Mythic Beings of the Weird Elements (Pt.1)

I've always been inspired by the Saint Beasts found in East and South East Asian mythologies. Not the vapid, meaningless, predictable elementals often found in traditional fantasy, but primal mythic beings, with both intentionality and idiosyncratic features.

These mythic beings correspond to the four generated elements found here, and maybe I'll do another post for the other four here.

Was going to add some specific adventure hooks or flesh these out further... but then I didn't, but hopefully the adventure hooks are at least implied.

I was also going to give them names, but at this time haven't found a naming convention that feels right.

Song-glass Elemental

Domain: Information, Communication, Music, Patterns

Like a chicken if it kept its down and other adolescent features into adulthood. Mostly invisible except for a puff of down, or when dancing to the sounds of song-glass which it nips from its coat and munches on for fun. A deceptively wise and powerful being whose wisdom must be inferred slowly and patiently by those who care for it.

Popstone Elemental

Domain: Energy, Movement, Transience, Cacophony

A fitfully lucid-dreaming cocooned antlion-dragon, its minute myoclonic jerks setting off chain reactions of popstone explosions. Irritable and impatient, prone to fits of rage, yet full of wisdom and good intent. It will grant wishes to those who remove disturbances interrupting its sleep, or even frivolously to those creating disturbances if it will make them go away. While the latter approach may be easier, tread lightly.

Godrend Elemental

Domain: Sustenance, Cuisine, Social Clubs, Wellness

A shriveled bullfrog melting unxiously in an indigo stew of its own fat, from which it is inseparable. It communicates through the consumption of its stew or the absorption of its fat through skin. Wealthy beyond measure and endlessly giving to those who enter its exclusive grace, demanding in return only the illusion of mutual respect and friendship in the face of its graceless self-centeredness. Nonetheless, it means well, in its own way.

Shadowbrine Elemental

Domain: The Unknown, Engineering, Science, Creative Inspiration

Slick and silky bits of marine snow, glowing pickled pieces of fish, eel, whale, and cephalopod, in an inky swirl of shadowbrine. Left alone, it creates powerful constructs like cosmic dams, destructively and without purpose, or beautiful useless things always just beyond the ken of mortal understanding. Under careful supervision it can produce benevolent wonders, but it is demanding and difficult in its communications.

A World of Many Elements (More Generated Elements)

Four more elements from the Elements Generator. Intentionally avoiding redundancies with the elements in the first post, otherwise fully randomized. I wrote these and the previous four as if they were all part of the same micro-setting, but they don't depend on each other or the setting.

Element 5: Memoria

Color: Green

State: Vaporizing

Additional Quality 1: Iridescent

Additional Quality 2: Fibrous

An elusive pattern in a pea soup fog, reflecting yesterday's light. Thick enough to be cut with a machete, but beware, snapped fibers don't repair easily. The source of the oracles' visions and the wisdom of elders; the species now believes it to be a dilation of cultural consciousness as it evolves; a magnified moment of complexity between an enthalpic and entropic state of awareness. The first generalized artificial intelligence was trained on a data stream of memoria.

Element 6: Liminalium

Color: Rainbow

State: Gas

Additional Quality 1: Incandescent

Additional Quality 2: Semi-translucent

A common origin myth of the species is that all of space and time has always existed all at once, undifferentiated, until the world sneezed into existence. Globular gaseous particles permeate, hot waves slicing reality into holographic categories of Truth. All things have a spectral signature under liminalium, and many unfortunate deeds have been committed upon those based on their visible liminalium signature. Scientists now know that what liminalium reflects visibly only loosely correlates with the spectroscopy. Nonetheless, it was crucial for the development of the natural sciences, and continues to be a source of scientific and philosophical inquiry today.

Element 7: Heartstar

Color: Magenta

State: Plasma

Additional Quality 1: Metallic

Additional Quality 2: Splash of Pale

A silky, oily magma of a metal never seen in solid state, brilliant, yet marred with pale flecks. Painfully hot to the touch, yet provocative like a blister, or a sexual taboo. The oldest novel of the species and the majority since have been tales of romance and conquest, inspired by or in pursuit of heartstar. The most popular commercial formulation today is sold under the brand name Mineral Love.

Element 8: Paradoxicon

Color: Electromagnetic (X-Ray)

State: Solid

Additional Quality 1: Gelatinous

Additional Quality 2: Splash of Teal

Vessels of impossible shapes like borromean rings and penrose triangles, no two exactly alike, barely visible except for a teal mesh, like an engineering schematic diagram. Something not quite life but life-like, like a macro-virus, a mystery of the universe even today. Each paradoxicon is like a complex puzzle, containing otherwise inconceivable wisdom. Those few in history who have cracked a paradoxicon are remembered as saints who went on to change the world with their well-earned wisdom. A common koan of the species is to ask: did civilization begin with the cracking of a paradoxicon, or with the solution that cracked it?

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.

Worlds with Missing Elements

I keep talking about elements and their significance to me (this post about the positive and negative plane, which further links to other posts where I discuss this as well). When it comes to elements, I generally prefer to create worlds of new elements, either entirely made-up like Impossible Light, Absolute Solid, Anti-Information, and Liquid Starfire, or of real things (or at least real fictional things) like Phlogisten, Yeast, Lymph, and Ectoplasm. However, I had the thought the night before drafting this post; what about a world with the typical alchemical elements (in this case I'm assuming Fire, Water, Earth, and Air), but where one of the elements is missing? How do the other elements adapt or develop? How do the organisms, the cultures, the gods, and monsters and magic?

