Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 153 - Planar Series - Elemental Planes

Episode Date: December 4, 2022

The 4 elements of creation in Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder lore are so powerful that each has its own plane of existence.  What's on these planes and what dangers will characters face when they go there?  Tune in to this episode when I discuss this and give you some adventure ideas for each plane!   #DungeonsandDragons #DnD #Pathfinder #Elemental #Planes    Resources: Resigned:  How to Know When It’s Time to Go: https://www.amazon.com/Resigned-Know-Truths-Stigma-Quitting-ebook/dp/B0BLP2LCQJ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1AO4TAC6LM4AO&keywords=resigned 5e elemental planes:  https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Elemental_planes Pathfinder elemental planes:  https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Elemental_Plane Dungeons & dragons discontinuing the use of the word race for the word species: https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1393-moving-on-from-race-in-one-d-d  

This week on the Taking 20 Podcast. These planes are part of inner planes, meaning they are close to the prime material plane. And on these elemental planes, one element reigns supreme. To quote the manual of the planes from the 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons, the plane of fire is like stepping into the flaming maw of an ancient red dragon. Thank you for listening to the Taking 20 podcast, episode 153. This week, resuming the planer series and giving you some quick tips about the elemental planes of D&D and Pathfinder. Before I get started, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Hot Dogs. My wife made hot dogs a lot when we were dating and I got burned out on them. After we got married, we had to have a frank conversation.

I once again want to thank this week's real sponsor, the book Resigned, How to Know When It's Time to Go. This book is about taking responsibility for your career and getting out of a bad work situation. There is a right and wrong way to handle resigning from a job. This book will guide you to quit your job with class and keep your dignity and sanity intact. Resigned, How to Know When It's Time to Go is available on Amazon.com. It'd make a great holiday gift for anyone considering a career change, and really, aren't we all? Do you have some feedback for me? Want to tell me how I'm doing? Offer some

suggestions for improvement? Maybe some topic ideas for future episodes? Do you want to call me a hooligan and tell me my butt stinks? Send that to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com or send me a DM on Insta or Facebook. Before I get started with the episode, Wizards of the Coast made an announcement this week that they have decided to no longer use the term race to refer to the ancestry of your birth. In the announcement, they stated, quote, we have made the decision to move on from using the term race everywhere in 1D&D, and we do not intend to return to that term. The term species was chosen in close coordination with multiple outside cultural consultants. In the survey for this Unearthed Arcana playtest, which goes live on December 21st,

players will be able to give feedback on the term species, along with everything else present in the playtest materials. Honestly, the word race has a number of negative connotations associated with it in this world, and moving on to another term is probably a positive for the gaming community. We want to be inclusive of everyone at our gaming tables, and I'm glad that Wizards of the Coast and Paizo both have made positive strides to remove some problematic terms from their game systems. Pathfinder 2e, for example, deprecated the term race for the term ancestry a while back, and both game systems have worked to uncouple physical and mental ability score bonuses and penalties based specifically on the accident

of your character's birth. Will it take some getting used to for us old fogies? Yeah, probably. But I like the change. I just ask that all of you give it a try as you're playtesting 1D&D, now with the Cleric class and the Goliath species. Give it a download today. Now, on to the episode. Back in episode 106, I talked about elementals in general and briefly discussed the lethality of their home planes. I asked if anyone was interested in an episode about those planes, and I received a few messages saying yes please, so here we are, about a year later, but I eventually got to it. Sorry for the delay.

Also, I had a choice to make. I could A, devote four whole weeks and episodes to the elemental planes, only cover one in each episode and tell you to extrapolate out, or B, what I actually did, briefly cover the four planes and give you some ideas for research and adventures on those planes. So with that caveat, let's get started. The elemental planes are fascinating to research and they are a lot more involved than you might think. As you can imagine they are the home planes of the vast majority of elementals that you can find but not all

of them. Sometimes elementals earth air fire and water can spawn into being on the material plane but ever having come from visited or maybe even know about their home plane of existence. In Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Starfinder, and many other gaming systems, there are what we call elemental planes of water, earth, fire, and air. These planes were first detailed in the D&D first edition Manual of the Planes, released in 1987. These planes are part of inner planes, meaning they are close to the prime material plane, and on these elemental planes, one element reigns supreme. The plane of water is an ocean without

surface and without bottom. It's water as far up as you want to go, as far down as you want to go, and infinitely in every direction. There may be bubbles of air and the occasional piece of solid ground, but those are very much the exception. The plane of air is an endless sky with clouds and occasional motes of earth, water, or fire. The plane of earth is a never-ending dirt, stone, and ground with pockets of air to be found occasionally. And then finally, to quote the manual of the planes from the 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons, the plane of fire is like stepping into the flaming maw of an ancient red dragon. All four sound like an absolute cakewalk. Oh my gosh.

