Genies and Aging

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Jem
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Factor
Joined: 2006-05-10
Genies and Aging

So I'm one of those players that loves backstory and associated characters and all that, and I've been playing an air genasi for a while with a djinn grandfather and human grandmother.  My assumption has been that djinn were unaging, and that Granddad would far outlive Grandma and knew it.  However, upon doublechecking with the canon sources I can find, this doesn't seem to be specifically stated, even for elementals!

 

In 3.5, djinn have the Outsider and Air subtypes.  Are they unaging?  Very long-lived?  Has the current Caliph of all Djinn ruled for centuries, or longer?  What about the other genies, and the elementals that populate the plane?  I can only find one oblique clue: the chapter of The Inner Planes, written in the voice of an efreet, refers to humans as "you mortals."

 

I'm going with that for the moment... but does anyone have something canonical?  Is a djinni or elemental ever explicitly stated to be immortial or very long-lived, or is such a character ever given an age category, or what? 

Dunamin's picture
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Offhand, I can't recall a

Offhand, I can't recall a source that explicitly states it, I'm afraid. I've always DM'd games with genies being immortal, though - and now that I think about it, I've probably also assumed the same was true for games I've been a player in.

Classic stories of magic lamps with genies often have them trapped for looong periods of time. Would sort of be anticlimatic to rub such a lamp and get an ancient corpse deposited at your feet. Laughing

Quale's picture
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Joined: 2008-01-11
lolmaybe the lamps provide

lol

maybe the lamps provide some kind of temporal stasis

they do age, very slowly, think it's mentioned in the Vortex of Madness (City of Glass)

  

Azure's picture
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Factol
Joined: 2006-05-17
I think it also depends on

I think it also depends on their power.  The Archomentals are certainly unaging, but they are nearly Powers, anyway.  I always figured Jeenie-races like Efreet and Marid aged, but very slowly.  That way a dm could introduce an old and broken down elemental humanoid npc, but most of them would live for centuries.

Dunamin's picture
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Return Again to the Temple

Return Again to the Temple of Elemental Wrinkles

Now with eroded stone and extinguished fire.

Laughing

ripvanwormer's picture
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I would assume all

I would assume all elementals and outsiders are ageless. Both are spiritual creatures rather than creatures of true flesh.  Fiendish Codex II notes that devils never age unless they're under a curse or the equivalent. I'd make an exception for half-breeds, of course. 

 I admit that the image of an aged and wizened efreeti or djinni has its charms, though. It reminds me of the aged angels in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials. There are always ways  to explain such things other than straight-up aging, but "the genie ruler has been around since the beginning of time, and in strange eons even immortals may get wrinkles" works as well. Xanxost in Faces of Evil says something like, "We don't know if fiends are immortal or not. Put one in a prison until the end of time and if it's still around then, we'll know it was." 

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