D&D General Advice needed for planar adventure...

Rhemoraz

Villager
My players have never really ventured into the ethereal plane. They're long accustomed to land treks, dungeon crawls, resting/ taking watches in shifts, etc...

I have an adventure in mind where I want about 2/3rds of it to take place within the ethereal plane (including the deep ethereal), in order for them to eventually get to the 9 Hells. Thing is- if I remember correctly, no sleep or eating is required in the ethereal plane. So my Qs are:

-Would they need to pass through the deep ethereal to reach the Hells?
-I understand you can just "will" yourself to a destination but only if you're familiar with it?
-Would I simply increase the number of encounters to "stretch out" the duration of the whole adventure? (it'll be running this during summer & I'd like it to last a good 2 months)

- There is SO much to keep track of. Different categories of spells will act differently outside of the material plane. (eg. Evocations, divinations, enchantments etc) So, How does one keep all that detail organized?

Thanks for any tips!
 

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One thing that I always thought was neat about the ethereal was that is was the place of ghosts and that it touched on the material plane. So having them pass by a castle or old building that half sits in the fog (there's rules how ethereal interacts with the material) and having a classic "ghost" adventure but from the other side of the veil would be cool.

I'd save it for a time if they happen to get lost. I think, unless you've been somewhere before, it's pretty easy to get lost and if they happen to lose their way and are wandering aimlessly through the fog, it would be neat if they happened across a place where they could "save" a ghostly figure and help them move on in exchange for directions or as a guide. What kind of form that story may take, I don't know.

That ghost could even be headed for Hell and could guide them straight there...or the adventure could help the ghost avoid its hellish fate.

Anyways, just an idea.

Besides that, maybe set it up as a "hex crawl"? Just populate it with ethereal stuff. Small demesnes that belong to strange people and creatures, people in need, random encounters and different 'turf' dominated by certain factions.
 

To piggy back on what the previous poster said, the Ethereal borders the Material planes....all of them. So in theory they can wind up adjacent to other realms. Navigating to the Hells may require charting a course using other planes as reference points in regard to some other aspect of the Ethereal. Mmaybe the mists have "currents" that have some nuanced element of distinction l(blue, blurry, moss) .

I.e. Athas is in the iron current. Travel upstream until you reach the intersection with the blue current. In accordance with the "right hand rule" travel down until you hit the blurry current. Follow that to the crystal wall of Krynn. Then....

Now you have landmarks, the ability for PCs to get resupplied and/or pulled into local events. You also have options like like a phase spider to attack the party and flee to the adjacent material plane. Possibly having stolen things from the party.

Even if there's no need to sleep/eat, long rests are still required to renew spells/abilities/hit points. This gives opportunities for currents to shift and the party to get lost. Especially if they use some extradimensional pocket or a magical defense that would block the nuance of the current. (I.e. if the current is distinct for smelling of rotten eggs and tiny hut provides clear air)
 


It sounds like you want to run the Ethereal Plane "by the book", but is it different across settings and editions.

I still use the 3.0 Manual of the Planes as a starting point (the 5e DMG has much less information, some of it actually copy-pasted verbatim from the 3.0 MotP), but after running various planar adventures I generally drifted away from planar RAW without even noticing it, so I went and check the 3.0 MotP and 5.0 DMG.

-Would they need to pass through the deep ethereal to reach the Hells?
The 3.0 MotP describes the deep ethereal while also stating that it doesn't exist in standard D&D cosmology, but the 5.0 DMG presents it without saying anything, so presumably it exists by default; however, it also says that the Deep Ethereal is scattered with curtains that lead to material, transitive and inner planes, but no outer planes like Hell.

In any case, portals to anywhere can be found anywhere, so you can have a passage to Hell wherever it suits you.

- no sleep or eating is required in the ethereal plane
I think you do need to eat and sleep, time passes normally.

-I understand you can just "will" yourself to a destination but only if you're familiar with it?
I don't think this is the meaning of moving by will... The Ethereal Plane has no gravity, so you move to a direction by willing it, including up or down.