Falling until you starve to death, being entombed in a never-ending earth, swimming until you pass out and drown, or you know, burning to death. Sounds like a great weekend. I can see why characters all want to go there. Now, an important note for my creative DMs out there. The Elemental Planes are home to an extremely wide variety of creatures, many of whom are similar to what can be found on other planes, like the Prime Material Plane, but they have the appropriate subtype for that plane of existence. Do you want there to be Krakens that swim in the rivers and lakes and lava on the plane of fire? Okay. Start with a Kraken, stat it up with fire immunity,

maybe give it a fire subtype, a magma jet, some other fire-related abilities. Same with a watery hellhound that breathes superheated steam or a formian that makes its nests on clouds on the plane of air. Give it a fly speed, throw that at your players. This advice is doubly true if your gaming group has some veteran players who think they've seen it all and done it all. What do you mean tentacles come out of lava dripping liquid death on the obsidian bridge? What the heck is that thing?

But let's deep dive on the individual plane starting what obviously sounds deadly, the plane of fire. If you don't have the proper protection from overwhelming heat, If you don't have the proper protection from overwhelming heat, then stepping almost anywhere on the plane of fire results in an extremely painful and mercifully swift death. Now that the bad news of almost immediate immolation is out of the way, let's talk about the good news. The plane of fire has normal gravity, rock to stand on, and atmosphere to breathe. Of course, that atmosphere is extremely thin, and flying creatures that aren't native to the plane have a hard time maintaining speed and maneuverability in the sparse air. Oh, by the way, the air is hot enough to cook you from the inside out. Oh, and there are thunderstorms that roll through the plane, dropping hot ash and soot from a perpetually burning sky.

But that's okay. At least your corpse will be smoldering on solid ground. Of course, when I say solid ground, bear in mind that the ground is basically either extremely dense rock baked beyond belief to be as hard as obsidian, or areas where fire is so dense that it feels like loosely packed hot coals with slightly more solid feel. like loosely packed hot coals with slightly more solid feel. Everything solid on the ground moves like it rests on a core of magma. Very few reliable visible navigational points exist because hills, plains, and even mountains slowly move over time. Permanent structures are extremely rare.

One of those permanent structures is the most inhabited place on the plain. The City of Brass is a major city and trade hub that's a monument of a freedy culture. It's home to 4 million souls, around 800,000 of which are slaves. The city itself is uncomfortably hot, but not lethally so like the rest of the plain is. This thermal protection provided by the city is sufficient to allow most mortals the ability to walk around without temperature and breathing protections that would be needed elsewhere. Around the city of Brass are relatively stable areas called the obsidian fields. There, specific hardy crops can be grown and slaves can mine for precious ores in gems. It's said that nearly anything can be bought and sold in

the markets of the city of brass, and that includes slaves and servants of widely varying ancestry. All slaves are made to wear an easily identifiable bracelet which lists their owner on it. Slaves serve for a specified time, depending on the crimes they committed, debts they owe, or the whim of their cruel master or mistress. Slaves who commit further offenses against the city, or other Afridi, or even their owner, can have their service extended by weeks, months, or even years. Slaves, though, are not the only thing the city of Brass is famous for. It has metal workers in the district called Paraculum that are fire giants and extremely skilled craftsmen.

