Para-Archomental

Archomentals of the Para-Elemental Planes

The para-elemental planes of Ice, Magma, Ooze and Smoke are fluid places where the elements mix, and planar currents ebb and flow. As the para-planes themselves are transient and fickly, so are their elemental rulers. A diverse bunch of cutters rule the roost here—diverse in form at least. One thing they almost all share is a bad attitude, for the para-archomentals in charge are all cruel and uncaring. None of them are as ancient or mighty as the primordial archomentals of the ‘purer’ planes; some of them in fact are not even archomentals at all, but merely pretenders who have yet to be betrayed and ousted. That’t not to say that ancient primordials of the churning elements do not exist—it’s just they are all imprisoned in various planar gaols, locked away for aeons since their defeat in the Dawn War.

Name	Status	Alignment	Portfolio	Realm
Alyolvoy	Archomental	NE	Deadly currents	Ooze? Water?
Bwimb II	Archomental	NE	Liquefaction	Ooze / Deep Ooze / Fortress of Bwimb I
Chilimba	Magma mephit	NE	Lava	Magma / the Caldera
Cryonax	Archomental	NE	Cold	Ice / the Chiseled Estate
Ehkahk	Archomental / Smoke mephit?	NE	Smouldering	Smoke / the Choking Palace
Gwond ‡	Archomental?	NG	Good ooze	Ooze / Wanders
Sisanthak	Primordial archomental (bound)	CE	Winter	Astral / Frostmote
Umboras	Primordial archomental (bound)	LE	Rimefire	Pandemonium / Agathion / Gullet of Echoes ‡
Uzrith	Primordial archomental (bound / barmy)	CE	Clay	Ooze / Backswill Bog ‡
Vezzuvu	Primordial archomental (bound)	NE	Volcanoes	Elemental Chaos / the Chains of Light ‡

Alyolvoy

The Hungry Tide. CE Archomental of Muddy Waters [it/its]

Alyolvoy [al-EE-ol-voy] is a obscure archomental of muddy waters and greedy currents. An entity of extreme possessiveness and territorial avarice, Alyolvoy guards its domain with a jealous ferocity, tolerating no rivals and no encroachment upon what it claims. Its philosophy seems to be of quiet domination through obscurity and the pollution and subjugation of all water elementals beneath his will. In partnership with its sworn rival Uzrith of Ooze, Alyolvoy crafted the legendary Mudships of Earth and Sea—seven magical vessels capable of traversing land, sea, and subaqueous depths. Bitter competition between the archomentals after their work was finished led to the ships being lost to both of them. Alyolvoy now lairs in the Darkened Depths of the Plane of Water, or perhaps in the para-elemental plane of Ooze. This realm is so obscured by thick muddy waters that even its name is unknown. Many of the more powerful and dangerous riptide currents that criss-cross the plane of Water end up dumping the debris they’ve picked up into Alyolvoy’s realm.

Source: Dungeon Magazine #37 p65,70 (brief mentions only)

Bwimb II

Bwimb, Princess of Ooze. NE Archomental of Ooze [she/her]

Bwimb, the Baron of Ooze, was according to legend a ‘great and cruel’ general. He fought in the Dawn War and later allied with the Queen of Chaos against the Wind Dukes of Aaqa. It seems he escaped the fate of most primordials by excelling at pretending to be mud and hiding like a coward when any consequences came knocking. His philosophy was simple as a slime-trail: drown, dissolve, engulf—Bwimb saw structure as something to be liquefied back into primordial muck. Bwimb II, his daughter and successor, arose from his dissolved essence after his destruction at the hands of &*%#$, becoming the para-elemental Princess of Ooze only recently. She’s more cunning than her sire, already working to cultivate alliances—most notoriously with Juiblex, the Faceless Lord—while still embodying the same dissolving malice. Philosophically, Bwimb II embraces corruption as a patient, creeping inevitability, preferring slow infiltration and steady planar seepage over risky attacks. Some graybeards reckon she’s the force behind the increasing number of ooze portals in Sigil, although if it is truly her work, how she’s doing it is dark. Her seat of power, the Fortress of Bwimb I, is a vast, sentient morass in Deep Ooze, riddled with half-dissolved citadels and barmy cultists dedicated to slime and rot.