What I think the 5.0 DMG is trying to say, is that you use the Deep Ethereal (not the border ethereal) as a means to travel between different planes (material, transitive, or inner, but not outer), because of its curtains, and you know the destination plane of a curtain from its color. Therefore, if you want to reach the Shadowfell, you wander casually until you find a grey curtain. That's why distance itself is meaningless, and the time it takes is random.

Conversely, using the Deep Ethereal as written doesn't work for a long journey to Hell. But a unique portal could be there anyway if you want it to be, in which case you could let the PCs find it exactly when you want them to find it.

Or for something more interesting, you could let them find the information on the whereabouts of a portal on the border ethereal in terms of what is the location on the material plane nearest to it. Say that for example they learn a portal to Hell exists on the border ethereal at the location in the middle of a BBEG fortress on the material plane. Because entering the fortress on the material plane (and then shifting to the Ethereal to access the portal) is too dangerous, the adventure may require the PCs to enter the border ethereal outside the fortress, and reach the portal from there.

So the problem is with the Deep Ethereal as written, it is not coterminous with the material plane (so it's not near anything on the material plane) and basically empty making it too random to navigate even if you place an ad-hoc portal to Hell there. You can still use the Deep Ethereal in your game to create a hazard: maybe to save themselves from an immediate threat, the PCs may choose to move away from the border ethereal and towards the deep ethereal, but then risk getting lost and having to exit somewhere else and restart the journey.

-Would I simply increase the number of encounters to "stretch out" the duration of the whole adventure? (it'll be running this during summer & I'd like it to last a good 2 months)
Well this is unrelated to the adventure's location. My very general experience is that D&D always takes longer than planned, so I would rather not worry about stretching out until it looks like your players got somewhere much earlier than expected.

That said, if you go with an idea like my suggestion above, instead of the target portal being at the center of an evil fortress, you could have it at the center of an evil kingdom, which would take quite some time to traverse all through the Ethereal! The 3.0 MotP even says explicitly that travel speed is halved on the Ethereal, probably as a result of having to navigate by looking at the blurry features of the material plane.

- There is SO much to keep track of. Different categories of spells will act differently outside of the material plane. (eg. Evocations, divinations, enchantments etc) So, How does one keep all that detail organized?
On the Ethereal plane all spells should work pretty much normally. Force spells have the ability to reach into the Ethereal from the Material plane, but not the other way around.

While on the Ethereal plane, the challenging things to remember are about what and how you can see. Your vision is impaired to max 60ft, and you are supposed to be able to see what is on the material plane but blurry (for example, you probably can't read stuff that is on the other side). However, there is diffuse light on the ethereal, so you don't need light sources. At the same time, there is almost nothing on the ethereal itself, and it's not clear if you can recognize easily an object that is truly on the ethereal plane other than when hitting it instead of going through it.

In addition, the really messy part IMHO is (again) the relation between border ethereal and deep ethereal. The border ethereal is supposed to exist in parallel with the material plane (and some other planes have their own ethereal), but how do you go willingly from border ethereal to deep ethereal was never really explained, possibly because it doesn't make sense.
 



One thing that I always thought was neat about the ethereal was that is was the place of ghosts and that it touched on the material plane. So having them pass by a castle or old building that half sits in the fog (there's rules how ethereal interacts with the material) and having a classic "ghost" adventure but from the other side of the veil would be cool.
I like this. It would be great to foreshadow another adventure when the PCs return to the material. It could be an enemy castle or something where the players just gain knowledge on the rooms. Maybe they discover a secret room that nobody knows about with hidden treasure. Maybe it is the resting place of the ghosts that allows them to put them to rest finally.

You could also just have fun with the PCs essentially being the ghosts and wander into some sort of séance going on trying to communicate with another ghost.
 

So, here's the basics of the Deep Ethereal Plane and traveling. Some of this has already been brought up.

