Elemental Planes

“Elemental planes” can mean a few related things. Most commonly it refers to the four great domains of Air, Fire, Earth, and Water; some scholars also include the Positive and Negative Energy planes as coequal fundamentals. Older catalogues speak of border-realms between them (para- and quasi-elemental regions like Smoke, Magma, Ooze, Ice, Radiance, Lightning, Minerals, Dust, Steam, Salt, Vacuum), while later cosmologies recount a convulsion that blended much of this strata into a roiling Elemental Chaos. Names and models change; the realities they try to tame do not. What follows is a traveler’s précis of each principal plane—what it is, how it feels, who calls it home, and why the wise prepare before stepping across.

Plane of Air — the endless blue

If one word defines this place, it’s blue—an infinite firmament of sapphire clarity, marbled by cloud-seas, mist shoals, and windborne wreckage. “Ground” is optional: you fall only in the direction you believe is down, and most seasoned travelers learn to will themselves level. The air is not pure; it is patterned with pockets—banks of fog, thunderheads stitched with lightning, streamers of scalding steam, veils of stinging ash, even floating lakes that shear into glittering spray when storms take them. Islands of stone, wood, and wrecked cities drift like archipelagos; many were towed here and anchored by magic or the patient labor of outsiders.

Weather is the chief hazard. Squalls can flower into continent-spanning hurricanes, and the feared maelstroms—torus-shaped, decades-long cyclones—chew sky and stone alike. Within their throats, flight fails, spells misbehave, and speed is life. Near the borders to other influences, the air grows thin toward Vacuum, crackles and storms toward Lightning, ices into glacier-clouds toward Ice, or smokes and suffocates toward Smoke.

Inhabitants & havens. Air elementals range from whisper-eddies to roaring tempests. Djinn build palaces on cloudbergs—the famed Citadel of Ice and Steel among them—and trade in swift travel, curious devices, and stories. Invisible stalkers and other unseen servants hunt or guide by contract; mephits (air, dust, ice) are ubiquitous nuisances and newsmongerers. Wayfarers prize rare refuges like Borealis or the Palace of Tempests, and carefully chart the Waterspout, a stable blue funnel that links this sky-ocean to deeper seas.

Plane of Fire — the world that burns

To arrive unprepared is to die. This plane is flame incarnate: ash skies lit by curtains of orange and white, cinder dunes that shift like surf, and rivers, lakes, and firefalls of liquid conflagration coursing through slopes of ember and coal. Stone softens and creeps like wax; mountains migrate. The atmosphere itself sears lungs and peels metal unless you carry the right protections. Even “cold spots” feel like a noonday desert.

Amid the inferno stands the City of Brass, the best-known refuge: a bowl of gleaming metal floating above obsidian, its towers and minarets shimmering behind heat-wards. The efreet rule here from the Charcoal Palace—dealmakers, slavers, princes of industry and spite—trading with salamanders, azer, mercanes, and any who can pay in craft, slaves, or secrets. Beyond the city, travelers report magma cataracts that birth vortices, and rare groves of flame flowers, plants that drink light and bloom in colors mortal fires cannot mimic.

Inhabitants & lords. Fire elementals sculpt themselves into lions of lava, whirlwinds of sparks, or faceless striders with jetting limbs; salamanders mine and war; azer raise forges and high towers of bronze; mephits (fire, magma, steam) whistle gossip through furnace flues. Great powers of flame claim volcano-realms and wandering pyres; princes of ash, radiance, and smoke gnaw the borders where Fire slouches into Magma, Ash, or Radiance.

Plane of Earth — treasure and tomb

Imagine an infinite mountain: a cosmos of rock, soil, crystal, and metal pressing in from all directions, sleeved with caves and brewed with pressure. Open caverns exist—some natural, some gnawed by elementals or chiselled by miners—but the stone flows over eons, filling voids with slow inevitability. Gravity here is heavier; sound travels keenly through the strata; light is precious, coming only from luminous veins and gems unless you bring your own. Pockets harbor water, air, magma, and worse; breach the wrong one and a mine becomes a funeral.

Near other influences, Earth tells on itself: cohesion sloughs toward Ooze; heat and plastic stone announce Magma; glittering seams swell into the bounty called Minerals; desiccation powders bedrock to Dust. Legends of galaxies of gemstones are true—and the plane defends its riches with quakes, collapses, hungry natives, and possessive overlords.

