Opening Thoughts:
The concept of a "primordial chaos" is one that you can find in many different religions, from Greco-Roman to Chinese to Babylonian. In fact, I think most mythoses have some concept of an untamed, unformed reality that existed before the gods brought form, order and stability into being. It's one of the reasons why, when Order vs. Chaos is invoked, we tend to unconsciously associated Order with Good, because the idea of order as something superior to chaos, something inherently benign and safe, is one reiterated in religions the world over.
A Guide to Chaos:
Our chapter, one of the longer ones in this book, opens with this sentence:
A place of elemental fury and churning chaos, of constant creation and destruction. This is the Elemental Chaos.
From here, we move onto two topics that are closely related, as both focus on presenting the fluff behind the plane; The Birth of the Universe and The Chaos Today.
The former talks about the coming of creation; it describes the D&D multiverse as a single point of infinite potential, changeless, serene and complete, the epitome of perfection. When something touched this too-perfect entity, it destabilized it, propagating within what had once been the sum of all and becoming first confusion, then convulsion, and finally eruption. From this metaphysical big bang, creation tore itself into two infinite planes; the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos, with torrents of creation-stuff spilling and eddying in the nothingness between them.
In both realms, life emerged. From the Astral Sea came the Gods, whilst from the Elemental Chaos arose the Primordials. Being partially composed of creation-stuff, the latter were the first to realize the existence of the untamed nothing-yet-something between the planes, and they set upon it in a frenzy. Crafting the Titans to aid them in their labors, they shaped it into an ever-shifting yet solid realm, locked in a cycle of creation and destruction akin to the Elemental Chaos. As a side-effect of their efforts, the Feywild and Shadowfell came into being, born from discarded lumps of creation-stuff that were deemed "too vivid and bright" or "too murky and dark" respectively.
The gods, beings of manifest thought and ideal, were slower to recognize the existence of the foundling materium, but once they saw what the primordials were doing, they were fascinated. So much so that they couldn't resist meddling, for the saw endless room for improvement. From their efforts came life, which spread across the world and then spontaneously kindled in its mirror-planes. Astral essence was taken and mixed with just the tiniest bits of creation-stuff, creating the first angels. And then, emboldened, the gods created the sapient races of the world.
This interference angered the primordials, and sparked what later sources in 4e will call "The Dawn War". The primordials were ready to destroy the world rather than let the gods use it as their plaything, whilst the gods fought to save what they had created. Each god selected a different aspect of creation to champion and care for during this time, giving rise to their modern portfolios. Though outnumbered and outmuscled, the gods triumphed by virtue of teamwork; they learned to band together into small but powerful groups, which used their combined might to subdue the fiercely independent primordials.
Victory was somewhat phyrric, however. The gods won the Dawn War, but were no longer able to bring themselves to work together. They left the mortal realms, leaving their followers to pursue their own destinies with only the subtlest guidance and interference from on high, as well as the gift of divine magic, and retreated to their Dominions - places removed from the world, where they and their angelic servants could live alone or with like-minded allies.
Despite the fury of the Dawn War, the Elemental Chaos remains fundamentally unchanged. It is an endless cycle of creation and destruction as elemental substances and energies crash together, knitting, tearing and reknitting into endless new forms. To quote the book again:
It is a plane of possibilities made reality, of imagination without the reins of morality or reason. Here, raw disorder cavorts. Here, everything—and nothing—is possible. Elements are born in mighty detonations and die just as spectacularly.
The Elemental Chaos is a realm unlike anything that the average mortal has ever seen. Reality is fluid here, and particularly when strong-willed entities desire it, this can lead to bubbles of what mortals would consider normality - bits of forest, patches of meadow, ruined castles and small islands being scattered through the infinity by the whims of residents or lost visitors. But the only constant is change, and the elements here behave like nothing in the mortal world. Forgive me for making yet another quote, but I really don't think I can do this better justice!
