Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 106 - Monster Series - Elementals

Episode Date: January 2, 2022

Elementals are a foreign concept in a lot of ways.  Creatures made up of water or air that are relatively intelligent, can be summoned or spontaneously created, and aren't just a humanoid in an element suit just seem weird.  If you ever wandered where they come from, what they can do and how the fight, give this episode a listen.   I want to specifically thank Keith Ammann and his great book The Monsters Know What They're Doing.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  It's an amazing read!

I rarely insert commentary before the episode proper starts, but when big news breaks in the RPG world, I'd rather give my thoughts out quickly rather than waiting a couple of weeks for the next episode I record. I've taken a couple of weeks to read and understand the changes that were made, and I want to talk about them very briefly. First off, some of the changes were merely clarifying language that made spell effects and class abilities clearer. I don't think any of these are controversial and don't merit discussion here. Some of the changes have been to remove some racially insensitive language. Curse of Strahd changed Gypsy to Man and clarified the descriptions of the Vistani people. They've also renamed some things that could be interpreted as insensitive.

In Tomb of Annihilation, Mad Monkey Fever is now Blue Mist Fever. In Storm King's Thunder, terms like Savage Frontier and Barbarians have been altered. The Reghead Barbarians are now called the Reghead Nomads, and the Uthgardt Barbarians are now just called the Uthgardt. Some of the changes have been to address language that could be problematic for people with certain mental health challenges. They replaced paranoid with prone to sudden suspicion. Some words like genocide, references to cannibalism, certain personality features being endemic to races in their culture,

and asides like the darkness of the drow people have been removed entirely. I think the biggest, or at least the most visible change, is the removal of default alignments from a lot of the humanoid races. The races section of the 5th edition player's handbook had all of their alignment sections completely removed. References to the drow being irredeemably evil also have been removed. But the most visible change isn't the one that seems to have people up at arms about the changes. Wizards of the Coast also changed some of the lore entries for different species. Language about Beholders believing they're the pinnacle of their race,

hell, pinnacle of all races, has been removed. Fire Giants ransoming useless captives has also been removed. Something that affects my episode 99, the section stating that a lone kobold realizes its weakness in the face of a hostile world, is gone. Mind flayers are no longer described as inhuman monsters. Orcs had language removed saying that they are indoctrinated to a life of destruction and slaughter. Finally, Wante references to being emotionless and feeling no remorse for non-1T is gone. If you've listened to this many of my episodes, you probably know what I'm going to say next. To anyone who is lamenting Wizards of the Coast being woke or bending to societal pressures, please stop. In 2021, they announced they were going to be revising some of their text to remove

insensitive phrasing, so we all should have seen this coming. Is this change a good thing? I think every DM will have to make that determination for themselves. As I mentioned in episode 59, God, Craig Guggen, that was like a year ago. I don't think we should get wrapped around the axle over the word all in the descriptions. Wizards of the Coast is now saying some drow are evil instead of all drow are evil. Some DMs, like myself, like the flexibility this change

gives us when gaming with people who aren't regular attendees of our games. I won't have to explain the traitor lizardfolk, the sewer-carving tribe of kobolds, or goblin trash collectors anymore. I can point to this errata and say, races aren't inherently evil anymore. Calm down. DMs, if you want your orcs to still be warlike, uncivilized, nomadic, and living apart from other races on your planet, make it happen, Cap'n.

It's your world. But now, thanks to this change, we can have the orcs that are focused on intelligence or the gith focused on diplomacy and other examples that would require a ton of explanation under the previous non-errata rules. we can have the orcs that are focused on intelligence, or the gith focused on diplomacy, and other examples that would require a ton of explanation under the previous non-erotic rules. If you gave me truth serum, I'd probably say that I think some of these edits made by Wizards of the Coast are a bit of an overreaction. Specifically the stuff about beholders and mind flayers. These are aberrations. They have completely foreign ways of thinking compared to what we

standard humanoids would have, and I'll probably continue to play them as egotistical orbs looking for a fight and emotionless creatures that kidnap humanoids to reproduce, respectively. Game systems evolve, change, and grow. The hobby has gone from the thing that people were embarrassed to admit they play to a multi-billion dollar industry. thing that people were embarrassed to admit they play to a multi-billion dollar industry. That level of visibility has produced more resources and opportunities to play and grow our games than I ever dreamed possible when I was playing in dorm common areas a thousand years ago. But at its heart, this is a business for the companies producing content.

