D&D 5E Ethereal Plane in 5e?
Sword of Spirit
Legend
Wait a minute, I think I heard of a place like that before from a gypsy woman...
Quickleaf
Legend
Yes, I have A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and have been reading it. Some of it's good material, and because it's by Bruce Cordell of course that are Cthulu-esque/Far Realms-ian references.
However, the picture it provides of the Ethereal's unique identity – that it's where demiplanes reside as "islands in the mist" & where dreams happen – doesn't mesh with the 5e cosmology. In 5e, demiplanes are "free floating" with no special relationship to the Ethereal (unless the DM decides a specific demiplane has a special relationship) and the Astral Plane is called out as the realm of dreams.
Obviously, I don't need to restrict myself to following anything written in a book slavishly, but I like to cover the bases of established lore before going my own way. For example, I could just say "the Ethereal IS the realm of dreams", but in doing so I then need to think further about what I'm using to fill that void in the Astral Plane's identity if I take away its connection to dreams.
Li Shenron
Legend
The Ethereal Plane as I have personally always used in my adventures, which is not necessarily as it was intended, is merely "behind the curtains" of the material plane. A bit like a fourth dimension into which you can "step" and then move around and observe the material plane as if you would observe a house from the outside through its windows.
I've always narrated the existence of the Ethereal Plane as the place where mortal souls move to after death, and occasionally get trapped there (ghosts) instead of moving forward towards the afterlife domains.
If you have seen the movies of the horror series "Insidious", their depiction of "The Further" is very close to how I've always seen the Ethereal Plane.
Li Shenron
Legend
Honestly I would not even think about involving the Ethereal Plane into this story... I don't know the details, or what else you have in mind, but from the sound of this summary all I get is that the key story element is planshifting i.e. actively moving around the multiverse (not necessarily all of it). Why do you want to use the Ethereal Plane in this story?
Quickleaf
Legend
The TL;DR is that there's an artifact hidden in the city's Border Ethereal "counterpart" or "side" which many factions are on searching for (though nobody knows for certain it's in the Ethereal, or even that it's in the city yet).
My actual answer is more involved...
Here's the former thread.
The Lost City of Ubar (which I'd previously been calling Qaybar until I found the Ubar references in Wolfgang's AQ4 Secrets of the Lamp) ir primarily inhabited by jann, lesser genies comprised of all the elements. In my story, these jann settled in what grew into the city, and they are much more mercantile and amoral than the nomadic jann of the desert (at least that's how I'm depicting them). One of the traits of jann is that they can have Innate Spellcasting – specifically, the ability to cast etherealness 1/day. So they can exist on the Border Ethereal for up to 8 hours a day! I wanted their habitation to reflect that (along with other things like having the ability to create food & water, fly, etc).
I'm really intrigued by what that means for the jann... maybe they are creatures with very active dream lives, or maybe they regard a child's fantasies with far more gravitas than humans, or maybe they forbid the unauthorized casting of illusions, or maybe they are accustomed to navigating in unusual ways & rely on plant life and/or creatures that can see/shift ethereal to block potential ethereal intruders.
I was trying to think of literary examples of a city with another side...maybe the Plateau of Leng from Lovecraft? or whatever that troll market was in Harry Potter?
I'll be honest that I do enjoy taking things that previously were "why on earth would a DM use this?" and making them fun and imminently usable. For example, I did this with the planar renovation project for Bytopia. But that's not my driving reason. If that was all I had, I wouldn't have gone forward with the idea. My driving reason is that somehow it feels right for the jann to have a city with a vibrant presence on the Ethereal Plane....something about the mystery, the mists, the ghosts of the past, the dimensions ethereality adds to thieves & repelling them, the thrill of a chase through the bazaar in both the Material and Ethereal Planes...it just feels right.
The one visual I have for this is the Prince of Persia game from 2008 (see below). In that game, the player uses magical pressure plates to navigate environmental obstacles in magical ways including accessing something akin to the Ethereal Plane.
Here's one small segment of my writing that's relevant to what I'm doing....