Source: Dead Gods [2e] p36,43,49,124 (Bwimb’s death); Dragon Magazine #353 p45 (succession); Inner Planes [2e] p84; On Hallowed Ground [2e] p53; Fiendish Codex I [3e] p128 (death); Planescape Campaign Setting [2e] DM’s Guide p33; Planescape Monstrous Compendium Vol. III [2e] p11

Chilimba

First General, Prince of Magma, Searing Emperor, First General of the Cauldron, Master of All Mephits. NE magma mephit [he/him]

The archomental prince of magma is, perhaps, not actually an archomental at all. All the evidence points to the creature that calls himself Chilimba [chill-IM-bah] being a magma mephit. An unusually large and powerful one, sure, but a mephit nonetheless. Now, magma mephits are a pretty aggressing and dangerous breed of the horrid little elementals—but how a mephit effectively took control of the wicked creatures of a whole plane is frankly something of a mystery. The smart jink is on the theory that the real Chilimba was killed in the Dawn War, or at the very least bound and imprisoned by the powers. . The mephit who has usurped his title has merely taken advantage of the power vacuum to assume his mantle. Whatever the real dark of the situation, ‘Chilimba’ has made his realm a permanently melting obsidian fortress called the Caldera. The only other likely challenger, Vezzuvu, is conveniently imprisoned in the Elemental Chaos—and Chilimba is prepared to take steps to ensure things remain that way….

Source: Dragon Magazine #347 p39; #353 p43; Inner Planes [2e] p76-78; Planescape Monstrous Compendium Vol. III [2e] p18; On Hallowed Ground [2e] p53; Planescape Campaign Setting [2e] DM’s Guide p33

Cryonax

The Prince of Cold, Cyronax, Bringer of Endless Winter, the Bleak Monarch. NE Archomental of Ice [he/him]. Bound (?)

Cryonax [cry-oh-NAX] is the archomental of cold, and near‑unchallenged tyrant of the para-elemental plane of Ice. He appears as a hulking fifteen‑foot simian with a shaggy white beard, his lower limbs replaced by many long, suckered tentacles. He radiates an aura of soul‑gnawing cold that can slay the unprotected by proximity alone.

His goals are threefold, ambitious, and brutally straightforward: first, to bring the entire plane of Ice under his personal rule; second, to transform the para‑plane into a full elemental reality by freezing and annexing the neighbouring planes of Air and Water; and finally, to extend the ice‑age to the whole multiverse, snuffing out suns, ending summers forever, freezing fire, and enthroning himself as supreme sovereign of a frigid cosmos. His creed is that ice is the strongest of the elements because it halts motion, life, and change. Everything warm or mutable is an insult to this rigid perfection and must be entombed in permafrost.

At present, Cryonax is amassing an army of ice mephits, para-elementals, frost worms, and frost giants in his stronghold, the Chiseled Estate, somewhere deep within Core Ice. Some graybeards reckon he’s frozen inside a vast block of ice there, but this seems fanciful screed given he can move through ice as if it were water. Bound or not though, his dominion of the plane is not absolute however: the great white wyrm Albrathanilar, various ice‑natives, and even meddling powers work to check his advance. This has led to an ongoing cold war—quite literally—of spies, sabotage, and creeping glaciation rather than open plane‑shattering conflict… at least for the time being.

Source: Dragon Magazine #347 p30-32; Inner Planes [2e] p71-73; Fiendish Codex I [3e] p113; Planescape Monstrous Compendium Vol. III [2e] p10,16,18,70; On Hallowed Ground [2e] p53; Planescape Campaign Setting [2e] DM’s Guide p34

Ehkahk

The Smouldering Duke. NE Archomental of Smoke [he/him]

Ehkahk claims the titles of Para-Elemental Lord, the Smouldering Duke of the Plane of Smoke, amongst others. His name is pronounced like the sound of a satisfied cough after you take a puff on a pipe. Although frankly, one wheeze sounds the same as another to me, dear reader. Chant goes though that he’s nothing more than an unusually cunning and charismatic smoke mephit. Anyone who’s ever met a smoke mephit will realise that this is not a particularly high bar. Thick fumes leak from his eyes, nose, ears and mouth, forming translucent wings which surround him.

