Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 9676178" data-attributes="member: 1465">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.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.I think you do need to eat and sleep, time passes normally.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.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.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.</blockquote>

Verification