[ Archomentals ] [ Air | Earth | Fire | Metal | Para-Elemental | Quasi-Elemental | Water | Wood ]
Archomentals of Wood
Deep in the verdant wilds of the plane of Wood, the wood archomentals hold court. All of them share wood’s common essence: they bend, they adapt, they endure through cycles of bloom and blight. Wood acts as a bridge between the solidity of Earth and the freedom of Air. Shumunue, the Carved Lady, teaches her saplings to walk and mimic animal life, while Verilorn plants seedlings in rows and trims trees into sustainable order. Corbicula causes flowers to bloom as he merely passes by, unleashing a frenzy of pollen, while Hederex grows at a galloping pace, threading their vines all across the plane. Even Murgremir, the Rotting Hill, ensuring even the death of plants feeds new life, as he gurgles a song of patient decay. Together they make Wood a realm of relentless vitality.
Yet for all their shared roots, the wood lords also clash like branches in a gale. Shumunue and Verilorn, once close allies, split over proliferation versus cultivation: she awakens trees to wander freely, he binds them to disciplined groves. Corbicula’s seductive explosions overrun Verilorn’s tidy fields, while Hederex spies on all of them, distilling secrets into amber sap that no one trusts. Murgremir’s nutritious rot is mercy to some, but a horror to the bloom‑lovers who fear their petals turning to mulch. Between them, the archomentals embody wood’s paradox: life that thrives on both wild overrun and careful tending.
| Name | Status | Alignment | Portfolio | Realm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corbicula ‡ | Archomental | CN | Flowers, pollen, frenzy | Wood / Flowerboughs / the Florid Riot ‡ |
| Hederax ‡ | Archomental | CN | Sap, subtlety, poison | Wood / Everywhere and anywhere ‡ |
| Murgremir | Primordial archomental | N | Rot, soil | Wood / the Rot / Blackmire ‡ |
| Shumunue † | Archomental | NG | Camouflage, carpentry | Wood / the Canopy / Transcendent Grotto |
| Verilorn † | Primordial archomental | LN | Cultivation, pruning | Wood / Core Wood / the Boughs Pollard ‡ |
Corbicula
Herald of the Blooming Storm, Sovereign of the Golden Haze. CN Archomental of Flowers and Frenzy [he/him]
Realm: Wood / Flowerboughs / the Florid Riot ‡
Sure, I once clapped eyes on Corbicula, that fancy ‘Herald of the Blooming Storm’. He wasn’t a treant like I was expecting, but a radiant and exploding swarm of flowers. They say he’s the master of buds and blooms, pollen and perfume—but it was his aura that knocked me off my feet. It was like a hurricane of colour, but also emotion. When I was surrounded by it, it was like I’d lost control of my senses—all I could do was surrender myself to the frenzy.
Corbicula’s no patient gardener; he’s ecstatic and seductive, luring cutters in with scents of impossible orchards and nectar better than your dreams—and drowning foes in his overwhelming cloud of pollen that sparks hallucination and confusion. They say Shumunue birthed him from her own blooming excesses—carving the first “floral animals” that burst free from her as unbounded growth. Since then, Corbicula has rebelled hard against Verilorn’s pruning shears and his orderly groves. These days Corbicula is a storm of seductive life, his pollen seeding vines that overrun the sturdy trunks of Core Wood. Corbicula proves that beauty can’t be controlled easily—but if life is left unfettered overruns, chokes, and remakes.
His realm, the Florid Riot, is a floating nebula of pollen high in the plane’s endlessly blooming canopies of the Flowerboughs. Up here the massive petal-palaces grow, woven together from colossal lotus leaves and buzzing with bees and sprites. Pollen falls like rain, building up thick and sticky on the leaves—until suddenly it doesn’t, and the it cascade into the undergrowth below as an avalanche of life, birthing rogue groves overnight. I barely escaped with my lungs intact, and that haze lingers in my head—trying to seduce me with visions of what I could become if I just let go and bloomed. Breathe carefully when Corbicula storms, planewalkers; one whiff, and you might stumble in your reverie and put down roots forever.
Source: Homebrew. Corbicula is the name given the bee’s knee-sacks for holding pollen.
Hederax
The Ivy Ubiquitous. CN Archomental of Sap, Poisons and Memories [they/them]
Realm: Wood / Everywhere and anywhere ‡
You want to know how I first found Hederex? I didn’t—Hederax found me. One day I was pushing through a tangle of ivy, the next I realised the ivy had been pushing back, its leaves angled towards me, as if listening. Hederax is the archomental of poison and memories, a lord that wears no crown and claims no tidy domain, because they themselves are the domain: A vast, fast‑growing vine that threads through half the plane, if the chant’s to be believed. Their portfolio runs on sap, subtlety, poison, and the secrets that cling to all three. Hederax grows as fast as a man can run—and faster than he can climb—and their tendrils blend so perfectly against bark and leaf that you don’t notice them until it’s too late.
Every leaf is an ear, they say. Hederex hears through their foliage, catching snatches of conversation from root‑cellar cabals to the canopy courts, though even the archomental can’t attend to every leaf at once. So they distil. Memories, confessions, and whispered plots soak down through the vine and ooze out as amber sap—thick globes of sweet sticky memory that can be tapped off and consumed by a bold (or foolish) cutter. Drink deep, and you might relive a conspiratorial meeting, a lover’s quarrel, or the last thoughts of some long‑dead druid. Of course, all that knowledge comes at a price: take in the memories of too many strangers memories and you might start to have trouble remembering which life was yours. And mind the leaves, berk. While the amber sap is memory distilled, the fresh, sticky resin of the leaves is venom—slow, creeping stuff that numbs the tongue and blurs the line between your own thoughts and the secrets you’ve stolen.