Through cunning diplomacy and bluster—a combination of smoke and mirrors—Ehkahk has persuaded many para-elementals, smoke mephits, and even some efreet and djinn to follow his banner and acknowledge his authority.

Ehkahk is a diminutive tyrant: he’s vain, status‑hungry, and like most mephits fond of flattery and ostentatious titles. He’s also shrewd enough to keep his following by rewarding loyalty. He particularly values gifts such as ever-smoking bottles, cured meat, braziers of sleep‑smoke, and rare incense. Chant goes he possesses perhaps the greatest collections of pipeweed and smoking paraphernalia in the multiverse. He and his minions are almost constantly partaking of some inhaled substance—incense, smoke, smelling salts, snuff or vapours—literally living in a permanent haze.

Ehkahk holds court in the Choking Palace, a floating gray‑black iron structure that’s more chimney-stack than castle, adrift in the para-elemental plane of Smoke. Every room contains great braziers that pour out enchanted fumes: to Ehkahk’s sincere servants the smoke is utterly transparent, but to everyone else it is completely opaque, allowing him to see all within the palace while his enemies are blind. The palace hangs in a particularly toxic part of the plane, an endless expanse of hot, choking, noxious vapours, where breathing unprotected is very quickly lethal.

Source: Dragon Magazine #347 p39 (mention in sidebar); #353 p43,47; Inner Planes [2e] p89-90; Manual of the Planes [1e] p53; [5e] p172; Planescape Monstrous Compendium Vol. III [2e] 10-11; On Hallowed Ground [2e] p53; Planescape Campaign Setting [2e] DM’s Guide p32; The Plane Below [4e] p72-73,146

Gwond

Elemental Prince of Good Ooze. NG Archomental of Ooze (?) [he/him] ‡

Unheard of up until about eight months ago, when the basher attacked Bwimb II proclaiming himself the Elemental Prince of Good Ooze, Gwond now wanders the para-elemetal plane of Ooze trying to attract those good-hearted natives he can find to his side in his self-declared battle with the forces of evil. Bwimb II herself seems to be as surprised by this development as any other basher, and is apparently searching for information about this would-be elemental lord.

The dark of the matter is that Gwond was born to one of the gnomes of Gnome’s Home, but who—or what—his father was is unknown. Gwond always showed signs of affinity to the Mud even as a young child. Seemingly a gnomish form of ooze genasi, when he grew to adulthood he set out into the Great Swamp alone. Somewhere in the depths of the plane a weird fate befell the gnome. His body dissolved into the acidic sludge of the plane, but even as it did he was reborn as Gwond a being of the para-element. His first act was to attack the Fortress of Bwimb, slipping past her guards without being detected. Ultimately, Gwond was captured, beaten, and seemingly dissolved into the muck that makes up the plane—but some time later he re-emerged once more as, and he began to try and rally allies to his cause.

Gwond appears as a tall, gaunt creature made from the ooze and gunk of the plane, standing over nine feet tall. Though he has a humanoid torso and arms, he lacks legs his body merging into a homogenous mass of ooze beneath his chest. His face shows no signs of his gnomish heritage, or indeed of a humanoid heritage at all. Gwond’s head is a long and worm-like, ending in a large, circular mouth lined with small, barbed teeth. It has several nodules which seem to work as eyes, and stand out from the gunk due to their reflective black surfaces. His arms appear humanoid, ending in hands able to manipulate solid objects. He seems to possess extreme strength capable of tearing into, and through, opponents. Why a creature ostensibly of Good looks so terrifying though, that’s a good question.

Whether Gwond is in truth an archolemental or not is as of yet dark, although the same could be said of Bwimb II. Gwond lacks a follower base of any sort, perhaps becaise he looks absolutely terrifying. Yet the chant goes, like a true archomental he seems to be able to grant spells to his very smallhandful of followers—although none have yet advanced far in clerical prowess. This would seem to be a point in his favour, as most of the self-proclaimed para-elemental lords are unable to grant spells.. Even so he has yet to rally many ooze para-elementals to his cause, and is also being hunted by the servants of Bwimb II. Gwond shows little fear of them, and has been able to defend himself easily thus far. However, the fledgling archolemental has yet to be posed a real challenge, such as a visit from one of Bwimb II’s tanar’ri allies.