There are a few key points to my thought process:

• I try to take an almost evolutionary approach to it, thinking about how the remaining elements or the world adapts to the lack of the element.
• I generally try to not conflate the science with elementalism. For instance, ice is just solid water, but in a world without earth, ice may be, in an elementalist sense, meaningfully distinct from water and take that role.
• That being said, I'm willing to break this soft rule if it would be more interesting to do so.

These are very brief. I've been struggling with putting my thoughts to words lately; I'm sitting on several new settings which I think are really cool but just haven't been able to write them up. There's something to be said for brevity though, so maybe it's ok if they are just brief little blurbs.

Ice Pillar Reborn

A World with no Earth

Large ocean. Pillars of ice the size of cities pulled up towards the sky, connected by bifrost bridges. Rays of focused light rain from the sky like beams of holy light, burning into the ever-rising pillars, sculpting the landscape, and inducing violent wave patterns into the ocean. This is a world of constant change and high concepts, of flight and mobility, a world that feels light and airy.

Red Moon. Couldn't find a good image with a red moon, steam or smoke vents, and red hot stones and glass, but I think this gets the vibe across of being fire-less and dark.

A World with no Fire

Harsh winds vibrate glass and stones to glowing red. The world is pocked with vents of steam and smoke from naturally-occurring coal and hydrothermal power. A softly glowing red moon provides barely any heat or illumination. On land, this is a harsh and tired world of survivors, of competitive energy-oases. It is a world of little change and little accrued knowledge, except what is necessary for survival. In the bubbling oceans, hot-water life thrives. Who knows what rests in the energy-rich deeps...

Lava Fields. No gelatinous air and cities on glass planes. 

A World with no Water

Magma oceans. Gelatinous humid air. Glass planes cut through swimmable air; a vertical landscape. This is a world of strict hierarchy, of unmoving objects, of tradition and propriety. Except for the sky pirates...

Slime Cavern

A world with no Air

Silent and still. Flat oceans. Pockets of city-sized sugary ooze containing zymological life. A low and persistent dusty fog. Geothermal vents glow from ocean pits, as do motionless volcanoes topped like molten glass.

Quath (Art by Scrap Princess)

After nearly two years, I've finally ordered another commissioned piece of art by Scrap Princess. This is Quath, one of the Four Ordinal Beasts, along with Mun Jira, Mogleth, and Zaphrad (yet to come) from my Phantasmos Campaign Setting (Big Picture, Themes, Key Concepts, Play Reports).

Eventually I'm going to do proper writeups for these mythic beings, or so I've been saying for two years now. I find it difficult to write for these, because her art is so incredible, and so many other writers have already written brilliant things accompanying her brilliant art, that every time I try to write for them, I get writers block. Also, in these last two years, I've much more so prioritized my career over my hobby of RPG writing, and while I have absolutely no regrets about that, I just don't have much regular practice or momentum with real prose writing right now. Probably the only semi-long prose I've written on the blog (not the brief descriptions in my Weird & Wonderful Tables) is A Crawl Through the Dungeon of Impossible Light, and even that is very clunky and cringe-y in certain parts and also not really a complete story, and also something I wrote quite a while ago.

But enough about me, below is Quath! If you want a description, check out the Four Ordinal Beasts link above, until the day when I write something actually worthy of accompanying the art. In addition to the description in that post and the general themes around anti-information and the elements of Phantasmos (as described in the varying hyperlinked posts above and additional posts hyperlinked within those), another visual influence was the concept of denisyuk holograms.

Concept: The Positive and Negative Planes

I had originally intended to accompany this post with a micro-setting I'm tentatively calling Shadow Mars and Crystal Mars, but I've been super busy with work lately and just haven't had the time or mental energy to give that a full writeup. I include at the bottom of this post a very brief blurb on Shadow Mars, not even including Crystal Mars, that I will hopefully expand upon in a future post. Some of the details may change in the process, there are a few things that don't quite feel right with the concept yet. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

The Positive and Negative Planes

As I've discussed before, I'm always fascinated by the idea of elements, the features of a universe at their most reduced (or nearly most- more on that later), see materials, phantasmos key concepts, weird & wonderful loot, tama-dama collectible egg battle game. There's nothing wrong with the traditional alchemical elements (Fire, Water, Earth, Air) or Taoist elements (Fire, Water, Metal, Wood, Ground), but these are rooted in our own world. Admittedly, it is hard to seriously conceive of a world with non-traditional elements since that would make it a fundamentally different, alien thing, but it is, to me, so much more provocative that way. A world of Impossible Light, Absolute Solid, Anti-Information, and Liquid Starfire; or Ectoplasm, Phlogiston, Yeast, and Lymph, has the kind of potential that only comes from that which is near-inconceivable.

For this reason, I've found the idea of the Positive and Negative planes in D&D / Planescape to be both intriguing and also disappointing. I should acknowledge that I have not read much of the source material directly and am going more off of descriptions I've seen elsewhere, so it's possible that it's much more interesting than I give it credit for. But at the end of the day, as best as I can tell, the D&D concept of Positive and Negative basically just maps to life and death, or all-ness vs. nothingness. As with the traditional elements, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, and I think it can be done in interesting ways (or subverted, such as with my Cancerverse), but it just seems too... obvious. Positive and Negative as absolutist elemental/planar concept should be like the sub-atoms of the universe, so life and death is fine, but what if it's something else?

But if Positive and Negative are not black and white; life and death, all and none, then what are they? I knew that I wanted to play with colors, to me that's an important part of elements. But being that Positive and Negative are like the sub-atoms of the elements themselves, they shouldn't necessarily map to colors per se, but to the origins of colors. While Positive could be mapped to white and color reflection, and Negative mapped to black and color absorption, it is more interesting to broaden it to Positive mapped to additive colors and Negative mapped to subtractive colors (color theory). 