Hederax has no formal realm, palace or grove, because anywhere the vine has crept can be their stage. Spies, assassins, and blackmailers all whisper prayers to Hederax when they tap a knot of amber or smear a blade with contact poison.
Source: Homebrew. Hedera is the Latin name for the genus of plants better known as ivies.
Murgremir
The Rotting Hill, Blightwurm. N Primordial archomental of Rot [he/him]
Realm: Wood / the Rot / Blackmire ‡
The Rotting Hill Murgremir [murr-GREM-ear] is a primordial of muck and decay that haunts a rotten region of the plane of Wood. Hard to distinguish from the landslides of slurry around him, Murgremir is a titanic, mobile mass of filth and decomposing matter. He’s patient and voracious, with a voice that gurgles like slurry going down a drain. As an archomental of Wood touched by energies from the Negative Material plane, he’s a destructive, entropic force—but don’t assume he’s as morally corrupt as the likes of Juiblex. While he embodies the death of wood and plant matter, his rotting touch also creates mulch that, while smelly, is nutritious for new seeds, fungus and even some intelligent plants. He delights in toppling the arrogant by undermining their plans and returning them to the soil.
His realm is the Blackmire, a morass of fetid sludge within Wood. It’s more like a particularly ripe swamp than a temple or citadel, but unlike many of the other negative quasi-elemental planes, it teems with life. Sentient oozes and slimes, puddings and blights, as well as myconids and other fungal life forms, all find this place to be a delicious paradise.
Source: Heroes of the Elemental Chaos [4e] p33 (brief entry only); homebrew
Shumunue
The Carved Lady of Mimicry. NG Archomental of Ambulatory Wood [she/her] †
Realm: Wood / the Boughs Pollard / Transcendent Grotto
Shumunue [shoo-MOO-noo] is a rarity, an archomental who is not native of her plane of influence. She may not even be a living creature, as some legends claim she is in fact a particularly compelling construct. In any case, she’s given credit for teaching the flowers of the plane of Wood to mimic insects, the plants to pull up their roots and wander around, and the trees to bend into the forms of animals. Sure, the plants were alive before her arrival, but she showed them how to Live. For this, the plants crowned her their ruler.
The Carved Lady of Mimicry can take many forms, but her true shape looks like a long slender dragon carved from wood and bent wicker sticks, with four kindly eyes that blink in turn. Moss grows on her back, and leaves hand from her sides—except for one blighted patch on her flank which was irradiated by a poisoning attempt by Ayrzul and had never healed.
Shumunue is a patient teacher, valuing growth, adaptation, and finding the slow unfolding of potential in all living things. Her philosophy exalts wood as the uniquely living element; a bridge between Earth, Water and Air that grows, bends, and endures. Her realm in Wood is the Transcendent Grotto, a beautiful grove of colourful flowers that mimic birds, topiary bushes sculpted into the form of animals that walk and talk, and awakened trees.
Source: Rage of Elements [PF2e] p194; Divine Mysteries p191,306; Archives of Nethys
Verilorn
Custodian of Oak and Ash. LN Primordial archomental of Wood †
Realm: Wood / Core Wood / the Boughs Pollard ‡
Verilorn [vuh-RILL-orn], the Custodian of Oak and Ash, is a very ancient, and very wise archomental of wood, cultivation, and forestry. He appears as a strange combination of man and tree, his body a stout trunk supported by a pair of slender legs, and bristling with as many arms as a tree has branches. His hair is leaves, his long beard is ivy, and mushrooms sprout from his bark skin. He’s a gardener of impossible precision, whose mere gesture seems to be able to coax growth from the oldest of seeds or most barren of soils.
The Custodian is meticulous, ponderous, and protective of the natural order, treating the plane of Wood as a garden to be tended rather than exploited. He believes that life must be cultivated with discipline and foresight, pruning away the wild and chaotic to make way for sustainable abundance. Verilorn sees himself as the steward of wood’s potential, shaping trees and plants into perfect forms through careful husbandry rather than letting nature run rampant.
Once a free‑spirited cultivator alongside Shumunue, Verilorn’s outlook hardened after the plane’s severance from the elemental cycle killed many of his people; he vowed never again to let wild chaos harm his charges, becoming a colder sort of guardian who prioritises order over exuberance. Verilorn’s philosophy stresses discipline as the root of wood elementalism, likening it to healthy growth before bending—routines build resilience amid change, much like joints and dowels in a long-lasting house. Wary of the plane’s recent reconnection to the Inner Planes after aeons of isolation, he restricts travel through limited portals. Though he longs to reconcile with Shumunue—they became estranged over the plane’s closure—he fears bending too far lest he break.
Source: Rage of Elements [PF2e] p195; Divine Mysteries p191,306; Archives of Nethys; his realm is homebrew
Source: Jon Winter-Holt. The longlist of Primordials was inspired by the work of Mentat55 (on enworld) and Medivh (on the RPGnet forum). † From Pathfinder lore; ‡ homebrew.