Brainstorming the Elements

For awhile I've also been working on the flavor associations by element, for the purpose of myself and others brainstorming spices for the inner planes. Here are the associations I've come up with thus far.
Note that SOME of these words lack a consistent definition. I'm going to list off real-life spices (and foods) with the associated flavor so people know what I'm talking about.

*Aromatic: Allspice, Bay Leaf, Cardamom, Cinnamon, Citron peel, Clove, Coriander, Galangal, Ginger, Lavender, Lemon Zest, Malabathrum/Tejpat, Orange Blosom, Pandan, Rose Blossom, Saffron, Yuzu Peel

*Astringent: Black Currant, Pomegranate, some unripe fruits (juices cause the mouth to feel dry)

*Bitter: Camphor, Cubeb Pepper, Hyssop, Penicillium chrysogenum (bread mold), Rue, Zedoary

*Kelpy: Kombu, Wakame

*Metallic: Aspartame, Blood, Prickly Pear (not a desirable flavor to humans)

*Numbing: Long Pepper, Szechuan Pepper, Vietnamese Coriander, Water Pepper

*Pungent: Black/Brown Mustard, Black Pepper, Chives, Garlic, Grains of Paradise, Green Pepper, Horseradish, Long Pepper, Shallot, Wasabi, White Pepper

*Resinous: Basil, Boldo leaf, Caraway, Cumin, Juniper Berry, Lavender, Pine leaf (used by the NW Indians), Pink/Peruvian/Brazilian Pepper, Rosemary, Thyme

*Sour: Amchur, Anardana, Calamondin, Citric Acid, Dock, Kokum, Lemon, Lime, Bitter Orange, Rueberry, Sorrel, Sudachi, Tamarind, Vinegar, Yogurt/Lactic Acid, Yuzu

*Sweet: Allspice, Angelica, Aniseed, Apple, Date, Fennel, Grape/Raisin, Licorice, Pear, Star Anise

Now by element.

Air: Aromatic
Earth: Sweet, Bitter, Metallic
Fire: Hot (chili pepper), Pungent
Ice: Numbing, Minty, Cooling (ethanol, menthol)
Lightning: Numbing, "Bite" (some gourmet quality cheeses covered in Penicullium camemberti/candidum, such as Humboldt Fog)
Magma: Pungent
Mineral: Metallic
Ooze: Bitter, Sour, Resinous
Salt: Salty (duh), Astringent
Smoke: Smoky (including black cardamom)
Water: Kelpy, Sour

Jem, you are not an earth genasi are you?
BTW, its a neat idea to associate flavors vith elements. Of course, I don't know most of the stuff you have, so I don't see myself using them all. But I can see this as another way of making PCs get a different feeling from different planes.

Three of the elemental planes were already touched upon for renovations
Ice – confinement (e.g. putting on ice), non-existance

Actually, there is sortof a renovation project for that-- my Paraplane of Ice topic was meant to be that before I understood what the renovation projects were.
I should probably make a post there about overall personality and behavioral traits of the natives, which can be broken down into two separate sub-themes based on either ice/cold or snow/blizzards.
Oddly enough, these two themes have some opposing traits.
I'll get to that post in Ice in a bit, though I apologize for the convoluted mess that topic has become (I have Asperger's Syndrome, which yes, makes me a bit disorganized. Oddly enough though, I also have OCD, which makes me ridiculously organized and meticulous to pedantic detail. My disorganized/lazy side usually wins out, though.)
The difference between the Elemental Planes and the Outer Planes is that themes are not absolute--
that is to say, while as a general theme, the natives will adhere to certain behavioral traits and patterns, there are those who break this rule, as well. A good example of this is lightning quasielementals vs. shockers, whose behavior is complete opposite. The lightning quasielementals represent more the norm for the plane (energetic, chaotic, swift, hyperactive, passionate) while the shockers represent an exception to the rule (inquisitive, logical, unemotional)
This is as opposed to creatures of the Outer Planes, who absolutely must adhere in some way to the narrow focus of the plane and alignment. For instance, you can't have creatures that are sane, dispassionate, pensive, and well-adjusted indigenous to Pandaemonium. You can most certainly have such beings on the Elemental Plane of Fire however, even though it goes against the general theme that the beings there are passionate and impulsive.

