A Political History of the Elemental Planes

Preamble

Elementals are hard to figure out.
Unlike say a goblin, dragon or demon it's not obvious what drives them or what their function is in the world.
I had a bit of an epiphany when I was perusing some d&d wikis when I came across something interesting.

From the Forgotten Realm Wiki’s page on the government of the Plane of Ice:

The Plane of Ice was unique among the Para-Elemental Planes in that it had a powerful archomental desiring to establish his realm with the full status of a major Elemental Plane. Lord Cryonax longed for ice to be considered the fifth element and wanted the borders of his realm to be the Para-Elemental Planes of Slush and Snow.

Now this was interesting. I’d always seen the elemental planes as something stable, something constant, something primordial (Something, dare I say…elemental).

But if what I read is to be believed then an elemental plane doesn’t mean what we thought it meant. It's a political status, not unlike ‘global superpower’ or ‘empire’. Like the sight of an iceberg with it’s tip peeking over the water, this implies a whole deeper side to elemental politics waiting to hit us in the starboard.

And that’s the purpose of elementals.

Elementals exist to give a political personality to primal forces.
Geological activity is political activity.
The elemental is political.

To that end I’ve written an alternative history of the elemental planes.

In the Beginning

The gods had forms of pure thought.

The gods had a wish to make worlds.

The gods had a problem.

While the likes of beauty, piety and justice are all fine things, you can’t make a planet out of them, much less a person. And so the gods decreed that there be matter, so they might make worlds and shape them to their liking.

Several of the greatest of the gods ventured into the void and expended great effort to create elemental planes. Each plane held a unique form of matter and all its multitudinous varieties. (The exact number of original planes is politically contentious.)

Meanwhile another group of gods created the Nexus, a means by which matter could be brought from the elemental planes to their own worlds. Today the Nexus looks like something between a violent storm and a black hole. The elemental planes are constantly spilling into it, swirling around and disappearing off into the worlds beyond. If you’ve ever heard someone describing the planes as ‘elemental chaos’ they were probably talking about that part.

If a god wanted to create a planet they would call up a great mass of rock from the plane of earth, fill its oceans from the plane of water, grab an atmosphere from the plane of air and then draw from the plane of fire to light up the heavens. (Wizards perform a lesser version of this when they throw fireballs or conjure up a pitcher of water.)

After eons of work only one step remained: unite the elemental planes together around the Nexus and let the elements flow.

This is where it all went wrong.

Calamity

First supersonic winds tore across the lands as the Plane of Air decompressed.
Floods followed behind it as the Plane of Water spilled out across the lands.
The Plane of Earth discovered what geological activity meant.
There was reportedly once a Plane of Wood next to the Plane of Fire, in the spot where the Plane of Ash sits today.

It was only some last minute dimensional re-engineering that stopped the planes from completely collapsing in on themselves. Although to this day the planes remain riddled with little enclaves: great lakes in the Plane of Earth and floating mountains in the Plane of Air.

Now you might think the gods, wise as they are, should have seen this coming but keep in mind that matter was a new invention at the point and the gods hadn’t considered that the elements might react with one another.

Although the elemental planes were a mess by this point, there were some upsides to all this chaos.
At the borders of the planes where elements merged and mixed, new substances were formed. The palette of the gods would now be much broader, even if the paint was smeared all over the place.

The Nexus and the Rise of the Elementals

After eons of delays the planes grew somewhat stable and the gods grew somewhat impatient.

And so the Nexus was finally opened to all and the creation of worlds could finally begin.

Immediately a whole new set of problems emerged.

The first problem was demand. All types of matter were created in equal proportion but not all matter was equally desired. Precious metals, perfumed winds and rejuvenating waters were being drained rapidly while duller and deadlier elements were gathering dust (dust was also in very low demand you see).

Reportedly a draconic deity managed to get in early and now sleeps happily on a planet sized hoard of gold.

Soon the remaining high-demand elements became trapped behind a surplus of unwanted mud and seawater.

The gods had to spend another eon or so establishing a complex pricing/rationing system among themselves. This, incidentally, is why wizards can’t just conjure up wealth for themselves, the effort and time needed to conjure up gold is often more difficult than just mining it out of the ground.

But while the Gods were hammering out their matter market, another problem was taking hold. Things were finding their way back into the elemental planes.