Gwond is as yet unrecognized by the elemental lords of other planes, and this dispute seems solely between him and Bwimb II. He has sent one of his servants, an ooze para-elemental known as Marlibey, to Sunnis pledging his support should the earth archomental request it. What Sunnis thinks about this is any basher’s guess, but bloods say she didn’t look too impressed at the offer, and chant has it that she doesn’t think Gwond is powerful enough to prove a useful ally at all.

Source: Homebrew from the Giant in the Playground thread Mundus Primordialis by Zaydos

Sisanthak

The Endless Winter. CE Primordial of Ice [he/him]. Bound

Prison: Astral / Frostburn

Sisanthak [siss-ANN-thak], once called the Endless Winter, was a primordial of cold and pain who delighted in the intimate cruelty of frostbite and freezing lungs. During the Dawn War he specialised in making terrain hazardous to the powers by throwing down howling snow storms and entombing battlefields in ice. He delighted in encasing powers in glaciers—some have suggested Asmodeus later stole the idea to trap Levistus in Stygia—until a coalition of weary gods forged an astral prison of glassteel and lured him inside.

They then trapped Sisanthak and the fire primordial Vorsheen, his arch-nemesis. Why build two prisons when one can do the job? Perhaps the powers expected one of the primordials to overcome the other, but millennia later, the two enemies are still at battle. Each one is so consumed with defeating the other that they have no idea how long they have been fighting, nor that the Dawn War is over. Vorsheen and Sisanthak have been locked in battle for so long that most cutters view them both as two halfs of a duality of opposites—light and dark, heat and cold. You can bet the would both hate that.

From his prison, Sisanthak has found ways to influence the Prime. Every so often, he is able to steer Frostburn out of the Astral Sea and near enough to a Prime world for it to manifest as a streaking comet in the sky. Whenever this happens, it’s an omen that the next Winter will be a particular harsh one. Particularly dangerous are the shards of black ice that sometimes fall from the comet. These cursed items promise their owner protection from and power over ice and snow—but slowly freeze the heart of their owners over the course of a Winter season. Come the Spring, the berk must either pledge themselves to Sisanthak, or melt away to nothingness when the weather warms up.

Source: Heroes of the Elemental Chaos [4e] p30,33; the rest is homebrew

Umboras

Lord of Rimefire. LE Primordial archomental of Ice, Bound

Umboras [umm-BORE-us] was a primordial of absolute, mind-numbing coldness, the echo of a winter that tried to last forever, and very nearly succeeded. Before the War of Winter, he was a relatively minor ice primordial, content to reign over glacier‑choked demiplanes. When the godswars began—those ugly aftershocks of the Dawn War—he reinvented himself. He learned to fuse absolute cold with hungry, pale flame: rimefire, a paradox that burns all heat out of matter and leaves behind only brittle, luminous ash. Mortals saw it as a ghostly blue‑white fire that froze what it touched, leaving statues of frost that collapsed into glittering cinders. Worse, Umboras’ rimefire had a side‑effect: it burned the memories out of the souls it touched, leaving behind vacant spirits without regrets or stories. To the Raven Queen, the erasure of the recollections she hoarded was simply unacceptable..

In the War of Winter that followed, Umboras tried to freeze the memories from the minds of the powers. The Raven Queen played along, pretending that her memories had been stolen, but it was a ruse. She lured Umboras to Agathion, and cast him into the Gullet of Echoes, a vertical chasm where the ceaseless screaming winds strip any remaining shreds of sanity from the sod. He’s in perpetual freefall, but blown upwards by the wind, and thus trapped in the middle of the Gullet, unablw to think or act to free himself.

