Gloo
Ulula soared around the next room. Through her eyes, I could see an indiscernible shape bobbing about on the ground. It suddenly grew longer, reaching up towards my familiar, and I directed her to turn back. I then dismissed Ulula, drew my rapier, and headed in.
In the darkness, I could see a round, shapeless mass lying on the floor in the center of the room. Suddenly, it began to quiver and stretch upwards. Growths began sprouting from the sides, and the top began wrinkling & pinching into a more detailed form. Needing a better look, I cast light on the tip of my sword.
I found myself standing before… myself, but bright green all over. The thing had mimicked me, save a number of smaller details that were apparently beyond its capabilities, and its "feet" were merged together into a puddle.
Then the thing spoke. Though its mouth moved roughly in time with the sounds, the actual lip movements didn't match up, and the warbling sound itself seemed to be coming from its entire body as it quivered almost imperceptibly.
"Hi!" it said. "What's your name?"
— Veloptima Maekkelferce, Exploits, Excursions, and Expeditions of an Eldritch Knight, Vol. III
Gloo are sapient, brightly-colored oozes found scattered throughout the dungeons of the world. They are highly curious and love learning new things, but their ooze ancestry makes most of them reluctant to leave the comfort of their dungeons. Those gloo that do venture outside find a world ripe for understanding that in turn does not understand them.
Unlike most oozes, gloo can see & hear, using their entire membranes as sensory receptors (and thus they can see in all directions at once), and they are able to speak by vibrating their membranes.
Gloo are sexless & genderless and typically refer to each other as "it." Some gloo who have had more contact with gendered races may assign themselves a gender, though to outside observers the assignment usually seems random.
Fluent Shapeshifters
At rest, a gloo's form is simply that of a big blob on the ground, though when active it can shift & reshape its form at will to give itself various limbs, heads, and other extremities that it's seen on other creatures. Although gloo can shapeshift things like wings and eight arms, they lack the membranous strength and mental pathways to make use of them. A gloo can give itself two usable arms or arm-like appendages, but any growths beyond that are purely for show.
Unless it spends considerable time practicing, a gloo cannot shapeshift small details, and any attempt at forming legs fails unless one of the legs is large & load-bearing. Most gloo that attempt legs simply have them meet in a puddle or blob on the ground in lieu of forming feet.
A gloo's shapeshifting has one major drawback that keeps it from being a decent method of disguise or imitation: whatever shape a gloo assumes, it always remains the same bright fluorescent color.
Budding and "The Dance"
Most gloo reproduction occurs via budding: A parent gloo — motivated by its growing size, desire for companionship, or need for allies to help secure a section of dungeon — breaks off a Tiny piece of itself to create a child of the same color. This child gloo inherits a small random subset of the parent's memories, knowledge, & personality, and there are reports of magic-using gloo whose offspring formed knowing some of their cantrips. For a time, the offspring still considers itself part of the parent and follows the parent around everywhere, but as it develops and grows by feasting on organic material, it gradually develops its own identity. Within two years, it and its parent are only physically distinguishable if they want to be, and quite often the offspring is repulsed & bored by the duplicate nature of the pair and so strikes off on its own to dwell elsewhere.
The gloo also allude to a second method of reproduction, known only as "the Dance," in which two or more gloo interact in a way that produces a new gloo of any color. There are no records of what this "Dance" entails, and attempts to observe it in the wild have all been fruitless. Asking a gloo about "the Dance" directly produces non-stop giggling until the subject is changed.
Legend of the Black Gloo
A few gloo try to use budding as a means to siphon off any undesirable memories or personality traits, though this generally does not work, and even when it does, it produces Evil offspring. There is a legend of a wizard-gloo possessed by numerous evil tics & compulsions who tried to purify its mind by investing them all in a bud; the resulting offspring was a cruel black gloo who dealt necrotic damage and had inherited many of its parent's spells. The wizard-gloo was swiftly destroyed, and the black gloo is said to terrorize the dungeon of its birth to this day.
Gloo Personality
Gloo take joy in discovering new things and can find wonder in anything. A gloo's attention can jump around its surroundings at lightning speed before suddenly fixating on one small detail and studying it for hours.
Gloo tend to be impulsive, abandoning activities and starting new, marginally more-interesting ones on a whim. A dungeon that has been inhabited by a gloo for a long time is likely to contain numerous half-finished structures (forts etc.), incomplete diagrams of the magical field, partial experiments, tight hollowed-out passageways that don't connect to as many rooms as they could, unfinished inscriptions of poorly-written poetry, and so forth.
Although gloo are interested in the idea of the outside world, their ooze ancestry makes them prefer to stay in the comfort of dungeons. Those few gloo that do venture outside are likely to be quite overwhelmed at first by the high rate of new & varied experiences. Gloo that leave dungeons also tend to end up ultimately returning to dungeons, either for a new home, to simply explore, or as part of dungeon-crawling adventuring parties.
Gloo rarely form communities with other gloo, as they tend to find their close relatives to be too similar to themselves and thus unoriginal & boring, and only larger dungeons tend to host more than one line of gloo. Some gloo have instead been known to shapeshift into other dungeon inhabitants, like kobolds and goblins, and live among them for a time, often using their unusual traits to become clan shamans or wise men.
Gloo see race as just a shape. Being shapeshifters, they naturally attach no inherent meaning to one's outer shape, and thus race doesn't matter to them. They do have a fondness for individuals with funny & amusing shapes, though.