However, then I started to think about a world of entropy (additive colors = starlight = thermodynamic entropy) and anti-entropy (I dunno, black holes, wormholes transferring energy across universes, something like that), which quickly devolved to something more or less akin to life and death or all and none anyway, albeit maybe a bit of a subversion like the Cancerverse, which isn't really what I wanted.

Then I tried thinking about physics. Non-fiction is always a good source of inspiration. I should say that I know very little about physics. But I was thinking about how, at least to my minimal understanding, Positive and Negative in physics don't really mean anything. Or rather, it's not so much that Positive and Negative reflect two different binary states like 0 and 1, but that they are opposites from the origin along a dimension, like -1 and 1, which are in an absolute sense the same thing ( abs(-1)==1 ).

So then I started thinking about how to combine the idea of additive and subtractive color with binary logic, and that led me to anaglyph 3D; those old-school red and cyan 3D glasses. In most cases, one lens is an additive color such as red or blue, and the other is a mixture of the two other additive colors to produce an opposing subtractive color, so cyan (subtractive or blue+green) against red (additive), or yellow (subtractive or red+green) against blue (additive). So these lenses act as opposing filters [1 0 0] in one eye, [0 1 1] in the other eye, the union of which is [1 1 1]. The vectors themselves aren't binary per se, they just map to Red Green Blue (or Magenta Yellow Cyan), but they are binary-valenced and the end visualization is a binary OR operation, or union. That's not actually totally correct for various reasons, but that's how it all came together in my head, in any case.

So we have Positive and Negative elements which are like the sub-atoms of the other elements, have an interesting pseudo-science schtick, and also a cool retro aesthetic, but they aren't inherently meaningful (by design). So what makes them interesting?

What makes them interesting is what can be revealed when one separates or combines their perception of the planes. You see, reality as we know it is merely the overlap between the Positive and Negative planes, but much is misaligned or left off the intersection entirely. Special "anaglyph" lenses may be used to correct the misalignments, or singularly positively or negatively filtered lenses may reveal that which is hidden from reality, overlapping in space but existing only in one plane or the other.

And what does it mean for the elements themselves to be separable by Positive or Negative where there is no intrinsic meaning such as life and death or all and none mapped to them? What does it mean for life and consciousness? For magic and science? The answers to these questions will depend on the elements themselves, but independent of anything else, isn't this just a fascinating question?

Shadow Mars and Crystal Mars

The dead planet Mars; the red marble. Or so it seems to those on Earth. In fact, Mars is just as vibrant with life (of a sort), merely out of phase with reality as we know it. It exists disproportionately in the cyan Negative Plane, and so what we see in reality is mostly its red Positive form, and not even all of it, at that. Although life exists on Mars on both planes, let us first discuss Shadow Mars.

Through a Positive-filtering lens, usually cyan-colored, one may see Mars as it exists on the Negative Plane: Shadow Mars. The red planet appears black, and its cyan occupants shimmer white against the cyan sky and black planet like an inversion of a starry night sky. Thin rivers of iridescent azure vein across the twinkling lights of cyan cities like connecting the dots of astrological formations, pulsing with schools of fish and nixies overwatched by the vampire lords.

A Very Incomplete Periodic Table of Elementals

This is something that Saker Tarsos and I started a long long long long long time ago and never got even close to finishing. The periodic table is big, a lot of the elements aren't that interesting, and also working on this was a good reminder that I know embarrassingly little about chemistry and therefore couldn't really leverage this to its greatest effect. Many of my entries are a mix of my poor understanding of the chemistry, real-world applications, any historical or mythological significance of the element, or random stuff that popped into my head. I haven't re-read these in probably at least a year so I'm sure they're full of mistakes. It is unlikely that I'll ever finish this, although I'm realizing we missed some good ones so maybe I'll come back to some of them. Any suggestions also appreciated. A lot of the entries are repetitive for reasons I've already kind of explained. Each entry starts with its symbol, name, period (I think that's what it's called...), and then the creator (ST is Saker, MC is me). Hopefully some of these are not terrible.

EDIT: Blogger is being obnoxious and making it inexplicably difficult to edit new entries in, but look to the comments for Nerdhogg's entries until I can figure out why this isn't working.


H Hydrogen Nonmetal ST They have witnessed the beginnings of the Universe, and the experience has left them terribly scarred. They meld with others to forget themselves, or flee to the upper atmosphere to get away from it all. They have an explosive temper when in large numbers. Those that remain in the troposphere will combine with Oxygen to become standard Aristotelian water elementals, or with Carbon to become Hydrocarbon Moleculars.

He Helium Noble Gas ST Self-reliant Helium elementals seek to rise above the troubled memories of their creation, for they were either smashed together from bits of Hydrogen in the forges of the gods, or spat out from angst-filled Uranium or Thorium elementals in their fits of self-harm. They are calm and collected, regarding themselves as being above asking other elementals for help. They have long memories and are thus wise and knowledgeable if questioned, but hard to locate.

Li Lithium Alkali Metal MC They are migratory beings, traveling along bolts of light between the positive and negative planes. The gods designed their routes as a circuit, which they channel to power their divine machines. It is thought that mortals were designed from those same circuits, which explains why some mortals find emotional balance and comfort in their presence.

Be Beryllium Alkaline Earth

Be Boron Metalloid

C Carbon Nonmetal

N Nitrogen Nonmetal

O Oxygen Nonmetal MC Ethereal and ubiquitous elementals of life and death. In their purest form they enrich and refresh those around them, but in less pure forms make the air heavy, crackling with ozone. In sufficient quantities they can produce powerful winds, suppress flames, or feed them. While they provide energy and strength, they also oxidize metals and carbons, draining and corrupting the host. Some cultures accept oxygen elementals as spirits, above good and evil, and embrace their gift and their curse, while others see them as parasites and vampires, and others still as weapons to be harnessed.

