News You Can Bruise for 2007 September 27

AD&D has long had the traditional four Empedoclean elements as a gameplay element. There's a whole theme park/plane of existence devoted to each element. Then it got silly: they created para-elemental planes where the elemental planes touched. So at the intersection of Fire and Air you got the para-elemental theme park/plane of Smoke. Then it got even sillier with quasi-elemental planes like Salt and Vacuum. Andy and I mocked this trend in one of our ZZT games. But recently (ie. ten minutes ago) I had the idea of using modern materials science to create new para-elemental planes, equally ridiculous but cooler than Smoke:

• Earth+Air = Aerogel
• Water+Fire = Napalm
• Earth+Water = That cornstarch stuff
• Earth+Fire = Ceramic superconductors