Golemdregs Ooze

[Andrew Shumate]

This quivering blob of fatty tissue streaked with green alchemical reagents seems to behave as both liquid and solid.

Golemdregs Ooze CR 4
XP 1,200
N Large Ooze
Init -5; Senses blindsight 60 ft; Perception -5

----- Defense -----
AC 4, touch 4, flat-footed 4 (-5 Dex, -1 Size)
hp 44 (4d8+24);
Fort +6, Ref -4, Will -4
Defensive Abilities improved spell resistance, ooze traits, shifting state; SR 19
Weaknesses sonic dissolution

----- Offense -----
Speed 15 ft.
Melee Slam +5 (1d6+4+1d6 acid)
Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft.

----- Statistics -----
Str 17, Dex 1, Con 22, Int -, Wis 1, Cha 1
Base Atk +3; CMB +7; CMD 12 (Cannot be tripped or grappled)
SQ compression, mire

----- Ecology -----
Environment any urban
Organization solitary
Treasure incidental

----- Special Abilities -----
Improved Spell Resistance (Ex) As a result of having the base elements of a flesh golem, golemdregs oozes have SR equal to 15 + their CR.
Shifting State(Ex) A golemdregs ooze responds to force in unnatural ways, behaving as a solid when struck abruptly and as a liquid when under continuous pressure. When a golemdregs ooze is dealt a powerful blow, it firms up. If a single attack deals more than twice the golemdregs ooze's hit dice in damage, that damage is halved. Conversely, because a golemdregs ooze behaves as liquid when dealing with a slow-moving force, a golemdregs ooze cannot be grappled.
Mire (Ex) When a creature strikes a golemdregs ooze with a melee weapon and triggers its shifting state ability, the attacking weapon can become stuck as the ooze attempts to incorporate the invading object into itself. The wielder of such a weapon must make a DC 15 Reflex save to prevent the ooze from swallowing the weapon. A swallowed weapon takes 1 point of acid damage per turn, bypassing hardness, until the golemdregs ooze is killed and the weapon is recovered. A golemdregs ooze may only swallow manufactured weapons in this way. The save DC is Strength-based.
Sonic Dissolution(Ex) When a golemdregs ooze takes sonic damage, its shifting state and mire abilities are suppressed for one round as its surface tension is briefly disturbed by the resonating sound waves.

These strange oozes are created when builders of flesh golems accidentally allow the alchemical reagents that animate golems to mix with the discarded scraps of flesh that are cut away during the process by which flesh golems are stitched together. Masterless and mindless, these oozes seek only to find more flesh to devour. As a golemdregs ooze feeds, it expands and often outgrows its former home, even occasionally escaping the factories and laboratories in which they are created. When outside the confines of a laboratory, golemdregs oozes roam the streets, harassing citizens, butcher shops, and small pets. These incidents have caused public outcry in areas where large quantities of flesh golems are built, such as Magnimar or Kaer Maga.

Golemdregs oozes resemble lumps of fat or muscle held together by a green alchemical gel. These lumps pulsate and shift continuously, causing the ooze to emit an unpleasant slurping noise whenever they move. The alchemical gel which binds the golemdregs ooze emits a distinctive, sharply acidic smell. Some say that golemdregs oozes taste even worse than they smell, but few are willing to discover for themselves.

[Lee Hammock]

Hi Netopalis, I'm Lee Hammock, the lead game designer on Pathfinder Online. Before that I did lots of d20 freelance work, but I'm probably going to be leaving mechanics to the more up to date judges and concentrating on story, overall balance, and how I could see using them in a game.

This monster seems an exercise in frustration stats wise. Really high spell resistance for the level, and then if it's hit for any decent amount of damage it stands a chance of stealing the attacker's weapon and slowly destroying it (in addition to reducing the damage). The ability of sonic damage to render some of its abilities ineffective is nice, but sonic is one of the rarest damage types for PCs. Giving this creature some sort of energy vulnerability would help as it currently seems like it would be really hard to do much damage to.

The background is interesting and I do love golems. Some sort of guidelines for how fast they can grow would have been helpful since that is their primary drive. Other than random encounters in cities that produce flesh golems or the lower levels of a golem factory, I'm not sure what I'd do with it.

I'd rate this as a Should Not Vote For.

[Liz Courts]

Hi there! I'll be one of the judges for this round, and I'll be looking at a couple of key points for your creature: flavor, GM usability, and how well it fits into the world of Golarion. For some background, I helped found the Wayfinder fanzine before I started working for Paizo, and these are all points that I took into consideration when selecting articles for the magazine. In addition, I oversee every third-party Pathfinder Roleplaying Game product that makes its way onto Paizo.com.