F Fluorine Nonmetal MC Pinkish-white creatures. Known as the celestial sword-and-shield, they can pierce the heavens, but they can also harden and form a protective barrier around objects. They are able to take a form like heavy water elementals, and naturally repel water.

Ne Neon Noble Gas MC Normally colorless, odorless, inert gaseous beings. They dislike interacting with other elementals or materials of any kind. Some will dance across the skies, but most traverse the cosmos, preferring the vacuum of space to atmospheres. When forcibly extracted from the air and caged in glass tubes and electric containers, they produce a bright reddish-orange laser light. Such neon lanterns are highly valued for ornamentation and are seen as a sign of wealth.

Na Sodium Alkali Metal

Mg Magnesium Alkaline Earth ST Born from tumult, they carry within themselves the slumbering rage of stars. They form themselves into wicker-wire forms of dull metal that burn with intense heat and light should they suffer insult.

Al Aluminum PT Metal

Si Silicon Metalloid

P Phosphorus Nonmetal

S Sulfur Nonmetal

Cl Chlorine Nonmetal

Ar Argon Noble Gas MC Gaseous, blue-green glowing creatures found mostly high in the sky. They do very little, but also keep very much from happening in their presence. It is nearly impossible to start a fire around them, and most magics are silenced. For this reason, their presence is often requested for diplomatic meetings or to maintain order at neutral grounds.

K Potassium Alkali Metal

Ca Calcium Alkaline Earth

Sc Scandium Trans Metal MC Sporty, silvery, yellowish-pink metallic elementals with auras like sunlight. They forms objects like baseball bats and lacrosse sticks from themselves. They're more interested in playing than fighting, but have no problem throwing down, especially if their favorite team is insulted.

Ti Titanium Trans Metal

V Vanadium Trans Metal

Cr Chromium Trans Metal

Mn Manganese Trans Metal

Fe Iron Trans Metal MC Large, bulging muscles, thick veins with perfect blood flow, the prototype of bodybuilding. Despite their unwieldy size and musculature, they are surprisingly flexible and adaptive, and are one of the more prosperous and abundant of the periodic elementals. They are seen as allegories of technological advancement and progress, both for good and ill.

Co Cobalt Trans Metal

Ni Nickel Trans Metal MC Silvery-white with a gold tint, and often covered in veins of greenish salts embedded in pores. They are hard and highly ferromagnetic. While valuable in their own right for their strength and magnetic properties, and as a measure of the value of a currency, they are known for their trickster behavior, misleading miners towards useless veins of fool's copper. As a result, they are often seen as an omen of bad luck, or gifted as an insult.

Cu Copper Trans Metal MC Sometimes they take humanoid form, usually feminine, but mostly they form as bundles of wires in relatively simple circuits. Although relatively soft, they are durable to environmental conditions and highly electroconductive, and are in fact the most abundant of the electroconductive periodic elementals. Blue blood courses through them, rich in oxygen and prized by deep aquatic life. While their skin is metallic and reddish-brown or pinkish-orange in color, they develop a greenish layer of rust when exposed to air. While many find this rust attractive and embrace it, others diligently scrub their skin. They are toxic to bacteria and fungi, and are therefore often sought after for the natural sanitation they provide.

Zn Zinc Trans Metal

Ga Gallium PT Metal MC Silvery-blue metallic elementals covered in blue and violet LED lights along circuit-lines. They have what appears to be a microwave in their solar plexus, which is actually a powerful ion beam cannon. They can sense infrared radiation on their skin. They have a low melting point and will seamlessly transition from liquid to solid and back based on the temperature in their environment or the temperature of those touching them. In addition to being superconductors, they can make other metallic periodic elementals weak and brittle by touch.

Ge Germanium Metalloid MC Nanofibrous beings invisible to the naked eye and infrared. They collect like string in a pocket, but the jumble is not random, it is a mathematically impossible circuit. The fibers weave throughout molecules, bending them into super-dimensional polymers. The weave bends light, magnifying and contorting sensory stimuli, interfacing with life and transmitting the signal directly into the brain. The circuit is like a superconducting transistor, amplifying the signals it collects from light and from the molecules in its weave, like an exponentially growing singularity.

As Arsenic Metalloid MC On some worlds they are the most fundamental elementals of life, treated like gods or demigods or progenitors. On our world, they are often seen as an harbinger of death. They come in three forms; the most common being gray and brittle and the most electroconductive, another form yellow, soft, and waxy and the most poisonous, and a third form black, glassy, and brittle and mostly inert. They are sometimes merged with lead elementals to strengthen them, but are most often employed as assassins, given their toxicity to many carbon-based lifeforms.

Se Selenium Nonmetal

Br Bromine Nonmetal

Kr Krypton Noble Gas MC Thick, flowing lines and beams of gaseous laser, mostly white but sometimes red or other colors. They are ethereal and can take on many forms as a gestalt of laser, although they often take a roughly humanoid form when dealing with humanoids. In addition to lumination, they can produce stunning flashes of light, which also serve as perfect photographic memories. Their gaseous form is heavy, and has a tranquilizing effect on oxygen-breathing lifeforms in their vicinity if i close proximity or tightly enclosed.