There are also Aesir fire dwarves crafting arms and armor for either their owner or the Sultan of the city. Speaking of which, the Grand Sultan of the City of Brass is a powerful Ifriti who lives in the Charcoal Palace in the Furnace District of the city. palace in the Furnace District of the city. He rules the town with an iron fist, and while he mostly stays out of sight, he is known to get involved in noble disputes or serious threats to the city. I do find it interesting that both Pathfinder and 5th edition D&D have legends about the City of Brass. It's one of those rare pieces of lore that exists in both game systems. Examples of creatures that are native to the plane of fire include fire elementals, of course, Mephits, Aesir, Red Dragons, Efridi, and any other creature with the fire subtype,

fire salamanders, inferno spiders, and so much more. Dangers of the plane cannot be overstated, but those that can protect themselves in such a way as to survive, the plane of fire has been described as incredibly beautiful. Flames burn every color you can think of, from the vermilion of a forge hearth to the yellow-white of heated iron, from the blues and greens of alchemical reactions to the familiar candle flame yellows and oranges.

Flames form fountains, jets, sheets, rivers, waves, walls, rains, cascading, clouds, swirling, and pits of brilliant incandescence on a scale found nowhere else. Plus, if you need to cook a turkey, just set it outside for a few minutes and voila, it's charcoal on the outside and raw in the middle. Some adventure ideas for the plane of fire that tend to revolve around the city of Brass, well, they usually have to. The city of Brass is a dangerous town, full of slave traders, Ifriti, transformed red dragons, and gods know what else. What if the PCs have to come to the city of Brass to reclaim someone important to an NPC who's currently being sold as a slave? Maybe a djinn contracts with the

PCs to travel to the Plane of Fire to slay a rival Ifriti. Or it could be that the PCs get caught up in a good old bar fight that breaks out between an Ifriti and a fire giant and spills out into the street. Do the PCs join in and risk getting charged with a crime? Or they steer well clear of it. Let's go to the Plane fire's opposition plane, the plane of water. From the manual of the planes, the plane of water is an ocean without surface or bottom. It's a domain of current and wave. Imagine water as far as you can see in any direction that you can see. Now, interestingly, there's not a shallow and deep section of the plane of water. Similarly, there's not any shores of any note.

The Plain of Water is absolutely teeming with aquatic life, from marids and nereids to tritons and sahagin. Almost every species of salt and freshwater marine life can be found there. In its blue depths are aboleths, brine and black and bronze dragons, mephits, sea hags, and the list goes on and on. There are humanoid species who make their home there as well. Aquatic elves, humans, Kuo-Toans, lizardfolk, locothaw, mercanes, sahagin, all trade with the Tao and extraplanar creatures that may visit. But where do these humanoids live? One possibility is that there are chunks of coral the size of, well, up to continents

that can serve as respite and protection from other predators of the plane. The Marids are said to have a city called the Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls. It is rich with strings of spherical lights, glistening fish, waving kelp, and a brilliant shell-like architecture, forming the beautiful city ruled by the great Padisha, a married who delights in spectacle. Though on the surface she seems quite childlike and excitable, many have noticed that she has quite keen eyes and her political scheming rivals some devils. The Plain of Fire had the City of Br brass as a trade hub. Similarly, the plane of water has the city of glass. The city of glass is a massive city that contains air bubbles and can facilitate trade between water-breathing and air-breathing creatures.

Plants, kelp, seaweed, plankton float in the endless ocean, providing food for some of the herbivores that call the plane home, and the herbivores provide sustenance for the carnivores that do the same. I know it's dangerous to do this, but on Earth, most of the time creatures can't grow past the size of food that they can hunt and quantities of prey their ecosystem can support. Well, the plane of water is infinite in size. Its aqueous depths are water elementals, whales, krakken, squid, and even anglerfish the size of, fuck, however big you want them to be. Big as a house? A city? A mountain? A continent? Sure, yep, yep, make it happen. Imagine sharks the size of, I don't know, a double-decker bus,

with remora swimming in their rake the size of a small car. That's the kinds of creatures that you can find on the plane of water. For adventure ideas for the plane of water, let's get one piece of advice out of the way first. Before you let your adventurers go to the plane of water, you might want to bone up on the swimming rules, holding your breath rules, and 3D combat rules before you go. For more about those concepts, by the way, see episode 84 where I talk about them briefly. For more about those concepts, by the way, see episode 84 where I talk about them briefly. Adventures. Say there's a temple to a water god that has an artifact the characters need to retrieve. Or maybe it's rumored there's a chunk of rock tumbling through the watery plain that's lined with diamonds as big as your fist and clears the water. You'll be incredibly wealthy if you can

