Demons' World ~ A Strange Paradise Called Eden OOC

I'm still here.

I don't remember seeing this. SO I guess I am here now.

It'd be pretty helpful if you could all give me ideas for Demon Elements, outside of the original ones. I am stripping a few away too, because they were a tad esoteric, as someone once told me.

What were the original ones? It's been a while, and I think I was only in this series briefly, in one that never got anywhere.

Fire, Wind, Water, Earth, Light, Shadow, Matter, Space, Dimension, and a few others I can't think of the other ones right now.

The two that have been stricken out are gone, and not sure if I want to keep Dimension.

lightning/electricity would be a good element.

Looking at old threads, I dunno about asserting that full personality archetypes correspond to biological distinctions, assuming those are the primary (meta)physical properties denoted by a demon's element. But thematically, the Western classical elements do have interesting bundles of concepts associated with them.

Here's a possible set of thematic subtypes, arranged roughly along a Shadow - Light axis. Since I jotted them down before noticing some elements had gone up in the OP.

Fire	Wind	Water	Earth
Infernal	Hollowed	Abyssal	Troglodytic
Spirited	Barometric	Tidal	Steeled
Luminescent	Discursive	Cleansed	Jeweled

_
No electromagnetism, unfortunately. Spirit might be close to Lightning: speed, power, (loosely) storms. Although it does appear to lack associations with metal and computation.

A plant like one, or something to do with plants, life, the wild, etc. Unless there are plans for that. Everything else I think of can be put into subtypes or combinations of the stated types already.

So there's earth,fire, wind, and water. The next element would be heart then.

Balufire wrote:

A plant like one, or something to do with plants, life, the wild, etc.  Unless there are plans for that.  Everything else I think of can be put into subtypes or combinations of the stated types already.

A plant one, if following the shadow to light axis that Jazz set up, might look like Fungal, Growth, and Flower (or something). I'm clearly not very good at this. Flower might have to do with natural aromas, mind-altering effects, pheromones, et cetera.

Though I'm not sure what to be going for this time around, I do miss Abasi. He was a bug-like humanoid (scarab to be more precise) and was a poison demon at the time.

Erk, flowers are sex organs. So of course they have fertility and attractiveness going for them. But I hardly see what makes fungi creepy, threatening, or... ah, it's motivation enough, though. Life pretty much covers Heart, kinda sorta, except for most of the 'caring' thing.

Life: Viral - Constricted - Self-Refined

I could use some different adjectives for 'the difficulty of being born into a poor strategic position' and 'the intermediate, yet intricate, yet potent products of evolution'. Mind-altering effects aren't obviously covered here, but Discursive might suit. Communication, manipulative or otherwise, doesn't need to be carried in words.

Picking a form of life or some other concrete entity in addition to a theme might help to define characters. It is interesting that poison clicks with bug, in the abstract, given the diversity of arthropods.

Also, I took a stab at alternate names for the current set of elements so that their referents would have more similar types, for what it's worth.
Am blanking on a god of disease and cursedness, though. And far too many of the ones in the list are Greek.

person-names: Prometheus (or some other fire-stealer), Xuán Wǔ (houses Aquarius, pertains to water), Notus (storm-bringer, destroyer of crops), Hades (or Demeter, or Persephone), ???, Themis (divine justice), Nyx (or Erebus)

event-names: inferno, flood, cyclone, tremor, miasma, judgment, blindness

The idea I had behind fungal was that fungi regularly plays a part in decomposition. And assuming there are aspects of that "element" that a demon could manipulate offensively, perhaps they could have the ability to send out spores into the air with a wide range of effects they could selectively impose upon another. From mind-alteration, have it be breathed into the lungs to restrict their breathing, or even an affect similar to the Ophiocordyceps. Though that may require a powerful demon to perform that sort of action effectively.

As for the character I made, it was yeeeears ago. What went through my mind was basically "holy shit I can make a bug man this is awesome". Naturally I went with poison, because people generally correlate the two with one another, whether it's done unconsciously or not. Would you think that poison demons would fall under "Viral" and its many forms? Or would you say that viral would be a bit too specified?

Though we are making a bunch of elements without Jac's approval, so there's no saying for sure whether all of this is going to pass or not. In that case, Abasi would likely fall under miasma (or miasmic, whichever way you want to look at it).

Hm, shoot, I've not read up on fungi yet. But I don't really associate them with causing malady in a way that other things (poisonous flowering plants, for instance) don't, I guess. Except for hijacking ants, perhaps. By itself, that's interesting, but I do hope that the kind of zombies currently in vogue don't become a thing here.

Fair enough! I figure that Viral means taking someone else's stuff and using it to propagate your thing, which is one kind of poison, whereas Hollowed seems more to do with poisons that merely shut down important physiological pathways.

Still, it's something to do while we wait.

How many elements do we really need, though, before it starts getting overcomplicated?

That's what I was beginning to think. The original selection we had seemed doable enough. Except for Matter, Space, Dimension, and Hatred. We don't talk about those.

Using only a single set of elements would be prudent, of course. I do enjoy the structure imposed by multiple axes. But whatever happens, I should be fine with.

I'm... sure things would go less awry given present company, quite possibly, maybe.

I'd rather more of a "take two and blend, with one more prominent" method, using a smaller pool of elements, myself.

Air Water Earth Fire

Air/Water: Storm
Air/Earth: Poison
Air/Fire: Light
Water/Earth: Wood
Water/Fire: Dark
Earth/Fire: Metal (metal is the other way to get lightning as one of your associations, but storm has more raw force behind it, whereas metal has finer innate control)

Why are their two woods? On of those should be poison, me thinks.

Okay, then one of them can be poison. I couldn't think of much else :p

Earth and water, I would say, should demonstrate some control over life. Wood seems a bit too restricted, whereas control over plant-life, dominance over wildlife and minor healing capabilities would allow for more versatility.

Not sure what to make of the earth + air combo. Doesn't sound like poison, though granted, toxic fumes definitely have something to do with air, but for actual poisons... perhaps as metal has some control over lightning, generally being a storm quality, life could work in conjunction with something else? I don't know. We might have to add another element to the mix to get the spectrum. Earth + air sounds like sand and sandstorms.

Oh, if we're doing primary/secondary elements, perhaps we'd like to characterize them as transitions? This might yield the desired combinations more easily, though I've not tested it out.

Using the five Chinese classical elements - there's a diagram on Wikipedia - the idea is that element(i) generates element(i+1) and overcomes element(i+2), where the elements are water -> wood -> fire -> earth -> metal -> water.

So for any pair of elements (not both the same), we have one of these relationships, possibly reversed. We can then code for growth using water/wood, dessication using wood/water, air using fire/water, and so on.

There's not much one can come up with for air/earth. And that's generally what I use "wood" for, so no problem there.

Air combined with earth sounds like sand to me.

Okay, soooo back! Been doing stuff recently, things have been crazy, but now I can direct attention to this yet again! Quite a few nice ideas I see put forward as well, I will have to look over them carefully.