Hey everyone,

I’ve been revisiting the Elemental Planes lately—Air, Earth, Fire, and Water—and realizing how often they get glossed over as simple “terrain with a theme.” But there’s so much more potential here, both in lore and in gameplay.

For example:

The Plane of Fire isn't just lava and salamanders—it’s home to the City of Brass, a massive, decadent metropolis of genie politics, infernal markets, and ancient contracts. That place is practically Planescape meets Dune if you run it right.

The Plane of Air could be this surreal, endless sky of floating cities, cloud fortresses, and semi-sentient weather patterns. Imagine skywhales, glass spires drifting on wind currents, or hurricane cults.

The Plane of Water might be the most alien of all—no “up,” no “down,” just pressure gradients, abyssal trenches, and whole nations that can only be reached by folding space or navigating currents like stargates.

And the Plane of Earth—sure, it’s solid and slow, but that makes it ripe for claustrophobic exploration, buried empires, or ore-singing dwarves who’ve lived without sunlight for a thousand generations.

I’d love to hear how you use the Elemental Planes in your campaigns. Do you go classic with them, or twist expectations? Ever blended planes (like a Water-Air borderland of constant storms)? Created planar NPCs that aren’t genies? Got ideas for planar-themed dungeons, societies, or relics?

>>95860950 (OP)
Each of my 'seven worlds' in my spherejammer campaign has a different balance of elemental energies. It's not exactly for elemental planes, but it's similarish.

(Each plane is stacked on top of one another like a plate of pancakes, with the astral punching a hole through the center like a fork.

Tir'Seras is Air and Earth. It's a bunch of floating crystals, flying islands and distorted gravity, full of elves and flying islands.
Cthull Volem is mostly Water, and it's effectively an infinite ocean. While it has a 'surface', it's also a hollow sphere, gravity pushing away from the single 'sun' in its center.
The Underdark (named so as a joke to reference the duergar being all over the place) is a hellscape of earth and negative energy. The higher up you go, the less hospitable it gets, to the point where the surface of it is a wasteland full of undead. The sun there isn't just a sun- it's a gate to the plane of negative energy, radiating damage to the living. Everything on this plane raises from the dead.
Edelgard is a perfect balance of all four elements. It's the basic idyllic land the party is from.
Shadar Kul is Earth and Divine energy. It's a frozen wasteland, and the orcs who live here develop their own tulpa-style artificial gods that grant them magical abilities.
Balsidhe is marshy land of Water, Fire, and Positive energy. It's also pure black. No sun, wind, or rain whatsoever, except for sparks of positive energy that gathers like an aurora and rains down. It's also a deathworld because everything is poisonous and grows to extreme sizes. The only moisture is found welling upwards from the oceans, and that's mostly taken up by pools of primordial ooze, fungi forests, or algae. Many plants 'catch' the positive energy 'starfall' and slowly absorb it, becoming bioluminescent.
Alishqatar was Fire, Earth, and... something else. But now it's been shattered. So now you've got a dozen little desert, sand-filled mini-planes accessible by rifts.

>>95860950 (OP)
>>95861505
How did your last session go? How did these things impact the game?

>>95861661
Last session, our weather mage was able to use his magic to throw together a 'baleful eye' storm, which is one of the weathers on the Underdark's surface. It was still technically one of the environmental effects from that world, so he had access to it. Melted away a slew of elves that were attacking, since they'd prepared for his normal lightning spam.

>>95860950 (OP)
I unironically like the IDEA of what 4e did with its elemental planes.

>put that pitchfork down, I can explain.

A lot of what each D&D edition does is a response to the previous edition and criticism of it. An issue that would come up in 3e play was that there were several official settings, each of which had a convoluted set of planar dynamics. They'd have a full detailed breakdown of how the leg bone's connected to the knee bone, but for the planes. Elemental planes got detailed, autistically so.
The upside is that if you needed info on how some planar shit worked, it was written up.
The downside is that it was often boring as hell. OK, the elemental demiplane of ash is... endlessly falling through a dimly lit dense cloud of ash.

4e said "most of the planes are shit as adventure fodder, and since the game is about going on adventures, let's fix that". The end result was the Elemental Chaos, a plane created by crashing all the elemental planes together. That means you can have a floating rock that spews magma in the middle of an ashy tornado without Melvyn saying
>Um, there shouldn't be any magma in the demiplane of ash unless someone's created a permanent Gate... that's a lot of expenditure just to do that. Whomever performed this must have had a purpose, we must study it!

Now I am not opposed to any GM writing an autistically detailed setup for how anything in their setting works. You wanna go ham on the loretism, go ahead. Create planes for alignment-element overlaps if your setting needs it. Have the plane of Lawful Water and the plane of Chaotic Water if you think they should exist.