Rb Rubidium Alkali Metal

Sr Strontium Alkaline Earth MC Silvery-yellow metallic humanoids with a CRT monitor for a head, covering their entire face up to their mouth, which bares humanoid but inhumanly large, strong teeth. They are immune to X-ray radiation, and by lifting a glass visor over their face, can emit harmful X-rays. They can also project burning-hot crimson fireworks from their hands, and are phosphorescent in the dark. They were once bountiful and highly sought after for their ability to safely project messages streamed at electromagnetic and magical frequencies, but in recent years have been replaced by newer tools, and have significantly declined in number. They have a bit of a chip on their shoulder about this.

Y Yttrium Trans Metal MC They form in lung fluids as a silvery, crystalline cluster, like a cancer. They spread throughout the body, turning the host into a superconductor. The host's skin becomes phosphorescent. They emit light from their orifices like a cathode-ray tube. Nerve clusters light varying colors like a circuit of LEDs. Electrodes develop over the surface of their body. Outside the host, they cannot survive unless they merge with rare earth metal elementals, although there is no known method of testing whether a rare earth metal elemental is carrying the yttrium infection.

Zr Zirconium Trans Metal MC White-gold metallic elementals, resistant to heat and corrosion. By smashing their bodies they can create powerful flames from the particles, but they are otherwise better suited as workers or defenders in hot, radioactive, or corrosive environments.Each Zirconium elemental is born as a pair with a Hafnium elemental, but the Hafnium elemental is often absorbed into the Zirconium elemental shortly after birth/creation.

Nb Niobium Trans Metal MC Crystalline, normally gray creatures, although they can take on many colorful, iridescent forms. In addition to electromagnetic powers, they are also able to strengthen many other metallic elementals into steel alloys. Niobium elementals sexually reproduce. Their litters count in the dozens, but most are killed or consumed by other elementals long before reaching full maturity.

Mo Molybdenum Trans Metal

Tc Technetium Trans Metal

Ru Ruthenium Trans Metal

Rh Rhodium Trans Metal MC They appear like a sleek automobile, usually like a sports car, and are white-gold in color. They are highly resistant to corrosion, and their fumes are actually just recycled air that has had toxic or dangerous substances filtered out. For these reasons, they are often prized as mounts (although they are intelligent and will take umbridge with this description of their relationship with their driver), or called upon for assistance in toxic environments.

Pd Palladium Trans Metal MC They are a lustrous white-gold in color, and appear as a feminine humanoid. They are engineer-soldiers, masters of craft and warfare, their natural armor and weapons always at least one age advanced as compared to the rest of the setting, and always banded and studded like jewelery. They offer their knowledge to enlightened societies, but are keenly aware of the consequences of such knowledge. They teach the concept of discrete time, but acknowledge the anxiety it may induce. They provide medical and dental care as they fill the cavities caused by sugar refinement and clean the air polluted by their technologies. They are generally well-meaning, but cannot accept complacency, even if comfortable.

Ag Silver Trans Metal

Cd Cadmium Trans Metal

In Indium PT Metal

Sn Tin PT Metal MC Soft and silvery-white, with a liquid crystal display somewhere on their body, often as their face or on their chest, and studded with artistic punches outwards from their skin. They are able to shift between a metallic beta form, and a non-metallic, crystalline, gray alpha form. They are electroconductive, weaker than rare metals but useful for their ubiquity, and are resistant to water corrosion.

Sb Antimony Metalloid MC Silvery, crystalline elementals with striking, beautiful eyes accentuated by naturally-forming kohl. They are both invisible and immune to evil eyes. They are naturally brittle, but can harden lead elementals, particularly against fire and acids.

Te Tellurium Metalloid

In Iodine Nonmetal MC They are scouts and medics, able to perform a wide variety of chemical and spectral analyses on an environment and regulate endocrine systems in many lifeforms. They have a blackish-purple color, and vary in shape, but mostly humanoid or aquatic. They often have a briney, salty smell like the ocean. When set aflame, they glow a brilliant violet.

Xe Xenon Noble Gas MC Although technically an invisible gas, they emit bright and colorful lasers, and tend to be showy. They are like an EDM or disco DJ, producing shows of laser light, but also their lasers can alter the neurochemistry of their partygoers, giving them energy or sedating them.

Cs Cesium Alkali Metal

Ba Barium Alkaline Earth

La Lanthanum Lanthanoid MC They appear as komuso monks, but are more like ninja in disguise. Their heads are covered in a flammable mantle, covering their gas lighter heads. They are capable of producing powerful, focused arcs of flame, but are soft and vulnerable in a direct fight.

Ce Cerium Lanthanoid

Pr Praseodymium Lanthanoid

Nd Neodymium Lanthanoid MC They are naturally silvery metallic elementals, but are often found in a glassy form of pinkish or bluish color. In their metallic form they are powerful magnets, often constructing metal shells around themselves in the shape of microphones, automobiles, and computers. In their glass form they project infrared laser beams, and have mastered the art of transmitting information onto hard disks via lasers. Between their magnetic properties and laser-transmission properties, they have become prized librarians or mentats of powerful alchemages. Nonetheless, they are not only drivers of alchemagic, but also of nature magics. In their glass form they often take a shape reminiscent of roses or other flowers, and in fact have the ability to enrich soil and promote plant development.

Pm Promethium Lanthanoid MC Small, phosphorescent creatures. They are radioactive, can be used to produce energy, and have x-ray vision.

Sm Samarium Lanthanoid

Eu Europium Lanthanoid

Gd Gadolinium Lanthanoid

Tb Terbium Lanthanoid

Dy Dysprosium Lanthanoid MC Silvery metallic elementals that can change their shape using magnetostriction, literally restructing themselves through application of ferromagnetic force. They often have one or more metal-halide lamps on their body, which hum and radiate red, green, or white light and give off heat. They have the ability to produce infrared laser beams, are resistant to radiation, and have fine-grain control over electromagnetism.

