D&D General other possible elements?

[Mind of tempest]

One actual honest suggestion. (I was kidding with the other one)

Light(Life)-Darkness(Soul)
Crystal-Metal
Sound/Music

light and darkness fel both over done and lacking in ways to depict them that do not just go holy and evil respectively.

crystal is too many things from rock to ice.

music is not an element?

 

[Staffan]

Now we just the other three kinds of quarks.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

light and darkness fel both over done and lacking in ways to depict them that do not just go holy and evil respectively.

crystal is too many things from rock to ice.

music is not an element?

I mean, after a fashion, you're going to find that happens with pretty much everything.

Either it's going to be really weird and alien sounding, because it doesn't conform or "isn't an element" or the like, or it's going to be something that has been done to death a zillion times before.

Consider the Principles from Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours. They're intentionally weird and not fully realizable into clean, neat elements. That's the point. They represent the eldritch reality of which our own is merely a thin skin, or perhaps a thin skein.

 

[Ancalagon]

Smoke. In a webnovel called The Butcher of Gadobhra the author spends time developing it as different from prime in fascinating ways, pretty sure that starts in this chapter. TL;DR to get a grasp on a few details that might seem weird when jumping in almost 200 chapters in. The whole thing takes place in a mmo-like virtual world run by an AI a couple hundred years in a mildly dystopian cyberpunkish future & Ozzy is a "contract worker" playing the role of an NPC

Well, if we go by "standard D&D lore", smoke is a paraelemental (quasielemental?). If you look at the mephits, they all correspond to an admixture of 2 elements. Smoke is air and fire.

So it's elemental related, but it's not an "element", since by definition an element is composed of one thing

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

 

[Tonguez]

light and darkness fel both over done and lacking in ways to depict them that do not just go holy and evil respectively.

crystal is too many things from rock to ice.

music is not an element?

Who said music isn't an element? Everything in existence has its unique resonant frequency, created by the spin of its atomic components - The Elemental Spin Doctor, playing the symphony of creation

Darkness - Calm, Rest, Secrets, Concealment

Light - Blinding Exposure, Languid Demise, Desertification

 

[MoonSong]

light and darkness fel both over done and lacking in ways to depict them that do not just go holy and evil respectively.

Yes, they are overdone, but from the binary perspective good/bad. The dark I refer to is the cosmological dark, what we cannot see but that holds time and space together and the material souls are made of. Not merely the absence of light.

And music/sound like @Tonguez mentioned, the comic symphony.

 

[ichabod]

honestly, I am looking for four more options that are not boring fusions of elements I want stranger stuff.
wood is a solid choice, metal is had to make easy, void and such is too alien right now.
anyone go three more?

Wood, Flesh, Fungus, and Spirit.

The thing is, you have to think about the why of the elements. Are they the basic things all matter is made of? Are they basic agents of all action? I did the above four based on the basic building blocks of life. But if you like wood, figure out a why that gives you wood, and then use that why to figure out the other three.

 

[kolya]

Adventure Time elements:
Fire
Ice
Candy
Slime

 

[Hriston]

does anyone know any other options that could add on to water, rock, air and fire that would be great both from old myths and more modern tales?

My choice would be Void.

My default cosmology for D&D, more fully described in this post, follows these five broad categories in descending order:

Fire - The Positive Energy Plane, WIS, (Con), radiant energy/radiance, light, spirit, spiritual fire, this is basically that from which everything else (except Void) is made.​

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Air - The Astral and Outer Planes, INT, (Dex), thought, within this region, the Upper Planes have an affinity with Fire, and the Lower Planes have an affinity with Void.​

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Water - The Ethereal and Elemental Planes, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell, CHA, (Str), emotion/sensation, the Feywild has an affinity with Fire, and the Shadowfell with Void, spirits of the four physical elements (fire, air, water, and earth) mainly reside in the Elemental Planes.​

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Earth - The Material Plane, STR, DEX, CON, (bodies of) the physical elements, physical reality.​

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Void - The Negative Energy Plane, necrotic/necromantic energy, darkness.​