What's the coolest alternative elemental system besides standard fire-water-air-earth and the real table of elements?

What's the coolest alternative elemental system besides standard fire-water-air-earth and the real table of elements?

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Dominions has Fire, Air, Water, Earth and then Astral (which is like stars/fate/metamagic), Death (undead, underworld, death, etc.), Nature (animals & plants and shit) and Blood (demons and mutations and such) This is my current go to.

>Fire
>Water
>Air
>Dirt
>Fucking magnets, how do they work?

sauce, pasta, dancing, and turtles
my goto

Well, there's always the Eastern classical elements. Water, Earth, Fire, Wood and Metal.

>not using Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void.

Kingdom of Loathing?

...

>the real table of elements

But no one does this, mostly because it would be fucking dumb, real elements are boring af, most of them are different kinds of dumb silvery rocks

The custom one my friends and I use for our current campaign is Pants, Meat, Fire, and Despair.

For more (unrequested) explanation.
Pants are (broadly) inorganic stuffs, but also represents things that are made, or have a determined purpose or function.
Meat is (broadly) organic stuffs, things that move themselves, or ideas that try to control themselves.
Fire is energy, entropy, and destruction.
Despair is the intangible, gravity, that which has force but no source, and emotions (duh).

People are a mix of all the elements, and the easiest conjuration spell is [Create Pants].

That makes way more goddamn sense than it should and I want to find a way to word that seriously

Periodic table

Go and take a look at the superpower wiki and Seikon no Qwaser wiki (don't actually watch/read SnQ, it's one of the most fan-service filled manga out there), you'll find a ton of interesting ideas

Take all radioactive elements and use those

Dont forget the para-elemental planes of Flowers, Mirrors, Liquor, and Paper.

>Besides the real table of elements?
>The real table of elements

>real table of elements
>Respect the Physical Elementalists, for they understand the very nature of the universe
>Greet the Organic Elementalists warmly, for though their focus is narrow, they understand both how to give, and take, life.
>But above all else, fear the Inorganic Elementalists. For that way lies madness.

This system is interesting, but this picture is an aesthetic nightmare.

This just confirms how shitty using the periodic table as a basis for magic is

Nuclear/Atomic
Electromagnetic
Gravity

Anti-Matter/Void

I kinda like the idea of emotions being elements.
There's no fire, there's wrath for example. Any one can manage to rage enough to boil water, but "Pyromancers" are just really short-tempered people.
Hope is light, serenity is water, etc...
And the "gods" are non-sentient beings made of emotions. Like the ocean is pure serenity.
Sentience is empathy, humans and others clevers beings can take on the emotions of others being and makes them own.

This is a element system I made myself, inspired by bathroom tiles.

From left to right, top to bottom:
Air; wind, power, all that jazz.
Decay; entropy, rust, that type of stuff.
Sky; basically force fields, in the world this system was used the world was flat and the sky was made of, well, sky, a boundary.
Water; connection in all it's forms.
Void; you get nothing, you lose, good day sir!
Fire; since decay was the destructive element, fire is more for abrupt and sometimes violent transformation.
Earth; basically everything static and unmoving.
Metal; all about skill, being honed to perfection.
Life; healing, creation, you know.
And the last less obvious element is represented by the entire diagram, and is called Luck; pretty much deals with fate and fortune, the least flashy element, but those that wield it are invariably far more successful than those that wield the other ones.

That begs the question, who or what is the god of empathy?

Hmm, now that you made that correlation, that has some interesting implications.
Wrath, if applied correctly, creates Hope.
Serenity, if in abundance, creates Despair (Darkness).
Hate, I imagine, would be Ice.
Shock would be electricity.
Earth would be resolve and air would be whimsy, which reveals another relationship, that just as a wind can blow out a candle or fan a flame, a joke can either take the wrath out of a situation or increase it.

Yeah, if I think up a good story to put this in I am definitely going to steal this.

Fire, Blood and Ash technically it's just fire, water and earth

When laid out like that with the Magician and the Fool at the top it looks like tabletop race game with the goal of becoming god before other players

Well, that's what gnosticism and left hand path is about user

Who is winning right now?