Flavor
I really like the flavor of this creature--the unintended consequences when all those reagents are left sitting out. I don't think the creature's origins support an initial size of Large...I would certainly hope that somebody would notice an enormous pile of aggressive pudding before it starts menacing the populace.

GM Usability
Most abilities are based off of a creature's hit dice, not their CR. The spell resistance feels abnormally high because of this, and while I don't disagree with the ability's origins, the method of calculation seems off, and the SR would only get higher the more templates you stacked on it. An initial size of Small would fit better with the creature's stated origins, and a mechanic that would allow for a quick increase in size via absorbed spell energy or consumption of material would work better with what you had in mind. In addition, the shifting state ability would have been better handled with a temporary Damage Resistance, and I can see this particular point getting bogged down at the table. The manufactured weapon restriction on mire seems arbitrary--I don't think an ooze with an Intelligence of null is going to care whether or not you're using a chair or a mace to hit it.

Setting
While brief, the origins of the creature do work within the setting, and as massive as the Golemworks and the Ardoc family's workshops are implied to be, there's gotta be some interesting side effects of having all those raw ingredients next to each other.

Final Thoughts
A new ooze formed from alchemical ingredients does not feel particularly innovative, and there are problems mechanically with its abilities. I do not recommend this monster for advancement.

[Adam Daigle]

Congrats on making it to this round! May you have the luck and talent to push all the way through to the end!

”How I Judged These Monsters”:

When I develop a monster for the Adventure Path bestiaries, I print out the monster entry, and then go through it in a quick pass, marking up the page with notes and highlighting any problems that I need to address later when I really dig into it. Much of the time I’m circling things in the stat block or flavor text and leaving a quick note. Most often, this quick note pass is performed while I’m writing out art orders for the monsters so I can make sure that the description I give to the artist is what the final monster will be. This is where I make note of any changes I plan to make (some of which I’m sure frustrate some of my freelancers from time to time).

I’m going to judge this round in a similar manner to how I’d treat a monster I ordered from a freelancer if I asked one of my freelancers to just send me something within the same parameters that you’ve been given. My review isn’t anything personal, and since tone is difficult to communicate online sometimes, imagine my comments and critiques read in a friendly and nudging way. To heighten the experience, imagine my comments on your monster written in purple ink. :)

The blue italicized first line in my review was my gut reaction from reading the name with no context whatsoever. It was a fun guessing game I was playing while reviewing the monsters, so I included that note for everyone’s enjoyment. (Spoiler Alert: I was wrong a lot.)

And now to the monster!

Makes me think of the fleshdregs I did in Shattered Star, but oozy.

This is the first ooze in the contest, and the third Large creature so far.
Its target numbers look about right for an ooze. Ooze target numbers are always weird.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen improved spell resistance.
I don’t like that they can’t be grappled. That’s a bit weird.
The mechanics in the special abilities could use some work. There’s a lot of nonstandard language and formatting.
While Magnimar and Kaer Maga both have mentioned having golem makers, I don’t recall flesh golems being a big focus. Either way, good effort on connecting the urban monster to Golarion.
Eww! Their taste. :)
This monster has some neat ideas, but the execution was rough.
This entry would take some time to develop for print.

I don’t recommend golemdregs ooze for advancement.

[Kiel Howell]

Congrats!

The name - I'm not a fan. Golemdregs Ooze looks and sounds like it's a possessive but it's really not and that's frustrating. Plus...it just doesn't fit that well.

Large seems odd at this CR...either it's kind of a cop out or not thought out all the way. I agree with Liz that being Large just doesn't really fit this creature at this CR.

Holy SR batman! Even if a party has a sonic spell available to them at this level...SR is going to pretty much kill the chances that it deals damage. If it had a drawback that sonic bypasses the SR that would have helped.

The abilities are nice but I'm just feeling like this is a GM's TPK dream. Sure it's easy to hit but it has good HP and it can halve damage, has high SR, and is only vulnerable to a rare spell type.

Overall I can't put my vote on this, it feels like a rough draft.

[Jacob Trier]

I like the flavor of this concept, but I think Lee is spot on when he calls it an exercise in frustration.

The wizard can't beat the SR (19!! at CR4?), the fighter either rolls for crap or sees his damage halved and possibly his sword taken away and eaten, and the rogue can't sneak attack it. Meanwhile, the cleric is off in the corner praying for divine intervention.

As a GM, I dislike the shifting state, since it adds to the bookkeeping and extra calculations that really slows down combat.

I think this would really have benefited from some thorough playtesting. You have some interesting ideas, and decent writing chops, but mechanically this monster is flawed.

