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, weāre going to be picking plasmoid, whatever else we do.
For class, Iām pretty sure weāre mostly looking at spells to do acid damage, and most of the acid dealing spells are on the sorcerer/wizard lists. There arenāt that many of them, mind you. But. If weāre 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 itāll do here too to let us drop a giant ball of acid (fireball) on top of our enemies. Itās 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 youāre looking at.
There is one acid spell thatās not on the sorcerer list that Iād kind of like: Primal Savagery, a cantrip from the druid list that gives you acidic claws, itād work real nice on a plasmoid to mimic most oozesā being able to just unarmed hit you for acid damage. Plus itās 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 weāre a sorcerer, and weāre aiming for a theme of ooze ⦠there mostly isnāt one. There isnāt 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 thatās fun. Also it gets us Hunger of Hadar, which is another of the acid spells thatās not on the sorcererās list.
The one thing with Aberrant Mind is that itās psychic damage themed, rather than acid damage. And psychic damage isnāt really an oozy sort of thing. Except.
What if weāre not technically a plasmoid? What if weāre actually an oblex. Specifically, what if weāre a memory duplicate an oblex made, that thing they do where they eat someoneās 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? Weāre not quite an oblex spawn directly, something weirder happened, and now weāre 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. āThe 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.ā).
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 Iād want a custom background for this, call it something like āamnesiacā. 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 Iād like to borrow the Rebornās āKnowledge from a Past Lifeā: āYou 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.ā 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 weāll pull in some influence from Juiblex, too. Heās a demon lord, not an ooze or an aberration, technically, but heās 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 Evardās Black Tentacles, we can say thatās Juiblexās 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 weāre 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, weāre not too bad off either. Weāre a standard enough sorcerer, but weāll have resistance to poison, acid and psychic damage by level 6, and weāll 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?