Ho Holmium Lanthanoid MC Naturally silvery-white, they are fragile beings, corroding to yellow and pink and often partially aflame. They do not live long, but they live their brief life to the fullest and are known for their magnetic personality. In fact, they are the most magnetic of any of the periodic elementals. Even when taken against their will, they are prone to Stockholm Syndrome.

Er Erbium Lanthanoid

Tm Thulium Lanthanoid

Yb Ytterbium Lanthanoid MC Shining and silvery, with an emerald green aura of flame and radiation surrounding them. They can control their radioactive output to be (relatively) safe, and can harness the energy for X-Ray vision and imaging. They are masters of precision, from their internal atomic clock to the strength and sharpness of their self-cut blades.

Lu Lutetium Lanthanoid

Hf Hafnium Trans Metal MC Born as a pair with a Zirconium elemental, it is almost identical in appearance except for having a filmic iridiscence. It shares many of the abilities of its sibling only stronger. Most Hafnium elementals are absorbed by their Zirconium sibling shortly after birth/creation, so they are more rare. Hafnium elementals can be summoned by an occultic/alchemical ritual involving the mass sacrifice of Zirconium elementals.

Ta Tantalum Trans Metal

W Tungsten Trans Metal

Re Rhenium Trans Metal MC Silvery-white and honey-comb patterned. They are durable creatures, resistant to melting and when melted resistant to boiling. Their guts extend from their body like a hernia, in the form and with the function a jet engine, dripping gasoline and jet fuel.

Os Osmium Trans Metal

Ir Iridium Trans Metal MC Yellowish-white, metallic, with humanoid female traits. They are (arguably) the densest of the elementals, hard, and almost entirely resistant to burning, melting, or corrosion. They are often utilized by the gods as messengers, shot ballistically on beams of rainbow across the cosmos. In their pure state they are brittle and generally shatter on arrival, but are nearly indestructible and unstoppable along their rainbow trajectory. Occasionally they are used as ballistic, planet-killing god-weapons.

Pt Platinum Trans Metal MC Silvery-white elementals known for their rarity. It is considered a sign of wealth to employ platinum elementals or to have a concentration of platinum elementals within a kingdom. In addition to their electromagnetic abilities, they are also known for their ability to act as catalysts for various alchemagical transmutation spells.

Au Gold Trans Metal MC Although soft, these reddish-yellow metallic beings are some of the most useful and sought after of the periodic elementals, complicated by their relative rarity. The malleable elementals are often shaped by alchemists, wizards, and craftsman into exotic forms as fashion accessories. They are also highly electroconductive, making them useful weapons, but also useful for electrical transmission. They can also reflect electromagnetic radiation, and even have anti-inflammatory properties that make them useful to apoptomancers. They are also often used as the benchmark for a currency, where the value of the currency of a kingdom is measured by the quantity and quality of gold elementals in service to the kingdom.

Hg Mercury Trans Metal

Tl Thallium PT Metal MC Like tin treants with a subtle green aura. They harness light, integrating cognitive processing and circulation into one photoreceptive mechanism. They can see in infrared and are poisonous to the touch, making them excellent nocturnal assassins. They hide in forests, waiting for nighttime passersby to brush into them, sealing their fate. Their favorite snack is hair.

Pb Lead PT Metal

Bi Bismuth PT Metal MC Iridescent, rainbow-colored, metallic elementals with a stair-step crystalline structure that psychedelically bends and warps like a four-dimensional MC Escher painting. They are healers, treating digestive discomfort and certain infections. While not humanoid in form, they will often bond with an intelligent lifeform that is beautiful on the inside and out, worn like exotic jewelry, but also painting their eyes and nails, an aura like splotches of shimmering paint builds along the surfaces surrounding them, disappearing as they pass.

Po Polonium PT Metal

At Astatine Metalloid

Rn Radon Noble Gas MC Gaseous elementals that are normally odorless, colorless, and tasteless. They are also highly radioactive, making them silent and dangerous killers, but too slow and too unwieldy for singular assassination. When cooled to a solid state, they have a yellow or orange-red radioluminescence. They mostly reside safely underground, although accidental deaths sometimes occur around hot springs where radon elementals bathe.

Fr Francium Alkali Metal MC Native yet unstable elementals, they spend most of their lives as astatine, radium, and radon elementals. They are highly radioactive, making their francium form more like a last-ditch kamikaze effort.

Ra Radium Alkaline Earth

Ac Actinium Actinoid

Th Thorium Actinoid

Pa Protactinium Actinoid

U Uranium Actinoid MC Silvery-gray metallic elementals with neon-green circuits that glow under UV light. They are normally weakly radioactive, and take the form of small, innocuous lizards. When enriched, they grow to monstrous, kaiju proportions, wrecking havoc physically and radioactively in the environment. Some have learned to harness the power of the enriched elementals to produce energy and magics.

Np Neptunium Actinoid MC In the shape of a horse, their color varies from silver to dark purple, yellow-green, green-blue, light reddish-pink, or dark green. They are nuclear powered and able to move on land or in the sea (transforming into a hippocampus), and are prized as mounts even amongst the gods. They may self-destruct in a highly radioactive nuclear fission explosion.

Pu Plutonium Actinoid MC They usually have a dull gray shell of oxidation, although sometimes yellow or olive-green, but in their purest state they are silvery-gray. They are highly radioactive, but containable and fissible. At a high cost, plutonium elementals can be summoned or birthed, and used for massively powerful explosive alchemagics or as a source of alchemagical energy. They are sometimes in humanoid form, but often phallic and with aerodynamic features.

Am Americium Actinoid

Cm Curium Actinoid

Bk Berkelium Actinoid MC Feintly silvery-white, metallic elementals that reflect mostly in infarared. They are weakly radioactive, but generally not a passive danger.

