"whatever types of dirt, stones, precious metals, and gems it was conjured from"

[RoboEmperor]

Earth Elementals: "When summoned to the Material Plane, an earth elemental consists of whatever types of dirt, stones, precious metals, and gems it was conjured from."

What the hell does that mean? I thought if you summon a monster, it just appears out of thin air. What is this "conjured from" mean? Do you target something when you summon Earth Elementals? But Summon Monster does not have a target. Does the Earth Elemental suck up a Huge monster's worth of dirt and stuff from the ground and create a Huge sized hole? Does this mean you can't summon an Earth Elemental if you're standing on a plane of force? What is this???? How does this work?

Reason I ask is, I like metal not dirt so I want my elementals to look like robots not a treant's best friend. Is a tiny amount of the stuff enough like a pebble or do I need to haul around a Huge sized statue worth of obsidian/jade/marble/precious metals?

[Anymage]

It's a holdover from 2e that they never quite got around to clearing up. Back then, Summon Elemental was its own spell.

There are two ways to go about this. The first is to assume that the earth elemental is formed out of whatever substance the ground is made out of. Doesn't make a hole, any more than summoning a fire elemental requires a nearby fire or puts one out, but it does imprint on whatever happens to be nearby. The second, assuming that the player doesn't try to justify anything foolish like trying to farm gemstone elementals, is to treat the line like the 2e-ism about how stacking extradimensional spaces in general is bad, and ignore it.

[Silly Name]

You don't create summoned monsters out of thin air. Instead, you summon them to you, from wherever they normally are found. So, when you summon an elemental, you're calling them from their respective elemental plane. In the case of Earth Elementals, they're formed from the minerals, dirt and gems that the Elemental Plane of Earth is made out of.

As for how your summoned earth elementals actually look, I would say that you can make them look whatever you want (as long as it makes sense, and the GM is ok with it).

[RoboEmperor]

It's a holdover from 2e that they never quite got around to clearing up. Back then, Summon Elemental was its own spell.

There are two ways to go about this. The first is to assume that the earth elemental is formed out of whatever substance the ground is made out of. Doesn't make a hole, any more than summoning a fire elemental requires a nearby fire or puts one out, but it does imprint on whatever happens to be nearby. The second, assuming that the player doesn't try to justify anything foolish like trying to farm gemstone elementals, is to treat the line like the 2e-ism about how stacking extradimensional spaces in general is bad, and ignore it.

So what happens if the ground is a plane of force? Like from a permanencied Wall of Force. And underneath the plane of force is non-ground, like eternal fire, an ocean, empty void, etc. What would the Earth Elemental look like?


You don't create summoned monsters out of thin air. Instead, you "call" them to you, from wherever they normally are found. So, when you summon an elemental, you're calling them from their respective elemental plane. In the case of Earth Elementals, they're formed from the minerals, dirt and gems that the Elemental Plane of Earth is made out of.

That's what I thought but the line "conjured from" means you need something to conjure the Earth Elemental from.

[Kayblis]

Just like Anymage said. It's mostly fluff, so an Earth elemental summoned in a desert would be apparently made of sandstone, while if summoned underground it would look like it's made of the very stone around you, like granite with small ore chunks. The actual elemental has the same stats and doesn't consume material around it.

EDIT:

So what happens if the ground is a plane of force? Like from a permanencied Wall of Force. And underneath the plane of force is non-ground, like eternal fire, an ocean, empty void, etc. What would the Earth Elemental look like?

The line specifies the Material Plane because those cases don't really happen there. If you're under special circumstances, make it look like whatever you want - it's a visual quirk.

[RoboEmperor]

It's a visual quirk i want to manipulate and if I want to manipulate something i need to know the rules! Even if it's just fluff.

I was just wondering if there was an official example from like an older edition or a novel that tells you whether the Earth Elemental grows from a pebble to huge size or if it sucks up stuff around it.

[Elkad]

Maybe it's an attraction issue. It's not made from it, it's just easier to summon something that likes/issimilarto the surroundings.

[Anymage]

I'm relying on memory here. But back in 2e, you needed enough material of the appropriate type house the shape (and size) of the elemental you wanted to call. I'm totally blanking the how long the spellcast took and how long the elemental hung around for, but it didn't work like the Summon Monster line does now.

There are literally zero rules for this, other than references to an older edition spell that works fundamentally differently. So long as it's just a fluff thing and you're not trying to abuse the system (mining gold elementals) or be pointedly misleading (having your elementals look like iron golems), just ask your DM.

[RoboEmperor]

I'm relying on memory here. But back in 2e, you needed enough material of the appropriate type house the shape (and size) of the elemental you wanted to call. I'm totally blanking the how long the spellcast took and how long the elemental hung around for, but it didn't work like the Summon Monster line does now.

There are literally zero rules for this, other than references to an older edition spell that works fundamentally differently. So long as it's just a fluff thing and you're not trying to abuse the system (mining gold elementals) or be pointedly misleading (having your elementals look like iron golems), just ask your DM.

My DM told me "find the rules."

If what you say is true that in 2e you needed to have enough material of the appropriate type to house the shape and size of the elemental you wanted to call, that answers a significant part of my question and is enough "rules" for my DM. Creature fluff doesn't change much between editions.

The only question remains is what happens when there is literally no earth around you when you summon an earth elemental.

[Daefos]

The only question remains is what happens when there is literally no earth around you when you summon an earth elemental.

Then you still summon an earth elemental comprised of generic stone and dirt, because nothing about the 3.5 spell indicates that you need sufficient material like you did in 2E.

