Dissecting the 5E D&D Elemental Creature Type

November 29, 2021

Salutations, nerds, I’ve got some hot stuff for you today. The focus of this post about a specific creature type in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons is all about elementals. These primal creatures are basically made of earth, air, fire or water. It’s a little bit more complex than this and since this is one of my very favorite 5E D&D creature types I’m pretty excited to tuck into this one.

Elemental creatures in 5E D&D

This goes back to basic alchemy from a long, long time ago in the real world. Elementals deal with states of matter. Each standard element in the western set represents some way a thing could be. The element of earth represents solids, air represents gases, water represents liquids and fire represents plasmas. It’s nice and symmetrical and more importantly the human brain likes things when they come in fours. You see these elemental categories crop up a lot, not just in 5E D&D but in things like Avatar: The Last Airbender and the mobile app game Alchemy where you combine things, make new things and see how many things you can get starting with the basic elements.

It’s worth noting that while 5E D&D uses the western set, they use different elements in the east — Earth, Air, Water, Metal and Wood. That’s not what we’re talking about today but I just think it’s really cool and worth mentioning. Part of what we are talking about today, however, are para-elementals because it’s relevant to the topic at hand. The elemental planes are arranged in such a way for a little bit of overlap between them and as such you get the para-elemental planes, which include a little bit of the two elements overlapping around them. In other words there are cusp elementals.

You’ve got ice between air and water, magma between earth and fire, ooze between water and earth and smoke between air and fire. Yeah, you read me right — oozes are their own creature type but there’s also an elemental plane of ooze. All in all elementals are anything primordial and this makes them feel very different from anything else in 5E D&D.

“Elementals are creatures native to the elemental planes. Some creatures of this type are little more than animate masses of their respective elements, including the creatures simply called elementals. Others have biological forms infused with elemental energy. The races of genies, including djinn and efreet, form the most important civilizations on the elemental planes. Other elemental creatures include azers, invisible stalkers, and water weirds.” — from the 5E D&D Monster Manual

Things Elementals Do

One of the big things elementals do is attack with damage of the type belonging to their element. Fire elementals deal fire damage, water elementals deal cold damage, air elementals often deal lightning and thunder and earth elementals… let’s be honest most of what they deal is bludgeoning damage.

Elementals also have a tendency to explode on death, or at the very least collapse in a pile of whatever element made it up in the first place. Part of this is because if you kill an elemental on the Material Plane it’s just going to go back to where it came from and it won’t be properly dead. You are basically just aggressively unsummoning the creature.

The less solid of the elementals can do things like fit through cracks in surfaces, which makes them very difficult to capture. Additionally, many elementals boast damage resistances to basic types from nonmagical attacks.

Five Elementals of Note

Chwinga. I know, I try to keep examples to the Monster Manual and Basic Rules, but listen. These things are CR 0, making them the lowest CR elemental in the game and they are Tiny and adorable and the only thing making playing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden worth it to me right now. They are tiny little masked looking things who look like they just rolled out of a Miyazaki movie, they’re playful and they can do no wrong.
Elementals. By which I mean what is listed under the Monster Manual as Air Elemental, Earth Elemental, Fire Elemental and Water Elemental. They’re CR 5 and they’re the ones who can get through cracks in things and basically just look like a bunch of whatever element they’re representing. If you imagine an elemental you’re probably thinking of these things.
Genie. We’re not going to pretend like Dao, Djinni, Efreeti and Marids aren’t part of a matching set. They’re all CR 11 — kind of a big deal to most parties until you get to higher levels. They’re very intelligent and according to rules as written only speak the kind of primordial associated with their own element but to be honest I’ve never seen a Dungeon Master who doesn’t have them understand and speak Common as well. They all have innate spellcasting, good saving throws and even if you’re not fighting them they still make for an interesting encounter because they look more human than most other elementals.
Invisible Stalker. This one is one of my favorites. I love elementals and I love assassins and this thing is really good at being both. It flies, it has a good chunk of hit points, it clocks in at CR 6 (about when 5E D&D is at its most fun in terms of the monsters actually being challenging for the players to go up against) and as the name suggests — it’s invisible. You summon this thing, tell it what it’s going after and it pursues relentlessly. [NERDITOR’S NOTE: Invisible stalkers also make an appearance as one of the 14 Mighty Medium Monsters of 5E D&D]
Xorn. There’s a lot of cool stuff in the Underdark. This one looks like it’s made of rocks with one eye under a huge mouth surrounded by big scary teeth and has three legs and three arms for some reason. It likes treasure to the point it has a special sense for finding ores and such. So yeah, adventurers have a pretty solid reason for targeting this thing first.

Got elementals in your 5E D&D game? Did I miss a kind of para-elemental and you want to yell at me about it? Really excited about chwingas, too? Please tweet me about it @Nerdarchy or me @Pyrosythesis or connect with us on Facebook and as always, stay nerdy!

*Featured image — A selection of elementals of note from 5E D&D with the individual elementals appearing beneath their genie counterparts. Would it surprise you to know we’ve got a tremendous amount of content here at Nerdarchy the Website about dragons? Want to transform any monster into an elemental creature? Secrets of the Vault: Lost Lore Vol. 2 includes the Elemental Kin creature template along with two new Sorcerous Origins: Aberrant Mind and Blood Mage, a new disease: Ill-Turned Fate, 7 new Arachnomancy spells including the 9th-level Hail of Crystal Spiders and 100 Mystery-Touched Trinkets. Find out more about it here. [Composite images courtesy Wizards of the Coast]