many of them, mind you. But. If we’re thinking sorcerer. Sorcerers can get the transmuted spell metamagic, which for 1 sorcery point will let you swap the damage type of a spell that deals one of the following to another of the following: acid, cold, fire, lightning, poison, thunder. I love this for storm sorcerer/tempest cleric multiclasses, and it’ll do here too to let us drop a giant ball of acid (fireball) on top of our enemies. It’s spending a lot of sorcery points just for a damage type, but eh. If you want a rarer damage type, this is kind of what you’re looking at.
There is one acid spell that’s not on the sorcerer list that I’d kind of like: Primal Savagery, a cantrip from the druid list that gives you acidic claws, it’d work real nice on a plasmoid to mimic most oozes’ being able to just unarmed hit you for acid damage. Plus it’s a melee cantrip, and sorcerers only get shocking grasp there (or booming/green flame blade), so I might pick up either Spell Sniper or Magic Initiate to pick that up later on.
Now. If we’re a sorcerer, and we’re aiming for a theme of ooze … there mostly isn’t one. There isn’t really any subclass on a theme of ooze. But, if we want slimy, tentacley things, Aberrant Mind is an option? The slimy part of Revelation in Flesh we already have just for being a plasmoid, but it could also give us writhing sensory tendrils and/or glistening mucus that gives us a fly speed, so that’s fun. Also it gets us Hunger of Hadar, which is another of the acid spells that’s not on the sorcerer’s list.
The one thing with Aberrant Mind is that it’s psychic damage themed, rather than acid damage. And psychic damage isn’t really an oozy sort of thing. Except.
What if we’re not technically a plasmoid? What if we’re actually an oblex. Specifically, what if we’re a memory duplicate an oblex made, that thing they do where they eat someone’s memories and extrude a pod person copy of them, that somehow detached from the main oblex and wandered off by itself. After a while, without the parent oblex to maintain it, the duplicate lost cohesion and devolved back into a vaguely humanoid reddish hunk of slime, but it still has some foreign memories and aberrant psychic magic as a result? We’re not quite an oblex spawn directly, something weirder happened, and now we’re a lost, fractured personality of stolen memories inhabiting a mobile pile of goo.
(Did I mention I love oozes? I really love oozes. Oblexes are such a cool monster, I adore them. “The oblex extrudes a piece of itself that assumes the appearance of one Medium or smaller creature whose memories it has stolen. This simulacrum appears, feels, and sounds exactly like the creature it impersonates, though it smells faintly of sulfur. The oblex can impersonate 2d6 + 1 different creatures, each one tethered to its body by a strand of slime that can extend up to 120 feet away.”).
Yeah. Yeah, I like this. An aberrant ooze, an oblex spawn, full of bile and torment. (Aka full of acid and psychic damage). A wandering ghost of a mostly likely murdered person, their form eroded into nothing, and only scattered memories remaining.
I wonder … I think I’d want a custom background for this, call it something like ‘amnesiac’. Take Stealth and Survival, maybe, as the skills, or Stealth and Sleight of Hand, and I wonder if a DM would let me borrow from a race feature as a background one? Because if so I’d like to borrow the Reborn’s ‘Knowledge from a Past Life’: “You temporarily remember glimpses of the past, perhaps faded memories from ages ago or a previous life. When you make an ability check that uses a skill, you can roll a d6 immediately after seeing the number on the d20 and add the number on the d6 to the check. You can use this feature a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.” I do want their actual race to be Plasmoid, you see.
So. To pull all of that together. An Amnesiac Plasmoid Aberrant Sorcerer. A collection of fractured memories in a reddish, oozing form. Maybe we’ll pull in some influence from Juiblex, too. He’s a demon lord, not an ooze or an aberration, technically, but he’s the creator of all oozes and pretty fucking aberrant on his best day. If he took a holiday in the Far Realms, none of the locals would so much as bat an organ-analogous-to-an-eye at him. So later if we pull out Hunger of Hadar or Evard’s Black Tentacles, we can say that’s Juiblex’s influence threading through our magic, his vast writhing pseudopods slipping through a crack in the world to answer our call. Yeah. On top of our oblex nature, a being born from stolen memories extruded on a string, some part of us also calls back to the Faceless Lord himself.
But we remember being something else. Humanoid. Normal. We remember being a person. And now we’re wandering the world trying to figure out how much of one we still are. While gently or not-so-gently creeping out everyone in our general vicinity in the process.
And mechanically, we’re not too bad off either. We’re a standard enough sorcerer, but we’ll have resistance to poison, acid and psychic damage by level 6, and we’ll be theming our spells around acid and psychic damage, aided by the transmuted spell metamagic.
So. Picture a distinctly reddish plasmoid, one that smells faintly of sulfur, one that holds itself oddly at times, like it remembers being differently shaped, remembers being someone else. A very nice, perhaps oddly innocent plasmoid, that nonetheless is a little off. And that, when threatened, has a tendency to hurl acidic bile and eldritch horrors at people. Heh.
I just really love oozes, you know?