The planes themselves do not represent belief or themes (beyond that used for movement or that found in certain divine realms) because the Elemental Planes represent energy and matter, whereas the Outer Planes represent belief.

One plane that we definitely do NOT need a renovation project on (though perhaps when the renovation projects are finished a summary should be provided) is the Ethereal-- Guide to the Ethereal is pretty damn clear on what the Ethereal's theme is (potential, possibility, and creation), as well that Ptah perfectly represents all these aspects as a power. Ptah is to the Ethereal what the four Elemental Lords are to the Elemental Planes, basically. The only addition one might add is that (my theory anyway) the Ethereal plane has always existed in some form, since Possibility has always been there.
It's probably the one plane that even survives the creation/destruction cycle of the multiverse.
Though Hellbound claims that the Ethereal sprang from the Elemental Planes, this is impossible given what we know of their interaction from Guide to the Ethereal.

As for the Elemental Plane of Wood in eastern settings, I would designate that as an ethereal demiplane with numerous portals to Air (in Japan at least, wood and air are associated with one another with things such as wind blowing dandelion seeds, fallen leaves, fungal spores, and cherry blossoms, as opposed to wood's association with earth in the west.) The "Elemental Plane of Metal" would merely be the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral-- they're prettymuch identical, except that in Japanese culture, metal is associated with both earth and electricity. Which of course poses some problems for the spell lists and associations with Shugenja and Wujen.
The Chinese system of elements poses a further problem since they're arranged much like the Great Wheel, with elemental earth being at the center (with fire opposing water, and metal opposing wood)
I suppose this is one area where belief could possibly alter perceptions of the planes. We do know that on Abeir Toril, belief affects what planes (other than the Ethereal) are coterminous with areas of the Prime.
Then again, perhaps the Celestial Bureaucracy is simply the Kara Turian's perception of the Great Wheel. This does not appear to be the case for the House of Mazca and the other demiplanes, however.

I think the Plane of Wood might be identical to the Plane of Faerie/the Feywild. That seems like a good place for plant elementals to hail from.

The connections between the various planes might be complex enough that more than one map of infinity might be equally accurate. Since you can't go directly from one inner plane to another without a guide, it's impossible to tell if the common conception of the planes is objectively true or merely one possible option.

My reading, as discussed in the "Do the planes need to be infinite?" thread, is that the inner planes are trackless and endless in a linear sense, and elemental guides provide shortcuts through an otherwise unfindable dimension. If the only issue is people wandering in circles, we're left with planes only a few hundred miles across.

Faerie's a demiplane in one of Todd Stewart's late-3e Dragon articles, though there are other possibilities I'll go into later.

Well, you wouldn't, because you're not an elemental. Presumedly. I mean, you might be, I suppose, for all I know.

But I described what I meant better in this post.

Basically, if you travel across the plane in a straight line, it's infinite. You'll never reach the end of the plane. You'll never even reach the next settlement. Not only is the plane infinite, but the distance between any two sites is infinite. But elementals can reach the end of the plane so quickly that, if the plane is simply three-dimensional space as primes understand space, elemental planes are tiny. Tiny, and not infinite at all. And if the only thing unusual about them is that non-natives wander around in circles, then how are they not tiny? Is space is ordinary but disorienting, then inner planes are only a few hundred miles across. If they're more than that, despite the short travel distances, then something is going on with space.

But there is something screwy going on with distance, because it takes longer to travel between any two points inside an elemental plane than it does to travel to the next plane over. Much longer. You're going to take over a month to travel from one point in the interior to another, even when it only takes a few days to completely cross the plane (seeing nothing interesting the whole time). Even for elementals, who we know aren't just running around in circles. Elementals know their way around, and they get weird distance effects, too.

