Various poisonous yet apparently delicious slimes, sludges, and jellies

[Venger]

I was refreshing myself on the particulars of Faustian pacts, when I saw a familiar refrain when it comes to D&D:


A devil slain outside Baator devolves into a puddle of foamy, stinking ooze over a period of 3 to 9 minutes. This residual soul essence registers as both magical and evil. Any mortal ingesting it must make a successful DC 20 Fortitude save or become sickened for 2d4 hours.

This is not the first time I've encountered this phenomenon. There are a variety of monsters that turn into toxic sludge when killed. Sometimes things infect you with spores and when you die, you turn into toxic sludge. Other effects transform creatures into toxic sludge without the intervention of creatures.

But they always specify that, should you choose to whip out a spoon and dig in, that it will somehow make you ill, usually imposing a status, ability damage, or sometimes killing you.

I know the idea of playtesting is, at best, a polite fiction when it comes to this game, but what was the impetus for this bizarrely common rule? When pcs saw their enemy melt into gross foam, did the player controlling Vadania just dive in there and start eating it? Was the party really disappointed when she asked what happened and the dm didn't have an answer?

I know I've seen this kind of thing come up a couple of times, but since there's no standardized language, it's vaguely annoying to search for. Post with any instances of this kind of thing you can think of and I'll compile them here.

Monsters
Dead devils outside Baator: mortals who eat it face dc 20 fort v sickened for 2d4 hours

Keepers: when captured, pinned, or held helpless for more than 1 minute, keepers "dissolve into a 5 foot wide puddle of poison" that evaporates in 4 rounds unless you make a dc 20 craft (poisonmaking) check. this also happens when a keeper is killed. the poison nauseates on contact, so would nauseate you if you ate it as well.

Spells
rejuvenative corpse: living creatures who eat the flesh fort save vs filth fever. creatures who are neither alive nor undead are unaffected.

[Maat Mons]

Now I'm curious if devils are good-eatin' in the few minutes before they dissolve.

[Venger]

Now I'm curious if devils are good-eatin' in the few minutes before they dissolve.

Devils have no organs. Aside from skin, meat, and bones, they are full to the brim with eggs. Inside those eggs are tiny, fully-formed devils of various kinds.

Sounds like caviar. Maybe it tastes like caviar. I'm sure a mouthful of bone devils is a flavor-blasted experience. Plus you only have a few minutes to harvest it all before the devil dissolves.

[Vizzerdrix]

I feel like this comic suits the flavor of the topic well
https://mangarock.com/manga/mrs-serie-66020

I could have sworn I'd scene a vine critter someplace that grew edible berries or something, and skiurids makes edible nuts from shadowstuff.

[Gemini476]

While some of it might be from the "maybe I can get magical powers if I eat it" crowd, I suspect that part of it has to do with animal companions. It might also be one of those "hey, here's a cool magical substance you can use" things: carry a bottle of this stuff with you and toss it in the mouth of the next Purple Worm you fight.

I'm not sure where this comes from, either. It's not in the 2E Monstrous Manual, so it might be from Planescape or else be a Fiendish Codex 2 original?


The Keeper might just be a "gotcha" for people keeping it pinned down for an extended time, with the Craft check being the "hey, cool magical substance" instinct so common to some schools of D&D. (1E's DMG includes rules for extracting poison from venomous monsters because that was obviously a thing players were doing often enough that Gygax decided to write down his rulings.)
Rejuvenate Corpse is pretty obvious, though: you cast it on a corpse so your Ghoul minions (or whatever) can heal 50hp, and then to answer the obvious question living creatures just get Filth Fever.

[AnimeTheCat]

Devils have no organs. Aside from skin, meat, and bones, they are full to the brim with eggs. Inside those eggs are tiny, fully-formed devils of various kinds.

