Types of Elemental Magick in Fantasy

[Steelinghades]

The thread is actually rather simple, what is all the kinds of elements you can think of to make up Elemental magic in fantasy? For example, everyone probably knows things like Fire and earth, but what else can you think of? For example, from Naruto There's things like Vacuum, Ice and Wood, but what else?

[Jub]

There's the main 6 that are common in the RPG genre:

Fire
Ice/Water
Earth
Wind
Light/Holy
Dark/Unholy

You can add in:

Water/Ice
Lightning/Electricity
Gravity
Life/Healing
Steel/Technology
Poison
Unlife/Harm
Psychic (mind reading/Illusions)
Time (Haste/Slow)

You could also add in any Pokemon type not alredy used above though you may find that some types are covered by combinations of the above. I would also add that you can gain a fair bit by picking a limited number of base elements and using combinations to create your other effects. It's easier for most people to understand the 4 classical elements, the six main elements listed above, etc. than to learn a complex system with many distinct base magical elements that may or may not mix. Of course it could be that magic is far from solved and as new ideas are introduced new elements are found and that could make for a very cool magical science type setting.

I think the main thing to figure out is what do people in your setting believe to be the essence of things they cannot otherwise explain; this could also be less a lack of understanding and more of a divine mandate if there are living gods that interact with the world in your setting. Some settings will have technomancy while others will have magic and technology in opposition, in other settings life and unlife magic may be the same thing just used in a different way, in yet another magic may vary by nation and which tradition and magic user follows.

[madd0ct0r]

Bamboo
Reed
Vine
Clay
Charcoal
Sand
Shell
Horn
Bone
Silk
Hemp
Resin, rubber

Copper, tin, brass and bronze

For human magic to take, the object must be shaped by human hands. The more effort and steps away from nature the material the better.

[Jub]

For human magic to take, the object must be shaped by human hands. The more effort and steps away from nature the material the better.

This gave me an idea for types of magic based on how you access it rather than what it does. So a setting might have magic of movement expressed through dance or complex hand gestures, the magic of spoken word expressed through song, poetry, or chant, the magic of the body expressed via excellent physical conditioning and made manifest by tattoos and piercings, the magic of the mind all silent meditation and still calm thoughts; you could add anything else you like to this and give them all unique strengths and weaknesses.

[Lord Revan]

I'd use Fire, Water, Air, Earth as the "basic" elements with (magical)energy, Void/Nothingness, life and death being a secondary set and you could also add holy and unholy to that secondary set as well. How those elements are manipulated depends on how the magic system works and there doesn't have to be just one way, for example a wizard might use magical energy to manipulate/create the basic elements while a druid/shaman/priest would call upon pre-existing magical spirits or deities to perform their manipulations.

[Formless]

Aether is the traditional fifth element in the west, dating back to ancient Greece. It may sound like a modern invention of the fantasy genre, but it isn't. A variant would be Luminiferous Aether, which was still speculated to exist in the 19'th century as the medium of light (before its existence was falsified by one of its true believers, ironically).

In China you had wood and steel as two of the five elements. The chinese system did not include air or aether like the western system did.

In Japan the four traditional elements of the west are the same, but the fifth element is "Void". However, while western RPGs understand it in terms of negative energy or physical nothingness, it was actually understood in Bhuddist terms, as in the state of No Mind that certain forms of Bhuddist meditation attempts to achieve. So its a more abstract, metaphysical element than its normally portrayed as.

D&D and Final Fantasy effectively make electricity its own element. Because it has its own damage type, you could argue that D&D treats acid as an element as well. But D&D is a bit schizo about the treatment of the elements. Sometimes acid is treated as a subtype of the element of Water (just look at the Wu Jen spell list).

If your fantasy story does a lot with ghosts and undead, ectoplasm is a good one, if a bit bordering on the science fictional or new age side of things.

[mr friendly guy]

We could use the "elements" from Versatile mage/ full time mage.

Its a Chinese webnovel so its interesting take on some of the elements. For example Ice is separate from water even though we know in RL they are the same chemical composition.

Lightning is also separate from air (D &D puts them together) and separate from Fire (MTG and Avatar puts them together). Lava attacks counts as fire (Avatar puts it with earth).

https://versatile-mage.fandom.com/wiki/Elements

Main element types - earth, fire, ice, lightning, water, wind and also Light
High tier elements - blessing, chaos, curse, healing, plant, poison, shadow, sound, psychic, summon, undead, space/void

Some of these would fit perhaps more in school of magic rather than elements per se.

Shadow rather than darkness runs counter to light.

Summon deals with summoning living creatures, while undead deals with summoning, well undead.

Space has telekinesis and teleportation.

Psychic is telepathic attacks. Sound gives superhearing and sonic attacks. Like psychic attacks it aims to disrupt a mage casting their spells.

Blessing acts as a buff for other mages, ie the support role in RPGs.

Chaos is a weird one. Its generally seems to disrupt how intuitive things behave, for example it can reflect spells, can reverse gravity (pulling up a creature from the sea so it can't hide in the water), and combine with space element you have these weird dimensional area where the directions are wrong, so shooting something in a person's direction causes it to go further away etc.

[madd0ct0r]

On the Stos Valley Pokémon like experiment I used the seven types of energy in positive and negative forms:
https://amp.reddit.com/r/StosValley/com ... _the_game/

Light/shadow
Sound/silence
Heat/cold
Nuclear increase decrease
Electron increase decrease ect

You could shift from one related power to another - eg sound heat and kinetic are all interlated.

[Starglider]

Obviously the canonical set of elements are those present in the Skylanders games:

[madd0ct0r]

The carpet people has the more unusal set of:
grit, sugar, bronze, varnish, wood, hairs and dust

Three unusual ones in malifaux:
Grave golems - huge walking mounds of graveyards
Whiskey golem - easiest way to transport barrel
Addiction elemental

Give. It's steampunk wild west, you can see why those are key elements for the setting.