Air Elemental: what it look like?

[Maglubiyet]

How can you see the air? It should be invisible! Are there any good images or videos someone could link to?

EDIT: This thread is to brainstorm ideas about the biology and appearance of air elementals in fantasy games. If they are made out of "air" how can they be seen, how can they cause harm, and how can they be injured?

[GorinichSerpant]

One way is a make them look like tornados with "eyes" and "arms". Another is to make a tornado in the shape of a man. Logically you would probably tell where the elemental is by looking at the consistently swirling particles.

[warty goblin]

An air elemental is basically a swirl of air right? Which means the air will have different densities, and distort light slightly; like a heat shimmer. So it should be nearly invisible unless it's moving fast around a lot of dust, and extremely hard to fight, but you can see them.

Actually, related question, how do you hit an air elemental? And how does hitting it do anything to it?

[Beta Centauri]

How can you see the air? It should be invisible!

But it's not, so you can. Either don't worry about it, or make something up. I don't see a lot of point in proceeding from an assumption which is not the case in the rules.

Actually, related question, how do you hit an air elemental? And how does hitting it do anything to it?

The same way you hit anything else. And the reason why hitting it hurts it is probably related to the reason why it's able to act on its own in the first place.

Here's mine: how do normal creatures harm gigantic creatures with weapons or even with spells that are scaled to Medium size? I can understand spells that don't involve real damage and simply kill, but spells that burn or freeze or poison seem like they'd never do any harm, no matter how many were used.

I'm considering not using any really big creatures until I get this figured out. Even assuming that hit points aren't just physical damage doesn't really help me.

[Gavran]

But it's not, so you can. Either don't worry about it, or make something up. I don't see a lot of point in proceeding from an assumption which is not the case in the rules.

Worth pointing out this is the RPG forum and there is no one "the rules." I think the point of the thread is to make something up, collaboratively.

Here's mine: how do normal creatures harm gigantic creatures with weapons or even with spells that are scaled to Medium size? I can understand spells that don't involve real damage and simply kill, but spells that burn or freeze or poison seem like they'd never do any harm, no matter how many were used.

I'm considering not using any really big creatures until I get this figured out. Even assuming that hit points aren't just physical damage doesn't really help me.

What exactly is the difference between Medium and Gigantic? If humans are gigantic and ants are medium, then yeah, I get you. There are lots of insects with poison dangerous to humans, but physical damage? Preposterous. But go half our size and there are lots of animals that can mess up a human in a fight (boar, wild dogs, small big cats.) And the sorts of weapons PCs use are generally more lethal than tooth and claw. Can't really think of anything that does much physical harm around the 1/4 human size though. Badgers maybe?

[Lord Raziere]

How can you see the air? It should be invisible! Are there any good images or videos someone could link to?

Tornadoes with arms and legs? Mist or Fog in shape of a man? a living cloud? maybe look into some gaseous chemical elements that look visible? seems pretty easy to visualize for me.

[Beta Centauri]

Worth pointing out this is the RPG forum and there is no one "the rules."

True, but whatever "rules" the poster was using apparently don't refer to them as being invisible, or the question wouldn't have come up.

I think the point of the thread is to make something up, collaboratively.

I wish then that that had been made more clear.

And the sorts of weapons PCs use are generally more lethal than tooth and claw. Can't really think of anything that does much physical harm around the 1/4 human size though. Badgers maybe?

Seems like there was someone who got messed up by an otter or ferret recently, because they let it too near their face. But that's going to be rare, I'd think.

[Gavran]

Yeah, something cat sized can definitely hurt you but not I think in the context of "battle between two mighty forces."

[Beta Centauri]

Yeah, something cat sized can definitely hurt you but not I think in the context of "battle between two mighty forces."

Maybe if the cat sized thing was just as intelligent as you, and trained and equipped specifically to fight you. And there were five of them.

[Karl Aegis]

What do you mean by "invisible"? Technically, I can't see my black television because no light reflects off it into my eye, but I know it is there because it is opaque. Did you mean transparent? You can still notice transparent things because of the way they diffract light. Unless, of course, you are blind or run into glass doors quite frequently.

[Yora]

I like the design from Baldur's Gate II, where air elementals are a large human-like shape surrounded fog that waves in a strong wind. Looks a bit like you'd imagine a liquid nitrogen elemental.

[goto124]

A distortion in the air may be difficult to spot.

It probably can be heard, and it stirs up nearby debris such as pebbles, dead leaves, and sand.

Real life has birds that fly into windows (ouch). Now, if there's a PC who does that...