With that extra visibility, that maturing of the industry, that increased awareness of the hobby by society at large, comes additional scrutiny. Thank you so much for listening. Now on with the episode. Elementals are all defined as neutral. The logic in the older versions was that these were manifestations of one of the founding elements of nature, and as such were impartial to petty concepts like good or evil or law or chaos. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 106 of the Taking20 podcast. This week, continuing the monster series all about elementals. This week's sponsor, well this is appropriate,

the New Year. Did you hear about the person that was teaching trigonometry lessons at the party just before midnight? He really helped us understand Auld Lang Syne. Happy New Year, everyone. My gift to you is no begging for likes or subscriptions or ratings like I usually do at this point of the episode. Just take my sincere wish that everyone's 2022 is much better than 2021 was. The ancient Greeks believed that everything on earth was made up of four elements. Earth, fire, water, and air. This concept was the cornerstone of their science, philosophy, and medicine. Dungeons and Dragons and later Pathfinder and Starfinder borrowed this idea

to incorporate the concept of these four elements being the building blocks of the multiverse. But what are elementals and how are they related? Elementals were the corporeal incarnations of the four foundational elements, air, earth, fire, and water. They are creatures composed entirely of one of those classic elements animated from the energy of their home planes. Home planes? What, like the 777s? No, no, wrong kind of plane. In D&D, Pathfinder, and Starfinder, and many other gaming systems, there are these things called elemental planes of existence. On these planes, one of those four elements reigns supreme. For example, the elemental plane of water is an ocean without a surface and without a bottom. It's water as far up as you want to go and as far down as you want to go,

and infinitely in every direction. There's no sun on the plane, but it's illuminated in a bluish-green glow. The plane teems with life. Traditional fish, mermen, water genasi, krakens, coral reefs the size of continents, squids the size of a house, all sorts of fun wet shit. No, not wet shit. That's an unfortunate turn of phrase. That sounds like I meant when you fart and you strike oil.

Let's try that again. All sorts of fun stuff happens when you're wet. Look, if you don't at least get moist on the plane of... Like it's been spurting. I keep trying to use an analogy and it keeps turning into a sex joke. And my wife is looking at me like I'm a moron. I think it's time to just move on to my next point. Wetter than a mermaid's t***? Fine.

Water elementals are living creatures made of water. Duh. Not all water becomes an elemental, but certain conditions have to be met to make them spring into existence. Similarly, on the elemental plane of fire, everything burns. The atmosphere is fire. There are molten liquid fire lakes. The land is on fire. The atmosphere is hot enough to melt most stone, and most mortals will turn into charcoal briquettes in about six seconds. The plane of earth is an infinite expanse of solid material with little pockets of air and water scattered throughout. And you can imagine what the plane of air looks like. Infinite gases, as far as the eye can see, pot-marked with occasional small sections of solid material,

no bigger than an asteroid. There's a lot more to the elemental planes than I have time to cover here, so if you're interested in an elemental planes episode, leave me some feedback or a comment below. But what are elementals made of? They are living creatures that spring to life, and they're made up of the stuff of their plane. A fire elemental is a walking fire. There's not a solid body underneath it that's on fire. It's literally just fire all the way through. Water elementals take the shape of humanoids, but they can also be whirlpools or waves. Air elementals can appear as tornadoes.

Earth elementals look like walking humanoids made of rocks that can swim through the earth the way we do water. Even on this plane, they're at home in environments that are lethal to us, which is a completely foreign concept. There are creatures on earth like that, like some creatures that live in thermal vents in the ocean that would fry us if we got close to them. Similarly, these elementals can be very, very comfortable in environments lethal to us. For a very dated comparison, there was a miniseries called Alien Nation

that was on TV in the late 80s and early 90s. It was one of my first introductions to fairly hard sci-fi storytelling, and it's indirectly led to my love for sci-fi shows like The Expanse. Anyway, these aliens have different biologies to us. If they drink sour milk, they got drunk. And importantly for this point, saltwater was lethal to them. So where did they land on Earth? California, right next to saltwater. Of course, it makes a whole

shit ton of sense. Why? Yeah, moving on. Anyway, there's a scene where humans are killing one, and they just grab it and march into the sea and it just dissolves. It dies a horrific death whereas humans walking into the ocean were perfectly safe. But it was absolutely deadly for these aliens. Now you may be saying to yourself, Jeremy, I don't remember that show. Well, just pretend I'm your grandpa rambling about how old sarsaparillas were a nickel and if you were lucky you got to see a woman's ankles the day before the wedding. And if she let you see a calf, you knew it was going to be a fun wedding night. How the hell did I get here?

Anyway, elementals do have some common characteristics. They date all the way back to first edition Dungeons & Dragons and the very first monster manual that was released in 1977. They were described as being, quote, strong but relatively stupid beings conjured magically from their natural habitat. Back then, they were mostly found outside of their native plains if they'd been summoned, and if the summoner lost control of the elemental, there was a 75% chance the elemental would turn on the creature who summoned it and beat the shit out of them.