Sounds like caviar. Maybe it tastes like caviar. I'm sure a mouthful of bone devils is a flavor-blasted experience. Plus you only have a few minutes to harvest it all before the devil dissolves.

see you're thinking about this like an adventurer, not an entrepreneur. You've got to capture the devil, alive, and imprison the devil, alive, and then keep the devil alive while you steadily harvest it's eggs. Sell the deviar, use the money to capture MORE devils, alive, and imprison the devils, alive, and keep the devils alive, while you continue to harvest their eggs. Sell all that sweet sweet deviar and repeat.

Foolproof plan really. No high level devil is going to care about their minions being imprisoned and turned into glorified chickens, so you're basically good to go. Since this effectively makes Devils chickens, does this mean they can be infinitely summoned using chicken infested?

[Particle_Man]

Turning it around there are some monsters that became monsters because they ate dead people, so depending on your definition of people . . .

And to be fair, there is a monster called Black Pudding. Who doesn’t love pudding?

[Jowgen]

Kinda in line of this, Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk p. 160 specifies that drinking Green Slime makes it so that you die from being eaten inside out unless you get a remove disease spell on ya real quick.

Although in that particular scenario, the stuff was glamored to appear like water in a fountain.

[The Viscount]

The Requiem Jar from Dragon compendium is full of slime you can use to destroy corpses. Drinking it sickens you for one hour.

The fact that this comes up in more than one place makes me feel like there might have been some substance or creature that would reward you for eating it. Or perhaps it's just for the type of game where players would attempt to eat their fallen foes due to running out of provisions in a dungeon.

[Efrate]

You mean you do not have players who will say I want to eat it/drink it to anything gross, either for the lulz or because it is there so why not? I mean it must be important if the DM takes so long describing it. It fades away fast?! Gotta be super powerful then; let's get as much of it as possible and use it!

[Gemini476]

The Requiem Jar from Dragon compendium is full of slime you can use to destroy corpses. Drinking it sickens you for one hour.

The fact that this comes up in more than one place makes me feel like there might have been some substance or creature that would reward you for eating it. Or perhaps it's just for the type of game where players would attempt to eat their fallen foes due to running out of provisions in a dungeon.

For the specific case of unidentified jarred liquids, that's usually a "is this a potion?" thing. Risking your life by sipping an unknown potion and praying that it's not a Potion of Poison has been a thing since '74.

There's also been a number of magical fountains or pools that do stuff when you drink from them, usually a generic wish or attribute increase or Youth.

I don't know that there's been that many edible monsters over the years, but it wouldn't surprise me - the Monstrous Compendium back in the day loved to give obscure uses for underappreciated monsters in an attempt to flesh out the text to multiple pages. IIRC you could make armor from Ankheg exoskeletons.

If you figure out which author wrote it, you could maybe just send them a question on Twitter/email and see if you get a response?

[Thurbane]

Devils have no organs. Aside from skin, meat, and bones, they are full to the brim with eggs. Inside those eggs are tiny, fully-formed devils of various kinds.

Deviled eggs?

[Zaq]

I mean, ADOM was more inspired by D&D than the other way around, but you want to eat damned near everything in ADOM (with a few very notable exceptions that will poison you or give you a disease).

I think it’s mostly just future-proofing against That Guy.

[Mnemius]

I remember being told of a monster that made itself look like pancakes and if you ate it... very bad stuff happened to you. But that was in high school, when I was first getting into AD&D...

[Venger]

Deviled eggs?
How did I not make this joke myself? Well done.


I mean, ADOM was more inspired by D&D than the other way around, but you want to eat damned near everything in ADOM (with a few very notable exceptions that will poison you or give you a disease).

I think it’s mostly just future-proofing against That Guy.
What's ADOM?

[Efrate]

The pancake golem? I know there is a pie fiend, I think a pancake golem might have existed?

[Thurbane]

The pancake golem? I know there is a pie fiend, I think a pancake golem might have existed?

There was a Calzone Golem in the free online adventure Something's Cooking (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/oa/20010413a), but I think the link is dead now...

