I am reminded why, as a horny pimple-faced preteen, (as opposed to a horny non-pimple-faced pre-middle-ager), I was so enamored with D&D and its philosophies. Much like a fat rube and her chocolate snack-pack pudding, I couldn’t resist slurping down this piece (see below) of earnest description from memory lane and posting it in its entirety for your philosophical contemplation. Particularly enjoy sentences that start with the unlikely trope: “Like most oozes,” and of course the earnest and voluminously simple header: “Elder Puddings,” makes my anemic attempt at absurd humor look like a deficient halfling.
[i]In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, the black pudding is a fictional creature of the ooze family. It resembles a bubbling, heaped pile of thick, black, pudding-like goo, roughly fifteen feet across and two feet thick.
Like most Oozes, the black pudding is a mindless, underground-dwelling scavenger which drags itself around caves and sewers and absorbs and digests whatever it finds. It attacks by grabbing, grappling and constricting prey, and then inserting it directly into its liquid mass. It also secretes a deadly acidic substance which quickly dissolves weapons, clothing and organic tissue alike.
When struck by a slashing or piercing weapon, instead of taking damage, the black pudding splits into two smaller puddings. These also split into smaller black puddings when struck, and this continues until they are too small and weak to do so further.
Like most oozes, puddings are mindless and thus neutral in alignment.
Elder black puddings
Black puddings get bigger as they eat and age. The oldest black puddings can become hundreds of feet in diameter, and have several times the attack strength and hit points of a regular black pudding, with greater spitting and acid secretion abilities.
[edit]Other puddings
Other types of deadly pudding creatures in Dungeons and Dragons include the white, dun, and brown puddings. The only significant variation between black puddings and these other types is the terrain they usually inhabit: black puddings live underground, white puddings live on Arctic plains, dun puddings live in arid deserts, and brown puddings live in marshes.[/i]
So there you have it. We must eat the pudding, lest the pudding eat us. Is this not what philosophy is all about? Read it again, for a buffet of philosofique metaphor. I submit to you that philosophy is Elder Black Pudding, and philosophers are fighting it.