>winning
>implying "muh evil demiurge, I want to escape this cruel realm and become an astral soup for eternity" fags aren't a bunch of retards

In one of our games we had Candies, Puppies, Awesome, and Explosions.

Candies were very dangerous.

Add frogs and I'm good to go

>trying to be scientific with your elements
>doesn't split nuclear forces
Shit taste

There's no god of empathy, it was created by the mixing of all the others emotions. All the primordials beings radiate a little bit of themselves and after a while, the first sentient being was born.
The First People do not exist anymore as the place you live in influence your shape and mentality.

You know the concept, except that in my setting, ice is melancholy (depression), hate is corrosion.
You can mix them all, having empathy in the end as a mix of everything and the opposite, that should not exist in the plane as apathy.

Hmm, maybe a better term for Ice would be greif, it can overwhelm and end you, but in small amounts helps you to heal and generally drives people to spend more time together.

Brutal Legend. Metal, Noise, Blood, and Fire.

Yeah, grief is better, now that I think of it.

Or the musical element:
Mic
Bass
Treble
Feedback
Metal

Bionicle had some interesting elements

I find it interesting that departing from the standard classical four elements is something people are always talking about, but when we come down to actually do it, most people can't do more than post jokes.

I do like MtG's list (light, dark, fire, water, life). With five elements, you have the potential for complex interrelationships but not TOO much complexity. Everything is adjacent or opposed, and you can draw some pretty sacred geometry and have some cool numerology.

Earth, fire, water, and air works pretty well, since it covers solids, plasmas, liquids, and gases. All I can think is to add other states of matter.

>superfluid
>radiation

Thanks for the (you).

We've set them up to be opposite pairs (like earth is to air), but I want to know what someone with the basic understanding of them would think the opposite pairings should be.

Well, my best guess is Pants vs. Fire, Meat v.s Despair. I say that because Pants are very structured, intentionally made, specific, if inorganic, and entropy and destruction always take those things with time. That's the specific vs. the unknowable, the structure vs. time, so that makes sense to me.

Meat vs. Despair: Meat mentions ideas controlling themselves, self-movement, which implies some sort of intelligence, some will. Something sentient. Despair takes us in our worst moments and breaks us down, our emotions counter to our will; the meat seems concrete and true, but despair is, as you said, intangible. Unknowable. It's the feeling you get when you stare at the abyss; maybe you get a surplus of it when you feel the abyss stare back.

Anyways, that's enough of that. That's my guess on that one. Again, I really love that system and am probably going to steal it, so sorry for that one.

Fire
Frost
Electricity
Toxin
Corrosion
Virus
Gas
Explosive
Magnetic
Radiation

I like Dark Soul’s magic systems. Chaos flame pyromancy, crystal sorcery and lightning miracles.

Elements from skylanders

Magic, tech, death, shock, maybe light?

Get out of here Tenno

So just Cold, Electric, Heat, and Toxin, with various combinations.

Would you play a campaign set on the corpse of God? Players travel up/down through the land, learning mastery of the elements, each based on the 7 chakras.

Do we start at the anus of Brahman? Can't we awaken our atman some other way?

Rolemaster's Elemental Companion book.

>Lesser Basic Elements: Basic, simplest building blocks + easiest to control.
Air
Cold
Light
Vibration
Water

>Greater Basic Elements: Basic, simplest building blocks + harder to control
Gravity
Heat
Dark
Inertia
Earth

>Compound Elements: Two or three basic elements combined.
Electrical (light, heat, inertia)
Fire (air, heat, light)
Ice (water, cold)
Wind (air, inertia)

>Super Compound Elements: Some of every basic element is present.
Plasma (equal amounts of all ten, homogenous)
Vacid (equal parts opposing elements but unequal percentages of those combinations air to gravity, cold to heat, dark to light, warth to water, inertia to vibration. Example: 20% air/gravity, 10% cold/heat, 30% dark/light, 35% earth/water, 5% vibration/inertia. Heterogeneous.)

