The diversity of slimes?

I have been playing Slime Rancher recently and it has been a huge blast of fun! It made me think a bit more on how slimes (aka blobs, jellies, oozes, puddings, sludge, etc) have been treated in fantasy gaming. Although they are a hallmark of the genre since its inception, they have received fairly little attention aside from obscure niche products. I wrote a post on blobs a while back, so consider this a second part.

What qualifies as a slime has rarely varied. I have seen some taxonomies list jellyfish, shoggoths, chaos beasts, etc as examples of slimes. The only thing they all have in common is a lack of an internal skeleton and a lack of specifically bilateral symmetry: jellyfish are radially symmetric, whereas shoggoths and chaos beasts lack any symmetry.

Although even that commonality vanishes when you include WarCraft's take on oozes. For some reason they have a tendency to incorporate the bones of prey into themselves to give the illusion of an internal skeleton and bilateral symmetry. They are described an having "elemental heritage" that was "corrupted by the powers of chaos," whatever that means in this context.

Where fantasy gaming has failed in my opinion is that slimes have generally been repetitive to the point of banality. Slime Rancher is like a breath of fresh air because it gives more creative designs and powers to its slimes. Rock slimes roll around in their spiky exteriors, quantum slimes teleport, dervish slimes generate tornadoes, etc. I wish slimes in fantasy gaming were that creative more often.

I forgot to mention it in my last post, but the Monster Encyclopaedia book by Mongoose Publishing included a "primordial ooze" monster. It had a trait similar to the chaos beast in that those struck by its attacks risked degenerating into pools of primordial ooze themselves. A second trait allowed it to sacrifice hit points to spawn an entirely different monster like a beast or a giant, a nod to the origin of its name.

Then we have the intelligent (and sometimes humanoid!) slimes. Jubilex, the lord of slimes and poison is the foremost example. More recently we have been introduced to humanoid-presenting slimes in anime, such as Jellax from Sailor Moon and Rimuru Tempest from That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

• Jellax was a simple amorphous slime monster that could reshape itself into various weapons. It apparently proved so popular that somebody wrote a fanfic where it tries to conquer Earth.
• Rimuru was a human reincarnated as a slime with the ability to replicate the properties of substances he consumed, effectively making him a shapeshifter. Instead of going the evil overlord route, he decided to become a benevolent dictator over the monsters of the forest he lived in.
• Jubilex (aka Juiblex, Ghaunadaur) is not a very detailed or important figure in fantasy gaming at large, tho I like to tweak him into the god (not simply a random demon lord) of slimes and poison elementals. (Yes, I treat poison as an element.) I even conflate him with Abhoth from the Cthulhu mythos.

I hope to explore more in the future. That's all for today!

Mephits

Mephits are elemental imps, serving the same simple role of messengers and spies. They are one of those throwaway monsters that shows up in most monster manuals but nobody pays attention to and whose backstory is constantly changed by the writers.

In AD&D the mephits were imps summoned from the lower planes to animate elemental forms. Later they were tweaked so that they were created on the lower planes, and typically had a low life expectancy since they were often used to send insults.

Starting with 3e, mephits were no longer tied to the lower planes. This change did nothing to make anybody care about them more. Curiously, Necromancers of the Northwest gave them a detailed ecology as a web enhancement for The Traveler's Guide to the Elemental Plane of Fire. In this ecology, mephits may arise spontaneously on the ethereal plane, born to two mephit parents, or created by magic as servants. Mephits that are born or generated lack an elemental affinity, though they might be able to gain one later.

Derek Holland suggested a few new varieties of mephit, such as gilded mephits, number mephits, and shadow mephits. He further suggested a new disturbing origin for mephits: children cursed by magic and enslaved by villains. This creates a moral dilemma for our heroes.

Relevant links

• http://legacy.aonprd.com/bestiary/mephit.html
• https://d-infinity.net/blog/derek-holland/new-mephits
• https://d-infinity.net/blog/derek-holland/new-use-mephits
• http://www.necromancers-online.com/articles/ExoticEncounters/2016/20161205.html
• http://www.necromancers-online.com/articles/BestinClass/2016/20161206.html
• http://www.necromancers-online.com/articles/BestinClass/2017/20171219.html
• http://5e.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/mephit.htm
• http://themonstersknow.com/mephit-tactics/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/3vblot/mephits/
• https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Mephit
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephit

Elemental humanoids

So a weird aspect of pre-5e D&D editions is that the taxonomy of elementals was pretty nonsensical. Azer, genies, salamanders, etc were not typed as elementals despite originating from the elemental planes. So this led to a number of attempts by third party products to introduce elemental humanoid equivalents.