So distance in the inner planes is weird. It's not just that direction is impossible for non-natives to pinpoint. Distance is weird.

Now, there might well be something screwy with direction too. It's very possible that not only do non-natives have to deal with the fact that the space between any two sites or settlements on the plane is, for them, infinite, but that they don't even know what direction to go in. My only interpretation of that is that elementals have their own directions that go beyond the normal three. But sure, it's perfectly possible that non-natives aren't even able to comprehend the normal three. Not strictly necessary to explain anything, so Occam's Razor might suggest dropping that bit, but it's perfectly possible, and reasonable for the reasons you mention.

Anyway, I promised an essay on Faerie.

The influence of Carl Sargent's Monster Mythology (published in 1992) on Planescape shouldn't be underestimated. Many important Planescape deities, such as Ilsensine, Sehanine Moonbow, Gzemnid, the Great Mother, Stillsong, Gorellik, Annam, Psilofyr, and many more were created for this book. The entire Faerie pantheon, or at least the parts that weren't cribbed from Shakespeare and T.H. White, was created for this book as well. And Sargent described the outer planar realms of many of these deities, including the odd Seelie Court that travels through the upper Planes of Chaos, and the gloomy Unseelie Court in the howling depths of Pandemonium. He gave us the first descriptions of both.

But Sargent also mentioned, in the same book, "deep sylvan realms," places in the deep, deep forest where Nature is at its most potent and things work differently, where Time does funny things and everything is more or less how you'd expect, from the legends, that Faerie would be.

And Sargent also gave us, in the From the Ashes boxed set he designed for Greyhawk at about the same time as Monster Mythology, something called Fading Lands. Fading Lands are demiplanes coexistent with the Prime Material Plane instead of the Ethereal Plane. They're otherworldly realms that overlap our own. One of them, the Court of Rings, includes avatars of the Seelie Court hunting about, and it's where the Cat Lord is said to have a bower; you reach it through faerie circles or enchanted wells in the deep woods, and it sounds remarkably like the Seelie Court when it visits the Beastlands. It's not entirely clear if deep sylvan realms are examples of Fading Lands, but they're treated as similar concepts.

Detour, also, to For Faerie, Queen, and Country by Carl Sargent and David "Zeb" Cook, an RPG about an alternate Victorian era in which creatures of Faerie coexist openly with our own world, though some have realms of their own. This was another major influence on Planescape, from the dictionary of underworld cant to the random faerie trait chart that fae-blooded PCs could role on, the obvious precursor of tieflings.

Short detour: "Legacy of the Liosalfar" in Dungeon #42 (1993), in which Faerie was defined as an alternate Material Plane inhabited by good faeries (including elves); evil ones were banished long ago.

Now zoom over to the Forgotten Realms, where elves are said to have migrated to Toril from another world called Faerie.

Zip back to Spelljammer and the adventure Crystal Spheres, which presented us with Faeriespace, a crystal sphere filled with a single massive tree the size of a solar system, from which suns and moons hung like ripe fruits. One could have any number of adventures on those nigh-endless branches without ever realizing the millions of miles of solid wood beneath you. Some of us thought Faeriespace may have been the world of "Faerie" that the elves of Toril migrated from.

Except, zip forward, air rushing behind us until we reach 4th edition and Faerie was explained to be the Feywild, moving back into sync with Toril after its long exile after the Sundering (I guess).

Now back up, eying in a cursory manner the version of Faerie we got in the 3rd edition Manual of the Planes, and the Fey Feature on the WotC webpage. Not really very important except that it gave us a mention of Faerie among the demiplanes listed in Dragon #353.

For good measure, we can look at the Shadow World in the Birthright campaign, a version of Faerie complete with faerie queens and sidhe horribly corrupted by an evil god. A Guide to the Ethereal Plane explained that the Shadow World was a variant Border Ethereal.

