Dust Elementals - The Desert's First Caretakers

Elementals take our minds back to classic fantastical stories, even beings in science fiction can be made of living air, earth, fire, and water. A hulking figure made of roiling flames and whirling winds can make for a terrifying presence.

It's quite a common thing in these stories that they're only one element. In past posts on this blog, we have seen what kind of creatures can come into being when the elements combine. The contemplative elemental of earth and water watches over the rivers, while the short lives of cloud elementals turn them quickly into storms.

Dust Elementals

Shifting sands are never still - Sand Runner by Gianluca Rolli

In places of the world where arid air, hot with desert sun, meets the endless earth ground fine into sand, there's bound to be dust elementals.

The immense tornado like shape of the air elemental makes up the usual look of the creature. The yellow grey of whipping particles colour the creature. The sand inside its body takes on many shapes, that the creature strongly controls. Huge clumps around the face and limbs give it a readable face and otherwise humanoid expression. Entire chunks of clumped sand spin inside the creature, sometimes keeping whole forms, breaking up and reforming constantly.

These beings are more than air elementals that have picked up the sand. That's common to see in most arid deserts. The elusive sand elemental is made of cascading sand that reshapes and changes its form as it slinks across the dunes.

The dust elemental is the air and the earth together. The sand that brings these elementals into being makes the sand strong inside the whipping winds of the creature's body. The speed and flight of the air elemental is given the immense stern strength of sand clumped together. The sand can be reshaped as the creature wills to move or defend against the strange creatures found in the scrublands and sand wastes it lives.

Dust Elemental Stats generated with Homebrewery

Doom of the Dunes

The dust elemental is often the precursor to immense sandstorms, and exist on the fringes of the desert, in the places where the heat and weather are most extreme. As the heat kicks up hundreds of tonnes into the roiling clouds, the dust elementals swirl around it. Many are born out of such storms as a feedback of elemental energy.

As the storm ebbs and passes, the dust elementals usually remain, wandering the sands looking for whatever may live. They may warden living things through the intense heat, or have every desire to use the speeding winds and sharp particles in their bodies to pick clean the bones of the living and the dead. Personally, there's an ancient dust elemental that wanders the greatest deserts of my world making sure the random cow skulls are bleached white and visible wherever the action is.

Now we want to hear from you. Where would dust elementals appear in settings you GM? They make for an amazing wandering monster, what interesting challenges would they make for your players? Let us know in our discord server and in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, he writes about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out himself. On Youtube, he can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Follow his Twitter @IzzetTinkerer.