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In this installment of Khayd’haik the Troll Mystic’s series on elementals, he discusses how elementals can move between dimensions, including when they are magically summoned from their home planes.
Check out the introductory installment on elementals if you missed it or any previous installments, or just want to refresh your memory on what has come before.
Dimension Hopping Basics
Elementals can freely pass from one dimension to an adjacent dimension, but only to an area that contains a concentration of its associated element. Elementals may also cross dimensions in answer to a wizard’s proper summons. A proper summons will involve some amount of the associated element, the purer, the better.
Summoning Basics
Elementals can be summoned by wizards to perform tasks. They often do not care they have been summoned nor do they care they are being given tasks. An elemental has a strong survival instinct, however, and will abandon any task that threatens its survival unless the magic binding it is too powerful for it to break. There are not many wizards who can work magic that powerful. Wizards are best served by giving an elemental a task that involves the elemental’s associated element and does not put the elemental in danger.
Summoning an Elemental
The means by which elementals are summoned and the ease of such summonings depends on three main factors: The size of the elemental, the power of the summoning wizard, and the proximity of the wizard to the summoned elemental. The larger the elemental, the more difficult it is to summon. The more powerful the wizard, the less difficulty the wizard will have in summoning an elemental. The closer the wizard is to an elemental already, the easier it is to summon the elemental.
Given that elementals often inhabit elemental dimensions and wizards do not, distance is not always easy to take into consideration. If the wizard is able to travel to an elemental dimension to perform a summoning, it will make the summoning easier. If the wizard cannot travel to an elemental dimension, the next best thing is to occupy a dimension adjacent to the elemental dimension. Trying to reach across multiple dimensions to summon an elemental becomes exponentially difficult as the number of dimensions involved increases.
Another factor is the types of spells available to a wizard for summoning elementals. In some worlds, no such spells exists, and so summoning elementals in these worlds is impossible. In other worlds, the magic for summoning elementals is too draining for most wizards, or has been all but forgotten.
A wizard who has summoned a particular elemental before can typically summon that specific elemental again with less difficulty than summoning an arbitrary elemental, provided of course that the elemental has not been destroyed.
In some worlds, spells exist for summoning certain types of elementals and not others. Spells for summoning shadow elementals are more rare than spells for summoning other types of elementals.
In the next installment, Khayd’haik discusses elementals in combat.