We all know the traditional 4 element theme for magic. What are some underused "elements"?

What would a surprise Elemental look like?

You won't know until it's too late.

If I told you it would ruin it.

With proper training, surprise can conjure up some of the most unique artifacts and spells imaginable, but the magic is dependent on the unknown. If the spell is expected, it does not function well, if at all. It starts with conjurings that create small constructs with odd properties, but the target must be unaware that the element is being used. When developed fully, you can do damn near anything in front of a crowd, so long as the result is unexpected.

Then, the true question becomes, can you ever expect the unexpected?

If you knew its true form, you would never be able to find one!

Suprising!

I generally stick to the Chinese 5 + lightning, void and light.

Does anyone have a screencap of that thread that turned up "motherfucking bees" as part of a four element system?

You're forgetting the powerful element of funk

Strong Nuclear Force
Weak Nuclear Force
Electromagnetism
Gravity

Nah, the setting is more rock than funk. Like Fury Road. If there was a musical element it would be METAL.

Smoke, Metal, Plastic and Meat,

I was thinking about this yesterday. There's a great old flash RPG caled MARDEK RPG that had the traditional 4 and then a bunch of others. Light, dark, soul, dream it was I think, it's been ages since I played it... I should go do that right now.

Yellow Bile, Black Bile, Blood and Phlegm.

Well, how about alignment magic?
Lawful, chaotic, good and evil magic.

I've always liked "sound". It would be a combination of what Banshee can do in X-Men and the typical bard powers of inspiring, convincing, inducing fear etc.

Some of the Pokemon types could be interesting too. For example ghost, being able to become non-corporeal, blending into shadows, subtly making people feel more unsettled/fearful.

You mean Piss, Poo, Blood, and Snot

Heart is pretty goat element.

What elements would Orks believe in?

Dakka, Choppa, Cunnin' brutality, Brutal cunnin'.

Da four elephants made up da WAAAAAGH.

You ever realise that the four Greek elements correspond perfectly to the four most common states of matter?
Earth, water, air and fire
Solid, liquid, gas, plasma
Greeks knew their shit.

salt, mercury, brimstone
Light, dark, bomb, water, wind, poison, thunder
Fire, ice, lightning
non-elemental
slime, ice, candy, flame

Life is a nice one to add. it stops Earth being the nurturing, kind, nice element and lets it be the brutal, poisonous, decay and earthquake monster it is.

Saw it coming

...

Chaos Knight
Keeper of the Light
Wisp
Enigma

Like a plastic mask with a large nose and glasses.

...

Gravity, electromagnetic force, strong and weak nuclear forces.

Makes me want to play a mage who can't use the same spell twice.

...

You. I like you.

P sure KotL is EM and Wisp is the Weak Force.

Snot isn't phlegm.

It takes a special kind of sharpness to counter smuggery with smuggery from the same source

Water can be solid, like or gas and so can air. Earth can be solid, water and arguably air.

you're just being a phlem apologist

I chuckled at that one.

Classical
Blues
Bluegrass
Jazz

7 domains of magic, 7 notes in music. Everything was clearly sung or rocked into existence.

Someone posted this here a fucking long time ago so I don't exactly remember what the specifics were. But, he defined everything by eight directions: Up, Down, Left, Right, Forward, Backward, In and Out.
It was something like
Up = holy
Down = evil
Left = solitary
Right = conglomerating
Within = magical
Without = mundane

I forget the rest. But, everything in the universe could be plotted into these coordinates, with humanity exactly in the middle. If anyone can remember the rest or even just help me make it up again it'd be much appreciated

> Da four elephants.

Elemental magic is shit. SHIIIIIIIIT

It's fucking magic. You can do ANYTHING. So you go and just... set people on fire or electrocute them and call it a day? Do you have no imagination?

PS: If you are one of those guys that tell people to go back to /pol/ dont answer this thread or the guys that are answering the replies to this post

A question how a 2 axies elemental theme based on political compass would be?

First you pick one of both Social or Libertarian
And then one of both Left Right

>It's fucking magic. You can do ANYTHING.
Thats is not what magic is about.
Magic is basically magical soft scifi

Great movie by the way (the hussars one)

Isn't black bile ichor?

The powerful elements of ordinary matter! I've mastered Ruthenium and all the Noble Gases myself.