Maelstroms churn the earth as if it were a turbulent sea, chunks of rock breaking off and floating into the sky, where some collide and fall again as stony rain. Rivers of magma or fire flow across the landscape with no obvious source. The air lights up with cloudless displays of dazzling lightning, hot and cold blazes, and simple radiance. Dust and flames drop from passing clouds as often as common precipitation, and those clouds are as likely to be smoke or sand as mere ice or water. Balls of sentient fire, vengeful thunder heads, animate chunks of earth, and waves of water battle for superiority until they are, in turn, overcome by yet another chaotic surge.
Though travel in the Elemental Chaos can be extremely hazardous, it's not inherently lethal. One side-effect of reality being so malleable here is that normal rules governing the elements don't always apply. Fire may not burn you here, or water may be as breathable as air, for example.
Denizens of the Elemental Chaos:
This subtopic, obviously, lists some of the many different entities that inhabit the new Elemental Chaos.
Primordials are self-explanatory, being the imprisoned survivors of the Dawn War.
Elementals, likewise, are self-explanatory. The most interesting thing of note here is that they are described as limitless in size, shape, composition and template, with new elemental variants arising even faster than sages can categorize them. This hints at something we see in the actual edition's Monster Manuals: we wouldn't see the iconic "singleton" elementals until the MM3, with the MM1 and 2, and Secrets of the Plane Below, both focusing on mixed elementals, to better emphasize the chaotic and unstable nature of the Chaos.
Efreeti are described as the strongest force of order in the Elemental Chaos, with the City of Bras being a permanent still point amidst the plane's usual chaos; unchanging and eternal.
Djinn are described as spirits of the air who inhabit the empyrean heights of the Chaos; flighty, tempestuous and generally disinterested in the affairs of all other races. This is an idea that would actually not make it into the finished project, as we'll see later.
Demons are the result of the Abyss being made by the spiritual corruption of a significant chunk of the Chaos. They are elemental embodiments of destruction and corruption, existing only to defile and tear down.
Slaads are elementals of entropy; beings of total randomness that seek only to bring about more chaos.
Finally, we finish with Titans; the original giants, the largest and most powerful of them all, they rule vast kingdoms within the Elemental Chaos, and may even slip into the mortal world through portals or planar bleed zones.
Locations of Note:
This is the last of the chapters in this book to have this subtopic, and I would argue that it's actually the largest. Not just in terms of how many locales are provided, but in how fully each locale is detailed. It even opens with a fairly large paragraph, which attempts to convey how open the Chaos is to DMs including fantastical locales in its depths:
Here and there, specific locales in the Elemental Chaos resemble just another part of the world. But a few days or even moments of travel can take an explorer into otherworldly realms where even the weather defies all sense. Lords of giants, efreet, and other elemental forces inhabit the Chaos. Some lie quiescent within its earth, hurled there after their defeat at the hands of the gods, while others govern in domains they’ve carved for themselves and their followers. Plenty of lesser creatures also inhabit the plane, often attracted to stable areas within it.
Within its changeable landscape, the Elemental Chaos holds strange places and hidden treasures. Courageous explorers have a host of locales to visit there, and they have even more reasons to go. In the domain of the elemental forces, enemies of the gods and all creation yet abide, and the fate of the world might yet be determined.
The specific locales detailed in this subchapter consist of:
Titan Realms: These evoke, at least to me, the various divine realms of the Giant gods in the Great Wheel. They're areas under the control of specific titans, the most powerful of the giants, who often claim an almost god-like dominion amongst their lesser kin. Three specific titan-realms are detailed; Nyfholl, where Thrym the Frost Titan directs his minions in pursuit of an eternal winter; Muspel, where Sutur the Fire Titan builds his fiery forces to bring cleansing flame to the cosmos; and Vedraeholl, the storm-carried castle of Hrydd the Storm Queen.
