Worldbuilding Ahoy! (Formerly the magic system thread)

Fire grants you empowering and invigorating magic that makes you more willing to do stuff, as well as your typical burning and exploding magic that you'd expect from Fire magic. RPG-wise, they grant a lot of damaging and offensive-empowering spells.

Water has a few offensive spells too, but they're usually not all that powerful unless you're talking about huuuuge quantities of water, which is pretty much, yeah. Water's more about healing (and poisons, and diseases) and maybe even letting you breathe underwater, and make it rain, or fog, or whatever water-related weather phenomena you want. Spell-wise, they sorta look like White Mages with really sadistic streaks (if they wanted to, which they normally wouldn't. Also Water magic doesn't magically cure all diseases, please consult your local physician before using it, as it can lead to side-effects such as bloating, overhydration, dizziness, nausea, severe fevers, drowning on land, and death.)

Earth typically creates structures and obstacles. If you want to, think Earthbenders from AtLA. They've also got stuff that can help reinforce something, like your wall of earth, or your skin, or other stuff. They also have abilities to destroy said obstacles if they need to. (They basically dictate the flow of the battlefield, sorta like how they want to dictate how society should be like)

Air is all about getting you anywhere you want to be, so most of the stuff it has is enhanced mobility. You wanna jump high? You can jump really good. You wanna reach that place? You'll reach it. They've also got stuff like removing air, turning into air, and creating pressurized balls of force. And you can also do tornadoes if you really want to. Nobody's the boss of you. It also lets you sense the air and weather, even control it like a champ.

You already got Lightning, lots of telepathy and chain-lightning, and spreading stuff. It also lets you zip past everything in... well, a flash. You could probably even do a lot of Flash-like stuff like phase through walls (so long as they don't insulate against electricity, which would be like smacking yourself at the speed of a bullet train, which is ow.)

Frost is all about freezing or stopping things. It could probably stop anything except time. You wanna stop your lover from meeting an untimely death by falling? You can do that by making something to catch their fall. You wanna make that annoying dude shut up? You can shut him up for a while with a little brain-freeze. You need to make sure that you don't miss that really good play on the Superbowl? You... could? But seriously dude, just watch it on the net. Other than that, Frost typically has a lot of ice-related powers like making stuff more slippery than a rotten banana peel and making it cold enough for you to make ice cream without a freezer. It's really handy.

Nature acts very hippie in a way. It's mostly plant manipulation (so no points guessing which Temple's probably ridden with all those Feral-making plants you thought about) but you can do a lot of things with plants anyway, since there are a huge category of plants available, and a lot of them are really really useful for anything you need really. Need a drink? Make a coconut tree. Need something to eat? Make a coconut tree. Need something to launch your enemies into the stratosphere? Make a coconut tree. Seriously, consider the coconut! Joking aside, Nature as an element is really versatile, you could patch someone's wounds with it, use it for making things grow, deal poisons, use the bark for defense, or pelt your enemies with giant coconuts...

Metal doesn't really have anything fancy like all the other elements and their flashy powers. Most of the stuff they do is just imbuing something with the power of another element, giving it those qualities. Other than that, Metal could create mirrors to reflect things back, and be a really good shield. Also, you could probably make yourself rich??? Though... oh, wait no, gold sorta got devalued for a long time now, and diamonds are pretty common due to the whole artificially created zirconium thing. Oh well. Much of the really good metal magic anyway comes from making whatever you practice and hone a lot easier to pick up and accomplish, like a sort of memory recorder.

Light has a lot to do with illusions. Not really smoke and mirrors sorta stuff, more like actual visual and aural illusions that play tricks on your mind. Making people see and hear things that don't actually exist. That's the main thing about Light powers. Other powers it has are truesight, which allows them to actually see through bullshit. They are really direct like that. Oh yeah, don't forget giant laser beams of death. That's also a thing for them.

Darkness has a lot of the sneaky and hiding in the shadows stuff that most people associate it with. However it does not have anything to do with communing with demonic forces, or anything evil-related. Rather, most of its powers are protective in one way or another. Heck, sometimes, they can even create barriers that can protect against some powerful stuff. You could also go invisible if you wanted to, or make people blind. Up to you.

Cosmos has a lot to do with Time and Space magic, so you might expect that there'd be a lot of time-and-space travelling involved. Unfortunately, no. That's super advanced stuff that's almost downright impossible to recreate at the moment. And even if they were able to do so, it takes way too heavy a toll on the mage for them to even time-travel to a few minutes back. So most of this magic is actually teleportation, creating weird temporal distortions (where time isn't in sync with the rest of the world) or spatial distortions (like folding space to make wormholes). Even in ordinary hands, this sort of magic is really creepy. (Also, the most time-travelling people can probably do with this is by virtue of looking into the past or the future, though the visions are muddied by perceptions, so it can show possible pasts and futures with clarity, their probable causes and effects, but they might not show you what exactly happened/can happen)

Spirit is probably like the Magikarp of the elements. It allows for stuff like luck and fate to be changed, so it falls on the level of being very Deus Ex Machina. Heck, it's powers are more or less stuff like temporary immortality/invincibility, being really lucky, and being able to revive the dead. However, there are always a catch with this sort of magic. It either takes a bit of your life whenever you use it, or you can only call upon it when you're in what you perceive as "dire straits". Like if you're in a situation where everything is falling to pieces and you're so desperate to do anything just so that you can turn things around for even a small moment. Otherwise, you're just inviting yourself to a quick death. (So in many ways, using this element is very much a gamble for the most part. A Spirit Wasteland however is sorta like if someone turned on all the cheat codes and ended up glitching the game so hard that your character is literally broken.)