1) Traditionally, the Deep Ethereal Plane connects the Material Plane to the Inner Planes and demiplanes. It is not connected to the Outer Planes. The Astral Plane is what connects the Material Plane to the Outer Planes.
2) You eat/sleep normally in the Ethereal Plane. Again, it's the Astral Plane where that's different.
3) Getting to a destination in the Inner Planes and getting to a destination in the Astral Plane are sort of similar, in that you have a destination in mind and start traveling until you get there.
4) While travel in the Astral Plane is clearly purely directed by intention, the Ethereal version is murkier. Ethereal maps apparently exist, and I get the impression from some materials that perhaps there are certain discernible qualities to the multi-colored strands of ether everywhere that you can follow to your destination (or something like that). Like, for example, maybe if you want to reach the Elemental Plane of Fire, you go the directions where there seem to be more red, orange, and yellow colors, and/or it feels a bit warmer, etc. Personally, I'd include a bit of something like that for flavor, even though the mechanics are similar (roll on a random table to see how long it takes to reach your destination). Maps probably shorten the time.
5) The Border Ethereal is just the little overlap with the Material Plane. You don't travel anywhere through it except to other parts of the Material Plane. So if you want to go to another plane, yes, you do need to go through the Ethereal Plane (though, as was mentioned, that won't get you to the Nine Hells--you'd need the Astral Plane for that).
6) While 3e wanted to make ethereal curtains (also known as walls of color) similar to rectangular astral color pools, that isn't what they have traditionally been. They are simply the membrane around the Border Ethereals of the various planes. So the Elemental Plane of Air has one ethereal curtain and it's going to look like an infinite wall in front of you when you find it. There are tricks you can do to use it to imprecisely travel around your destination plane at high speed, but it's really just the boundary between the Deep and the local Border, and you can freely pass through it in either direction.

Stepping back a bit, there are some serious problems with how the Ethereal and Astral Planes have been presented since the beginning.

They have always been presented as planes that are between other planes, and which are used for travel between those planes. However, the mechanics of the game have never supported doing so. It's frankly ridiculous. Here is how it works:
-To get to the Deep Ethereal Plane, you can use etherealness to get to the Border Ethereal, and then move into the Deep Ethereal (5e doesn't provide a mechanism for that, but 2e does, and it amounts to just willing yourself to pass from the Border into the Deep, basically taking an action). However, once etherealness wears off, it is going to yank you from wherever you are in the Deep Ethereal and slam you back into your origin plane (or maybe another plane that is closer). It doesn't last nearly long enough to actually travel to other planes. It's really intended to "interact" with the Material Plane, by invisibly scouting around, moving through walls, etc, rather than as a travel enhancer.
-Alternatively, you could use plane shift to get to either the Border or Deep Ethereal, and from there travel through the Deep Ethereal to your destination plane. At your destination plane, you can pass through the wall of color into its Border Ethereal. But there is no built-in means of getting from the Border Ethereal to the overlapping plane, so you would have to cast plane shift a second time to get there. This means the entire trip was a complete waste of time since you could have just cast plane shift to go directly to your destination plane without ever traveling through the Ethereal Plane. This fundamental flaw of the mechanics has been there since the beginning.
-Traveling through the Astral Plane is typically equally as useless as traveling through the Ethereal Plane. You can, again, use plane shift to get there, and find an astral color pool to your destination (which in this case, actually will send you to your destination if you hop in, without needing to cast another spell), but you could have just used plane shift and skipped the astral trip. There is the 9th level astral projection spell that lets you do it in an astral form, which can make it easier to avoid dying on the Outer Plane you arrive at, if you with go with traditional rules (or the little addition hidden in the 2014 DMG that isn't in the spell description itself), but otherwise it's not terribly useful. Also, when you can cast 9th level spells, you can just skip all that nonsense and use gate to go exactly where you want to go on any plane.

So there has been a fundamental disconnect between the really awesome lore that you use these strange dimensions to travel between other planes, and there being no mechanics to make that actually worth doing. The spells that would let you do that would let you bypass it, or they are equal or higher level than the spells that would let you bypass it.

