I thought up a new use for air elementals. Lets imagine the PCs are in a spaceship, and pirates blast a hole in the hull and air rushes out. A The PCs can't get to the locker where their spacesuits are kept, and unless they do something right away, they are going to die. So a spellcaster in the group casts Summon Monster IV, he casts it a few more times for other party members, and the each party member gets inside his or her designated air elemental, and the air rushes completely out of the ship. the spell caster commands each air elemental to follow each character they contain wherever they go for the duration of the spell. So would this work. I note that a water elemental can exist outside a body of water, so could an air elemental exist in a vacuum, could characters use these creatures to stay alive is a spaceship loses its air?
Maybe, but wouldn't Air Bubble be 3 levels lower, a longer duration (minutes instead of rounds) and guaranteed to work?
avr wrote: Maybe, but wouldn't Air Bubble be 3 levels lower, a longer duration (minutes instead of rounds) and guaranteed to work? Nothing pressurized I don't think. Then again how are you going to get "inside" an air elemental?
|
2 people marked this as a favorite.
|
Steven "Troll" O'Neal wrote: avr wrote: Maybe, but wouldn't Air Bubble be 3 levels lower, a longer duration (minutes instead of rounds) and guaranteed to work? Nothing pressurized I don't think. Then again how are you going to get "inside" an air elemental? You could start by offering to buy it dinner.
Air elementals aren't ethereal, so they are made of solid air. Even then, outsiders need to breathe.
the David wrote: Air elementals aren't ethereal, so they are made of solid air. Even then, outsiders need to breathe. Air isn't a solid, it is a gas, if it were solid, it would be a mixture of frozen nitrogen and frozen oxygen and very cold!
Tom Kalbfus wrote: the David wrote: Air elementals aren't ethereal, so they are made of solid air. Even then, outsiders need to breathe. Is air ethereal? how do you walk through air?
Air isn't a solid, it is a gas, if it were solid, it would be a mixture of frozen nitrogen and frozen oxygen and very cold!
Tom Kalbfus wrote: Tom Kalbfus wrote: the David wrote: Air elementals aren't ethereal, so they are made of solid air. Even then, outsiders need to breathe. Is air ethereal? how do you walk through air?
Air isn't a solid, it is a gas, if it were solid, it would be a mixture of frozen nitrogen and frozen oxygen and very cold! I know air is a gas. It's just that air elementals aren't a gas. They don't have a Gaseous Form, they are not Ethereal or Incorporeal, they don't have an Engulf ability (This would make a cool toxic cloud elemental though.), they don't get dispersed by Gust of Wind but are effected normally and they don't even get the ability to squeeze through tiny spaces. There is no way to get inside an air elemental.
I was wrong about the breathing though. Elementals don't breath, unlike regular outsiders.
So maybe I'm thinking of a Dungeons and Dragons Air Elemental, they look like little tornadoes. When I'm thinking of air elementals, I am thinking of something made of air, air is something that you can breathe, if it is solid, you can't breathe it and it isn't air. Air elementals look something like this in my mind anyway. It looks gaseous to me, doesn't look solid.
Tom Kalbfus wrote: So maybe I'm thinking of a Dungeons and Dragons Air Elemental, they look like little tornadoes. When I'm thinking of air elementals, I am thinking of something made of air, air is something that you can breathe, if it is solid, you can't breathe it and it isn't air. Air elementals look something like this in my mind anyway. It looks gaseous to me, doesn't look solid. Well, they are mostly cloud-like. Cloud is water vapor, and you can't really breathe the stuff.
I've been in cloud before and did not drown or suffocate. Anyway if it was 100% water vapor and no air, it wouldn't really be an air elemental now would it! There are water elementals after all, and air elementals are not them. It also seems to me we have elements of a life support system for starships if we have access to the inner planes, more than that. Open up a gate to the elemental plane of fire and you have a rocket engine that never runs out of fuel! Open up a gate to the plane of air, and there is the atmosphere you need to breath, access to the plane of water provides limitless water for flushing your toilet into space.
In Pathfinder - and I believe the bestiaries are meant to be largely compatible with Starfinder - air elementals are explicitly able to have different forms. Tornado-like ones do exist, but there are also animal-like air elementals (and, presumably, other shapes).