>Complex Elements: Special cases.
Aether: Power/energy of nonlife, undeath/death. Opposite spirit.
Chaos: Energy of absorption and growth, consumption. opposite Nether.
Nether: A mass of nothingness where the ten elements meet, annihilation. Opposite Chaos.
Nexus: The force of seperation between the elements, gates. Opposite Time.
Spirit: Power/energy of life, change. Opposite Aether.
Time: Temporal energy, both forward and backward. Erosion. Opposite Nexus.
Godzilla: The element of monsters. Opposite Peace.

>inspired by bathroom tiles.
Keep your fetishes to yourself man!

Go with the Four Humors: Hot, Cold, Wet, Dry. They don't affect the physical world of fire, water, air, and earth, but just how a character feels and is effected by their environment. If the humors are out of whack, so is the character.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

Yeah, I came in here to say The four fundamental forces. I've even come up with a magic system to pair them like opposites kinda.

Electromagnetism pairs with Gravity (Outwards force/radiation and inwards force)

Strong Nuclear Force pairs with Weak Nuclear force obviously.

I even have these color coded AND tied to the four coding chemicals in our DNA

Electromagnetism is Yellow and T(hymine), which bonds with Gravity/Blue/Adenine. Strong Nuclear Force is Red and Guanine, Weak Nuclear Force is Green and Cytosine.

This just gave me confirmation to take on this concept in my own game.

The 'groidal elemental system known as a "Bix nood"
>Muh dik
>Gib me dat
>WE WUZ KANGZ
>I dindu nuffin'

But I’ve already seen ATLA: The Guru

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

Heat, Cold and Electricity

Salt, Blood, Mercury and Sulphur

Bionicle

Four main aspects
Order, Chaos, Growth and Wither, each opposing its opposite set in a wheel.
These can function as basic elements.

These are then further divided into eight sections based on one or two of the four main ones.
These function more like schools of magic.
.
pure order: Control
order and wither: Stagnancy
pure wither: Death
wither and chaos: Ruination
pure chaos: Wild
chaos and growth: Alteration
pure growth: Restoration
growth and order: Summon

I would post the diagram i made for it, but for some reason Veeky Forums bugs out everytime i try post a picture

Discordia has the Five Elements: Sweet, Boom, Pungent, Prickle, and Orange.
They represent the senses

Schools of magic, not an elemental system but close enough

Spacetime magic (teleportation, time stop spells)
Physical magic (heat/cold, telekinesis, growing/shrinking things)
Biological magic (healing, body transformation)
Mental magic (telepathy, illusions)
Conceptual magic (manipulation of abstract things like justice, victory, luck, etc. Basically impossible without the blessing of some divine being who gives their own restrictions)

Probably. Alternatively, the God lays in the fetal position/had his back shattered by another god, meaning that the land is shaped more like a disk.
Wait, seriously? Fuck man, I was proud of that idea.

Yup. The entirety of the first 8 years of Bionicle are literally set on/inside the sleeping corpse of the Great Spirit Robot.

just by the bionicle elements:
fire earth water air sand ice magnetism vacuum sonics electricity gravity plasma light darkness

It kinda makes sense why bloodletting was such a common treatment looking at this, after all, a fever makes you hot and sweaty, so that must mean you have too much blood.

>the God lays in the fetal position/had his back shattered by another god, meaning that the land is shaped more like a disk
Wait, so it's shaped like shell of a snail?

It’s the spirals, bruh

not using elements

Always liked the elements in Homestuck, referred to as aspects and still somewhat ambiguous as to what they entail specifically, but the broad strokes are easy enough to decipher.
On the top is Breath, and that entails direction, freedom, and disconnection from the physical.
On the bottom is Blood, and that entails bonds of all kinds, responsibility, and in general connection to reality.
On the left is Space, and that entails (other than space itself) creation, science, and patience.
On the right is Time, and that entails (other than time itself) destruction, red herrings, and unrelenting determination.

Those are the main focal points, but the rest, from left to right, top to bottom are:
Hope, belief and positive emotions
Life, power and movement
Mind, choice and chaos
Light, fortune and information
Void, mystery and irrelivance
Heart, identity and order
Doom, rules and sacrifice
Rage, rejection of faith and negative emotions

Help, I'm trapped by the Curse of the Spiral!