Further additions expanded their lore, going into detail about elemental lords, more powerful versions of elementals that couldn't be summoned from their home plane, and these powerful creatures had abilities above and beyond what regular elementals have. Elementals are all defined as neutral. The logic in the older versions was that these were manifestations of one of the founding elements of nature, and as such were impartial to petty concepts like good or evil or law or chaos. All elementals come in various sizes, and the size is a direct correlation to the amount of power they have. Weak elementals will be small or medium-sized, depending on the edition and version of the game that you're playing.

As they grow in power, you'll find large, huge, and even gargantuan-sized creatures 80 feet tall that can destroy entire towns without breaking a sweat. All elementals also have dark vision, so they see just as well in pitch darkness as they can in daylight. Elementals can be found on nearly any plane of existence, except for those that are openly hostile to their nature, if you will. I doubt you'd find water elementals on the plane of fire, for example. There was one version of Dungeons and Dragons, I believe it was 3.0, that labeled the water and fire planes to be diametrically opposed and similar for air and earth. I don't get that

feeling from what I'm reading in 5th edition though, so it's probably not true anymore. So how would you use them in your campaigns? Well, it kind of depends on what they're doing, and what they're doing depends on how they got here. If they were summoned for a purpose and commanded to perform a task, the players will likely find them performing that task. If they're free-range elementals, most likely they're just going about their day, searching for a comfortable place to rest or whatever. They're neutral. They don't need to breathe or eat or sleep or hunt. They are practical, basic, and frankly, not very intelligent. Their intelligence scores are mostly in the single digits in 5th edition and Pathfinder. They aren't artistic by nature, and there's not a Bob Ross of Earth Elementals.

Although, maybe there should be. If he paints with clays, by the way, is he painting with flesh, or is his flesh made of paint? When he realizes this, he stops painting happy little trees and begins screaming and can't stop. That's when the adventurers are called. PCs, we need you to go kill the screaming pile of rocks near the old west road. There's 500 gold pieces in it for you. He's disturbing the wildlife. And everyone else. It's friggin creepy. And just like that, there's a side quest I might add to a campaign. Mostly, elementals want to preserve a balance of the forces of nature and are less concerned with the creatures within it. An air elemental, for example, may defend a particular very windy

pass in the mountains, not because of the goats that frequent it, but because it's a representative of the force caused by air. But suppose the PCs do get in a fight with elementals. How do they fight? As always, the book The Monsters Know What They're Doing by Keith Amon is a great resource here, and it goes into much more detail than I have time to. To boil things down from their stat blocks, though, here's the way I fight with them. Air elementals are fast and can get in and out of fights very quickly. I usually have them fight like ambushers and use their flying mobility to their advantage. Earth elementals are strong combatants who can glide into the earth like it's water. They will try to overwhelm enemies with their physical strength.

And if I'm being particularly nasty behind the screen one night, they will grapple someone and earthglide them down into unworked ground about 10 feet or so, where unless there's an open cavern, the PC will likely begin to suffocate. Use this tactic with caution, though, because it is lethal to low-level combatants. Water elementals are pretty strong and dexterous. They're great fighters in water and will happily use their Whelm ability to drown opponents when they can capture more than one in that ability. Finally, Fire Elementals are beasts of destruction. They aren't as worried about being mobile since they'd rather catch things on fire, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to be in proximity with it for a long period of time.

They don't mind burning people or animal companions or tents or the ground or anything else that they want to. They use their fire damage consistently on their opponents. But since we're talking about elementals and other similar creatures, we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about Genasi in 5th edition or their Pathfinder equivalents. talk about Genasi in 5th edition or their Pathfinder equivalents. All elementals have types of genies that they associate with. The Djinn, the Dao, the Afriti, and the Marids, for example. Sometimes those genies fall in love with, or they just want to get together to slither in the Hufflepuff with a different race or ancestry, and X months later you potentially get a Genasi. Genasi are other species which contain some past relative that carry elemental power in their blood.

They have some resemblance associated with that elemental power. Their hair and skin may have a color associated with it, like red for fire, blue for water, brown or green for earth, and so forth. They tend to have a higher constitution than average in 5th edition, and they gain other ability bonuses and powers based on the element their predecessor could manifest. Pathfinder, by the way, have Sylphs, Oriads, Undines, and Ifrits. Similar to the 5th edition Genasi, they have powers and capabilities that derive from their planar ancestor. Some aspects of their appearance may derive from that heritage as well, similar to 5e. But there are more potential creatures that may be allied with or related to elementals