Whatever “rules” you and your DM are looking for don’t exist. It’s fluff, nothing more.

[RoboEmperor]

Then you still summon an earth elemental comprised of generic stone and dirt, because nothing about the 3.5 spell indicates that you need sufficient material like you did in 2E.

Whatever “rules” you and your DM are looking for don’t exist. It’s fluff, nothing more.

Fluff has rules too! A human can't look like a medium sized Pit Fiend with no wings and tail.

[OgresAreCute]

Fluff has rules too! A human can't look like a medium sized Pit Fiend with no wings and tail.

That depends on how ugly you are...

[Nifft]

Fluff has rules too! A human can't look like a medium sized Pit Fiend with no wings and tail.

I suspect you can't cite anything to support that.

That's fine -- the game would be unplayable without unsupported assumptions, like how gravity works, or how air exists -- but it's not true that fluff has rules as such. It's that you and your DM are sharing a deep layer of mutually consistent yet unsupported assumptions.

The game's rules seem to be a layer of abstraction which allow you to resolve conflicts without needing to dig too deep into your shared (unsupported) assumptions.

[ben-zayb]

Spell Thematics is a feat, but 1. that is feat sink, 2. you can just ask the DM if you can refluff the elemental. It changes the rules of the game as far as that particular kind of aesthetics is concerned, so that should work for rule-stickler DMs

[Efrate]

magic missile is described somewhere as being tiny flaming skulls or somesuch for a particular caster, darts of energy for someone else. it might be 3.0, but I distinctly remember reading that somewhere. makes spell thematics kind of pointless.

if anyone can point him to that passage, you can infer that your elemental looks like whatever the heck you want easily enough.

[Darth Ultron]

In 2E Lore and fluff an Elemental was a spirit entity. They drifted, incorporeal, though each Elemental Plane and could move and shape and from Elemental matter at will.

So when you summoned an elemental, in 2E, you were summoning that spirit. You had to provide the spirit with a large mass of it's element that it can possess and from into a body.

So for like an Earth Elemental, most of the time it would be formed from dirt and top soil. But it could be formed of solid stone or gem stones(assuming you had a massive pile of them).

3E came along with the loopy ''politically correct" summing spells...that..er...made a copy of the creature and then sent the copy to the spellcaster. And no one ever changed the old text.

There is no way in 3E to make an elemental ''look" a set way.....but there is no reason you can't just say they look one way.

Also plenty of illusion or transmutation spells can make a creature look different.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

This is just flavor, but I think of elementals as sentient energy. On their home plane, they move through the air/water/fire/dirt as wind/waves/heat/tremors, formless until they want or need to assemble a shape to occupy. When summoned to another plane, they must do the same or be dispersed, creating a temporary body from a mix of native substance and elemental materials they could drag with them.

[RoboEmperor]

That depends on how ugly you are...

Not even the most ugliest of humans can have teeth that huge so no.


I suspect you can't cite anything to support that.

Description of the race. Or Pictures. Not direct rules but good enough.


Spell Thematics is a feat, but 1. that is feat sink, 2. you can just ask the DM if you can refluff the elemental. It changes the rules of the game as far as that particular kind of aesthetics is concerned, so that should work for rule-stickler DMs

If I knew this feated existed while I still played arcane spellcasters I would've done anything to cram it into my build.


magic missile is described somewhere as being tiny flaming skulls or somesuch for a particular caster, darts of energy for someone else. it might be 3.0, but I distinctly remember reading that somewhere. makes spell thematics kind of pointless.

if anyone can point him to that passage, you can infer that your elemental looks like whatever the heck you want easily enough.

please, Please, PLEASE POINT ME TO THAT PASSAGE! I WANTS THAT PASSAGE!

[RoboEmperor]

Stone of Controlling Earth Elementals

A stone of this nature is typically an oddly shaped bit of roughly polished rock.

The possessor of such a stone need but utter a few words of summoning, and a Huge earth elemental comes to the summoner. The summoning words require 1 full round to speak, and in all ways the stone functions as the summon monster VII spell. (If sand or rough, unhewn stone is the summoning medium, the elemental that comes is Large instead, and the stone functions as the summon monster VI spell.) The elemental appears in 1d4 rounds. Only one elemental can be summoned at a time. A new elemental requires a new patch of earth or stone, which cannot be accessed until after the first elemental disappears (is dispelled, dismissed, or slain).

So it's just more than dismissable fluff. Here it actually affects game mechanics.

So I guess you need enough of "earth" to be the Earth Elemental's body, not just a pebble which doesn't increase in mass.

So to do what I want to do I need to create a huge-sized statue out of obsidian/jade/marble and target its location when using the summoning spell if I want a robotic earth elemental instead of a dirt elemental.

Unless someone points me to the passage Efrate is talking about!

[Anymage]

3.5 DMG, P. 34 ""Describing Spell Effects".

Although if your DM is fixated on "rules" that are alluded to once because someone forgot to update something, that sounds like it speaks to deeper campaign flaws.

[RoboEmperor]

3.5 DMG, P. 34 ""Describing Spell Effects".

Although if your DM is fixated on "rules" that are alluded to once because someone forgot to update something, that sounds like it speaks to deeper campaign flaws.

The "rules" here are mentioned in more than one place. MMI, Complete Arcane, DMG, so I think it's not just something that WotC forgot since they kept it very consistent across several books.

Thanks for finding the passage for me. It wasn't what I was looking for but thanks anyways.