Elemental setting

 

While Gal Hadre is the primary setting that I have thought about over the years, it is hardly the only setting I have considered.  While the idea I am going to describe below has never been named, it has received a reasonable amount of thought.

It’s focus is elementalism, or more specifically elementally modified races.  These exist for humans in some fantasy settings, pathfinder in particular has at least 5 covering shadow, fire, water, earth and air.  However there are no equivalents for even other core fantasy races.  This seemed like a shame as earth dwarves or air elves and the like seemed like interesting ideas to explore.  It will be important to carefully balance adding elemental aspects to the races while not losing what makes them elves or gnomes.

 

 

As far as I can tell there are 7 potential elements to use in this setting, shadow, earth, fire, air, water, metal and wood.  Eight if you want to consider ice as separate from water.  Now it would be complete chaos if you wanted to detail every combination of core races and these elemental options so picking a few options for each race at least initially would make life far easier.

Now you will need an event or twist of the setting that causes so many elementally modified sub-races.  Perhaps the original settlers of the world were forced to flee from elsewhere by way of elemental planes, and some or all of them were modified by the journey.  Another option is to have the material plane and the elemental planes be unusually close, perhaps even overlapping in places, maybe raw elemental magic leaks or leaked into the material world in some places.  Exposure to this raw elemental magic would then be the catalyst for transformation.

 

 

The next thing you will have to consider is if the setting still has the base versions of the races that have elemental versions.  I lean towards having both, as you can then explore how the unmodified races react to their elemental sub-races.  Different races would probably react in different ways, I doubt dwarves or elves would be super keen on the concept while orcs would probably simply see the power gained.  It would also be important to consider if the various sub-races live together or are generally geographically separated; I would generally lean towards the latter.

Starting with Dwarves, earth is an obvious choice, probably followed by fire and metal.  Earth dwarves would probably mostly live underground and if anything be even better stone-masons than standard dwarves, their modifications could be stone-like skin, inherent stone shaping or affinity to earth magic.  Fire Dwarves would heighten dwarven' smithing skill to levels previously not thought possible outside of minimal numbers of highly skilled mages, they may also have a connection to lava and magma.  Racial modifiers to certain crafting skills or inherent low level fire magic seem like the easiest options.  Metal dwarves seem like the most martially inclined option and could make an interesting take on a very warlike dwarven society.  Metal skin seems kind of silly, so perhaps an ability to temporarily modify the hardness of metals or inherent metal shaping would make the most sense.  Now it may also be logical for one less obvious choice to add to the first three.  Personally I would favour water, but shadow could also be very interesting.

 

 

For Elves wood seems like the most obvious option followed by air and shadow.  Non-elemental wood elves are a common grouping of elves, so the elemental version is a logical progression.  Very nature aligned, they would likely have racial stealth bonuses in anything forest related.  Maybe the ability to move through natural terrain without being slowed by difficult terrain.  Air elves would build on the stereotype that elves are graceful and agile but not particularly strong or tough and heighten that; bonuses to movement or flight seem like the logical way to go.  Perhaps air elves would be linked to cloud giants and live on magical cloud fortresses.  Shadow elves have been done incredibly well in Malazan book of the fallen, though there they kind of also were wood elves in that setting.  Shadow elves seem like they should produce the finest assassins.  

Orcs would likely be fire and wood, maybe earth.  Fire resistance seems like it would be super-useful for a warlike race such as orcs.  Wood ties them to nature more and perhaps has them link with more wild or evil druid factions.  Earth orcs might live mostly underground and fight various dwarven sub-races in epic conflicts completely unknown to most of the surface world.  As a less obvious idea consider water orcs that are coastal raiders, like vikings.  Have them live in an island group or across a sea from the main continent and launch frequent raids.

  

I am not sure if elemental halflings make sense but probably the most logical two would be earth and water.  Having abilities linked to making food grow better would fit into a lot of ideas of how halflings fit into settings.

Shadow would make a great deal of sense for gnomes and play up their trickster nature, perhaps they would have minor shadow or light manipulation abilities.  They could be excellent entertainers or spies.  Metal would fit into their tinker aspects, perhaps a mend-like ability?  This group of gnomes would likely be nomadic (or would that be gnomadic in this case?), travelling around to offer their services to many.

  

Now just because I have written a bunch about an entire setting based around this concept does mean you need an entire setting centered around it.  You could instead choose to only add one or two parts, like fire dwarves and air elves.  Or you could even have only a handful of NPCs who were transformed for some reason from their normal version.

Hopefully this post gave you some ideas of ways you can spice up a setting, even if only to add some interesting NPCs for your players to encounter.