Oh, almost forgot. The Planescape anthology Well of Worlds by Colin McComb. In the land of Kellinon, on the Prime Material Plane, people believe in the land of Faerie, where "unnatural" creatures like dwarves, elves, and gnomes come from. Except, as the adventure explains, there's no such place. An elven bard made it up, and people believed it. It's a scam. At least, that's how things are in the land of Kellinon, where the influence of the gods is not felt as strongly as it is on many worlds.

Colin McComb also designed Faraenyl, in the "Planescape reunion" Beyond Countless Doorways, a small plane inhabited by elves and fey and ruled over by the lords of the four seasons.

My point, if I even have a point, is that there are actually many different faerie planes connected to the Planescape multiverse to one degree or another. There's the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, where the fey gods live in the Outer Planes. There are the deep sylvan realms and Fading Lands, including the Court of Rings. There's the false Faerie believed in by the folk of Kellinon and the corrupted Faerie/Border Ethereal Plane that surrounds the world of Aebrynis, where kings rule by right of divine blood. There's the third edition Faerie where celestial and fiendish elves war, which might be an ethereal demiplane. There's Faraenyl, which might also be an ethereal demiplane. There's the Feywild of fourth edition, which is very similar in many ways, and the Faerie of Dungeon #42, which is similar in a few ways.

If the Elemental Plane of Wood is Faerie, then it might be a demiplane, a Fading Realm, it might be Faeriespace or the Feywild or something else.

And the elementals know directions that few can perceive. Perhaps they know how to turn right instead of left, and find relatively unexplored paths and borders similar to the cosmology known to the people of the eastern lands, directions that join the planes of Earth, Water, and Fire to the seldom-remarked-upon planes of Metal and Wood.

Exactly (although we don't actually know if they rank in the billions).

Considering that the largest cities of the Inner Planes are the size of modern day real-life cities, I would say that yes, they rank in the billions (e.g. their population levels are similar to that of modern day humans)

I disagree that the Elemental Plane of Wood would be the Plane of Faery.

^^Because it's the opposite of metal. That is to say, it's the plane of cellulose-containing plant matter (be it alive or dead) just as Metal and Mineral are a plane of metallic elements, compounds, and crystalline minerals.

If you will permit a bit of math. Don't panic! It's not a hard kind.

Topology is the study of things like place, space, directions, shapes, and paths. One of the basic ideas about it is that a "place" doesn't have to be what we normally think of as a place at all. Ever seen a phase diagram for a substance like water? On one axis is temperature, on another axis is pressure. At some temperatures and pressures the substance is solid, at others it's gas, and so forth. You can call each particular choice of temp and pressure a point in a 2-dimensional space, a place. The collection of points where the water is in various phases are just what you would expect them to be, regions with a definite shape and area. If you want to stick a third axis on this, say salinity, you have volume. Volume, area and length are all examples of measure, which is "volume" in various dimensions. Probability is another way of assigning a measure to sets.

Now, what's a path in this space? Well, if your points are temperature and pressure, say (t,p), then increasing the pressure while holding the temperature constant goes from (t,p1) to (t,p2). You go through all the pressures in between, and you get a path. So a path is a set of joined points in the space.

Okay. Elemental planes. They're not really places, are they? The Prime Material plane is made out of places, where the paths are physical directions. The elemental planes are made out of, well, their elements. Maybe a "place" on an elemental plane is a description of one of the infinite array of states that it's possible for that element to be in, and paths between them are state changes. This being Planescape, possible state descriptors probably include things like "happy/sad," "enchantment level," "consciousness factor," "good/evil + law/chaos imbuement," and the like. A native of Air occupying a given nearby collection of "places" is a chunk of Air that has sustainably decided to occupy a few points by being airy in a certain way today. This is the natural way it thinks about place and direction, in terms of states of air-elemental essence and the state shifts between them. When you summon an air elemental to the Prime, it can't get very far from its element, because "far" doesn't make sense to it without reference to its element.

