Elemental my dear.

One of my favorite webcomics is Order of the Stick. Rich Burlew combines D&D style role-playing and fun with some observations of the world into quite a few clever comics. Sometimes the strips have many fun points, not just one. As a chemical engineer I really appreciated a recent strip in which he has the bad guys create Elementals to storm the good guy's castle walls in a siege.


These are not your scientifically inaccurate fire, air, water and earth elementals, his characters have taken and passed chemistry, so these are periodic table of the elements elementals. These titanium elementals even have the properties of titanium that makes it so good for golf clubs and rocket ships, light but strong.

Dungeons and Dragons updated to at least the 19th century. Mendeleev would be proud (I recommend Mendeleyev's Dream by Paul Strathen to hear the interesting story of the periodic table). Does this mean there are now 118 or so elemental planes instead of the four from the original Dungeons and Dragons game? Can you imagine a chlorine elemental or plutonium elemental being sent after your player character during a rousing session of Dungeons and Dragons? Neutralize the first with water and the second with graphite rods I guess.