Elemental Overview [Ravenloft]

Elementals of the misty dread realm resemble ordinary elementals, but they arise from a strange meeting of the realm's mists with the stuff of the elemental planes, and they soak up the land's darkness, gaining a macabre air no other elementals share. When their work is finished there is no home plane waiting for them; the essence that animates them dwells in the mists around the dark domains. As with true elementals, they survive away from the mists only inside a body of material drawn from wherever they are summoned.

They are not clever, but they know perfectly well that they have been torn from their lives and stuffed into a physical shell to serve someone else. That makes them vicious and ill-tempered, and they will try to take revenge on their summoner whenever they can.

Only +2 or better magical weapons harm them, and creatures of fewer than 4 Hit Dice without magical abilities cannot hurt them at all; a mob of goblins without such a weapon is helpless. Because the dread realm is their own plane, protection from evil and similar wards against extraplanar beings do not hold them back, and many spells meant to defeat elementals work differently here, making them doubly hard to beat. Each is immune to attacks that use its own element: a pyre elemental shrugs off fireball, and transmute rock to mud does nothing to a grave elemental.

Wizards conjure elementals in the usual three ways, but the dread realm changes the results. The dark powers of the realm limit planar travel in and out, so any attempt to call an ordinary air, earth, fire or water elemental has a 20% chance of producing one of these elementals instead; if the needed materials are not nearby, the dark powers supply them. An elemental summoned by accident like this is free-willed and furious from the moment it appears.

A caster can also try to call one on purpose, given the right material for its shell, such as soil from a grave or the fire of a funeral pyre. Only a deliberate summoning lets the caster control it, and drawing on the realm this way calls for a dark powers check of 1-5%, depending on what the creature is used for. Otherwise, conjuring works as it does elsewhere.

Controlling any elemental here is harder than elsewhere. Every conjured elemental gets a save vs. spell at -2 to escape control in the round it arrives; if that fails, it gets no further save unless someone new tries to seize it. Accidentally summoned dread elementals are always uncontrolled. Stealing control works normally, except that each successful theft gives the elemental a fresh save at -2 to resist its new master.

A summoned elemental here cannot slip home after a few rounds of fighting (most do so within 3 rounds elsewhere), and dismissal, banishment and similar spells behave differently and rarely send one out of the realm. Trapped, it will do all it can to destroy whoever dragged it there. Even a successfully controlled dread elemental breaks free when the conjuration's duration ends and, unable to leave, becomes free-willed.

An uncontrolled dread elemental spends its first action trying to go home 25% of the time; since escaping the realm is not easy, it fails at once and turns on its creator like the rest. Its goal is to destroy whoever summoned it, because only that frees it from servitude, and it dissipates the moment its conjurer dies. The bond formed at the summoning lets it always know where that person is, so a fleeing summoner is tracked anywhere, through any ward, until one of them is destroyed.