>Sound

>Change your voice for deception
>Throw your voice for distractions
>Silence someone to shut them up or stop them from casting magic
>Make people deaf
>Incapacitate enemies with ear-piercing screeches
>Sonic Boom attacks
>Resonance to disrupt structures
>or, my favorite, use the brown note to make people shit themselves

They're called elements because EVERYTHING is supposed to be made of them. So, no matter what is the special snowflake magic you're imagining, it's still elemental.

Even following your logic only magic that creates energy or matter would be elemental.

Nah senpai.

Blood, Bone, Breath and Shadow.

It's the easiest way to classify and formalise magic, and gives it very simple and easy to understand limitations, so it sees a fair amount of use.

Personally, I'm a sucker for the four element cycle. Hell, sometimes I even throw Light and Shadow in for maximum plebitude.

Where do you fit

Transformation magic
Time affecting magic
Gravity affecting magic
Teleportation and dimensional travel/Summoning
Illusions and mind affecting spells
Necromancy and curses
Divination and wards?

In my settings, or in the generic settings?

Because in generic settings that use elementalism, those might not exist at all. If you're limiting yourself to the four elements, you're... Limiting yourself to the four elements. Fire mage manipulates fire. Water mage manipulates water. End of story, it doesn't get more abstract.

In my settings, there's a whole bunch of overlap between all of them, even if each element has it's strong points.

>Transformation magic
Mostly Water.
>Time affecting magic
Super secret seventh element that nobody gets access to
>Gravity affecting magic
See above, though Earth gets a little of that at the top levels.
>Teleportation and dimensional travel/Summoning
Teleportation is Light, though all elements have summoning and dimensional travel.
>Illusions and mind affecting spells
Illusion is generally shadow, Mind affecting is Air and a little Water.
>Necromancy and curses
Different form of magic entirely, no interaction with elements.
>Divination and wards?
Both of those can be done with any element.

Fun-ny.

Why would you even want all of these in the same setting? If you let magic do literally anything it just becomes uninteresting. The limitations of magic are a great way to develop the theme of a setting.

Having all of these doesn't mean the players would have easy access to all of them.

Hell yea.

Mayan?

but that's not a comic about a semantic misunderstanding, the classical elements really were believed by some to be true "elements" in the modern sense.

>What would a surprise Elemental look like?

Uh, youz forgots da red fastness.

This needs to be one of those animated pngs so that people don't expect it to move until it does.

No, Keeper of the Light is the weak force as it's said in his bio he makes suns (spark of endless suns).

Enigma also says Kotl decays, and the Weak Force is responsible for nuclear decay.

>animated pngs
say what now?

>animated pngs
>say what now?

He hasn't heard of animated pngs... kek

>suprise2.gif
>.gif

Dammit, that was going to be funny.

Stories, Promises, Sacrifice.

Magic is affected by the past of the thing being sacrificed,
The promises you make wrt fulfilling the obligations of the spell,
And what you give up right now in order to activate the spell.

Always, always entertain the Krod poster.

You really only need two elements: Yes and No.

Yes spells cause things to happen. Make crops grow. Summon a huge creature to do things. Generate large amounts of electricity.
No spells cause things to not happen. Make crops grow, and choke out the soil. Summon a huge creature to do things, that make other people not do things. Generate large amounts of electricity, to kill a dude.

so basically your saying keeper is RADIOACTIVE?

My setting contains 21 elements. Some are what you would expect but many are unique. The story of creation in my setting uses all of these elements as they give birth to each other, starting with just Void. Each one has many powers, elementals, an elemental world, and philosophical implications. I could write several pages on any one element but I will be merciful and instead give a basic summary of some of my favorites.

Instead of a boring life/death duality my setting uses more of a joy/sorrow duality with the elements of Carnival and Funeral. Carnival involves the happy and lively and revolves around joyfully celebrating life. It includes clowns, mimes, candy, and all manners of manic, rainbow sort of aesthetics. Its opposite, Funeral, represents sorrowfully "celebrating" death (mourning) and this is, of course, the domain of ghosts, graveyard themed enemies, skeletons, zombies, basically what you would expect.

I have Fortune which often has sort of a gambler/casino type of aesthetic with lots of card symbols, gold, and ornate patterns. It revolves around money, and wealth in general, as well as luck, charisma, and cunning. Fortune based moves can gain more power from how rich the user is and are frequently very luck based and can have random effects.