The Slayer's Guide to Elementals introduced CR6 "higher elementals," described as "the sentient denizens of the Elemental planes, quite capable of building a civilization hidden from regular planar pathways." These included the gnomides of earth, royal salamanders of fire, sylphs of air, and undines of water.

Monster Encyclopaedia I introduced CR8 "emergents," described as "Not all elemental life is quite so simple – just as oozes and slimes give way to higher forms such as elves or humans, so too do primitive elemental forms lead to the rise of the higher elemental entities called emergents."

Legends & Lairs: Elemental Lore introduced CR11 "noble elementals," described as "Whereas normal elementals are the everyday inhabitants of the elemental planes, noble elementals consider themselves the more civilized elite." They held court on a demiplane at the center of the elemental planes called "Nexus."

Tome of Horrors 4 introduced CR20+ "elemental lords," described as "For every type of elemental, there is a ruler, a huge elemental of massive size and strength that holds dominion over its own kind. These rulers are often worshiped by elementals and some are even worshiped by cults on the Material Plane." The fire lord was Inder, the water lord was Lypso, the earth lord was Onyst, and the air lord was Susir.

In 4e, the elemental type was changed to an "origin" that could apply to beasts, humanoids, and so forth. In 5e, the nuance from 4e was discarded and all these elemental beasts and elemental humanoids are now simply typed as elementals. Hence, the emergent/higher/noble/lord elementals are no longer distinguished from azer, genies, salamanders, etc.

For example, I incorporated the royal salamanders in my post on salamanders. The gnomides could likewise be reflavored as earth-centric azer. I'd like to explore elemental humanoid races in future posts.

Ecology of gargoyles

Gargoyles are a standard D&D monster. Their key oddity, however, is that the lore across editions has been unable to agree on their actual nature. Sometimes they are stone statues animated by evil spirits, other times they are living creatures capable of reproduction.

Why can’t the physical elements have mental and spiritual counterparts?

The title of this post comes from "Limyaael's Rant #323: Elemental Magic". This is a very good question to ask. All too often elemental magic systems feel the need to introduce a fifth element for "spirit" or something along those lines. A number of writers for tabletop games have wondered this question and provided their own answers to it.

The Nephilim roleplaying game published by Chaosium, as well as the derivative sourcebook Enlightened Magic, posits a system of several elements including air, earth, fire, moon, sun, and water. These are explained as possessing both physical and spiritual aspects within both the environment and living things, to the degree that each directly corresponds to a gaming attribute: air to intelligence, earth to constitution, fire to strength, moon to charisma, sun to wisdom, and water to dexterity. Elemental magic uses any element to create effects on the environment and living things; the alchemy rules from the latter book specifically divide into three circles of physical, mental and spiritual effects that rely on any of the elements.

S. John Ross wrote "Elemental Magic for GURPS" which posited five elements of earth, water, air, fire and aether, each of which were divided into living and non-living aspects. As in the historical theory of the four humors, this system posits that living things are composed of a mixture of all the elements. Each of the elements manifests differently in living things: earth as flesh, water as soul, air as intellect, and fire as passion. Aether corresponds to the space and time in which living things exist, making it simultaneously physical and non-physical. This is both clever and simple, so I am surprised "space-time" is not used as an element by more writers.

The "Five Cities World" by Garblag Games uses an... interesting elemental magic system. I cannot make heads or tails of it.

The problem with para- and quasi-elements

The para- and quasi-elements have never been the most logical parts of planar geography. For example, steam is positively charged water and salt is negatively charged water, while ice is air plus water. Mimir.net went a step further and introduced quasi-para-elemental planes. Para-elements as logical mixtures of the elements was explored by Dark Sun. Air plus water made rain, air plus fire made sun, earth plus fire made magma, earth plus water made silt. The quasi-elements would be dramatically different depending on what logic is actually used, since they do not use the same logic.