I'm unlikely to vote for this monster.

[Scott Fernandez]

Interesting idea and a lot of the above suggestions could really fix this monster. I think vulnerability to sonic and perhaps a side effect of the alchemical nature of the beast having a weakness to thunderstones would help a low level party deal with this. But the SR is just too high for the CR.

--Monsters of Vrock

[Cthulhudrew]

The abilities of this remind me of shear thickening fluids (which I love to incorporate into fiction). There may be some mechanical issues, as noted above, but I really like the flavor of this one.

[Maurice de Mare]

Oozes are so RPG Superstar 2013!

Seriously, believable origin story but your mechanics are killing you here. There are too many moving parts involved which makes your monster difficult to run and most importantly - difficult to kill.

[Angela 13]

Seems to be based on Silly Putty.

[Nicos]

Thematicallty Ilike this monster, it non-newtonian nature is really cool. But I do have a couple of problemes

1) Why Mire Does not work with unarmed strike and natural attacks? it seems to be totally the thing that a flesh easter ooze would do.

2) Why it does not share the flesh golem weakness to cold and fire damage?

[Avatar-1]

How do you kill this thing?

[Sean McGowan]

Living oobleck that wants to eat you.
While I really like the notion of the solid/not-solid variable nature of this, it winds up not really working for me once it's down on paper. 'The harder you hit, the harder it is to damage' is a nice concept, but winds up involving a bit more math mid-combat than I like. I think another way to do it might have been to give it a solid DR/–, then give it an ability that lets anyone bypass that DR by taking a damage penalty of some kind.
And Mire doesn't work for me either, given the existence fo Shifting State. If it goes hard when you hit it, I have a difficult time seeing how those blows that are bouncing off its body are simultaneously getting stuck inside it. And even leaving the logistics aside, I'm not a fan of 'so much for your weapon' abilities. Rust monsters and the like should remain very isolated, as far as the prevalence of that kind of ability.

[Pedro Coelho]

Wow! A non-newtonian ooze! Cool!

I really like that part of the concept, and I think shifting state and sonic dissolution do a good job representing the properties of non-newtonian liquids.

There are serious mechanical issues here, but the idea has me hooked enough to overlook them for now; thus said, heed the judges's advice and work to improve your rules-fu.

The origin of the creature is ok; not terribly original, but efficient. Overall, I like this enough to consider voting for it, though I still have a lot of entries to read.

[Nicholas Herold]

I've given this round a lot of thought. I've read over all of the monsters, done some deliberation, and come to my conclusions. That said:

The concept of this monster is a little weird. I get the idea of making a non-Newtonian ooze. That's cool. I don't get, however, the idea of making it based on flesh golem run-off. For one thing, human fat is not a non-Newtonian fluid. Also, in D&D, flesh golems are typically made by stitching together corpses, not by making Creepy Crawlers out of meat. Although that is a good mental image.

The mechanics are a mess, frankly. The non-Newtonian mechanics of being flexible or stiff depending on input should be the star, and they are, only they don't work for the CR. Half damage, for the most part, was rejected for DR in 3.5, for good reason. It shouldn't be harder to damage monsters the better you are at fighting. The stealing weapons doesn't work conceptually with the rigidity--it resists blows, but softens enough to steal weapons? The SR is just mean. Low-level casters have enough woes without dropping a crazy-high SR onto them, especially when melee is useless and it doesn't have the commensurate weaknesses of a golem.

Overall, there have been alchemical oozes in Pathfinder and meat oozes in Pathfinder (the living flesh in B4). This entry doesn't fill a novel niche conceptually, and mechanically it is highly problematic. I will not be voting for this entry. Best of luck!

[Jeff Lee]

I didn't have a lot of time for item reviewing this weekend, so I'm doing monsters instead. First I'll look at how the monster's basic rundown fits the monster creation table, then general theme and abilities.

= Monster meets the target statistics for its CR
+ Monster exceeds the target stats for its CR
++ Monster greatly exceeds target stats for its CR
- Monster's stats do not meet target stats for its CR
-- Monster's stats are greatly below target stats for its CR

hp: +
AC: --
Atk -
Dmg -
Primary Ability DC: ++
Secondary Ability DC: n/a
Good save: n/a
Poor save: ++/--/--

Well, its an ooze, so its defenses are pretty abysmal. However the special abilities do counteract that somewhat. Attack is less than a gray ooze--also CR 4--but damage is equivalent.

Improved Spell Resistance: Okay, fine.

Mire: So the only way to get the weapon back before it dissolves is to kill the ooze? I don't much like that idea.

Shifting State: Um, too much math in the midst of combat. Why not simplify it with DR?