GM Rednal wrote: In Pathfinder - and I believe the bestiaries are meant to be largely compatible with Starfinder - air elementals are explicitly able to have different forms. Tornado-like ones do exist, but there are also animal-like air elementals (and, presumably, other shapes). So a tornado like one would be the one you want, so long as you stay within the eye of the tornado, you won't get hurt, might make it hard to grab stuff though with this swirling vortex all around you! So what do you think, if a character goes out into space, does he use a space suit or a magic spell?
how ever they present in the game, the rules are clear in that there is no way to get inside an elemental and if you could every breath you take would be consuming the body of the elemental. Basically it is thematically sound but needs a house rule to actually work like that.
and as others have said you would still need to account for other hazards of space such as freezing and burning at the same time and the whole pressure issue.
How about my other ideas for an Elemental Rocket engine or the elemental flush toilet?
i mean, in theory any summoning or creation spell could supply you with free reaction mass...
That's the simplest way to get a maneuver drive similar to the one used in Traveller, instead of inventing some technobabble just use magic, if you used fire from the elemental plane of fire it would look like a rocket engine, it would have valves and everything so you could turn it on and off. People would see a pillar of fire, and would just assume it was a fusion drive or some other standard rocket engine until you get into the details of how it worked.
Yeah the stat block of an air elemental does not make you think creature that is a gas. This is probably cause it was grandfathered in but I wonder if their is any after the fact fluff describing why an air elemental stats block makes them seem solid.
Fire elementals should probably be gas or plasma like too.
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
Torbyne wrote: i mean, in theory any summoning or creation spell could supply you with free reaction mass... Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
Vidmaster7 wrote: Yeah the stat block of an air elemental does not make you think creature that is a gas. This is probably cause it was grandfathered in but I wonder if their is any after the fact fluff describing why an air elemental stats block makes them seem solid.
Fire elementals should probably be gas or plasma like too.
Maybe the term "Air Elemental" is what makes me think it is made out of air, a water elemental makes me think of a blob of water that moves around, something I can swim in perhaps, something that can travel through pipes and come out of a Fawcett. A fire elemental is a living flame, the only thing that is solid is an Earth elemental, that is the image of elementals that I have, it has been that way since the early days of Dungeons and Dragons.
Yeah and they tend to look like just globes of their elements you would think you could swim in a water elemental. I think its just something taken from older editions and just not updated or intentionally kept that way for nostalgia.
How do you know its an air elemental then, if it appears solid?
If you stab an air elemental, it takes hit point damage and potentially dies.
I can't imagine shoving a human into one would be any better for its health.
Don't you need a magic weapon to do that?
I imagine a large part of it is the desire that elementals of the same size be the same CR. If a small earth elemental is a CR 1 pile of HP that punches things a small air elemental needs to be pretty similar if it is also going to be CR 1.
If the air elemental can only be injured by magic weapons, it is going to have to be a higher CR than the earth elemental. Not to say it couldn't be, but I suspect there was a decision taken that the elementals should be equally powerful.
So basically there is no body if you kill an air elemental, if it is made out of air, if should disintergrate if you kill it and their will be nothing left that players can grab. I don't know what kind of treasure it would have, I think probably it would have no treasure, no coin, and if you kill it, it turns back into air and there is nothing left!
Tom Kalbfus wrote: So basically there is no body if you kill an air elemental, if it is made out of air, if should disintergrate if you kill it and their will be nothing left that players can grab. I don't know what kind of treasure it would have, I think probably it would have no treasure, no coin, and if you kill it, it turns back into air and there is nothing left! Probably not, no. I don't imagine many elementals get summoned to the prime with their personal loot stashes, or that they have any reason to care about such things.
That said, I'm not sure why it would be relevant. Most elementals are off-plane temporarily through summon monster or trapped longer through planar binding. In the latter case, they might be forced to guard someone else's stuff.
Pathfinder Starfinder Society Subscriber
Tom Kalbfus wrote: Don't you need a magic weapon to do that? A magic weapon actually doesn't help against elementals. The damage reduction ranges from non-existent to DR 10/-.
Recent threads in Starfinder General Discussion
|