• Ice, water and steam make sense as the phases of water.
• Radiance, fire and ash make sense as the stages of burning. You make sparks, sparks set the combustibles aflame, flame burns the combustibles to ash.
• Lightning, air and vacuum are not on the same spectrum.
• Mineral, earth and dust are not on the same spectrum either.

I have seen a few alternate versions of the para- and quasi-planes.

Pathguy suggests:

• Dust is between Air and Earth. "Negative Earth" is Grime.
• Steam is between Fire and Water. "Positive Water" is Rainbow.
• Mist is between Air and Water. "Negative Water" is Ice.

The 3e MotP suggests that the quasi-planes would follow the logic of positive border being dangerously dynamic and active, whereas the negative border would be drained of life and color.

• Air: the positive border would be storm, the negative vacuum.
• Earth: the positive border would be earthquake, and the negative would be slag.
• Fire: the positive border would be firestorm, the negative cinders.
• Water: the positive would be maelstrom, the negative stagnant.

In general I prefer some variation of the elemental chaos for the actual geography. While the para- and quasi-elementals themselves seem cool, as geography they are just silly. 

The plane of water: The sky of the plane of water is analogous to the plane of mist, rain or vapor. One example of its inhabitants is the niln or "vapor horror" from Tome of Horrors. The land of the plane of water is analogous to the plane of cold or ice, though it is not necessarily cold. The sea of the plane of water is the material plane sea, where the planes merge.

Supplements: Dark Dungeons, Slayers Guide to Elementals, Tome of Horrors Complete, Tome of Horrors 4

Links:

• http://smileylich.com/dnd/collective/Collective_Q15.html
• http://expeditiousretreat.blogspot.com/2015/05/enter-elemental-borderlands.html
• http://www.pathguy.com/inner.html
• https://mimir.net/mapinfinity/quasi.html
• http://aveneca.com/cbb/viewtopic.php?t=106
• https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/environment/the-planes/
• https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/DarkDungeonsSRD/Out_of_This_World#h5o-12
• http://blogofholding.com/?p=3908
• http://crushingskulls.blogspot.com/2011/04/quasi-elemental-planes.html

Poison as an element

D&D has a weird relationship with real science. The D&D world is based on the premise that it works like modern science describes the real world to work, and then tacks on magic to explain any deviations from real physics. The problem with this is that the rules get real physics wrong: for example, D&D portrays poison in a way contradictory to reality. More information below the break.

Reinventing the Plane of Air

This post collects some random ideas I had in the past for reinventing the plane of air. These are unfinished notes right now, but I hope anyone who reads this can be inspired to have adventures on the plane of air, or as I like to call it: "Cloud Cuckoo Land."

D&D aberrations, celestials, fiends, etc in a Moorcockian context

D&D took the chaos/order alignment trope from Moorcock and then added good/evil onto it, even though this is unnecessary. I decided to go back to the original Moorcockian model for my setting, but this means that the various monsters like aberrations, celestials and fiends need to be re-contextualized.

For those who are not experts on Moorcock's multiverse, the epic conflict is between law and chaos. Neutrality is a law because it demands a balance between law and chaos. Chaos rejects this because it is chaos, and law decides to enforce the balance. At some point law goes overboard and decides the only way to preserve the balance is to destroy chaos, which violates the balance in the other direction.

This conflict is fairly easy to understand but is at odds with the conventional D&D alignment system, which has law/chaos playing second fiddle to good/evil. The Moorcockian alignment system doesn't define good or evil in cosmology terms, except insofar as imbalance is evil because it is anathema to life.

The typical terminology for the Moorcock alignments is lawful, chaotic and neutral, but this terminology is inaccurate since it neglects the subtleties I mentioned previously. In a world where chaos is ascendant, there is little functional difference between law and neutrality; in a world where law is ascendant, the reverse is true. The generic fantasy setting is the former, and the characters are nominally associated with law/neutrality. This isn't to say that harmful manifestations of law cannot appear in a world where chaos is ascendant, but it is vastly less common than harmful manifestations of chaos.

The various spiritual entities would have different alignment associations compared to the standard.

