There are 92 Naturally occurring elements on planet Earth, and about 40 of them are required for life. On Alterra however, everything is made up of just 10 elements, and their varying ratios compose all life and non-life on the planet. The ten elements are:
Magic users across Alterra have learned to channel these elements through a variety of means. For this reason, each spell school is distinct, and player will only choose spells from one element to form their character.
When constructing a new character, a player takes two spells of the same element that can each be used once per combat, and one spell called a cantrip that can be used any number of times both in and out of combat.
There are a few cases where the magical spell school has a different name from the element used to cast it. Those are:
Wood element -Nature Magic
Sun Element - Light Magic
Moon Element - Dark Magic
In Alterra, elemental enemies feature prominently-
Elementals form naturally when too much of one element becomes concentrated in one place. They are chaotic and dangerous, but more like untameable wild animals or forces of nature than evil or malicious entities.
Deviliers are unnatural and corrupted elementals, bound to obey the command of their creator. They must be created with a sole purpose, and they live only to serve or fulfill it.
Mages are called by their magic school, so while you’d see an Air Elemental, you’d meet a Wind mage. Classes don’t exist on Alterra any more than they should on Earth, so feel free to rename magic users to fit your game’s theme.
Dragons are all able to cast elemental magic that corresponds to their color. They all breath fire, but that fire has a secondary elemental property, which is likewise, based on that dragon’s color. A gold dragon breathes gleaming yellow SunFire. You can read more about Dragons on our shiny new Website!
As a Magic player, I’ve always felt that aligning with an element was a lot more evocative than trying to fit my character vision into the box that is character classes. Also, from Magic, we also gave each spell school its own color to help make the spell cards easy to identify. The largest influence, however, that made me want to make a game based around elements was Secret of Mana, which also had a big impact on the Alterra setting. Either me or David will be sure to follow up with a post in the next few weeks talking about the allied and enemy color pairs, but in the meantime, feel free to speculate...
-Parrish (creator, Alterra)
Art is from Pepper and Carrot by David Revoy CC 4.0