Personality by Color
The gloo themselves have a tradition that each color of gloo is predisposed to a certain personality type: green is a level-headed leader, purple is passionate & defiant, yellow is smart & clever, red is dumb & brutish, and blue is emotional & caring. These stereotypes were likely established or codified by a legend, passed down in some dungeons, of a five-member all-gloo party that adventured in ages past. Details on this group are scant; there is allegedly an epic gloo-composed poem describing the gloo-group's exploits, but the only known researcher to hear it simply wrote that it was "just the worst thing I have ever heard. Do these blobs have no sense of rhythm?"
Gloo Diet
Gloo will eat any dead organic material, aside from the remains of other oozes, which repulse them. Any non-organic material found on a corpse a gloo is eating is briefly absorbed and then spat out. A gloo's willingness to eat dead bodies regardless of its relationship to the deceased has lead to some problems when gloo have joined humanoid adventuring parties in the past.
Gloo have little awareness of and feel no connection to the gods. A gloo can be convinced to honor the gods in order to receive their blessings, but it would never feel an innate pull towards a god, and no amount of theodicy can keep a gloo from asking inconvenient questions about the divine. The very rare gloo that becomes a cleric of a god would do so primarily to gain spells and would view its relationship with the god as more contractual than devotional. On those worlds where clerics can manifest powers purely through devotion to an ideal, a gloo is much more likely to join their ranks, doing so through faith in knowledge, the arcane, or the like.
Gloo Quirks
| d8 | Quirk |
|---|---|
| 1 | Whenever I meet anyone new, I like to greet them by shapeshifting into them. |
| 2 | I consider myself an expert on identifying the genders of humanoids, beasts, and inanimate objects despite all evidence to the contrary. |
| 3 | I want to explore all the dungeons in the world. Why, there could be plaid gloo out there, and we would never know! |
| 4 | I wish I were a different color. My damage type just isn't me, you know? |
| 5 | Whenever I meet someone new, I want to find out everything about them, after which I get bored and move on. |
| 6 | The outdoors makes me quiver with excitement and anxiety over how big and unbounded it is. |
| 7 | I constantly change my appearance as I talk in order to match my tone and provide proper visuals. |
| 8 | A visitor to my dungeon once left behind a book from which I learned everything I know about the outside world — and it is crazy! |
Gloo Names
Each gloo assigns itself its own name, which is usually a short description of some prominent feature or behavior. At formation, a gloo's name is simply "Spawn-of-[parent's name]," and it afterwards changes its name whenever a change occurs in its life that means the old name is no longer the best fit.
Names: Explores-Whole-Dungeon, Guards-the-Gold, Has-Many-Friends, Hides-under-Tiles, Hoards-and-Trades, Knows-Secret-Paths, Looks-like-Goblin, Lives-with-Kobolds, Makes-Visitors-Give-Knowledge-to-Pass, Plays-with-Magic, Shapes-Many-Tentacles, Slayer-of-Bugbear, Steals-from-Visitors, Travels-Outdoors
Gloo Traits
Ability Score Increase. Your Constitution score increases by 2, and your Strength score increases by 1.
Age. Gloo reach maturity within two years of formation and have been known to live up to at least 360 years of age.
Alignment. With their impulsive natures and lack of social structures, Gloo tend to be chaotic, usually good or neutral.
Size. At rest, a gloo is a roughly-hemispherical blob of radius (and thus height) 2 to 2½ feet, though it can manipulate its body to be over six feet tall. A gloo weighs about 200 to 400 pounds. Your size is Medium.
Speed. Your base walking speed is 25 feet.
Darkvision. Accustomed to life underground, you have superior vision in dark and dim conditions. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can't discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.
Ooze. Your creature type is ooze, rather than humanoid.
Ooze Nature. You don't require sleep and cannot fall asleep without magic. When you take a long rest, rather than sleeping, you must instead spend at least six hours inactive & motionless. You are not unconscious, and you can see and hear normally. Most gloo find this the perfect time to get creative thinking done.
Shapelessness. You are immune to being prone. You have advantage on Strength and Dexterity checks and saving throws made to escape a grapple or restraint. Donning and doffing armor takes you 1 action regardless of category.
Lineage Color. As a gloo, you are one of five possible colors, indicating your lineage and elemental affinity. Choose your lineage color from the table below. Your pseudopod's damage type and damage resistance are determined by the lineage color, as shown in the table.
| Color | Damage Type |
|---|---|
| Blue | Cold |
| Green | Acid |
| Purple | Poison |
| Red | Fire |
| Yellow | Lightning |
Pseudopod. Your body exudes elemental energy which comes out in your unarmed strikes. If you hit with an unarmed strike, instead of the normal damage, you deal damage equal to 1d6 + your Strength modifier, and the damage type is determined by your lineage color.
Damage Resistance. You have resistance to the damage type associated with your lineage color.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and one extra language of your choice.
Racial Feat
Amorphous
Prerequisite: Gloo
You have learned how to manipulate & reshape your body at small scales, gaining the following benefits:
- Increase your Dexterity or Constitution score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
- You can move through a space as narrow as 1 inch wide (cf. the squeezing rules on page 192 of the PHB). Equipment worn or carried cannot be brought with you unless it can fit through the space normally.
Random Height and Weight
Note: The heights given by this method are for a gloo in its resting "blob form"; most gloo can easily shapeshift into forms over six feet in height.
Base Height: 1′ 10″
Height Modifier: + 1d6
Base Weight: 200 lb.
Weight Modifier: × 30 lb.