Cf Californium Actinoid MC Silvery-white metallic elementals soft enough to be cut by a blade. They are radioactive, and have the ability to activate other radioactive elementals. They can also harness their radioactivity into a "sixth sense", an ability to sense the radioactivity and other chemical properties in an environment.

Es Einsteinium Actinoid MC Naturally silvery-white and metallic, they glow hot blue with nuclear energy. They usually take the form of or are covered in cubic crystals, although sometimes they take on a hexagonal crystalline structure instead. Most are unstable, synthetic creations, like short-lived kamikaze bombs. A rare few are wrapped in a paramagnetic field which weakly attracts metal, but is more so a containment suit for the elemental. However, even within the containment suit they are soft elementals and not suited for much more than being a bomb.

Fm Fermium Actinoid MC These elementals are birthed in the aftermath of disaster, particularly nuclear disaster. They are short-lived and radioactive, a brief after-image of holocaust.

Md Mendelevium Actinoid

No Nobelium Actinoid MC Rare and myserioud elementals, with properties similar to ytterbium elementals. In our universe they are radioactive and rapidly decay. They come from another universe or dimension where the laws of physics are slightly different, allowing them to be stable.

Lr Lawrencium Actinoid

Rf Rutherfordium Trans Metal

Db Dubnium Trans Metal

Sg Seaborgium Trans Metal

Bh Bohrium Trans Metal

Hs Hassium Trans Metal

Mt Meitnerium Unidentified MC Rare and mysterious elementals, with properties similar to cobalt, rhodium, and iridium elementals, except highly radioactive. They come from another universe or dimension where the laws of physics are slightly different, allowing them to be stable.

Ds Darmstadtium Unidentified MC Rare and mysterious elementals, with properties similar to nickel, palladium, and platinum elementals, except highly radioactive. They come from another universe or dimension where the laws of physics are slightly different, allowing them to be stable.

Rg Roentgenium Unidentified MC Rare and mysterious elementals, with properties similar to gold, silver, and copper elementals, except highly radioactive. They come from another universe or dimension where the laws of physics are slightly different, allowing them to be stable. To summon a Roentgenium elemental is to summon nuclear death.

Cn Copernicium Trans Metal MC Rare and mysterious elementals, with properties similar to zinc, cadmium, and especially mercury elementals, except highly radioactive. They come from another universe or dimension where the laws of physics are slightly different, allowing them to be stable. They are gaseous in our universe, and when they bond with gold elementals they become volatile.

Nh Nihonium Unidentified MC Rare and mysterious elementals, with properties similar to boron, aluminum, gallium, indium, and thallum elementals, except highly radioactive. They come from another universe or dimension where the laws of physics are slightly different, allowing them to be stable. It is believed that in a sufficiently heavy enviornment, these elementals could be made stable in our universe, and much could be learned about the extra-universal/dimensional elementals from examination within these heavy, stable islands.

Fl Flerovium PT Metal MC Rare and mysterious elementals, with properties similar to lead. In our universe they are radioactive and rapidly decay. They are superheavy, but at room temperature are gaseous, creating a heavy, suffocating field. They come from another universe or dimension where the laws of physics are slightly different, allowing them to be stable.

Mc Moscovium Unidentified

Lv Livermorium Unidentified

Ts Tennessine Unidentified

Og Oganesson Unidentified

Weird & Wonderful Loot

This is a followup to my last post with (not actually) Four New Weird & Wonderful Fantasy Species (there were five, I forgot the gray humans). I'm doing a one shot in this setting later this month, so I wanted to come up with some ideas for cool loot to help me build out the world. Most of this is not specific to the setting (which I still need to properly name) and could work in probably any science fantasy setting.

Several of the items refer to the core elements of the setting. I like to play with the idea of elements; I think it says something about the world when it's not just the typical Earth, Air, Fire, Water type stuff. It's intrinsically hard to do, since these types of elements are so intrinsic to human civilization and our world (before anyone gets pedantic about it- Fire, Water, Earth, Wood, Metal isn't all that different either).

In this setting, there are four elements, which each correspond to a color and to a shape. That's mostly irrelevant to the rest of this post but I'll leave it here anyway:

Ectoplasm - Translucent - Star Fractal
Phlogiston - Pink - Perfect Circle or Sphere
Yeast - Brown - Spiral
Lymph - Gray - Hypercube

But as I said, I think these loot are mostly setting agnostic, even though they hopefully evoke some sense of a coherent setting.

And now, the list of 20 Weird & Wonderful Loot:

1. Ectograph Machine: A handheld box and viewing lens powered by ectoplasm. When a button is pressed, a bright and disorienting flash of light captures the image of anything within the viewing lens. The process drains the essence of the objects in view and transfers this essence onto a metal plate. The ectograph machine is more powerful in the hands of those with an eye for composition.


2. Magic Gyroscope: A magic ball the size and weight of a bowling ball. By chanting and rotating the ball in a defined indoor space (such as a room), the space can be rotated. The wielder rotates with the room, everything else flies and tumbles about.


3. Gelatinous Suit: A surprisingly lightweight suit of soft, white, squishy, congealed lymphatic tissue that protects the wearer from physical harm and disperses kinetic force. Excessive use leads to the suit being absorbed under the skin permanently.


4. Hyper-Active Dry Yeast: Drop a packet of this into a body of water (or down a creature's throat) and it will immediately begin to ferment into a zymo-zombie. If it lives, it can be fermented.


5. Phlogiston Bolt: 3d6 explosive crossbow bolts made of pure phlogiston. If they explode onto anything combustible, it also explodes, and so on. Don't get hit while carrying them...