But the default, stock, "nobody wants to think too hard" option being the Big Melting Pot of Elemental Stuff is better.

>>95862046
See, the way I explain having other elements in the plane of X is that everything in existence is a combination of elements. So for anything to be solid, you need a little bit of Earth - even something like a Fire crystal has a tiny, tiny smidge of earth to create its binding form. Otherwise it would just be pure Fire. So once you have that established it makes obvious sense to have gravelly slopes in the volcano plane, islands dotting the water plane, or breathable air practically everywhere.

>>95860950 (OP)
I feel Pathfinder did an OK job fleshing out its elemental planes to have different environments that you could feasible adventure in, like the plane of air has flying cities populated by genies, air elementals, and cloud giants, flying ships for transport, and chunks of matter that bleed in from the other planes that form little planetoids. Or how the plane of earth has everything from claustrophobic tunnels to caverns large enough to house entire civilisations.
Though you still run into the same issue all planes outside the prime material have, where it's very unlikely for players to actually end up going there over the course of your typical adventure, seeing as most of the time you're just going to be in the prime material plane. Maybe if the main antagonistic of a campaign is one of the evil elemental lords the climax of the campaign might involve going to its plane to confront it directly, but in most cases the average low- to mid-level adventure group has little reason or means to take a trip to the plane of fire or whatever.

The adventure I'm running eventually leads to a plane that is connected to the City of Brass itself. Instead of being inside of the Plane of Fire outright, the city borders it. And the plane itself is triangular in shape as shown in the image, bordering also the Plane of Earth and Air. Together creating the Plane of Molten Skies.

It's a really dangerous place all on its own, the closer you get to one of the adjoining planes the more varied the danger becomes. Sandstorms so powerful they might tear you apart, dangerous avalanches and volcanic rock being spewed forth. And the rest of the plane has everything from desolate black sand desert, a forest made entirely of steel, but also more habitable plains with strange plant life.

So they could actually get to those other three planes with relative ease from here. It's just very dangerous compared to doing it via planar teleportation.

Oh and the Plane of Molten Skies is growing, with every material plane that gets conquered a piece of it merges.

>>95861684
Nice. I presume that it wrapped up quickly after that?

>>95860950 (OP)
thanks for the utterly banal and highly-rehashed ideas. did you use AI to generate these? I certainly hope you didn't come up with them with your own brain, for your sake.

Here are your four elements.

>>95869905
The fight? Yeah. It was kind of funny, because the corpses started to get up and it was a whole separate fight afterwards. A much easier one, though.

As far as the campaign, it's on constant hold right now, since a buddy had to deal with work and we're still trying to arrange stuff.

>>95861684
What game are you using?

>>95874850
Pathfinder 1e, with a focus on the Spheres of Magic/Spheres of Power splats. When one of my players decided on a Tempestarii, I decided to put extra focus on the weather systems of various worlds and gave him an opportunity to take homebrew talents for each weather he's able to experience to a certain degree.

>>95860950 (OP)
They do well for a quick dip and then you're out-type of thing, just like other things in planescape, since you're dealing with such wild but ultimately one-dimensional ideas.

Storm giants making a play to bring down a Noble djinn's city would be fun.

>>95860950 (OP)
I’d like to see planes for elements outside of the Fire, Water, Earth, and Air quartet more. For instance, what would a plane of Light look like, or a plane of Darkness, besides going with the boring option and just having blinding light for the former or blackness for the latter (or copying the Shadowfell), to say nothing of their inhabitants? As an example, I was thinking that the Light plane could be filled with crystals acting like prisms, scattering light in various hues, with creatures that mirror the appearance of the viewer, though I have fewer ideas for the Darkness plane, what say you on this, and what planes like this do you have in your own settings and campaigns?

>>95861684
>Underdark
>surface
What? The? Fuck?
The Underdark has no surface. It's literally subterranean. It also has no storms, because it has no sky.

>>95877039
>>95877243
>>95877342
>>95877482
>>95877953
kill yourself bumpfag

>>95877997
As mentioned, my players called it the Underdark as a joke, because when they first got there they were underground and were fighting a bunch of duergar. It's not the literal Forgotten Realms Underdark.

>>95878374
Don't lump me in with him!

>>95877953
I'd like to see you jump off a bridge, but sadly we can't all get what we want.

>>95872581
You're welcome!
Yes, the opening post was generated using AI, as I simply wanted to discuss elementals/see ideas about elemental planes.
but here's an original idea
>what if the Plane of Water actually had liquids of all kinds?
>everything is "water," everything is liquid. >rivers of broth and tears, translucent liquid bones, waterfalls made of the very concept of banality
it's where we got the Fountain of Youth. Someone opened a portal to the Plane of Water, and some youth poured out.

wrong picture

>>95880717
wait wait wait, did you actually fucking ask AI to gen the text of your OP as well as the image, or am I misreading?
if that's the case - please, stop using this shit and think for yourself.