[ShurikVch]

When pcs saw their enemy melt into gross foam, did the player controlling Vadania just dive in there and start eating it?This thing was, probably, intended mostly to trick enemies who're dumb enough to fall for it; or for mindless and animal-level-intelligence, who would eat anything anyway; or to throw it into a cooking pot, so all the bandits would be sickened...

Also, "food monsters" is a thing, so it's not as farfetched as you may think...

[DrMotives]

The original description from 2e's fhorge included a recipe on how to cook them. Sadly, in 3e their description lacked any mention of them being delicious. A fhorge, incidentally, is basically just a dire warthog from The Outlands. So I can see why you'd try to roast one.

There's also a game on Steam & Switch called Battle Chef Brigade. You fight monsters as a classic platformer type game, then take their parts into the kitchen and do a puzzle-matching game to do a sort of Iron Chef competition. Literally everything you fight in that game can be made in dozens of delicious dishes. So it's what people want, I guess.

[ZamielVanWeber]

Add to the list diseases that can only be gotten be eating the flesh of certain sentient creatures. Part of me thinks they were just planning for players being freaking weird. That's probably a safe bet.

[Venger]

Add to the list diseases that can only be gotten be eating the flesh of certain sentient creatures. Part of me thinks they were just planning for players being freaking weird. That's probably a safe bet.

Which ones are those?

[ZamielVanWeber]

Blueguts from eating "disgusting" creatures such as otyughs, gibbering mouthers, and grey jellies and Soul Rot from eating the flesh of evil outsiders. Melting Fury is from "handling" undead flesh which would include eating.

[Psyren]

"Any mortal" includes animal companions. That might have been the impetus.

[Particle_Man]

I remember in first Ed they had the sentient giant beaver, who you could either converse and trade with, capture and sell into slavery, or kill and sell the pelts of. Rather alarming, that. Mind you these days there is dragonhide armour and magic items made from people’s hands.

[Thurbane]

In some folklore the Wendigo is caused by a curse from committing cannibalism - but the D&D template doesn't have such a clause, AFAIK.

[Venger]

In some folklore the Wendigo is caused by a curse from committing cannibalism - but the D&D template doesn't have such a clause, AFAIK.

It's in there, but the cause and effect is reversed. You can only turn into a wendigo by being bitten by one, contracting wendigo hunger (supernatural disease) and having it get your wis to 0. Any day where you fail a save versus the disease, you track down, kill, and cannibalize the nearest member of your race then go home with no memory of doing this.

Shame there's no la, it's a kickass template.

[Telok]

How did I not make this joke myself? Well done.


What's ADOM?

ADOM is a roguelike. Rogue, Mines of Moria, ADOM, Dungeon Crawl, etc., are a branch of computer game dating from before graphics cards existed. They use the ASCII character set to display the game. You have a single adventurer that explores a procedurally generated dungeon, sneaking, killing, looting,and often eating their way to the bottom in order to recover the plot item. There's a high level of replay-ability because it's easy to set up character customization and everything else uses random number generation, so no two play throughs are ever the same.

In a game I ran one time diamonds were extremely rare and the "x gp of diamond dust" was a weight measurement, not a value measurement. So raising the dead was hard. But there was a replacement for diamond dust called 'greymold salve' which cost a lot because it was rare and semi-anti-magic, but if you could find actual greymold it was effectively free. In addition it cured any diseases, including stuff like lycanthropy and green slime, and it stopped normal and magical aging for a few months. There was even a quest where an archmage was keeping his wife alive via daily castings of Limited Wish because he couldn't get any of the salve.

At one point the PCs went deep in a forgotten cave complex, fought their way through veritable hordes of gigantic spiders, centepedes, scorpions, mantises, etc. And found a 1/4 mile wide dead spider demi-god, covered in greymold. Riches beyong the dreams of avarice.

They cut out 50 pounds of spider demi-god meat, ran away, and then ate 10 pounds each. Raw. In one sitting.

I actually find rules for adventurers trying to eat random monster bits useful. Unfortunately I can't find any rules about PCs learning from repeated bouts of food poisoning.