Sunday, April 6, 2014

Micro-elementals

If coterminous or external elemental planes don't appeal to you, here's another idea that takes them in a different direction than the standard view or my previous posts. If we take the classical view that the four elements are the fundamental consituents of all matter, then (as science fantasy has told us at least since Ray Cummings' The Girl in the Golden Atom in 1919) there may very well be worlds inside those tiny particles. Elemental worlds.


Like Microworld, yeah, except that unlike its organic chemistry model look, elemental microworlds look like the platonic solids just like Plato told us they would. 


Maybe the world is on the interior of these shapes or maybe on their strangely-angled surfaces. Either way, they would be pretty weird places. Of course, this also may mean that elementals are microscope--even atomic level things. An elemental summoning would actually be growing a fractional bit of element to macroscopic size. The fact that size creatures have (rudimentary) intelligence might suggest that these microplanes themselves are intelligent. The implications of that, I'll leave you to contemplate.

7 comments:

garrisonjames said...

Nice alternative approach. This could be a lot of fun to explore, given the right preparations and so forth. It always seem to come down to angles, doesn't it?

Gothridge Manor said...

Interesting concept. I really dig the DNA strand of the universe. I can definitely get on board with intelligent microplanes. I just wrote a short adventure that combined that very concept with a little Irish mythology mixed in.

The Angry Lurker said...

My head hurts....sorry!

Chris C. said...

Very cool. They could even be smaller than atoms like Leibniz's monads (though maybe "pentads" since there are five of them?): "True substances were explained as metaphysical points which, Leibniz asserted, are both real and exact — mathematical points being exact but not real and physical ones being real but not exact." ("Monadology" in Wikipedia)

Timothy S. Brannan said...

I totally love that graphic.

I'll need to use that somewhere!

satyre said...

Nano-elementals? Hmmm...

Trey said...

It's elementals all the way down.