It bugs me so much that I made a couple spells to make the lore work:

Ether Conduit​

5th-level conjuration
Casting Time: 10 minutes
Range: 10 feet
Components: V, S, M (a quartz worth at least 50 gp, which the spell consumes)
Duration: 10 minutes

Drawing from the limitless possibilities of the Ethereal Plane, you conjure a volatile conduit of ether that snakes from the Deep Ethereal Plane, through the Border Ethereal, and grounds itself to a location on a plane that borders the Ethereal Plane.
You can cast this spell either at the Wall of Color in the Deep Ethereal Plane or on a plane that borders the Ethereal Plane.
If you are in the Deep Ethereal Plane when you cast this spell, an opening appears at a point you can see within range on the Wall of Color. If the Wall of Color is not in range, the spell fails. Another opening appears on the bordering plane.
If you are on a bordering plane when you cast this spell an opening appears at a point you can see within range. Another opening appears in the Deep Ethereal Plane on the Wall of Color.
The opening has a front and a back on each plane where it appears. The front is a a 10-foot diameter circular corridor of slowly swirling multi-colored fog. Any creature that enters it is immediately ejected from the corridor on the other plane, appearing in the nearest unoccupied space. The back in the Deep Ethereal merges with the Wall of Color, and the back on the bordering plane is a 10-foot diameter impassable opaque wall of multi-colored fog.
There is a 70% chance that the conduit opens somewhere in the corresponding vicinity on the other plane. Otherwise it opens 1d10 x 1d20 miles away in a random direction.
This spell has no effect if you cast it while you are on the Border Ethereal or on a plane that doesn't border the Ethereal Plane.

Astral Access​

6th-level conjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Components: V, S, M (a small platinum mirror worth at least 200 gp)
Duration: Instantaneous

You and up to six willing creatures who link hands in a circle are physically transported to the Astral Plane. You appear within 60 feet of a random astral color pool leading to your plane of origin.
This spell has no effect if you cast it while you are on the Astral Plane or on a plane that doesn't connect to the Astral Plane.

I designed those spells so as to be lower level, but not negate the utility of existing spells. So, for example, ether conduit is designed to take you from the Material (or Inner) Plane directly to the Deep Ethereal or back again. Since moving between the Border and Deep Ethereal are imprecise, this means you can't use this to jump to exactly where you want to go in the Border Ethereal, and then cast it again to go back to exactly where you want in the Material (which would have given it the functionality of etherealness at lower level). Instead, this spell is designed precisely to make traveling through the Deep Ethereal to reach other planes be something that actually happens. It is two levels lower than plane shift, and therefore fulfills a useful niche. Astral access is one level higher than that, but still an easier way to get to the Astral Plane to start a journey than plane shift is. It also has the added use of being a quick escape button to get out of a nasty situation, though it doesn't give you an easy way to return to your starting point (the color pool is unlikely to drop you off near your starting location, since it is random).

As one additional point, the 2e Planescape A Guide to the Ethereal Plane book is the fullest treatment of the Ethereal Plane. It has somewhat confusing language that may seem to suggest that you can go directly from a wall of color in the Deep Ethereal to the actual plane on the other side, rather than the Border Ethereal. It is extremely unclear and potentially contradictory in context. However, I might suggest making there be "shallow" areas on the wall of color that do exactly that. So normally the wall of color takes you back and forth from the Border to the Deep, but there are certain patches of it (which look different) where you can pass from the Deep Ethereal directly to the bordering plane, skipping the Border Ethereal (and not requiring a spell). This makes Ethereal Plane travel even more appealing, since it only requires a single 5th-level spell to get started (which you could hire someone to cast for your party), and you can then reach any destination plane that connects to the Ethereal Plane.

From your mention of the spell schools working differently, you are probably looking at 1e or 2e sources. Even if you are playing one of those editions, I recommend ignoring those particular rules. They are way too fiddly. Instead, just make up one or two interesting ways that spells might work differently on the plane and stick with that.
 
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