And you're the same way on Air. When you go there, you've been translated, spiritually and/or physically, into elemental air, occupying a particular coherent collection of states. You continue to perceive this as you-shaped, and in a physical place, because that's the way you, a Prime Material native, see directions, but given that you're seeing a different-dimensional state space, this is going to be a fairly limited slice of reality there. If what you see is an approximation of the boundary of a Mandelbrot set, the distance around the edge looks finite, but the better your eyesight, the longer the boundary is, and potentially its infinite. It's not infinite-dimensional, but it's more than 1 and less than 2, and it takes the right perceptions to see. If you can, then there are places where it's zero distance to hop over a gap which a fuzzier sight would see as a cusp that you have to circle around.

By the way, same goes on the Outer Planes. When you're journeying on the Abyss, the way I figure it, you're inhabiting a collection of states of essence of chaotic evil. If you're lawful good, then those states are going to be interfering with each other massively, because the impulses the structure is encoding are at odds with the constituent material (you can write a curse in Celestial, too). Same goes for, say, fire elementals on Air, or intrusions of rock into Air. The animate elemental has an easier time of it, because his structure includes self-repair and sustainability functions, but the rock will eventually wear down, because it's not natural for essence of air to be in rocky sorts of states.

I really, really like Jem's idea. You're not traveling through space, but through an abstract reality where qualities like temperature and moisture level are dimensions as real as height and depth. Going fifty miles "ductile" or "hardness" is as physical a journey as longitude and latitude, if you know how. It doesn't make the elemental planes non-physical. It does the opposite, really. Traveling the planes shouldn't be like traveling through mundane space. It can't be, if they work as described. You're traveling through a metaphysical landscape.

Brilliant, Jem.

But cartesian graphs and calculus are really just descriptions of a series of points, or in the case of calculus, change over time. Both are useful ways of describing distance as a property of the world, but distance has a property all its own that is inherent in the nature of space time. That is, the mere description of space is not space itself any more than the word "space" is a useful proxy for actual space. They are just ways of comprehending that concept and conveying our understanding through sets of information. The graph is not space in itself, and while I can represent space using a Cartesian graph, this does not make all Cartesian graphs representative of space. So, while we can graph hardness and temperature and so on, and use these graphs to describe these properties, they are just a way of visually conveying the different properties of a substance in varying states. Neither of these things really describe space at all, or anything all that analogous to space. At best they describe the properties of a thing that occupies space.

If you don't really relate things in spatial terms, by what principle when I enter the plane of Earth is it determined that my nose is placed in a particular area, and my ears in another? With no spatial reference, presumably the reference becomes based on phase diagrams, which means the phase of any particular part of my body should determine its "location". So my organs with large water content may end up in a radically different part of a plane than my bones because they are matter in different phase states. Beyond that, any differences on the molecular level should have similar results. Am I misunderstanding something about how that would work?

Notice that you're referring to time as a dimension there, which wasn't an idea before Einstein. The distance between objects that you're picturing as a simple geometrical distance in 3 dimensions isn't real. The distance between two events in reality is not in space, but in 4-dimensional spacetime, and it's called the Lorentz metric. If you're okay with including time as a dimension, now imagine this fantasy world where "conscious" and "enchantedness" and "earthiness" are dimensions. That's the Plane of Earth.

Sure, but you can picture something moving around in that space, and that makes perfect sense in terms of the varying state of that system. An engine moves around in a rectangle or circle. The part where we add a fantasy element is where we imagine ourselves saying that this convenient fiction is actually a real place, and we can go there, and actually do the moving around.

Yep. You're worrying about a physical distance when the distance that matters on Earth is one of atomic Earth states. You-ness, in D&D, is probably a very coherent collection of states of elemental Earth. When a spell or a portal moves you to the Plane of Earth, the various states of matter that included you-ness are all very near each other, and importantly, they're connected by short paths -- the various parts of you are points in the state space that are a small distance apart, according to the metric on points in Earth.

And remember Rule Zero. If all this nonsense isn't fun, don't sweat it. :^)

Alex Roberts theorized about an additional dimension of time, which he called "meta-time." A better word would be "mythic time," the dimension in which myths happen, separate from the literal time of history.

Oh! You misunderstood. I was just making a related point. I didn't think you were talking about mythic time.

