I am working on an idea for a game world that is heavily inspired byt The Codex Alera, and the Avater TV series. I have been thinking about the world having the main form of 'magic' being pacts people made with Patron spirits of some sort tied to aspects of the Natural world. The first 4 that come readily to mind are Earth, Air, and Water I was wondering if anyone had ideas on non-standard aspects of the world that may have patron spirits or even subsets withing the larger categories

Electricity is an option unto itself. Nature/life of course. Cold. Light. Darkness. Good and Evil if you wanna get metaspiritual.

For each set of Patrons there will be different things you can do and different things that would disrupt your power

Air - can fly and control air/winds disrupted by being buried or covered in dirt

Fire - Control and create fire/heat - disrupted by being wet( must be quite wet not just a little)

Earth - can control Earth and can have exceptional strength disrupted by not being in contact with the ground

Water - control water, disrupted by heat/ dehydration.


I like your suggestions maybe breaking up nature into Flora and Fauna with some minor shapeshifting or animal/plant control. maybe healing would fall here

Darkness I can see creating shadows and such and light can manipulate light perhaps even to laser focus.

Electricity could do some fun stuff with speed and electrmagnetism.



I'm wondering if the should have some ancillary abilities not literally connected to the element like in Codex Alera Fire can incite rage or fear and such.

If you want it to be inspired by Codex Alera and Avatar, I don't see much reason to go beyond the Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. Then, you could have each strange or non-standard aspect be a subset of the above. For example, since Fire produces a lot of radiation, it would make sense for a subset of furies to be other kinds of radiation (light, electricity, maybe magnetism (but maybe not).

Fire - Heat (basic), Cold, Light, Lightning (electricity). Creating heat means inducing Kinetic energy, so speeding people up or slowing them down. Smoke, Darkness.
Air - Wind, weather (esp. in conjunction with water), Sound (pressure waves). Senses - Smell, Sight, Hearing all depend on things moving through the air, though sight might better be handled by Light in Fire. Maybe light should be in Air, since light is both a particle (air-like) and a wave (heat-like), and fire seems to have a lot of stuff.
Earth - Manipulate natural minerals, like dirt, stone. Metal, Glass. Earthquakes. Sand. Wood, maybe, esp. in conjunction with Water.
Water - Manipulate water (basic), healing, Life-oriented stuff (e.g. bloodbending from Avatar, wood furies). Disease. Ice, Snow, etc. Weather (esp. with air).

If you want to go really nuts, try looking at Catholic Patron Saints and Japanese Shinto Spirits.

Patron Saint of Amputees, of Whiteners, painters, spirits of the road, plague, various stones, trees, and rivers, and so on.

Gravity, Entropy, and Magnetism.

If you want this to be pacts with spirits rather than deities, you might get better value out by having the act of spellcasting being convincing a local spirit to perform a task. Each spell could have its own spirit, or tap into one that is appropriate.

A 'god of fire' would be a great fire spirit who is responsible for all fire, but giving each torch flame its own spirit and each forest its own makes for a world filled with many and varied spirits - and certainly fits something like Avatar much better.

A patron spirit, then, becomes a mobile spirit that follows that caster. Maybe its a flame spirit that hops from torch to torch, maybe a water spirit that lives in a waterskin on the player's pouch. Maybe a spirit of anger that grants its boon regularly to the player (Barbarian!).

If you want to bring in things like cleric domains or similar, just call it 'affinity for spirits of <type>' - so a cleric with the Darkness domain doesn't have a pact with a god of darkness, but instead an affinity for and boons granted by all spirits of darkness, wherever they may be.