City of Brass: A fiery metropolis built on a basalt plate in an immense volcanic field, resulting in magma canals flowing through the city. This is the center of the efreeti civilization, and a true showcase of the malleable nature of reality; despite the abundance of lava and open flames here, the temperature is no higher than that of a scorching summer's day, making it merely uncomfortable for visitors not innured to fire. Useful for one of the largest nexues for planar travelers shy of Sigil.
Githzerai Monasteries: Many of these fortified city-monasteries dot the Elemental Chaos, home to the githzerai race, allowing them to contemplate matters of order, destiny, entropy and destruction. The greatest of them all is Zerthadlun.
Yrnsvellar: Also known as the Steel Glacier, this is a city-sized iceberg of unmelting ice that has been transformed into an enormous army barracks for archons.
The Pandemonium Stone: A mysterious monolith that travels at random throughout the Elemental Chaos, which the slaad revere almost as if it were a living god. Some suggest that destroying it would be a decisive blow against the slaads. Others say that the stone itself is the sleeping slaad lord - a primordial of great power.
The Keening Delve: I'll have to quote this entry, I really can't do it justice myself:
Parts of the Elemental Chaos are the remnants of ancient primordial lords. One such place is the Keening Delve. This labyrinthine maze of tunnels was once filled with the black blood of Haemnathuun, the Blood Lord, whose corpse now floats in the Astral Sea. The gaping tunnels he left behind intermittently howl with wind, making a maddening sound like a death shriek. Horrible monsters prowl the sticky passageways, and a crystal heart is buried somewhere within, holding untold eldritch energy.
Efreet, Elementals, and Evil, Oh My!
This subchapter talks about the reasoning behind the Scramjet team's radical redesign of elementals. Key to the whole process was recognizing the fame of the iconic adventure "The Temple of Elemental Evil", and to a lesser extent its 3e sequel.
It was a general design choice for the 4e Monster Manual 1 that they wanted to emphasize the popular and interesting monsters in the game, which also played its part in what was to come.
Let's be honest; traditional elementals are not really that interesting. They're monolithic masses of elemental matter sorted out based on size and thusly how many hit points they have. People have always tended to gravitate more towards the so-called "elemental-kin" races - the less overtly element-centric creatures such as salamanders, sylphs, genies and so forth.
So, with these elements in mind, it was natural that the Scramjet team decided to not only bring "elemental evil" more strongly into play as a central cosmological concept, but this also required them to reinvent the various elemental "factions" to be more diverse. The way that they did this was by redefining elemental from a very single specific creature - an animate mass of elemental substance - to a broader creature category, encompassing any creature with an elemental nature. To quote the subchapter's final paragraph:
In short, “fire elemental” now means a lot more than a living bundle of flame. It could be a burning humanoid armed with a sword of fire, a serpentine trail of flame that spits magma, a hill giant–sized humanoid of burning cinders who breathes gouts of fire, or a fire-skinned master of the arcane arts.
No More Genies?
Whilst this subtopic ostensibly talks about D&D's four genie species - Dao of Earth, Efreeti of Fire, Djinn of Air, and Marids of Water - it's mostly a reiteration of a point that was being hinted at in the previous subchapter, and touched upon elsewhere in this book:
The World Axis is forsaking the "bogus parallelism" (their words, not mine) of the Great Wheel.
Let's be honest; a lot of elemental creatures in the Great Wheel start of as "create an entity for element X, and then create variants of it for elements Y and Z". In fact, a lot of planar monsters in general, particularly in the TSR days, tend to fall into a similar pattern; we have creature A for plane 1, so we need creatures B and C for planes 2 and 3.
So, this subchapter boils down to this: the genie "type" is gone, and genies are only going to exist in the World Axis if they can be given compelling, distinctive identities to each other, rather than simply being different element-based retreads of the same basic concept of "genies are incredibly powerful beings who become beholden to whoever releases them from their prison". By extension of this same logic, 4e wants to avoid the "Underground Monkey" school of design, where monsters exist that are just palatte and/or element swaps of existing ones.