6. Lymphagen: A magical lymphatic fluid which, when absorbed by the immune system, coalesces and mutates any contained pathogens or antibodies into an immutant (immunogenic mutant). The immutant destroys the host from the inside, then physically explodes out of the host's body in their last moments of consciousness as a monstrous being covered in sticky white lymphatic fluids.


7. Ectogramophone: An old timey-looking video phone powered by ectoplasm. The dead dimension exists orthogonal to time as we understand it, and so it stands to reason that anything that will die, will exist in the dead dimension. You may communicate with anyone who ever has or ever will die, if you have their number. However, the dead are notoriously bad at answering their phone.


8. Jitterbug Bagpipe: A meatsack full of lymphatic fluid and intestinal pipes. Unlike regular bagpipes, the jitterbug bagpipe can be used to produce beautiful music. The music induces joy, a healthy appetite, and good health.


9. Karma Palm: 1d4+2 open-faced hands of light, psychically controlled by the wielder up to 7 ft around themselves. Can be used to push, smack, and press for 1d6 turns.


10. Karma Fist: 1d4+2 closed fists of light, psychically controlled by the wielder up to 7 ft around themselves. Can be used to punch for 1d6 turns.


11. Karma Eye: 1d4+2 eyes of light, psychically controlled by the wielder up to 7 ft around themselves. Can be used to see or shoot karmic laser beams for 1d6 turns.


12. Anti-Metal Armor: Armor that has been rusted and dephlogistonated. The rusted-looking armor is immune to all explosives, and rusts any other metals that touch it.


13. Mustard Bomb: A sack of meat fermented in a "special" yeast. The stench of the rotten, putrid meat is noxious, and at close ranges the methane produced by the fermentation may be deadly.


14. Vorpal Band: A set of rings combined into a shape like brass knuckles, made of a dimension folded in on itself. Pulling on each ring draws a unique weapon, including a vorpal garrote, vorpal disc, vorpal whip, and vorpal stake.


15. Mapmazer: An interactive scroll upon which a space can be mapped. So long as the mapping is accurate, it may be used to test routes in already explored regions of the mapped space and see the contents or occupants of rooms or corridors. In order to use the mapmazer, one must trace through the map like a maze. Normal rules of mazes apply, and mazing oneself into a corner can wreak all sorts of devastation within the space of the map, or alert other occupants to the users presence.


16. Escape Rope: A magical rope that allows a group of up to 20 to immediately escape a dungeon. There is a group-size in 20 chance that instead of exiting the dungeon they instead are transported to 1d6:
1. Somewhere else in the dungeon only a little closer to the entrance.
2. Somewhere much deeper and more dangerous in the dungeon.
3. The dead dimension.
4. A sexy place.
5. A not sexy place.
6. A place of madness and eldritch horror and OH GOD WHY!?


17. Rare Candy: A strange candy that makes one grow a year older (or equivalent for their species) and gain a level. On 1 in d100 the rare candy induces an extreme mutation, like an evolution into an entirely new species. Each time one consumes a rare candy in their life, the die size decreases (1 in d100, d20, d10, etc.), unless they evolve, in which case it resets. After an extreme mutation, they return to level 1 and lose all class abilities beyond first level abilities but keep any other attribute bonuses, saving roll bonuses, or other special abilities.


18. Good Vibes Machine: Everyone knows that a dungeon has bad vibes, but not many people know why. I don't know either, but what I do know is that a Good Vibes Machine (tm) will solve all your problems. After you've cleared out a dungeon, plant one of these gizmos right into the hot corpse of the boss monster, and this dungeon will be cleared forever. FOREVER. Over time, a bunch of cool cats will find their way into this dungeon; it'll be like the Brooklyn of the Underdark, and maybe it's also your new base and you're like a legend bro.


19. Mr. H: A mechanical man. He has limited functionality, but can be used for simple tasks like carrying stuff or one single complex task as programmed using punch cards (sold separately) which allow him to take the place of any number of other hirelings.


20. Magic Mercury: A bubbling, shimmering, colorful liquid that looks, tastes, and sounds like pop rocks candy dropped in coke in an endless loop of explosive carbonation. Induces extreme psychedelia for 1d20 hours, except where on a 20 the effects are permanent. Under the effects of magic mercury, one gains Heavy Metal vision. Everything looks like Frank Frazetta art with neon highlights and every sound twangs with an electric guitar or thunder. One cannot help but become the 1970's-80's pubescent male fantasy action hero they see in themselves. As a rule, it is impossible to fail at any task that would make the user seem uncool, unless the results of failure are so cool that it would be uncool to succeed, in which case the user necessarily fails. Cool is determined by the GM. None of this is actually happening, and at the end of the fantasy and/or on death, the GM and/or group as a whole retcon what actually transpired over that course of actions (they can still have succeeded, but not in as impossibly cool a way).

Mogleth (art by Scrap Princess)

So now here is the official post for Mogleth, the second ordinal beasts which I have commissioned amazing art from Scrap Princess, and also the art I've used for the new background for the blog. I also have another piece of stream of consciousness prose and thinking man, I forgot where my head goes when I don't get a good night of sleep and really hope I'm not going to be embarrassed by this tomorrow.

(NOTE: temporarily removing prose, going to rewrite it at some point but I don't feel comfortable with what I wrote originally anymore)

Mun Jira REDUX (art by Scrap Princess)

This is a repost of Scrap Princess' amazing interpretation of Mun Jira, now accompanied with words.

5/31/19 Nearly a year later I am quietly attempting to re-do this writeup! It's definitely a WIP, I'll continue to work on it as time and inspiration allow.

6/11/19 Keep making false starts, will do this eventually...