Elemental Overview

Elementals are sentient beings able to wear a body of earth, water, fire or air, the four building blocks of the material world. Their usual home is on the elemental Inner Planes and appear on the material world only when magic calls them. Each must take on a shell of its own element here, and when that shell is destroyed the elemental goes home. The elemental planes hold far mightier and cleverer beings, but the common sort is simplest to reach and so the one most often summoned.

Each of the four common kinds has distinct strengths, weaknesses, attacks and ways of moving, described in the individual entries. What they share is a lack of brains. Their low intelligence makes it hard for them to resist a summons, though even the dimmest knows it hates being pulled from its plane and held on this one.

Their magical nature protects them well on the material world. Nonmagical weapons and magical weapons below +2 cannot harm them, and neither can creatures of fewer than four Hit Dice that lack magical abilities. Such abilities include things like breath weapons, poison, paralysis, or even immunity to normal weapons. A band of orcs, for example, is helpless before a summoned elemental unless someone among them wields a +2 or better weapon.

Like all conjured and extraplanar creatures, elementals are hindered by protection from evil. One cannot strike a creature inside that spell and must recoil from its edge, but it can still harm the protected creature indirectly; a fire elemental might ignite the ground around its target and let the flames creep inward.

A conjurer may use a spell, a device or a staff, and and the method used decides how strong it is. The particular wizard or priest spell used greatly affects its size, and since a conjured elemental stands as many feet tall as it has Hit Dice, the method sets its height as well.

Each caster's use of a given spell, staff or device produces a unique call, and the inhabitants of a plane answer that call only once a day. So one person using one method can bring only one elemental of each type daily; a staff used four times in a day must call all four types once each. The exception is someone using several methods, who can call as many elementals of the same type as methods used. A conjurer with a staff and a device could thus call two earth elementals, but one with two staffs still gets only one of each type a day.

Because the arriving elemental is enraged, the conjurer must stay perfectly still and concentrate fully on controlling it. Any physical or mental distraction means control fails when the elemental arrives. An uncontrolled elemental is called free-willed. With luck, 25% of the time, it simply goes home. The other 75% of the time it attacks its summoner and companions at once, wrecking anything in its path. Lost control can never be regained, and its targets can only defend themselves. Their one comfort is the creature's own misery: being on the material world pains a common elemental, so a free-willed one always returns home once three turns have passed since control slipped, whether or not it has destroyed those who summoned it.

Starting with its second round on this plane, an elemental has a 5% chance each round of breaking free and attacking its summoner. It also becomes free-willed if the controller is wounded, slain or loses concentration. It then attacks the summoner first and destroys every living thing it can reach for three turns before returning to the Inner Planes. Dismissal can send a free-willed elemental home, but works only 50% of the time in this situation.

A properly controlled elemental remains only for the summoning spell's duration and can be directed at a range of 30 yards for each level its summoner has, who may dismiss it once its work is done.

A rival can steal a conjured elemental by casting dispel magic at the controlling magic itself, not at the elemental or its master. The usual dispelling rules apply, except that if the caster rolls a 20, all control is broken and the elemental becomes free-willed.

On success the elemental obeys its new master as if he had summoned it. On failure its hit points jump at once to the full 8 per Hit Die, and the original conjurer's hold strengthens so much that further theft is impossible. The elemental also marks the would-be thief as a threat: if its current controller ever loses control, it goes after the thief first, even before its summoner.