• Aberrations would represent chaos, full stop. While different groups of aberrations might behave in a seemingly lawful manner, that is due to chaos' inherent tendency toward diversity.
• Celestials would represent balance, law and neutrality. They are active in that they actively fight for the balance.
• Elementals represent neutrality in its purest form. They are generally reactive to imbalances, and actively maintain conditions suitable to life (e.g. the weather).
• Fey would represent chaos, but to distinguish them from aberrations they are tempered by the presence of neutrality and law.
• Fiends would represent any kind of imbalance, whether toward law or chaos.

Distinguishing constructs, elementals and undeads

The monster types mechanic in D&D has always been iffy due to the arbitrary definitions and distinctions between the monster types.

For example, the [fey] type is an amalgamation of many different concepts from mythology and folklore. It include Greek rustic gods (dryads, nymphs, satyrs), Celtic nobility of the Otherworld (seelie and unseelie courts), Celtic tricksters (sprites), fairytale hags, the ghostly fairy dogs of the British Isles (blink dogs, yeth hounds), and “celestial fey” invented for Planescape (eladrin, guardinals).

Another example would be the distinctions between the [construct], [elemental], and [undead] types. Although they are self-explanatory, it is very easy to devise monsters that straddle more than one of them or stretch the definition. This reveals weaknesses of the mutually exclusive tagging system.

Creature Collection Revised features the [elemental] “strife elemental.” The strife elemental is a personification of an abstract emotional concept rather than a physical classical element. What else would you type it? [demon]? [monstrosity]? Those are poor fits.

Forgotten Foes features the [elemental] “junk elemental.” The junk element is a spontaneous personification and animation of an artifice, in this case thrown away junk, rather than a simple classical element. It clearly straddles [construct] and [elemental].

Legends & Lairs: Elemental Lore features the [elemental] “last breath.” The last breath is an air elemental animated by the spirit of a dead person, the animated literal last breath. It clearly straddles [elemental] and [undead].

Creature Collection II: Dark Menagerie features the [undead] “siege undead.” (Monsters of Porphyra reprints it as “besieged undead.”) The sieged undead is constructed like a construct from the parts of a corpse, separating the skin, muscles and bones into three separate constructs with other materials (like sand, wood, nails, and wire) to fill the gaps. It clearly straddles [construct] and [undead], if not wrongly typed and more sensible as [construct] to begin with.

Creature Collection III: Savage Bestiary features the [construct] “spontaneous golem.” (Monsters of Porphyra reprints it as “spontaneous construct.”) The spontaneous construct arises naturally (or supernaturally) from crafted objects like pelts and gallows, but never deliberately created. It clearly straddles [construct], [elemental], and [undead], for all the same reasons mentioned prior.

Species names for the four elements?

The concept of elementals seems to have been invented by the famed alchemist Paracelsus. There were four elementals, one for each element: gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders. (Paracelsus seems to have invented the concept of gnomes.) In D&D, these subtleties were discarded. Instead of unique names, elementals were referred to as air elementals, earth elementals, etc. Furthermore, the original names are recycled for other creatures in the game.

Revising the elemental fauna to be interesting

Let's face it, elementals are boring. When Paracelsus first devised the idea of elementals, he considered them to be analogous to humans and other animals except with elemental affinity and no souls. When Hans Christian Anderson wrote The Little Mermaid, he was referencing Paracelsus when he wrote that mermaids had no souls unless they married a human. This was expanded by later philosophers and fantasy writers, as The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters attests in its entry on elementals. That book states that "Purely amorphous and non-animate representations of elementals are, however, fairly rare" (206), D&D notwithstanding...

Life on the elemental planes

I find it easier to keep track of my ideas if I take the time to sit down and write them. As I mentioned in a very old post, I prefer to reimagine the elemental planes as interesting places to visit. They have geography, wildlife and civilizations just like the material plane does.

Why are some elementals immune to poison? Who cares!

A strange thing I noticed while browsing the MM is that some elementals are immune to poison but not others. For example, azer, gargoyles and generic elementals are immune to poison, but magmin, xorn and genies are not. This may be a legacy from 3e, as in that edition elementals were automatically immune to poison, but this doesn't explain every example.

There isn't any explanation given for this, so I will just take it as a given. Not everything about a monster needs some kind of elaborate explanation. The poison in the game rules operates nothing like poison in real life, so it's acceptable that some monsters are immune without explanation. In real life, everything is a poison at certain doses, and different animals have different tolerances.

