Element Generator

With all the talking of elements I've been doing lately, I thought it would be interesting to make an element generator. Elements are by definition the primitives of the universe, but in the case of the alchemical elements often found in fantasy, they are also symbolic, which gives us a little more room for interpretation. I think it is necessarily the case that even with this generator, a lot of manual work will be required to make elements drawn from this table coherent. I was originally going to write up a full setting from a random drawing of four elements to really demonstrate what it might look like, but I've been too focused on my Maximum Recursion Depth setting and can't really think about it right now, but I'll write up four example elements just to give you all a sense of it.

The properties of the generator are color, state, and two additional qualities.

Color is fairly straightforward, although I intentionally throw some weirder ones in there. It can be the case that color is a literal property of the element, or it's more so a cultural association. Additionally, while I do distinguish between blue and cyan for reasons, generally a color can encompass a broad range (green can be forest green, neon green, etc.)

State includes not just solid, liquid, and gas, but also plasma, freezing (between liquid and solid), vaporizing (between liquid or solid and gas), and ionizing (between gas and plasma). These are not intended to be taken too literally or scientifically, but I have this feeling which I can't quite articulate that state provides some unique point of reference for elements. I realize that, with the traditional elements, ice is often sub-set into water and I think it's fine to give yourself a similar amount of leeway with these elements. Still, I think water as liquid has a certain symbolic resonance ("go with the flow"; water flowing around a large stone, a river carving a canyon).

The additional qualities are a mix of mostly visual and tactile features to give the element a little more flavor. I decided to go with two per element to create a bit more variety and potentially interesting combinations, and just to be more descriptive. It can produce results with duplicated qualities; you can either ignore the duplicate, or treat it as an exaggerated version of that quality.

I had considered also adding some more symbolic or metaphysical tables as well, but ultimately I decided that I preferred to allow the symbolic and metaphysical aspects of the elements to be an emergent property of the rest of the elements and how they fit together within the setting, rather than trying to pre-define them, although I think that could be interesting as well in a different way.

Given this generator, the traditional alchemical elements might be represented as such:

Water
Color: Blue (or colorless?)
State: Liquid
Additional Quality 1: Semi-translucent
Additional Quality 2: Silken

Fire
Color: Red
State: Plasma
Additional Quality 1: Incandescent
Additional Quality 2: Animate (flickering fire) (or marbled, or splash of yellow or orange?)

Air
Color: Colorless (or cyan, maybe yellow for lightning?)
State: Gas
Additional Quality 1: Iridescent (rainbows, other light reflections)
Additional Quality 2: Animate (winds, lightning) (or semi-translucent if given a color?)

Earth
Color: Brown (or green?)
State: Solid
Additional Quality 1: Gritty (dirt, sand)
Additional Quality 2: Fibrous (representing plantlife / nature) or Metallic (representing metals and minerals)


As you can see it requires a bit of a stretch of the logic to get the traditional elements from this table and they can potentially be represented in multiple ways, but I see all of this as a feature not a bug ;).

I might be tempted to curate my elements if I really want to build a whole setting out of them and not go full-random, but if you're less hung-up on elements than I am, or just want some weird material for a one-off instance, this generator should be good.

I haven't done javascript stuff in a while so this will almost certainly be broken at first but we'll see...

Generators produced using Meandering Banter's Automatic List to HTML Translator Version 3

Sample Elements

Element 1: Song-glass

Color: Electromagnetic (Radiowave)

State: Freezing

Additional Quality 1: Two-dimensional

Additional Quality 2: Splash of White

Minute particles in the air which condense like a sheet of frost over objects on cool mornings and winters. The song-glass is nearly invisible except for a slight cloudy sheen. It cracks easily to the touch, producing a fuzzy, static-y noise. Ancient shamans and philosophers learned how to decypher these noises into information, which gave the species valuable knowledge about the world and how to survive in it. They later learned to encode messages into song-glass, build devices to speak the messages or project the images of song-glass, and eventually even to transmit vaporized song-glass ethereally over vast distances.

Element 2: Popstone

Color: Cyan

State: Ionizing

Additional Quality 1: Matte

Additional Quality 2: Gritty

A dull, gritty, cyan-colored sand, believed to be condensed air. When rapidly shook, popstones crackle and pop like thunder and lightning. The thunderstorms of popstone deserts shine so brightly they twinkle like stars. The weaponization of popstone quickly led to the species' dominance of the world, and later they also learned to harness the power of popstone as a source of energy and means of locomotion. 

Element 3: Godrend

Color: Indigo

State: Melting

Additional Quality 1: Animate

Additional Quality 2: Marbled

Marbled like fatty meat, bleeds like a wet sponge to the touch. Not quite animal or fungus, neither organic nor inorganic. Believed to be the rendering fat of the gods. It absorbs properties of the things it touches, like DNA and also things beyond the measurements of modern science, and provides sustenance when absorbed through the skin or consumed. Godrend swamps burble and jiggle and dance, especially on nights with starry skies. Outside apocrypha, the species are the only ones capable of deriving sustenance through godrend; it is what separates the species from animals.

Element 4: Shadowbrine

Color: Black

State: Liquid

Additional Quality 1: Silken

Additional Quality 2: Phosphorescent

Light which is absorbed but is not transformed into heat, and is instead gated behind a one-way liquid medium to suffocate, ferment, and die. Like liquid eclipse, one can sense the energy of light by its absence, its shadow. Shadowbrine is found in caves and other dark places, and most abundantly in the hard to reach depths of the oceans. Shadowbrine brewers mold their processed concoctions, and as the sun rises and as the sun sets, the object which would block the light to create the shadow rises in its proper place. This is how the species' cities were first formed and mostly how they are formed still.