Suppose in order to give the feel that your world is slightly more advanced, you wanted the alchemists in your world to be able to "discover" a few extra elements. Not as many as the 92 natural elements of real life, but more than four, at least.
You would also need to retrofit some spells and monsters to use these new elements, or clarify that they've always been associated with them (but this link was unknown for a long time).
Here is a list of what I feel like would work as a simple but expanded list of "modern" elements as found in a steampunk style campaign. Some elements are associated with certain energies, and are actually interchangeable in some ways. This is the breakthrough that made it possible to identify void/electricity as a fifth element. The others took longer to research but their existence neatly accounts for all of reality that's otherwise unexplainable by the first five elements. Only indirect evidence has been found for proof of the "final seven" but given that elementals are known to exist for time, gravity, lightning, positive, and negative energy, it seems logical to accept the existence of law and chaos in elemental form (because order and entropy also arise spontaneously), and perhaps an element of pure neutrality which is neither positive nor negative, but is something else.
Sometimes one can find pockets of concentrated elemental matter deep underground. These veins of pure elemental material continually radiate energy and prolonged exposure without protection or innate energy resistance can be rather dangerous.
The energy radiated taken as damage depends both on the size of the elemental deposit and its purity. A huge but impure mass of elemental ore might deal 1d6 damage per hour, while a handful of highly concentrated material might deal 2d6 or 3d6 points of energy damage per round of unprotected exposure.
Here are the twelve elements, known asociated energies, and the color of light that emanates from a purified sample of the element, if known..
Air/sonic - red
Earth/acid - green
Fire - orange
Water/cold - blue
Void/lightning - violet
Time - ultraviolet (speculative--no reports of physical samples of the so-called 'time element' have ever been collected), nor of remnants of slain time elementals as they are such dangerous creatures)
Gravity - yellow
Positive energy - white
Negative energy - black
Order - brown
Entropy - unknown--reports continue to surface of impossible shades of 'greenish red' (which are *not* perceived as brown) or of a 'yellow blue' that does not look like any real shade of green.
Balance: grey (speculative)
You would also need to retrofit some spells and monsters to use these new elements, or clarify that they've always been associated with them (but this link was unknown for a long time).
Here is a list of what I feel like would work as a simple but expanded list of "modern" elements as found in a steampunk style campaign. Some elements are associated with certain energies, and are actually interchangeable in some ways. This is the breakthrough that made it possible to identify void/electricity as a fifth element. The others took longer to research but their existence neatly accounts for all of reality that's otherwise unexplainable by the first five elements. Only indirect evidence has been found for proof of the "final seven" but given that elementals are known to exist for time, gravity, lightning, positive, and negative energy, it seems logical to accept the existence of law and chaos in elemental form (because order and entropy also arise spontaneously), and perhaps an element of pure neutrality which is neither positive nor negative, but is something else.
Sometimes one can find pockets of concentrated elemental matter deep underground. These veins of pure elemental material continually radiate energy and prolonged exposure without protection or innate energy resistance can be rather dangerous.
The energy radiated taken as damage depends both on the size of the elemental deposit and its purity. A huge but impure mass of elemental ore might deal 1d6 damage per hour, while a handful of highly concentrated material might deal 2d6 or 3d6 points of energy damage per round of unprotected exposure.
Here are the twelve elements, known asociated energies, and the color of light that emanates from a purified sample of the element, if known..
Air/sonic - red
Earth/acid - green
Fire - orange
Water/cold - blue
Void/lightning - violet
Time - ultraviolet (speculative--no reports of physical samples of the so-called 'time element' have ever been collected), nor of remnants of slain time elementals as they are such dangerous creatures)
Gravity - yellow
Positive energy - white
Negative energy - black
Order - brown
Entropy - unknown--reports continue to surface of impossible shades of 'greenish red' (which are *not* perceived as brown) or of a 'yellow blue' that does not look like any real shade of green.
Balance: grey (speculative)
