The new Elemental Cataclysm is here to end one age and begin a new one in the D&D 2024 Monster Manual

The new Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Monster Manual has Elementals. They're not only from the elemental planes—Earth, Air, Fire, Water—but also from the mashups in between: Plane of Ooze, Magma, Ash, and Ice. These are the fundamental building blocks of the Inner Planes, the planes that house the Material Plane, Feywild, and Shadowfell.

Ok, that's a lot of proper nouns. But that just goes to show that there are lots of Elementals. They're either made of a primary element at the heart of one of those planes, or is at least in some way suffused by it. Some examples of Elementals:

• Djinni (genie)
• Fire Elemental
• Galeb Duhr
• Mephit
• Water Weird
• Xorn

Just like many monsters in the Monster Manual, some have played musical chairs with their creature type. Many of these come from the drastically shrunk Humanoid category—but had enough of the Elemental Planes in their makeup to make the move make sense:

You see that the Azer was already an Elemental. They're just in the chart above so you can see how developer Wizards of the Coast started with them as an example as to how to round out the Elemental family with Merfolk, Aaracokra, and Lizardfolk.

They also fill in a big gap that exists in the older 2014 Monster Manual: an apex big bad creature to sit at the top of the Elemental pyramid. That new apex creature is the Elemental Cataclysm.

High Challenge Rating (CR) creatures for Elemental Earth, Air, Fire, and Water already exist in the Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the  Multiverse sourcebook.

But the Elemental Cataclysm was created to top them all. And it's a fun creature for Dungeon Masters to run, because the DM gets to roll each turn to find out which element—Earth, Air, Fire, Water—will dominate the round and release its particular type of elemental destruction. 

Since the Elemental Cataclysm is Chaotic Neutral, there's no malice involved in what it does. It's just a disaster. It's a tidal wave, a hurricane, a firestorm, whatever. It doesn't care about you, and probably cares little for itself. But even as the Elemental Cataclysm has passed, the world is often renewed or changed in some elemental fashion. That's awesome. And its writeup says, "The End and Beginning of Ages." That's incredible. 

While many of us may see a dragon-like creature with multiple heads and think: Tiamat, the Elemental Cataclysm is not Tiamat. It's a Voltron of the four apex Elemental creatures in Monsters of the Multiverse: Zaratan (Earth), Elder Tempest (Air), The Phoenix (Fire), and Leviathan (Water). Considering the Elemental Cataclysm was inspired by being a mashup of those four major Challenge Rating creatures, it's absolutely the extinction-level event I'd love to bring to my table.

The new D&D 2024 Monster Manual goes on wide release on February 18.