either sneak past or kill the kraken that lives there. Or just north of the Bay of Broken Dreams lies the Wandering Whirlpool, moving this way and that throughout the oceans of the planet. People who get sucked in, ships get sucked in, creatures who get sucked in, rarely ever return. The PC ship ventures too close, and they're deposited on the plane of water and they have to find a way home. Okay, so let's dry off a little bit and head to the elemental plane of air. You know that sinking feeling you get when you fall? Your stomach shoots up to your throat and you get kind of that panicky feeling? Imagine feeling that until you starve to death. Still

falling. Still falling. And falling. And falling. Welcome to the plane of air! Home to djinn and mephits and cloud giants and flying creatures like Jan and incorporeal creatures like Spectres. The plane of air consists of, surprise, practically infinite amounts of pure breathable air with pockets of what planar denizens call impurities. Water, gases, solid ground, and so forth. There are clouds of every type that you could ever imagine. Fog, steam, mist, smoke, poisonous clouds, acidic vapors, and also the rare intrusion of an elemental fire,

which is flame burning basically without a fuel. Liquid impurities were usually water or water-based and tend to form floating spheres when not buffeted or frozen by the winds on the plane. Solid matter can be found here from dust, ash, salt, and sand to occasional chunks of earth approaching the size maybe of a large asteroid. These larger chunks, by the way, probably are inhabited because they were probably brought to the plane by an intelligent being. In a word, the entire plane of air can be described as beautiful blue sky of a sunny summer's day. Winds whip through the plane, sometimes as mild gusts, but other times as strong gusts of wind and sometimes even forming thunderstorms and tornadoes

with rain, lightning, and sleet, snow, and hail. Any type of weather you could imagine forming in the air. These storms are relatively common compared to the Prime Material plane and are a constant danger to their ferocity and erratic movement. The plane has subjective gravity, which is extremely confusing to players who have never experienced it and characters, obviously, who have never experienced it. It's also confusing to DMs who have never experienced it. You know what? Fuck it. It's just confusing, okay? Every sentient creature is pulled by gravity

in the direction the individual chooses. What? What it means is that every sentient creature can pick at what direction it wants to be down, and it will fall that direction unless they encounter a solid object. In theory, four adventurers plane-shifting here simultaneously could start falling, quote-unquote, in four different directions. Think of it this way. If you and I were in a hallway with subjective gravity, I could be walking on the wall while you're walking on the ceiling, and our buddy walks on the floor because he has no imagination and evidently doesn't like fun.

The neat thing is that all of us could walk normally since we have solid material under our feet and can choose down to be that direction. With the right training and a strong enough will or wisdom save, I tend to let characters learn to fly with a good enough roll. It takes time to learn, but on the plane of air, it's rare to hit anything, so time is one thing you have in abundance. The Djinn maintain a major city on the Infinite Plane called the Citadel of Ice and Steel, which is a gigantic chunk of elemental ice and earth windswept into a nearly perfect oval. The great city is in constant freefall based solely on the whim of the djinn who

controls it, the great caliph. The plane of air is beautiful and deadly, so what kind of adventures can you have there? The party is whisked onto the elemental plane of air and would eventually die, but for some reason, a powerful djinn lord has taken a shine to them and asks the party to entertain at his court. A flying magic item like a carpet transports the party there and desperately needs to be returned home, but it can only point with its tassels where it wants to go. Where is home and who's the rightful owner? Those two questions could spawn an entire campaign. Legends in your hometown tell of a castle that appears and disappears seemingly randomly in the mist and fog of Lileson Swamp.

The characters quest to find it, and they do, only to be whisked away to the plane of air on a cloud when it disappears. The party has to find out A. how to control the castle, B. defeat the current occupants, and C. find their way home. Alright, let's get our feet underneath this and talk about the plane of Earth, the last one we'll cover in this episode. Poetically, the plane is described as a place of hidden riches, but a grave for the greedy. The elemental plane of Earth is an infinite expanse of solid matter, with pockets of air and water interspersed throughout. These relatively small areas, compared to the size of the plane itself,

