Glass Elementals - Walking Shards of Magical Destruction
/The base elements; air, earth, fire, and water, make up a lot of the world according to alchemists. Elementals are living beings made up of living air, earth, fire, water. It's common for twisting beings made of flames or loping giants made of twisting earthen hilltops to be seen striding the wild, magical places of your Dungeons and Dragons setting. But what if those elements were to mix? It's unlikely for an elemental hybrid to exist, but why should that be unlikely?
We've discussed at length what certain elemental hybrids could be like. The mixture of earth and water makes a slow moving guardian of river deltas, while the mixture of air and fire is a destructive, pyroclastic force. I said we'd covered every elemental pair, but sike, there was another pair. Rather, another way to imagine the most interesting pair.
Glass Elementals
When you think of the pair of elemental fire and earth, minds go to the inside of roiling, active volcanoes. They see magma spewing over the earth, and people falling about scalded by the immense heat from the bowels of the earth. But what about when actual fire meets elemental earth; fine, raw earth in the form of sand.
The looming shape, made of shards of deep black glass - Glass Golem by Glen Angus
Certain kinds of sand under intense heat fuses into glass. This happens naturally in places of the most extreme heat, and has been used to make glass across many civilised places in Dungeons and Dragons.
Glass Elemental Stats Generated with Homebrewery
Beings made of living elemental glass resemble Earth Elementals closer than most other beings. They're humanoid shaped stacks of dirty black glass shards, stacked over each other. The intense sound of grinding and crunching sounds as they move. Loose sand yet to be smelted seeps from gaps in their form while their joints are held together with intense heat smelting the glass as it breaks down. The elemental has full tactile control of all the glass in its form, be it the immense shards that make up its body, or the tiniest, needle shaped splinters it launches when provoked.
Raw, natural glass like this is tough compared to the clear material most windows are made from. This makes Glass Elementals incredibly sturdy. They're still incredibly prone to shattering, but far less so than traditional clear glass. What makes them interesting is the properties of the glass itself. Natural glass already has properties that make them valuable to those who make crystal, and people who study minerals. Glass from these elementals are also suffused with raw magical energy. Elemental glass makes for an essential reagent in many potions and magical implements.
Glass Half Full of Adventure
In places of elemental magic or turbulent weather, the glass elemental wanders, as well as the conjuration of mages who seek to bind them into service, good and ill. A glass elemental can be a true threat for any band of adventurers who cross them. Hunting one down to harvest its magical glass for research and craft purposes has been a time honoured tradition for Adventurers Guilds across many worlds.
Now we want to hear from you. How would you use glass elementals in your game? Are there other elements you can think of animating into a wandering monster? Let us know in our discord server or 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.