It does reassure the reader that the dao and marid will return if WotC can come up with unique and exciting origins or concepts for them. Having covered their return in my let's read of the various 4e Dragon & Dungeon articles relating to monsters... sadly, I don't think that stayed true.
Behind the Scenes: Origins of the Elemental Chaos:
This sidebar, which marks the last entry before our Elemental Chaos/Abyss divide, reiterates the reasoning behind why the Inner Planes (or, specifically, the "Elemental Wheel") of the Great Wheel were dropped and the Chaos took their place. Simply put, the design team found the Inner Planes to be highly dissatisfing; many places were downright lethal to adventurers, and their depiction as infinite tracts of a single element offer nothing to the imagination. All of the fun and interesting stuff is restricted to the border regions, where the other elements are allowed to intrude and mingle.
The Elemental Chaos attempts to create an "elemental plane" that is better suited for adventuring and exploration by treating the mixing of elemental substances as the rule, rather than the exception. This allows for far more varied landscapes to adventure into, and it also makes traveling to the Chaos inherently safer; a player can enter the Chaos without needing a meticulously checked laundry list of magical protections to avoid immediately burning to ash, suffocating or simply exploding. Note that the Elemental Chaos is still volatile and dangerous, it's just not "you entered the portal without Immunity to Fire; you die" territory.
Additionally, the Chaos also subsumed the plane of Limbo, which was never really exploited to its full potential in the Great Wheel (and, I would argue, couldn't be), and incorporated the Abyss by giving it a newer backstory.
It also clarifies that the roots for the Elemental Chaos' design actually came from the team assigned to work on the Forgotten Realms for the new edition; the Scramjet team just refined it a little, such as renaming it from "The Primordial Chaos" to "the Elemental Chaos".
Closing Thoughts:
As I said when I opened this chapter's review, the concept of a primordial chaos that is the birthplace of the orderly multiverse in which we live is something that's a part of many mythologies and cosmologies. But it's not something that D&D has ever actually done very well, in my opinion.
The Elemental Planes are Aristotlean in origin, taking Aristotle's concept of the universe's base makeup to their extreme by positing entire dimensions comprised solely of elemental matter, and whose relationship to the existence of the prime material is nebulous at best.
Limbo best fits the primal chaos "mold", but is more focused on its role as the physical embodiment of the "Chaotic Neutral" alignment; it's a plane of spiritual chaos, not physical chaos, at least from the perspective of the wider multiverse. Although not touched upon here, Limbo also suffered a similar problem to the Elemental Planes, just to a lesser extent; the endless random shifting of the plane makes it hard to generate meaningful or interesting locales to explore there, and it can quickly become overly complicated, boring, or even dangerous, depending on the ruleset for planar travel you're using.
The Elemental Chaos is a marked step up, in my opinion. It goes back to a more mythical source and it sticks to it, and as far as I'm concerned, it prospers by doing so. I've had...debates... with people asserting that the Elemental Chaos is blatantly gamist; the sheer lethality of the Elemental Planes, they argued, was unimportant because they filled out the wider multiverse and made it "more complete", in the same way that Antarctica or the Mariana Trench does - they're defined places on the map of existence, even if we can't go there.
Me? I say a spot of nothing on a map with a name is still a spot of nothing. The Elemental Chaos actually fills out the position of Limbo and the Elemental Planes better because it's genuinely connected to the prime material in particular and to the multiverse as a whole, whereas you could literally ignore the existence of any of those planes in the Great Wheel and it would still work fine (the Chaotic Neutral Plane niche can be filled by Ysgard and Pandemonium, which, let's face it, are much more accessible and interesting than Limbo). And it does this while being fun to play in and easily accessible as a player, which is pretty important in a world that you're actually wanting to play in.