It's probably best to treat "poison" as an esoteric element, since that would explain its universal effects in the game world.

Resolving the paradoxes afflicting elementals

The MM entry on "elementals" is riddled with contradictions and plot hooks that go nowhere. In this post, I will examine those mistakes and provide solutions.

Planar flora and fauna (using the Fire Plane as an example)

The D&D rules are weird and geocentric. If you tried to run a campaign entirely on the elemental plane of fire, you would run into problems with various spells and class features that target specific types because by the rules as written every living thing on the elemental plane of fire should be typed as an elemental. Inspired by Planescape and The Traveler's Guide to the Elemental Plane of Fire, I would suggest a few changes using the elemental plane of fire as an example.

Elemental Lords and Beast Lords

The material world is composed of four elements: air, earth, fire and water. These elements occurs in both their raw forms and in more complex forms within living creatures. The elements not only form the basis of the four humors, but the temperaments of living creatures.

The elemental planes have multiple governing bodies, just like the material plane. These governing bodies act as a series of checks and balances on one another’s power, preventing any one party from overwhelming the interests of the others.

Reimagining the elemental planes

The elemental planes are generally presented as infinite featureless expanses of their element. The plane of fire is the sun, water the ocean, earth the compost, and air the sky. These portrayals are quite boring and do nothing to make players want to actually visit these planes. Which makes sense because the elemental planes were originally meant to explain where spells drew material from and not places to visit until the Manual of the Planes fleshed them out. I, on the other hand, would prefer an approach similar to that of The Traveler's Guide to the Elemental Plane of Fire...

Disambiguating taxonomies

D&D has a problem where it uses the same words to refer to monster types as well as specific families within those types. For example, the types dragon, elemental, giant and ooze are divided into "true" and "false" or "kin" families. The distinctions are often minor: "true" dragons have age categories, "true" elementals are amorphous blobs of one or more elements, "true" giants are prettier, and "true" oozes are fast moving. I'm going to devise some alternative terminology that is not ad hoc.

Elementals primer

What are elementals? Generally speaking¹, elementals are masses of base matter animated by a possessing demon, spirit, undead or other entity. They may be broadly divided into two groups: wights² and works³. Wights are the prototypical amorphous and homogenous elemental, which are the "elementals" presented in 13 True Ways. Works are elementals that have been somehow shaped into a more or less fixed form with unique traits.

Beyond air, earth, fire and water, there is also the fifth element and variants of these five. The fifth element, or quintessence, encompasses lots of weird things and will not be discussed here. Variants of the classical four elements include lightning, smoke, mud, lava, ice, vapor and so forth. There isn't any difference between these and mixtures of different pure elements because they are platonic ideals unconnected with real world science.

13th Age Monthly Volume 1 introduced the Spirit type. Sometimes the distinction between elementals and spirits and constructs may be ambiguous. As stated above, an elemental is a dual entity consisting of an animating force such as a spirit and a body composed of normally inanimate matter. Whether the animating force is a demon, specter or nature spirit will determine their behavior and motivation. The most common elementals are animated by nature spirits and are responsible for causing physical phenomena like earthquakes, morning dew and frost on windows.

Constructs and elementals are similar because their bodies are composed of base matter and both have animating spirits bound into them, and in some cases constructs may animate spontaneously or self-replicate or display a metabolism. The key (and perhaps only) distinction is that a construct's body is always a recognizable artifice⁴, hence "construct." So-called "junk elementals" arising from scrap yards would therefore qualify as constructs rather than elementals even though likely animated by a nature spirit or ghost.

Contrary to popular belief, the elemental planes are not inhabited primarily or mostly by elementals. The elemental planes are inhabited by flora and fauna no less diverse than that of the tellurian.

Endnotes

1. As an adjective "elemental" may refer to anything related to the elemental planes and their elements, such as the giants and various beasts which inhabit them.
2. The word "wight" means "a person of a specified kind, especially one regarded as unfortunate" or "a spirit, ghost, or other supernatural being." The undead of that name are properly known as mortwights or literally "dead people."
3. This is derived by analogy from the dictionary words earthwork, firework and waterworks.
4. This is similar to the distinction between a flesh golem and a zombie.