Yes, that's how I see it, too.

Are you familar with the 2nd edition supplement Chronomancer? Its "Temporal Prime" was a similar idea.

Quantum physics? I don't think anyone mentioned that, or anything like real-world physics.

The Lorentz Metric isn't quantum physics, it's general relativity (quantum physics is about the subatomic scale). And it wasn't in the context of using it in D&D. That spatial stuff doesn't remotely resemble real physics; it's pure fantasy. More than anything, it's like Flatland on acid.

You said something like that in the infinity thread, too, which confused me, since I wasn't thinkiing about real science at all. I basically just summarized the printed rules without venturing much interpretation of my own.

Oh, and in the Oriental cosmology of the elements the directions are consistent: each of the five elements is in a relation with the others. There is a generating cyle (fire produces (as Ash!) and earth yields metal), and an overcoming cycle (wood penetrates earth, and earth absorbs water). So each of the five elements is in a definite direction from the others -- in fact, consistent enough that a wu jen might be able to learn how to travel in those directions.

That was the original basis for the para-elemental planes, back in 1980's Deities & Demigods. Dryness (Dust) was between the Elemental Planes of Air and Fire, because they shared the quality of dryness in common.

Gary Gygax invented the quasielemental planes later on and redesigned the Inner Planes so that they were shaped like a six-sided die instead of a wheel with eight sections. Originally, though, the Elemental Planes were Ice (between Water and Air), Dust (between Air and Fire), Heat (identical to the Plane of Magma, set between Fire and Earth), and Vapor (between Water and Earth).

I could easily give a whack at it, basically the reason that it would be in a 'rigid' or more acurately 'semi-rigid' form is that each plane would be at least a within a certain 'distance' of the 'prime material' as well as the 'temporal prime'. Mind you spatio-temporal physics indicates that time is not just 'past', 'present', and 'future'... it indicates that the past, present and future blend into and effect each-other just like all the points in space do and are just as '3-dimensional'. So basically the 'planes' are simply the closest in terms of the 'magical' dimensional co-ordinates and can be considered to have a limited 'orbit' around the temporal and material primes.

Yeah, I loved City of Brass, but the Plane of Burning Skies (despite how interesting it is) is difficult to encorporate into the canon. Seems like the easiest ways to go about it is either making it an Ethereal Demiplane with numerous portals to Fire, Magma, Smoke, Earth, and Air, or demote it to the rank of Elemental Fire "Sub-Region" and have it consist of overlapping elemental pockets.

Seriously, though, I think the Elemental Pockets idea fixes most (not all-- how would you encorporate the Plane of Wood? Going by Japanese depiction, it would combine positive and air, or possibly positive + air + water.) of the problems earlier addressed. You can sidestep the limited size rules for elemental pockets by simply placing several of the same type of pocket overlapping one another. It also allows the elements to be combined in ways not normally possible, such as earth + air and fire + water.

I think Palomides is suggesting a middle ground, here. The planes are broadly homogeneous, but their configurations are less strictly ordered. So there's a Plane of Fire and it has everything Planescape's Plane of Fire has, and it's probably infinite in some sense, but you can travel directly from there to Earth, Ooze, Wood, Metal, Plastic, or Mineral, and there are unexpected border regions. It's not all one elemental soup, but it's not just 18 planes in a fixed configuration either. It's an unlimited amount of planes in an undefined, shifting configuration.

The advantage to keeping a fixed configuration, I think, would be continuing the Unity of Rings theme you see elsewhere in the multiverse. As Hyena said, you can fit just about anything you can imagine in the traditional rings, justifying unusual combinations with planar bleeds, elemental pockets, and elemental vortices (and let's not forget entropes). What's harder is justifying a cosmos where two civilizations can have entirely different models of the Inner Planes and both be equally correct. It's a little frustrating to say, "Sorry, people of Suhfeng, but your model is just wrong and not as enlightened as they are in Greyhawk. How does it feel to be so ignorant about the true nature of the planes? Clueless berks." It feels like enshrining ethnocentrism.