could become trading outposts, wizard fortresses, interspersed throughout. These relatively small areas, compared to the size of the plane itself, could become trading outposts, wizard fortresses, and even cities for air and water-breathing creatures. One issue could be that the air and water gradually lose oxygen, and unlucky travelers may emerge from the unforgiving rock only to choke on their own carbon dioxide. Not all open areas are like this, however, and there are areas where the air can refresh itself thanks to magical means or by being adjacent to the plane of the air or by DM fiat. You might be thinking that the plane consists of solid, immovable stone, but you'd be wrong. The plane consists of earthen material of every type you can think of. Dirt, mud, rock, slate, type you can think of. Dirt, mud, rock, slate, granite, talc, marble, gemstones, sand, and countless other types. But the plane also has fault lines and slowly shifts over time as parts of the plane

grind against each other. Occasionally, these faults will strike or slip and cause large earthquakes in a radius on the plane until the plates gradually resume their slow shift against each other. The plane is absolute pitch non-magical darkness, and light can only be found in occasional areas where there are glowing gemstones or maybe bioluminescent flora. Unless travelers have a way to see into solid material like x-ray vision, they are effectively blind while moving through the earth of the plane. Now, the plane does have some notable locations in 5th edition lore. The Iron Crucible was a fountain of liquid metal thanks to its proximity to the plane of fire.

An extension tube from the Iron Crucible actually leads to the City of Brass that we talked about earlier. The Sevenfold Maze work is the center of a major DAO activity on the plane. We haven't even talked about the DAO on the podcast before. They're variant genies from the plane of Earth who are evil enslaving monsters. Interestingly, they tended to return kindness for kindness even though they're evil, but they are ferocious industrial diggers and use their slaves to mine gems and carve out areas of the plane for their growing society. In 5th edition, the plane does have a ton of earth elementals, dao, mephits, zorn, and various tunneling creatures like massive worms. There's also a thriving dwarven population,

if you can find them on the Infinite Plane. In Pathfinder, it's home to the earth genies, called dao in 5th edition. They are merchants and traders. Also on the plane, there are crystal dragons, oreads, and hollow spaces where prime material plane dwellers like humans and elves can live. So what sort of adventures can you find on the plane? Maybe you find a gnome with some sort of contraption, and what's to test it in an area where the ground has no end? She hires the PCs to guard her while she tests and tinkers to improve the design. There's always the rescue plot where an ally has been enslaved by the Dao, so the party has to mount a rescue mission to a Dao slave camp. If the character's

like building, you could have an entire adventure where the party finds a partially buried structure that used to be a, I don't know, temple? Castle? Lost city of something? Or maybe the party receives stories that merchants, royalty, and nobles are going insane. After doing some research, they tie it to gems that were traded from the Tao. Was this accidental? Like maybe the Tao didn't know that these gems they were trading had these negative properties? Or is it part of a bigger Tao scheme to take powerful prisoners for ransom? It's easy to take the elemental planes for granted, but something to remember is that these are the four elements of creation in both Forgotten Realms and on Galarian. There are a ton of adventures that you could design for the planes, and you

can certainly homebrew a reason for the party to go there, but make sure your players know how damn dangerous it is on these planes for their characters. If it the party to go there, but make sure your players know how damn dangerous it is on these planes for their characters. If it makes sense to the story, give them time to prepare, or if there isn't time, find a way behind the screen to keep the characters alive until they can get their bearings and location for their next adventure. Treat these planes as completely foreign versions of what they could find closer to home, I'll bet you and your players would have fun doing it. Do you have ideas for a topic or questions you'd like to ask? Because I would love to hear them.

Send them to me via direct message on Insta, Facebook, or Twitter, or email them to feedback at taking20podcast.com, and your answer may be delivered in podcast episode form with a horrible pun at the beginning. Tune in next week, by the way, when we're going back-to-back series episodes, this time resuming the Monster Series covering big ol' lumbering giants, from hill to fire to cloud to stone. Once again, I want to thank this week's real honest-to-goodness sponsor,

The Book Resigned, how to know when it's time to go. The book addresses the lies, truths, and stigma of quitting your job and helps those who are thinking about changing jobs navigate the journey. Pick it up on Amazon.com as a gift for someone that you love. Also, before I go, I want to thank this week's other sponsor, Hot Dogs. Almost all hot dogs look alike. That's probably because they're all in bread. This has been episode 153,

all about Elemental Planes. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube media production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.