Source: Heroes of the Elemental Chaos [4e] p33 (brief mention only); homebrew

Uzrith

The Fetid. CE Primordial archomental of Clay [it/its]

Uzrith [UZZ-rith] the Fetid was once a vast ooze‑primordial of living mud in the Elemental Chaos. Its was formed from a great lump of luminous clay that remembered shapes and could shed lumps which could mould themselves into anything they desired. The oldest heresies claim the gods stole some of this clay to fashion the first mortals, then erased Uzrith from the official creation myths. Outraged not just at the theft but at having unfinished work paraded as divine craftsmanship, Uzrith became fixated on the idea that every clay‑born body was stolen property.

The gods could not safely destroy a primordial of raw potential, so they bound Uzrith in the Cyst Kiln; a hollow, world‑sized sphere whose spinning inner surface never let them settle, forcing them to tumble and churn through themselves forever. Sacred clay slowly dried out and sloughed off into sterile dust, and the isolation drove Uzrith barmy, condensing their mind around three obsessions—“the sacred clay is mine, everything shaped from it is stolen, and the only solution is to unmake and reclaim it all.” A later mortal cabal trying to find substances to construct better golems accidentally cracked the cyst; a tendril of true ooze rode their conduit out, and infected their works back in Sigil. This culminated in their clay constructs turning rogue, breaking out of their Lower Ward workshop, and diving into the nearest Ooze Portal. Enough fragments seeped back into the Elemental Chaos to reconstitute a diminished but free Uzrith, while the original mass likely still sloshes insane in its prison.

Now Uzrith rules the Backswill Bog, a parasitic realm that seeps under and between planes. Uzrith is subtle, indistinguishable from mud, and able to be in many places at once. A berk never knows whether that puddle they’ve just stepped in in actually a small diluted part of this barmy primordial, and you’d better believe, while an ooze splatter on your tunic can’t harm you, it’s not trying to. It’s just watching, and gathering information. Uzrith wants to know how many mortals there are made from his stolen sacred mud. Phase one of the plan is to send out many spies as footprints and stains to scout out the planes. Phase two, all the mudballs return to the Backswill Bog to report back. Phase three, well, that doesn’t bear thinking about…

Source: Heroes of the Elemental Chaos [4e] p33 (brief mention only); homebrew inspired by a cross between the Link from Deep Space 9 and the protomolecule from the Expanse.

Vezzuvu

The Burning Mountain. NE Primordial of Volcanoes [she/her]. Bound

Prison: Elemental Chaos / the Chains of Light ‡

Vezzuvu, the Burning Mountain, is a colossal primordial of volcanoes, magma, and pumice. She’s a mountain-sized embodiment of volcanic rage and upheaval. She once strode the young cosmos as a living cataclysm, her fury expressed in pyroclastic surges and plane-sundering eruptions. During the Age of Chains, Vezzuvu marshalled fire giants and titans as her shock troops, leading a brutal siege against Stoneroot, the stronghold of Moradin. Their demand: the surrender of the dwarven race. The old legends disagree on Moradin’s response—some say he surrendered the dwarves to buy time or spare others, others that he was driven back or outmatched—but all agree that Vezzuvu’s victory led to the dwarves’ enslavement in her fiery domains, seeding an ancient grudge—and Moradin’s eventual, devastating reprisal.

That vengeance ended in Vezzuvu’s imprisonment. Her current goal is a field of blinding radiance somewhere deep within the Elemental Chaos, where tides of positive energy bind and smother her destructive nature. There, she hangs half a step out of reality, her molten form frozen in a perpetual, silent eruption. She’s just visible as a silhouette of magma and stone, but she is unable to truly touch or be touched by anything around her. The light surrounding her acts as chains stringer than any solid, diffusing her fury into harmless light and holding the Burning Mountain in a state of frustrated, impotent wrath. And so she is forced to wait for the day some fool or zealot finds a way to extinguish the light and let the volcano walk again. By rights, she should be the archomental of the plane of Magma, but until the time she escapes, Chilimba can sit uneasy on his molten throne.

Sources: Manual of the Planes [4e] p70,72, expanded with some homebrew interpretation

Source: Jon Winter-Holt. The longlist of Primordials was inspired by the work of Mentat55 (on enworld) and Medivh (on the RPGnet forum). † Pathfinder lore; ‡ homebrew