The Sovereign Sponge

Hey all,

Thought I'd share a little bit of gamemasterly insight with y'all today. So . . . storytime!

Today I was thinking about how swords don't tend to work well against gelatinous enemies in fantasy settings. Typically, dungeons will include some variety of mold, slime, or ooze that blindly devours all in its path: rubble, player characters, what-have-you.

Now, I don't know why this became a thing. I'd probably attribute it to Gygax, but I'll admit, that's just a guess. I can't think of anything like this in Tolkien, so Gygax is a fairly safe bet.

Still, it's basically a fight against a giant jello mold. Real-life jello isn't best dealt with using blades, but it's also not something you'd normally take care of with blunt force. All that really leaves is a sponge.

Enter, the sovereign sponge (and yes, the name is an homage to sovereign glue). Simply toss the sponge into an ooze, and it draws in the entire enemy into itself. Naturally, such an item would be fairly valuable to the right brand of adventurer.

Of course, this leads to the next question, what if someone drops one into the ocean? This lead me back to a fantasy theory I'd seen before. Someone once pointed out that the magical spell "create water" is worded in such a way that, so long as the water gets consumed, it remains in the world permanently. Based on that, the theory went, it makes perfect sense that flooding would one day become an issue.

How does that relate to the sovereign sponge? It not only explains how the world can survive a sovereign sponge dropped into the ocean (the sponges absorb water at a rate that offsets the average rate of water creation from the "create water" spell), it actually explains why the invention of the sovereign sponge was necessary. This was made as a magical countermeasure to the effects of a widespread, low-level magical ability.

With all of this, we've established a very tenuous balance in the natural world. This gives us plot hooks for a campaign built around the concept of the sovereign sponge:

-In drought conditions, a mage decides to calculate and carry out a ritual spell that will neutralize all existing sovereign sponges to raise water levels worldwide.

-As magic becomes more widespread, many coastal towns are putting out bounties for the reagents necessary to have more sovereign sponges crafted to deal with the rising ocean levels.

-The death of magic, in addition to everything else attendant on the trope, comes with a mad max style loss of the world's oceans, as the create water spell ceases, but the sovereign sponges carry on unabated.

-A golem constructed from sovereign sponges constitutes a world-ending threat, and sparks deep philosophical questions about a sentient being's right to exist.

- Guild secrets about the manufacture of sovereign sponges are both closely guarded, and pursued for the promise of lucrative rewards for anyone who can duplicate the technique.

These are just a few campaign hook ideas for the sovereign sponge. What would you do with the sovereign sponge in your own campaign worlds?