Some of my other favorites are Sound, Mirror, Fluxx (Chaos, opposite to Void which is often called Nixx), Primal, Toxic, Time and Fae. Beings can have one element and get bonuses for it or have two elements and not be quite as strong in either, to make up for the versatility. Some examples of interesting combinations world be a banshee character (Funeral/Sound) who can attack with their screeches and buff allies/nerf enemies with their songs. I have a merchant who is a white bunny man that peddles magical goods. His elements are Fortune/Magic (the Magic element is more about stage magic and illusions) and I have a mime who can mimic spells and make invisible objects, he is Carnival/Mirror.

Could you list the entire 21?

Does that mean you like them? I was a bit self conscious to post my content here, so it's really uplifting to know that it's being enjoyed. I can't believe I didn't mention my favorite element, Eldritch. It represents incomprehensible, alien sort of things. It's the third element, after Nixx and Fluxx, and represents the paradoxical and alien. It first appeared in the now chaotic void in the form of immortal horrors that began to dream up worlds. My absolute favorite combo would be Carnival/Eldritch. Anyway, here's the list buddy. I hope you enjoy it and it would be even better if you find a way to become inspired by it and use some of it in your campaigns.
Nixx (Void)
Fluxx (Chaos)
Eldritch
Celestial
Infernal
Fae
Carnival
Funeral
Mirror
Time
Primal
Toxic
Fire
Earth
Wind
Water
Mind
Mechanical
Magic
Fortune
Sound

If anyone has any questions or would like me to elaborate on anything I would be more than happy to. It just makes me ecstatic thinking that anyone might actually be finding enjoyment in something I came up with.

Dude, I think that element system is freaking fascinating, of course I like them.

I'm assuming the order of the list represents the order they came into existence?

Approximately. I tried to, more or less, put them in the right order but, since I didn't have the actual list handy, had to retype it off the top of my head. As such, the order isn't perfectly accurate. I'm super glad you like it! I've always loved settings with elements to choose from, but felt like most are lacking, to say the least, and wanted to make a setting with elements that aren't seen everywhere and that really spark the imagination. My goal is a list where you can pretty much take any two random elements from the list and easily come up with an awesome monster/character that uses them. I like to think that I accomplished that goal. I hope to get a pdf for the whole setting typed up eventually. When I do you can bet your buns I'll post it here! Thanks again buddy.

>Carnival/Funeral

I like it

I'm so glad you do! I was so sick of the normal life/light and death/dark duality that I just had to do something new. It's good to see that people other than me think it's cool.

Yes, it is. Conflating classical "elements" and periodic "elements" is semantic pedantry.

>Nixx (Void)
>Fluxx (Chaos)

In my setting the main good faction worships chaos as a god while the main evil faction does the same for void. When being referred to as a god they use the proper nouns for them, Nixx being named after a Greek void goddess and Fluxx being named after a synonym for chaos that has a matching sound to Nixx. They're still called void and chaos when being spoken of as a force and not a deity. The other elements have an elemental lord that lives within the corresponding elemental realms that functions as their godhead whereas void and chaos have no elemental realm or elementals (there are wraiths of many sorts that serve as one of the main types of enemy and are void element but they aren't elementals but something else entirely) and are considered sentient on their own in a way the other elements are not, which is why they do not have proper nouns. Is there a reason you find these names objectionable? What names would you use?

My shitty homebrew that I'll never finish has (alongside healing and "summoning" magic) ice manipulation, light manipulation, and blood manipulation.

Energy and Matter and their dark versions.

Energy has sub-elements of Potential (teleporting and blocking teleports), Kinetic (telekinesis, flinging shit into walls at high velocity) and Internal (heating things and setting them on fire, cooling things and freezing them).

Matter has sub-elements of Solid (making things hard and resilient or weak and brittle), Liquid (manipulating shapes of things, altering their properties such as making substances corrosive or conductive or shit like that) and Gas (creating shit out of nothing - "thin air" and replicating it).

Yeah. Four parts of the soul, which coincidentally coincides with the four elements in a nice way.

I think he means the double x. Which makes it hard for me to take seriously too, honestly. It looks like they're just there to try and make it look fancy, and serve no grammatical purpose.

I guess.

wow, it's been....months, since the last element thread.

what about Smog and Volt?

Anger, Hatred, Unforgiveness, and Paranoia.