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Frank Mentzer saw their potential and used four of them-Imix, Ogremoch, Olhydra, and Yan-C-Bin-in the RPGA adventure The Egg of the Phoenix (1982), later collected as part of the TSR adventure module Egg of the Phoenix (1987).
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This idea was made explicit with the Elemental Princes of Evil, an original set of elemental monsters by Lewis Pulsipher that first appeared in the Fiend Folio (1981). Instead, elemental adventures occurred when the elemental planes intruded on the material plane. The elemental planes were seen as a dangerous and inhospitable place, so adventurers didn’t go there. Author Jeff Grubb even got to stat up the missing quasielementals in Dragon 125 (September 1987) and Dragon 128 (December 1987).Įlemental monsters like those that appeared in original D&D, the Monster Manual, and Dragon magazine were the height of elemental adventuring in the 1970s and 1980s. That book devoted nearly forty pages to the eighteen Inner Planes, including the paraelemental and quasielemental planes.
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Jeff Grubb then produced a final supplement to Gygax’s primordial elements in Manual of the Planes (1987). The elemental planes as imagined by Gary Gygax for AD&D had reached their ultimate form. The book also reprinted the lightning-based quasielemental.
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Later that year, Monster Manual II (1983) revealed a complete set of paraelementals, though three of the names were changed: a smoke elemental rose from the dust plane, a magma elemental rose from the heat plane, and an ooze elemental rose from the vapor plane. The positive side of things contained lightning (near air), steam (near water), radiance (near fire), and mineral (near earth), while the negative side included vacuum (near air), salts (near water), ash (near fire), and dust (near earth). There were thus eight quasielemental planes. The brand-new quasielemental planes lay between the traditional elemental planes and the two energy planes-which Swycaffer had replaced with good and evil in his own model. Swycaffer’s elemental globe had become an elemental cube, with the elemental planes and paraelemental planes around the middle, the positive material plane at the top, and the negative material plane at the bottom. It started in April with the publication of the adventure The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror (1983), which featured a new monster called the lightning quasielemental, said to inhabit “the Elemental Plane of Air and the Positive Material Plane.” Gygax explained the expanded elemental cosmology more fully in Dragon 73 (May 1983), published around the same time.
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Three years later, the elemental planes grew again. Now four paraelemental planes lay between the various elemental planes: ice between air and water dust between air and fire heat between fire and earth and vapor between earth and water. In Dragon 32 (December 1979), Gygax said that he also had been thinking about the elemental “borderlands.” He revealed the results in Deities & Demigods (1980), which contained the first official expansion of the elemental planes. Though Swycaffer’s elemental planes were totally unofficial, Gygax liked the idea. Finally, he added four planes between good and the elements-beginning, fertility, light, and pleasure-and four planes that lay between evil and the elements-barren, darkness, ending, and pain. Then he added two new planes lying above and below the elemental planes: good and evil. First, he introduced four new elements-cold, dry, hot, and moist-each of which lay between two of the existing elements. In Dragon 27 (July 1979), Swycaffer suggested a complex set of eighteen planes. Meanwhile, over in Dragon magazine, author Jefferson Swycaffer was contemplating other possibilities. The Great Wheel was officially incorporated into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the Player’s Handbook (1978). Gygax didn’t provide many details, but it was a first look at a cosmic conception. In issue 8 (July 1977), he laid out an entire “Great Wheel” that included “the ultra-pure Elemental Planes of air, fire, earth and water.” Those four “Inner Planes” existed alongside the material plane and the almost-elemental positive and negative material planes. However, these elementals only became part of something larger when Gary Gygax introduced a cosmology for Dungeons & Dragons in Dragon magazine. Princes of the Apocalypse marks D&D’s latest delve into the world of the elements-a constant presence within the game since its inception.Īir, earth, fire, and water elementals are as old as the D&D game, appearing in the original Dungeons & Dragons rules (1974). The elemental planes have long been a source of adventure in Dungeons & Dragons.