[Dhavaer]

What exactly is the difference between Medium and Gigantic? If humans are gigantic and ants are medium, then yeah, I get you. There are lots of insects with poison dangerous to humans, but physical damage? Preposterous. But go half our size and there are lots of animals that can mess up a human in a fight (boar, wild dogs, small big cats.) And the sorts of weapons PCs use are generally more lethal than tooth and claw. Can't really think of anything that does much physical harm around the 1/4 human size though. Badgers maybe?

In D&D, each size category increase is a doubling, so the largest possible Gargantuan creature (nearest word to gigantic) is eight times the size of the largest possible Medium creature.

[Feddlefew]

I would imagine an air elemental would pick up debris from it's suroundings- things like leaves, small twigs, dust, stones, bits of trash, paperwork, and so on. So what they would look like would really depend on their surroundings.

[Lvl45DM!]

In D&D, each size category increase is a doubling, so the largest possible Gargantuan creature (nearest word to gigantic) is eight times the size of the largest possible Medium creature.

...56 feet doesnt seem like that much.

[Yora]

I think it's the 3rd edition Player's Handbook or Dungeon Master's Guide that said, and I quote, "a dagger in the eye is still a dagger in the eye".

[Ashtagon]

Possible images...

Spoiler: Glass-like

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Spoiler: Smoke-like

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Spoiler: Wind-like

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[TheCountAlucard]

As others have said, just because it's made of "air" (for given definitions of "air" anyway) doesn't mean it's invisible. Likewise the suggestion that a being made of air would be invulnerable to the cuts made with a sword doesn't necessarily follow, either.

You're (largely!) made of water, after all, but the (largely!) water that makes up what-is-you is still arranged into layers of varied but delicate tissues that allow you to do things. If an elemental still exists inside an antimagic field, then it follows that it's held together non-magically. Even if it's not arranged in the same patterns of muscle and blood and skin and bone that we are, sticking a sword in there is probably disruptive to all that.

[Maglubiyet]

Thanks for the replies, guys. I've seen most of those images, CountAlucard, and I still am confused by the "biology". I know in certain games air elementals are not invisible or intangible -- I'm trying to figure out why (other than it wouldn't be easy to game). Yes, the thread was supposed to be called "what would it look like".

If it's a being of smoke or cloud, is that part of its makeup or is the particulate matter/vapor just debris that it's picked up? If it's visible just because of the debris floating in it, like a tornado, does that mean it wouldn't be if you encountered it high in the sky or on its native plane?

In a lot of pictures, other elementals appear to be pure (whatever that means when we're talking about artificial categories). Only air elementals are shown as a mix of other "elements", with earth or water mixed in. I like the comparison to us being mostly water -- maybe air elementals are mostly air with some kind of magical/ectoplastic/phlogistonical connective tissues.

The gases in atmospheric air are mostly colorless, but there are some gases that are visible. Could be an elemental is composed of a variety of different elements and molecules that are mostly in a gaseous state, some of which have color.

[Feddlefew]

I'm pretty certain they're like tornadoes- you can only see them because they pick up stuff, like water vapor and dust. So even though only the air is being animated by the elemental, you still see it because it's picked up stuff in its vortex.

[Lord Torath]

Here's mine: how do normal creatures harm gigantic creatures with weapons or even with spells that are scaled to Medium size? I can understand spells that don't involve real damage and simply kill, but spells that burn or freeze or poison seem like they'd never do any harm, no matter how many were used.

I'm considering not using any really big creatures until I get this figured out. Even assuming that hit points aren't just physical damage doesn't really help me.

When you says "creatures," do you mean mostly unintelligent animals, or do you mean intelligent humanoids? Most creatures do not attack creatures that are larger than they are, unless they have a way of rapidly taking them down. Mostly, this is because most injuries other than minor scratches are fatal, either because the creature is now unable to hunt, or it can no longer defend itself against others. Wolverines and badgers use this threat of injury to scare off bigger predators. Yes, the bear could probably kill the wolverine, but not without getting some deep scratches itself, which can become infected.

Also, predators generally use "called shots" to take down large prey. Wolves go for hamstrings and then throats. Big cats go for a neck strangle hold. Crocodiles and the like drag their prey into the water to drown it.

Something to keep in mind: Unless the PCs are involved, monsters do not need to follow the normal combat rules. The lioness can break the giraffe's neck with her jaws and swinging momentum.

Does that help?

[Flickerdart]

Air elementals are solid the same reason fire elementals are solid. It's possible that there's an "elemental air" and "elemental fire" that makes up these creatures - denser and more delicate than regular unstructured fire and air that just sort of hangs around.

[Millennium]

Strictly speaking, you can't see an air elemental, because, as you say, it is made of air. But the air is not stagnant: it blows about all throughout the creatures body, and carries with it small debris like dust, leaves, grass, and so on. If it happens to be standing in or near things like smoke and fog, it blows these about as well. These things, you can see, and the patterns of their motion give the air elemental a distinct shape to onlookers.

