Positive: 

Air - ideas, concepts, dreams, plans, visions, the intellect

Fire - desire, conviction, fierce protection

Water - flow and letting go, basic needs for all life, living water

Earth - roots and ground of being, ancestral connections, landscape and natural beauty, connection to all life and all living beings

Negative:

Air - abstract and distance from experience, ungrounded, lost

Fire - anger and rage, destructive power

Water -  physically destructive power, water sometimes represents emotions and emotions can drown out reason

Earth - phenomena on the planet that destroy: earth quakes, tsunamis, draught.  Metaphorically - being stuck, grounded, unable to make change

Just some thoughts!

Air and Fire: male powers

Earth and Water: female powers

The 4 lower, quaternary planes of our Humankind constitution: 

1. Spirit = Intuition Buddhic Plane
    
2. Air = Mental Manasic Plane
    
3. Water = Emotional Astral Plane
    
4. Earth = Dense Physical Plan

The 3 upper planes make up the Triplicity of Godhead.

Here is my riff:

Earth -- Healing, Resistance to change, Slow, Wisdom, Matter, Resistance to poison, the the concrete, Suffocation

Fire -- Change, alChemical reactions, Energy, Charisma, Will

Air -- Flighty, Intellect, Travel, the abstract, Occulted

Water -- Submission, Patience, Compassion, Poison, Dissolving, Drowning in armor (the more protection you wear, the more you sink in water)

Been playing a lot of RPGs lately, have we?

Mendalla

Actually, I haven't for quite a few years now.  But they definitely arewere a part of my spiritual journey.  I'm thinking of them as a kind of ship to explore a realm that is as important as any other one, the Imagination.

And didn't you know that life is an RPG? :3

(Christians could look upon their Bible as the 'Core Rules' for their RPG.  Muslims, their Koran, and the Hadith could be various supplements.  The ones that survive eventually fire their Gary Gygaxes and move on to niftier and niftier books)

One of my favourite RPGs was Everway -- character creation was quite fluid and the set came with GORGEOUS cards with art.

One of my stories is about the wind.

I cannot see the wind - but I can see it ruffle leaves, blow boats across the water, and I can feel it cool my skin on a hot day.

I cannot see God, but I have seen God change lives.

If I want to find God, I follow where God has been.

I've always connected the elements with the Kiersey temprament sorter AND to this cool site I found years ago that used the characters in the Wizard of Oz to explain the different tempraments (based on the Myers-Briggs):

Fire=SP=Cowardly Lion (seeking courage)

Air=NT=Scarecrow (seeking brain)

Water=NF=Tinman (seeking heart)

Earth=SJ=Dorothy (seeking home)

Hi Inanna:

A local farmer and friend of ours nearly died in his hip waders a few years ago. The hip waders offered him good protection from the water until he got in over his hips, and the hip waders filled with water and he got in over his head. Luckily, he was able to get the hip waders off while under water and make it to shore.

Alas, it was he element of air that  eventually proved fatal to him. He and his brother plunged to their deaths a few weeks ago when tracking cattle from the air in his brother's aeroplane.

Looks like he would have been better off with the element earth. Farmers should stick with earth, blacksmiths like me should play with fire. (I do :-)

Apparently the authors of the four gospels were also associatated with the fixed signs of the Zodiac and therefore associated with each of the elements:

St. Matthew, Aquarius the Man, Air

St. Mark, Leo the Lion, Fire

St. Mark, Taurus the Ox, Earth

St. John, Scorpio the Eagle, Water

You've got Mark twice. Is the second one (Taurus) supposed to be Luke?

Mendalla

I've been out of the hobby for 15 or so years now myself. My regular gaming group from high school and university kind of drifted apart in the 90s as we got jobs, wives, kids and so on. With family, work, etc. I don't have time to find a new one and I'm not sure I have the inclination anymore.

Agreed that life can seem like an RPG at times and that religious texts can be like rule books.

I kind of missed out on Everway (came along late in my gaming days, IIRC) but it did sound interesting when I read about it.

Mendalla

Ha, ha, That's what I get for posting quickly, after my first call for dinner was made. Yes, Luke for Taurus. See http://catholic-resources.org/Art/Evangelists_Symbols.htm 

Mandella - concerning your original list, "spirit:" comes from the root word meaning "to breath", which is also the root of inspiration (i.e. to breath in - air as well as ideas!). So although the Holy Spirit with air more than with fire (although fire needs air).

Water - also essential for growth. You will die within days if you do not have access to water. But just as we must be vigilant to ensure our water supply isn't polluted, we must also strive for a spiritual health that is not polluted by materialism, prejudice, and small-mindedness.

Earth - easy to take for granted. How often do we really look around us to see how we're squandering what we have been given? Yet earth is the foundation on which we stand, the provider of our food, the source of our metals, plastics and much of our energy.

So we can foul air, water, and earth and let fire ravish what we have built or we can use each of the elements to build a sustainable world for all.

I think I drifted away because my natural ability to find isomorphisms/abstracting ability got the better of me in RPGs -- I started seeing all RPGs in terms of "Ok, so rolling this target # means that you HAVE to act now in a certain way" :3  I have tried LARP, and that I prefer, especially since it is MAINLINING acting :3  Very heady stuff.

I am always titillated to find out how some of my favourite game designers are religious...like when I found out that Greg Stafford (Runequest) was a shaman.

I think the idea of life being like an RPG and religious texts being like RPG rule books can be liberating...it points again to the role we have in the world and our beliefs.  They are participatory.  You build a character and explore with it in a world that has been created, so you, for a bit, convince yourself (hypnotize yourself?) that it is 'real' (yay detachment!)  I used to joke aboot how universe would be if G_d used a certain RPG system--better hope Sie didn't use Rolemaster!

I've gone against form and recently ordered some gaming books from the local gaming store.  There is a soft place in my heart for horror, especially Call of Cthulhu.  One of my favourite game designers, Robin D. Laws (now living in Canada!) has come out with Esoterrorists, which is sounding so delightfully tasty that I ordered some of the work.  I don't think I will ever play it, but I do appreciate the work put in -- RPGs have come a long way since the old Chainmail and Napoleonics...

In high school I played Advanced D & D, and a western-themed game called Boot Hill. In university I played a PBeM RPG called Tango Fleet.

Which explains a lot about Glorantha, the world that was the predominant setting for the early editions of RQ.

Amen. Can you imagine having to consult a page long table just to see what you had for breakfast .

In spite of being a big horror fan myself, CoC is about the only horror RPG I've actually played. I did run some horror-ish scenarios using the Hero System, but those were the exception rather than the rule. Laws is definitely a big name in the rather small pond that is RPG writing. As I've mentioned in other threads, I still hang out at rpg.net at times and Esoterrorists and other games of his come up there quite a bit as examples of great design.

Dang. I've derailed my own thread, haven't I?

Mendalla

AD&D 1st edition was pretty much my group's go to game for most of the time we were playing together. The only system that came close to rivalling it for us was the Hero System (best known from the superhero system Champions), although we did try out, and even play campaigns in, a lot of different systems over the 80s and early 90s. I was heavily into espionage-themed games for a while and ran Top Secret (from TSR, the same publisher as AD&D and Boot Hill) quite a bit for a few years.

Mendalla

Air: dreams, freedom, flight, oportunity, possibility, potential, eagle, hawk

Earth: home, grounding, plants, houses, food, yarn/clothing, safety, sheep, cattle

Water: change, openmindedness, learning, purification, sturgeon, fish

Fire: passion, destruction, enthusiasm, zealousness, phoenix, bird of paradise, cobra.

I don't really think of anything bad for the first three.