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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6484004" data-attributes="member: 4937">There isn't much sense arguing the details.  This can be put down simply to the fact that D&D generally, and published settings specifically, have generally spent almost no time and effort into reconciling all their disparate parts and claims.   D&D generally is less coherent as a whole than DC and Marvel comic book universes.  Most everything is handwaved.  Coherent world building is seldom a focus or interest.  Batman and the Flash are on the same team.  Don't inspect or question the setting too closely would appear to be the main guideline.You certainly could have a setting where mining of the elemental Earth is part of long term ongoing operations, but despite claims to the contrary no published D&D setting (I know of) is such a setting.  If it were actually feasible and actually happening, you'd expect a fairly high percentage of mines in the setting to be converted over to mining the elemental plane of earth over the course of the last few thousand years of the average world's history.  But no published setting not even the high magic ones has this as an artifact.   Eberron, which has directionality and coherence most settings lack, conceivably could have such mining as a recent invention, but the rest show its infeasibility by ignoring the possibility outside of guides to the planes.   Given that the default planar cosmology requires that the elemental planes be shared by all possible prime material worlds, it's quite possible that the ongoing mining mentioned in the 3E manual of the planes represents either beings not from the prime material plane or beings from no known published setting aside from Planescape itself.This assumes that when an elemental is conjured, the actual substance transported from the elemental plane to the world is physical as opposed to spiritual.  It's equally possible that the elemental is spiritual and embodies itself in the substance it finds available when it arrives.</blockquote>

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