Ice Elementals - The Savage Cold that Grows with the Freeze
/I honestly love Elementals. As a creature type, they're so evocative and imposing. A being made of immense hulking shapes of air, earth, fire, or water is a constant and present threat in both fantasy and science fiction. In most tabletop role playing games, they're animated by immense and powerful magic or come from their own realm.
In past articles, I've explored some truly unique elemental monsters. In Dungeons and Dragons, most elementals exist as other forms of the four cardinal elements. I mixed together the elemental pairs to make six strange things, some of them twice over.
I also know that some of the elements have very different forms. Sometimes the air is dense and heavy with other gases that people cannot breathe, and sometimes water freezes.
Ice Elementals
Ice is one of the most abundant and strange materials on most worlds. Scientists still don't really know why it's slippery. The water that a person thinks is on the surface could not have been melted off when a person walks on it or from the much warmer air around it. Ice is very strange, so a being made of ice is just as distorting and dangerous.
The freeze can take all that it wants - Embodiment of Spring by Wayne Reynolds
The hulking white/blue figure of the ice elemental is a common sight in the coasts and tundras of most worlds. The jagged, uneven shapes of spikes and icicles lope around as crunching snow in its joints and constantly dripping limbs trail across the wilderness.
Ice Elemental Stats generated with Homebrewery
Ice expands when it freezes, one of the few substances in existence that does. As an ice elemental seeks out more and more water to freeze and take into its body, it grows as it does so. As it takes in more water, the ice extrudes out into its body, making it taller or bulkier, growing extra limbs or better senses. It may be able to keep some of the water in looser crystals inside its body to hurl as a projectile, like a shard or in harsh winds. No two ice elementals are the same.
There is an unexpected benefit of this constant freezing and taking in water; it makes them very resilient. By plunging a limb into a pool or by simply taking water vapour out of the atmosphere, the elemental can quickly heal a lot of the injuries that have befallen it.
The Frost Bites Back
Ice elementals are a common blight for those living in arctic conditions. Sometimes in places where water is abundant and the temperatures are low, elemental water can freeze into an ice elemental, making them very common underground or on mountain peaks.
Now we want to hear from you. Where would ice elementals appear in games you GM? What other elements do you seek to fight, or hope to avoid fighting? 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.