Sonic Dissolution: The reaction to sonic damage is a good idea, though it reminds me a bit too much of the Venom symbiote from Spider-Man.

This was an interesting attempt at an original ooze, but I don't think it paid off. You've got an inspired background and solid immersion into Golarion. However, the mechanics are clunky and it really doesn't stand out from the pack in terms of originality. I'm afraid I'll have to give this one a pass.

[Curaigh]

Congratulations Andrew,
I am trying to keep reviews simple to get through them quickly.
Creative: combines the qualities of ooze and golem, that's not bad. I like the sonic dissolution affect too (wish it lasted longer).
Fun to GM: Nothing unexpected in how to run, except the sonic, but between the SR and the CR, not sure how my PCs would find out. Especially as my players are likely to avoid melee after the first weapon gets mired. I could be reading this wrong: does it only reduce the damage if damage is 2xHD? so 2xHD-1, would do more damage the 2xHD +1? DR would be simpler.
Golarion Tie: Kaer Maga, 'nough said :)

Good luck! :)

[frank gori]

Golemdregs Ooze
The Good: I actually was hoping to see a good ooze after last year I thought a good designer would see a gauntlet tossed down and take the challenge.
The Bad: That name is awful
The Ugly: SR + Ooze traits + damage output means that this thing is going to be really really really deadly for the intended CR. Origins are sloppy at best.
Overall: 3/10 - Can't vote for it, too many issues.

[Joel Flank]

Have to agree with most of the other comments, this thing had too many defenses - there's really nothing a party can do to circumvent them, even with it's sonic weakness, and especially at the low CR level, when they simply don't have as many resources and options.

Also, for the acid bypassing hardness on consumed weapons, that's fine, but I feel it should have at least one material that it can't harm, like most oozes, whether that's wood, stone, etc. Gives someone who makes a good knowledge check something helpful they can pass on to the fighters in the party.

[Oceanshieldwolf]

I don't mind the name, and I like what it does - I think being a byproduct is completely fine, but I agree it perhaps should be small, with the ability to become larger. That would be fantastic.

I could see the shifting state not being universally effective against all types of weapons - maybe piercing OR slashing weapons might get through without being grabbed by the mire ability...

I'd like to have seen more pain from sonics for this guy, giving him a real Achilles' heel, and yes, the Spell Resistance might be high, but at least you gave a flavor reason for why this is so...

I think this is quite creative - taking an existing creature and twisting it into something new and unique is a good design path in my opinion. This is new enough to be distinct. Nice one.

[Mike Welham]

This is an interesting concept for a monster, and I like the idea of its weird flesh and its interactions with various attacks. You did a good job tying this to Golarion.

This is not necessarily an urban monster, since it could be just as easily located at a secluded wizard's laboratory. This monster seems extremely difficult for its CR, and I think at the least sonic effects should automatically bypass its spell resistance.

Good luck in the voting!

[Scarletrose]

Golemdregs Ooze

Category: Civilization byproduct

Flavor Factor: Eww.. which is not necessarily bad, is just … Eww. Also, I see what you did here. You made a non-newtonian Ooze. The ooze is a byproduct of golem making, which gives it the weird experiment vibe. Also... I didn't consider the crazy golemcrafter lab as an urban setting, as I usually think such people would probably have a secluded lab deep in the woods or the mountains. But that's just me, so I will consider your urban environment 100% valid. The whole concept sounds more Ustalavic to me than Varisian.

Cool factor: Non-Newtonian hungry blob. And is the typical mad scientist experiment gone wrong. I love it, as I love the idea of wanting to engulf flesh to grow. I would love to see specific tailored rules to advance this monster.

Balance Factor: This is really bad. Oozes already have pretty troublesome traits, and here we are talking acidic ooze of the weapon destroying variety, that means some of the most annoying monsters to fight. This is going to be awful for martial classes, so magic seems the natural countermeasure but here comes the huge SR. This is an unstoppable horror. And maybe this adds more cool factor but totally misses the balance and the CR4.

Clarity Factor: I get what you wanted to reproduce with shifting State and I do like it. I wonder if everybody would get it. Using double the hit dice amount of damage as a threshold for Shifting state is new. It shouldn't need a lot of work but I can't help but wonder if is supposed to be affected by negative levels.

Usability Factor: Aside from having to remember to trigger the shifting state based of damage received I don't see major problems. It's real flaw is the fact that is incredibly overpowered.

Vote:A very cool monster that I would have voted happily, but it completely misses the balance. Usually to me is not enough to not vote an entry, it just means it needs a couple of tweaks. Is the magnitude of that miss that really creates a problem. I did not vote for this entry. Sorry.