An air elemental could make itself invisible, if it could first cleanse itself of all debris and then be careful to only move through areas where there is no debris to accumulate. The first is easy: ordinary cloth is good enough to filter out anything big enough to be visible. But the second turns out to be quite difficult, because you have to keep a considerable distance away from other objects. The moment you touch something, you're likely to pick up at least a little debris, and while you might still be quite hard to see at first, you're no longer truly invisible. There's an additional drawback, in that an air elemental doing this could not carry anything. As a result, air elementals don't usually bother to do this; it's their equivalent of a parlor trick, rather than something worth basing a fighting style around.

[Yora]

Air elementals are solid the same reason fire elementals are solid. It's possible that there's an "elemental air" and "elemental fire" that makes up these creatures - denser and more delicate than regular unstructured fire and air that just sort of hangs around.

I usually go with nonsolid fire and air elementals. After all, stabbing water or dirt with a sword wouldn't injure such elementals either so all of them are only vulnerable to magic.

[Maglubiyet]

An air elemental could make itself invisible, if it could first cleanse itself of all debris and then be careful to only move through areas where there is no debris to accumulate. The first is easy: ordinary cloth is good enough to filter out anything big enough to be visible. But the second turns out to be quite difficult, because you have to keep a considerable distance away from other objects. The moment you touch something, you're likely to pick up at least a little debris, and while you might still be quite hard to see at first, you're no longer truly invisible.

Well, presumably all they'd need to do to avoid debris would be to stay 10 to 20 feet off the ground. The sky could be filled with them. There could be thousands of air elementals high overhead at any given time and no one would ever know it.

[Flickerdart]

I usually go with nonsolid fire and air elementals. After all, stabbing water or dirt with a sword wouldn't injure such elementals either so all of them are only vulnerable to magic.

Water and dirt can be disrupted fairly easily - you can lop off chunks of dirt with a spade, so when facing an Earth elemental it would be vulnerable to dismemberment. Water can be partitioned in a similar fashion - there's nothing magic about a bucket, and the only reason water in a lake "reforms" is because of gravity. It's rather trivial to split a stream with some dirt or rocks. The only reason such elementals would be able to reform is if the magic holding them together had this as a built-in feature.

The reason air elementals are tricky is because air is a gas and will reform, because it can flow around obstacles. But an air elemental doesn't behave like gas, since it's a discrete being that doesn't spread out to fill the space available to it. It's possible that such a being has the same weakness as water and dirt - matter interposed through it will break it apart.

And then, making elementals vulnerable to weapons is as simple as deciding that physical trauma causes stress on the magic keeping them together, and sufficient trauma overpowers the effect and causes them to fall apart. No reason to screw over non-casters.

[Maglubiyet]

I like this one.

Spoiler: Air elemental

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by javi-ure on DeviantArt

[Thrudd]

A related question that would help answer what it looks like: what is an air elemental supposed to do to a solid creature? If it is composed entirely of air, what does it do? In order to act on a body, it must create some force, and in the process generates movement and displacement. Elementals seem to mostly attack with their "bodies". An air elemental, in order to attack something, would need to do something like alter the pressure in it's body to become something like a tornado that can exert a great enough force to actually push around large physical objects. So when inactive, they might be mostly invisible, when they move you may detect them as a slight displacement of air, like a wind. It's possible they would take some time to work up enough pressure to attack, like a funnel cloud forming, so their attack would not automatically be a total surprise. However, you could easily walk into a whole army of them and not know it.

[Knaight]

I generally assume that air elementals consist of air with a far higher gas pressure than the atmosphere (a few hundred bars or so instead)*. The index of refraction is going to be different, dust particles and similar are going to get pushed out, and it creates a situation where the air elemental is obviously not at equilibrium with the atmosphere, and striking them causes them to interact with it and possibly drop pressure. So if one hacks an arm off, the arm gets disconnected, expands a bit (being at a few hundred bar), then reconnects at lower pressure, with the expanded gas lost.


*Assuming that I don't specifically bring in and distinguish between isobaric and isochoric air elementals with different shape shifting capabilities. By default they are usually of a particular size, so isochoric air elementals of varying pressure and temperature work pretty well.

[Surpriser]

In the end, the precise biology (elementology?) or elementals of all types is not described in most systems. So it's up to you as the DM to come up with a reason for why elementals work the way they do.
Note that this changes from system to system:
Elementals in D&D behave mostly like other corporeal creatures (with the exception of things like Whirlwind form or Earth Glide). Since they are vulnerable to physical damage, it would make sense that they would have some sort of tangible body composition ("semi-solid air"), although their form might be quite changeable depending on the surroundings (an air elemental might look like a cloud when higher up in the air and become dust- or ash-like near the ground).
Other systems have different manifestations of elementals.