>>95877953
Even the Forgotten Realms has a lot of planes outside of the primary four, or six since the Positive/Negative planes are in the same group.

Plame of Magma for fire/earth
Plane of Ooze for earth/water
Plane of Ice for water/air
Plane of Smoke for air/fire

Then there's quasi-elemental planes where they meet the positive and negative planes. Radiance, Minerals, Lightning, and Steam for positive. Then Salt, Dust, Ash and Vacuum for negative.

>>95861505
>But now it's been shattered.
What shattered it?

>>95880831
If he had two brain cells to rub together he wouldn't have spent the past 5 years spamming /tg/ with retarded questions trying to get people to think for him.

What prompts did you use for for your art in this thread?

>>95884770
>>95890925
You realize you're doing nothing for the thread, right?

I'm one of the people who have followed your inane questions and answered them in the past, but I stopped specifically because you never actually interact. You ask one-off questions and never follow up on the details. You might think you're doing something good for the thread or community, but what you're actually doing is disincentivizing people from responding to people taking actual interest in what they're talking about.

>>95861505
>spherejammer
I've never heard of this, what system does it use? And how do the party members travel between the layers?

>>95860950 (OP)
We get it, you were molested as a kid. Stop making that everyone else's problem.

>>95890961
There's no point, people have said this to him time and time again. He doesn't want to engage, he wants fixation-flavoured (you)s. More like an empty golem than a person.

The REAL people your should be direction reasonable complaints to are the fat arsed prolapse cunts that run this place aka jannies.

>>95895750
It's a joke about Spelljammer and a combination of Spheres, as in Spheres of Power.

It's a Pathfinder 1e game with a focus on the Spheres of Power, Might, and Guile splatbooks.

The primary way to get from one layer to the next is through 'Weirgates', which are large portals to the Astral plane set in the 'center' of each world. In the past the peoples of each world built fortifications or structures to access these weirgates, even though some of them are far underground and others are high up.

There are also elemental portals that go to most worlds, more common or more obvious for worlds with more or less focus on that element. In many cases, the sun is a gate to the Elemental Plane of Fire, while the dwarves built a bunch of what they call Blackroads, which lead from the Underdark through the Plane of Earth to most other worlds, to start up a kind of underground black market. (Though in Shadar Kul it leads to the celestial realm and gets your ass kicked by angels at the Solaris Gate.).

The party originally had to use the weirgates to navigate the worlds until they got locked down by the elven empire (who are conquering everything), they had to shift to Darkroads and Elemental Portals. They've been piecing together the legendary Spherejammer, which was built by Gnomes (alien to this world) who came here to avoid the Blight that destroyed their old world. Now that they found most of the parts, they have free access to each world. They're doing their best to fight off the elves, face against the Blight, and avoid getting murked by the Last Drow, an ancient lich from the surface of the world the party jokingly calls the 'Underdark'.

>>95902809
>in Shadar Kul it leads to the celestial realm
The sun, I mean.

There's also a bunch of infernal gates in the cracks between fragments of Alishqatar. Since it's mostly uninhabitable, most Alish cities need a powerful patron who can summon water or food... which means devils and genies.

>>95902809
That's a nice epic campaign. What level is your party?

>The downside is that it was often boring as hell. OK, the elemental demiplane of ash is... endlessly falling through a dimly lit dense cloud of ash
Except the elemental planes actually were very interesting with unique locations as detailed in the Planescape setting. And the alignment-based planes were just stuffed with neat adventure locales. The problem is that most players and GMs never read Planescape and the 3E Manual of the Planes was terrible.

>>95902809
>the Last Drow, an ancient lich from the surface of the world
Okay, I'm interested, what does the Last Drow want?

Where are the quasi and semi elemental planes

>>95910690
A typo. It's the *quasit* elemental planes. Planes populated entirely by elementally-aligned quasits.
One of the more secret weapons of the blood war between the lower planes.

>>95910789
>quasit
Huh, I've actually never heard of these before. If the elemental variants actually exist, what are their stats?

>>95915714
Could you elaborate on that?

>>95861505
I like the Underdark and Balsidhe.

>>95916046
Yes.

>>95918213
What else can you elaborate on, aside from what we've already covered?

>>95920015
I can elaborate upon many things, Ed Boy.

>>95860950 (OP)
>https://dumpstatadventures.com/the-gm-is-always-right/the-planes-plane-of-air

>>95920186
Many doors to the planes, yes?

>>95925880
What am I looking at here?

>>95860950 (OP)
What game?

>>95933480
What?

>>95860950 (OP)
>https://www.thegamer.com/dungeons-dragons-dnd-best-random-encounters-elemental-planes/