than the ones born from doing the nasty and the pasty. Air elementals, for example, may associate with Arakokra. These winged creatures have an ancient bond that allows certain members of their society to summon an air elemental for a time, although the elementals don't engage in combat on behalf of the summoner. Sylphs have a sympathetic relationship with air elementals. Traditional inhabitants from their home planes, such as aerial servants, invisible stalkers, and wind walkers, develop a kinship or at least a tolerance of air elementals. Many creatures that fly, such as dragons or rocks,

will develop kinship with particular elementals. By the way, that's rocks as in R-O-C-S, you know, the big-ass birds, not R-O-C-K-S, the things that you can load into slings and fire. Although if we did have flying R-O-C-K-Ss, it probably wouldn't be long before we'd be right back to screaming earth element. Adventurers, we need your help! Man-shaped chunks of rock are dive-bombing our town, screaming the entire time, and they're a huge detriment to our tourism dollars. The wizard smartly says, What are the rock men made of?

Maybe they're nice. Meanwhile, the bard asks the important question, Are they fuckable? Earth elementals, they associate with peck, stone giants, and other creatures made of earth like sandlings. One thing that I think would be interesting, though, would be dwarves. If dwarves in your world are skilled tunnelers and diggers,

then they very well may develop a working relationship with earth elementals to scout the ground ahead. Maybe even share any rich minerals or gems with the elementals in exchange for their services. And oh, by the way, can you imagine dwarves making it to the elemental plane of Earth? They can dig any direction as far as they want for as long as they want. Sure, there's occasional bouts of seismic activity on the plane, but that just means more digging, right? Jumping over to fire elementals and speeding things up a bit, fire elementals can associate with fire salamanders, fire giants, hellhounds, and pyrohydrous because they all feel comfortable around the elementals. Humanoids visiting the elemental plane of fire, they can survive in a location called the City of Brass.

It's uncomfortably hot, but survivable in the elemental plane of fire, and a lot of fire elemental and fire elemental kin trade with mortals there. Fire Elemental and Fire Elemental can trade with mortals there. Water Elementals, by the way, they love fish from the smallest minnow all the way up to enormous sea creatures the size of a damn city block. Mephits, Aboleths, Sea Hags, and Sahagin have been known to associate with Elementals and vice versa. To muddy the waters a little bit, there are areas where the Elemental planes touch each other and the roiling power intermingles, creating hybrid elementals that are a mix of the primary forces. Mud elementals, for example, are a mix of earth and water. Dust elementals, earth and air. Ice elementals,

water and air. And you have magma elementals, steam elementals, smoke elementals. And then finally, when it comes to hybrid elementals, there are Philip Bailey, Verdine White, and Ralph Johnson who are made up of earth, wind, and fire. If you get that joke, by the way, this is your reminder to take your daily fiber. In some lore, these hybrid elementals are meaner and more prone to attack than the others, except for the hybrid elemental named Philip Bailey. When you combine him with Phil Collins, he's an easy lover. And if you get that joke, it's probably time to take Advil for your bad back. Sometimes these creatures are created due to summoning errors. I mean, in those cases, yeah, I'd be pissed too.

My body is suddenly half fire when I was made up entirely of air before now, and I'm mixed together, becomes some squishy little human wants to bring me here to guard his treasure collection. You can bet I'm killing that motherfucker as soon as I get it free of being summoned. But sometimes these hybrid elementals are just born from areas where the planes touch, and they don't have to be mean. It's your campaign world, so you can make them what you want. But I tend to run these naturally occurring hybrid elementals just like the primary four,

mostly doing their own thing until disturbed. Finally, there are other elemental creatures that you may run into. Lightning elementals, acid elementals, blood, obsidian, venom elementals. These are all rarer forms of elementals that add some gameplay mechanics to the traditional elemental build. They fight differently, have different powers that you can present a unique challenge to your players. And if those exist, why not others? Get creative. Bone elementals, light elementals, corrupted elementals made from the energies from the negative planes. Concrete elementals. Wait a minute, let's combine those two.

What if your campaign takes place on Earth thousands of years after the fall of man, and the power of whatever evil force took us out has leaked into the fallen cities and structures we left behind? So there are giant walking concrete and asphalt elementals that collect sand, aggregate, and tar to build more of their kind in their own image. That sounds fucking terrifying and fun as hell. Elementals are monsters made up of one of the four elements that made up the world. They will generally leave you alone unless you disturb them or prevent them from accomplishing whatever task has been put in front of them. Bring them out in your next game session, have them guard an area appropriate for them, crank up their size to be level appropriate, and hopefully you and your PCs will have fun doing it. Tune in next week when I will talk about critical hits and fumbles, the good, the bad, and the how the fuck did I stab myself to death by dropping my dagger.

Before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, The New Year. I've been thinking a lot about my New Year's resolution this year, and I think I'm going to go with 8K. 4K resolution just isn't enough detail anymore. This has been Episode 106, continuing the Monster Series, all about elementals. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.