Don't Hate the Cube, Hate the Game

I've been writing a lot of one-shot adventures lately — short, run-in-an-evening dungeon delves I publish through Anvil N Ink (https://anvilnink.com/). The newest one is called Squeaky Clean, and it started from a stupid question: what happens to a dungeon nobody cleans?

The setup is simple. A dungeon is getting filthy. Not cursed, not overrun — just disgusting. Something has changed, and the people who rely on the place want it sorted, so they hire a party to go in and find the source of the mess. What the heroes uncover is sabotage. Someone has been quietly murdering the gelatinous cubes.

Here's the part most players never think about: gelatinous cubes are the cleaning crew. A cube oozes down a corridor and dissolves everything in its path — bones, rot, dropped rations, the occasional slow goblin — and leaves polished stone behind it. They aren't really monsters. They're translucent Roombas with a digestive system and no off switch. Pull them out of the ecosystem and the whole place turns into a landfill. That's the engine of the adventure: the players spend the session slowly realizing they're on the side of the thing that would happily liquefy them.

That idea stuck to me like, well, ooze. The cube isn't evil. It never applied for the job. It's a cube-shaped stomach with no exit, doing exactly what its nature demands, and we've decided to call it a villain for it. The adventurers it eats are an occupational hazard — on both ends.

Which is how I ended up with a phrase rattling around my head for a week: Don't hate the cube, hate the game. It's the cube's entire legal defense. Don't take it personally. I didn't write the rules of this dungeon. I'm just the guy who has to digest you.

Obviously I had to draw it.

One afternoon I grabbed my sketchbook and an iced matcha latte and sat outside to rough the whole thing out in red pen — a sad-eyed cube with a swallowed sword and a skull suspended in its guts, a half-dissolved hoard of gold beneath it, and a tattered protest scroll beside it reading DON'T HATE THE CUBE, HATE THE GAME. Red first, because red is where I let the drawing be ugly. Wobbly lines, wrong proportions, ideas I'll throw out. Nothing about a red sketch feels permanent, so I don't get precious about it.

Then I went back over the whole thing in black ink. That's the editing pass: tightening the linework, fixing the hand-lettering, deciding which of the red scribbles were actually good and which were just me thinking out loud. The black layer is where the drawing commits.

Last, I scanned the inked version and used an AI to help me color it — mossy dungeon greens, a torch guttering in the back, treasure glinting through the slime. The bones of the image were already mine; color was just the part where I wanted to move faster than my paint skills allow. The result has more panache than I'd have managed alone in the time I had, and the cube finally looks as gloomy and put-upon as he deserves.

I don't have a grand point here. It was a good process — a dumb pun, a quiet afternoon, a matcha, and a monster I'd talked myself into feeling sorry for. The kind of small project that reminds you why you started drawing and writing in the first place, before any of it had to be a deliverable.

So: run Squeaky Clean, tip your local ooze, and remember that the cube is only following orders.

Don't hate the cube. Hate the game — especially if you're the one getting dissolved by it. HAHAHAHAHAHhahahahahahahhh.....