The Nexus had always been envisioned as a portal from the elemental planes to our worlds. But portals work both ways.

Life, a recent invention who’s talent at invading new ecosystems was as yet unknown, started creeping its way into the elemental planes.

This proved a great annoyance. Someone would summon up a pitcher of water only to find an angry crustacean inside. A great many monsters can trace their origin to planer cross contamination of this sort.

But a more troublesome thing was seeping into the elemental planes.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned elementals yet.
This is because elementals are not native to the elemental planes.
The planes were places of base matter.
Life, thought and sentience were foreign to the planes.   

But souls seeped in from the worlds of the gods and, finding nowhere suitable to reincarnate, made due with elemental bodies.

Elementals emerged in many forms.
Some intelligent and some animalistic.
Some mighty and some meager.
Some microscopic and some colossal.
All were problems.

The elemental planes were already enough of a mess without its elements standing up and walking about. It was time for the elemental planes to become the elemental polities.

The Rise of the Genies

Gods create.

They do not oversee, supervise or micromanage.

This sort of work is unbecoming of a divine being.

Not to mention tedious...

So the gods delegated.

They went looking among the elementals for noble souls with the wisdom, prudence and might needed to command their lesser kin. To these elementals they granted great power and the right to rule over the elemental planes.

They became known as the genies and were tasked with bringing order to the elemental planes.
This went about as well as you’d expect by this point.

While genies did indeed have plenty of wisdom, prudence and might they also had no shortage of all the other traits common in aristocracy: a strong sense of self-importance, a contempt for those beneath them and an appreciation for the finer things in life.

While in retrospect, assigning the status of demigod to the smartest looking lump of granite might not seem like the best solution, understand that the concept of royalty was also very new at this stage and many gods were still quite proud of inventing it.

Inevitably the ‘order’ the genies chose to impose was focused squarely on their own enrichment, and so the elemental  planes became a series of despotic principalities. Most of the elemental distinctions we know today derive from genie efforts to unify or divide elementals into factions. Ancient genie rivalries and alliances are why fire and brimstone are such close associates and why oil and water don’t mix.

All this intra-elemental conflict has given rise to a plethora of ideologies.

This is about the level of accuracy you can expect from diagrams of the elemental planes. The reality is much more geographically and politically complex. 

D12 Polemicist Elementals you can Regret Summoning:

1. Genieist Smoke Elemental: Firmly maintains the divine-right of genies except genies they don’t like who are illegitimate pretenders.
2. Gold Elemental-Supremacist:  Believes in the natural supremacy of their own very specific material. Constantly questioning the purity of others of its kind. Disgusted by alloys.
3. Traditionalist Basalt Elemental: Believes in living as a stationary thoughtless rock unless it needs to preach to others about the joys of a traditional life, which it does often.
4. Technocratic Uranium Elemental: Believes the elemental planes should be reorganized according to a logical scientific basis. If they had their way the planes would look like a periodic table.
5. Jingoist Fire Elemental: Unapologetic about every crime committed in the name of fire. Denies the wood elemental genocide.
6. Fifth-Planist Ice Elemental: Believes ice should be recognised as the fifth element.  Had convoluted reasons for refusing to extend this status to mud, ash or magma.
7. Pan-Earthist Sandstone Elemental: We can only become strong by putting aside our differences, even minerals that react explosively with one another. Solidarity among the solids!
8. Egalitarian Saltwater Elemental: Believes in the natural equality of all elementals. Politely but frequently reminds you no to use terms like ‘precious metal’ or ‘noble gas’.
9. Pedantic Ash Elemental: Very knowledgeable on the latest political happenings, very eager to share. “Actually the Confederacy of Cinders declared independence from the Plane of Ash, which you should actually be calling the United Republics of Ash, Dust, Slag and outlying Grit territories…”
10. Honorary Steam Elemental: Due to some aggressive territorial claims on the part of a particular djinn, this chilly fog sometimes shows up when you summon a piping hot steam elemental.
11. Energetic Exclusionist Topaz Elemental: Believes the likes of fire and lightning are completely illegitimate elements. Not even real matter.
12. Organism-Inclusivist Ooze Elemental: Believes that since you’re composed of elements, you too are an elemental. Pushes you hard for your opinions. Wants to know how your blood and bones get on so well together.