Inhabitants & holdings. Earth elementals march as angular titans; crystalline crysmals chirr in gem hives; xorn and xaren glide through stone to feed on worked metal; khargra shear steel with jaws of granite. The dao have carved an empire—the Great Dismal Delve—a web of delvings, markets, and slave pits ruled from the Sevenfold Mazework. Rumors speak of vast caverns where winged folk revel in near-weightless air and of citadels perched on mesas inside vacuum pockets, claimed by princes whose names are spoken in a rumble felt more than heard.

Plane of Water — the ocean without a surface

There is no up, no down—only water to every horizon, faintly luminous and alive with currents. Temperatures and salinities vary by region and season; whole biomes drift: berg-forests toward cold, brine-fields toward salt, silty brown lanes toward ooze, steaming thermals toward hidden vents. Reefs are three-dimensional cathedrals of coral and shell; weedy spheres and kelp spindles feed teeming shoals and the monsters that hunt them. Currents are the weather: gentle rivers that carry travelers for days; tidal bores that smash and sweep; whirlpools that tighten into planar throats; stealthy steam flows that boil exposed flesh in a heartbeat.

Inhabitants & courts. Water elementals glide as hard-to-see blurs that mimic fish, serpents, or faceless swimmers; water weirds sometimes ride them like riders on steeds. The proud marids reign from coral palaces such as the Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls, trading pearls and currents for art and stories. Tritons patrol and parley; nereids haunt bright shallows; mephits (water, ice, steam, ooze) make mischief. Almost every aquatic creature known elsewhere eventually washes in: schools of mundane fish; kraken and aboleths in abyssal gulfs; shoals of tojanida; predatory hags near wreck-reefs. Along the borders the plane hardens into Ice, goes brackish toward Salt, grows turbid toward Ooze, or warms to scalding Steam.

Positive Energy — too much of a good thing

Often called the Plane of Life, this is not a paradise so much as an overdose. Picture an infinite sun-bright bloom of vitality: wounds knit at a glance; fatigue burns away; then the tide keeps rising. Cells overfill; thoughts fizz; and a living body bursts into radiance unless shielded. There are calmer eddies where matter can persist—a few are even inhabited—but surges roll without warning. Long exposure can leave curious side effects: gear that won’t stay still, objects that crawl and nip with borrowed life. Strange natives—luminous beings and life-touched outsiders—drift in the glare; constructs fare best, being indifferent to healing or hunger.

For the desperate or the reckless, brief, measured exposure confers astonishing vigor. It does nothing for thirst, starvation, or suffocation—and it feeds disease as surely as it heals tissue.

Negative Energy — the hunger that devours

The Plane of Death is an airless, starless gulf where warmth, motion, light, and breath are stolen the moment they appear. Gravity follows your will; sound dies close to the throat; mundane flames gutter and vanish. In places, the gnawing slackens into doldrums where structures endure and necromancers work; elsewhere the pressure concentrates into absolute black voidstones that erase anything they touch and sometimes jerkily hunt the living.

Here the unliving thrive: wraiths, wights, vampires, liches, and spectres make fastnesses in the doldrums, tapping the plane’s current like divers using air hoses. Scholars argue whether the darkness itself is a substance or a hunger without shape; either way, only the unwary confuse survival here with safety.

Getting there, getting around, getting home

Crossings follow affinities. A perfect column of clean sky might thin into a throat to Air; a mountain’s heart can open a seam to Earth; a caldera’s breath can widen into Fire; the cold, clear reaches of a trench may pour into Water. Ancient gates and well-tended roads exist where empires (or their bones) still stand—djinn sky-lanes between cloud-isles, efreet caravan routes between brass waystations, dao markets in gem-lit caverns, marid causeways threading pearl citadels. In wilder places, vortices, whirlpools, firefalls, maelstroms, and fissures serve as one-way tickets unless you know the return key or can bargain for a guide.

Borderlands matter. Many of the most-traveled “in-betweens” are neither one thing nor the other—ice floes in bright air; smoke seas over glowing basalt; mineral reefs in black water; dust deserts under a no-sun. Cultures have risen in such liminal zones, ferrying caravans and armadas between the elemental powers and growing rich on tolls, salvage, and the sale of safe passage.