Creative Origins
The gelatinous cube is an invention of Gary Gygax, and first appeared in the Monster Manual (1977), rather than being lifted from outside sources and adapted to a roleplaying setting, as were many mythological monsters like the minotaur and dryad.
Being a cube that is a perfect ten feet on each side, it is specifically and perfectly "adapted" to its native environment, the standard, 10-foot (3.0 m) by 10-foot (3.0 m) dungeon corridors which were ubiquitous in the earliest Dungeons & Dragons modules, particularly the randomly-generated ones created using the rules in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
Read more about this topic: Gelatinous Cube
Famous quotes containing the words creative and/or origins:
“What if all the forces of society were bent upon developing [poor] children? What if society’s business were making people instead of profits? How much of their creative beauty of spirit would remain unquenched through the years? How much of this responsiveness would follow them through life?”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)