Blog Bandwagon: Elements Edition
Your guide to catching up on a deluge of blog posts from a single day
I issued the challenge to my fellow bloggers to blog something inspired by the loose prompt “elements” all on the same day, which is supposedly the “Periodic Table Day”. As with prior Blog Bandwagons, many took up the challenge, producing more posts than your average post-enjoyer could reasonably enjoy in a single day. So consider this your guide to all the element posts for your perusal (I did my best to try to capture all of the posts, but if I missed yours, it is my negligence, please point it out to me!). At the end, I will also tell you what inspired this blog bandwagon!
Everything Changed When the Fire Nation Posted
Prismatic Wasteland: Control Weather Should Not Be a Spell (see excerpt below—this post also includes a new class, the Tempestarius, for OSE and standard D&D vernacular systems).
“Control Weather should be a whole field of magic. … it clearly is just a package of several effects each of which could be its own spell. It is 8th level only because it is a bundle of spell effects, but each of Rain, Stop Rain, Cold Wave, Heat Wave, Tornado, Stop Tornado, Deep Clouds, and Clear Sky could be their own lower-level spells. … For those who defend the bundled version of this field of magic, you should actually be even less happy with D&D’s spell list than I am because most other spells are not bundled. Why have so many spells that summon fire in various shapes when you could just have the spell “Control Fire”? Same for “Control Air” or “Control Earth”. You’re telling me that there are 1,001 spells for controlling elements but only 1 spell for controlling THE elements? Why have so many spells that create illusions when you could just have the spell “Manipulate Senses”? If creating these bundles makes more sense to you than unbundling Control Weather, you have much more work ahead of you than I do to consolidate the 500 or so known spells of D&D into a small handful of 8th level bundles.”
5 Million Worlds: The Matter Wars: Superstructures (describing a futuristic war over one of the two resources humanity cannot produce more of: matter).
A Billiam Banock for Every System: Thundermare (statting up an elemental horse made of thunder).
Among Cats and Books: Against the Elements (inventing a system for adding seasonally appropriate natural disasters to your game).
Binary Star: Valiant Horizon, Magic, Nature, and the Elements (explaining the origins of the four elemental types of magus in Valiant Horizon).
Blog of Forlorn Encystment: On Elemental Damage (diving deeply into the five elemental damage types from D&D).
Bommyknocker Press: Blogpost Bandwagon: Elements (describing three magic items that, among other things, are capable of boiling water).
Cats Have No Lord: The Stormseeker - A Cairn Background (introducing a Cairn 2e background that would feel at home in the movie Twister).
dungeon doll: The Elemental Plane(t)s (turning the planets of our solar system into the elemental planes).
Elf-wise: Alchemical Oozes (describing a oozy puzzle monster in system-neutral, fiction-first terms).
Farmer Gadda’s TTRPG Hobby: Lava Sea Shoreline - A Vanilla Biome for the Nether Hexcrawl (Lava is an element; I’m counting it, Gadda).
Idraluna Archives: Lunar Climate Simulations (simulating weather on the moon [I love lunar fantasy]).
Knight at the Opera: Rivers & Lakes: a Tabletop Fighting Game (Beta) (releasing a fully playable and free beta version of a forthcoming wuxia tactics game, Rivers & Lakes. In a series of posts all launched on the same day, the author describes the background behind the release, three key aspects [including the elements], and a post about better tactical crunch).
LootLootLore: 1d20 Elemental perk for the fighter. Bandwagon time (cataloging different buffs for fighters based on different elements).
Magnolia Keep: Periodic Table Day: The Rock Lords (detailing the spawn of the High Elemental of Stone, the Rock Lords).
Personable Thoughts: Elements of Alchemy: A Blackjack solution (using playing cards and common blackjack mechanics to develop mechanics for alchemy).
Playful Void: Five Not-Boring Elementals (making elementals more interesting by adding subjective fantasy-cultural flavoring).
Ramming the Dungeon: Make your elements weird! (laying out a step-by-step process for introducing a weirder set of elements for your setting, like those featured in Adventure Time or Zelda).
semitext games: Surviving the Elements (making overland travel more nuanced and engaging by adding more challenges for players).
The Novel Game Master: Chewing Gravel - Roleplaying Traits for Elemental PCs (giving personality traits to elemental characters depending on which plane from which they hale).
Wayspell: 1d60 Wasteland NPC names (joining the bandwagon by explaining the impossibility of writing about dystopic cyberpunk with all the actual dystopia going on around us. Too bad, I want to hear about the radiation golem!).
Weird Wonder: Found in Nature, Wrought by Wizards (narrating the relations between tower academics, the elements they attempt to catalog, and their true nature).
Why Elements?
In the waning months of 2024, Josh of the Rise Up Comus blog tweeted the following (this was before the CEO of Twitter did Nazi salutes and went about dismantling our government—I will just be posting the text of the tweet rather than linking to it):
“Humans subscribe to a "4 elements" theory. The Underfolk (dwarves, halflings, etc.) think this paradigm is too simplistic; air cannot be used in crafts—to think of it as an element is ignorant. They have advanced it with the 6 element theory: water, fire, wood, stone, bronze, iron”
In my humble discord server which, if nothing else, has become a hive of scum and blogging, this sparked a small conversation. I am just going to highlight some of it. Some quotes are omitted, some are truncated; I’m just giving you a flavor.
Rise Up Comus: I was amazed the people in the comments that were like AIR IS SO AN ELEMENT IT IS SO IT IS SO like they were trying to impress Plato himself
Magnolia Keep: Man like...different cultures have different conceptions of base elements. The Chinese throw Metal in there. And also DWARVES AREN’T REAL.
Prismatic Wasteland: Dwarves are real. They’re one for the five elements.
Knight at the Opera: Alright so obviously anyone seriously criticizing fake fantasy dwarven natural philosophy is being silly. But I am a little alarmed at how many of those responses are citing fake ancient Greek natural philosophy in their counterarguments. Like, do they not know that air also isn't an element in real life??
Playful Void: I like “bronze isn’t an element because it’s made up of other things”. Sweetie let me introduce you to chemistry
This continued. Nova of the Playful Void blog even bleeted about it, sparking even more thoughts about elements. Are “blogs” an element? Since everyone was thinking about elements anyway, I proposed that this be our next blog bandwagon. Simple enough. The topic arrived and a date was set. And now here you are with 20 or so tabs open and a lot of reading to do. Get to it!