[SECTION]An Ethereal City. Ubar exists as much on its current plane as it does in the Border Ethereal, where the ground level streets are shrouded in thick bluish mists and the minarets glow faintly against a sea of the cosmos. Special guardians and magical pathways known as the Masarat al-Jann are found in the mists. This is the spiritual heart of Ubar, sought after by malevolent forces which assail the city with ether cyclones (coinciding with sandstorms on the Material Plane or elemental storms on the Inner Planes). Jann alchemists and philosophers believe it is in the Border Ethereal where the Seal of Jafar al-Samal was hidden and where lies hope for the transcendence of the jann race into a form equal to other genies.[/SECTION]
In the end you can make it what you want. The different versions have slip-slided on the cosmology.
I've been playing around with a Cosmological model for my own campaign ideas and I've tried to read through the various pieces to come up with something that is cohesive. It is quite difficult.
The Ethereal is described as a coexisting transitive plane. The transitive nature has been altered between versions--but it was written off as the in-between of planes (Astral, too). What I think has been consistent is that it co-exists. Every point in the inner planes exists in the Ethereal Plane. I think some versions waffled whether the elementals and energy planes were overlapping with the Ethereal. This co-existing space is the Border Ethereal, since it overlaps with all. This is whether stuff happens. A ghost or other ethereal is walking around in the same "space" as you, but you can't see or touch them, because there is a veil separating the dimensions of the ethereal from the dimensions of the Prime Material. Ethereal creatures have limited vision into the other planes. But everything here is there. Remember they aren't peeking through a mirror, they are walking around the castle the same as you, but they have 60' vision before the shroud of the ether fogs the world out.
In early versions Ethereal and Astral were often depicted like Darkvision, black and white or grays. You can do what you like. Perhaps the Ethereal world looks just like the real world in color, only translucent. You see the room you're in, and the next and next. You see the floors above and below for 60'. It might be very disorienting.
(homebrew) One of the glaring omissions in the cosmological model is the absence of the weave. This was added in later versions to explain magic, but it is completely absent in the model. There is a plane explaining why Ooze exists, but no mention of the fabric of magic. I decided for my model, that the veil that separates the planes from each other is The Weave. As a side effect of that decision, an anti-magic field would merge Ethereal creatures (not sustained by a spell) onto the material Plane within an AMF. The veil that separates the two would be removed and there would be no separation between Material and Ethereal. I haven't decided if that means Ethereal become solid or remain incorporeal, but i believe the logic will work to be the latter. Since the veil has this one-way mirror effect, I've decided that the magical nature of the weave is more evident on that side of the veil. So if one did a detect magic in the Ethereal plane, it would be useless.
I've been playing around with a Cosmological model for my own campaign ideas and I've tried to read through the various pieces to come up with something that is cohesive. It is quite difficult.
The Ethereal is described as a coexisting transitive plane. The transitive nature has been altered between versions--but it was written off as the in-between of planes (Astral, too). What I think has been consistent is that it co-exists. Every point in the inner planes exists in the Ethereal Plane. I think some versions waffled whether the elementals and energy planes were overlapping with the Ethereal. This co-existing space is the Border Ethereal, since it overlaps with all. This is whether stuff happens. A ghost or other ethereal is walking around in the same "space" as you, but you can't see or touch them, because there is a veil separating the dimensions of the ethereal from the dimensions of the Prime Material. Ethereal creatures have limited vision into the other planes. But everything here is there. Remember they aren't peeking through a mirror, they are walking around the castle the same as you, but they have 60' vision before the shroud of the ether fogs the world out.
In early versions Ethereal and Astral were often depicted like Darkvision, black and white or grays. You can do what you like. Perhaps the Ethereal world looks just like the real world in color, only translucent. You see the room you're in, and the next and next. You see the floors above and below for 60'. It might be very disorienting.
(homebrew) One of the glaring omissions in the cosmological model is the absence of the weave. This was added in later versions to explain magic, but it is completely absent in the model. There is a plane explaining why Ooze exists, but no mention of the fabric of magic. I decided for my model, that the veil that separates the planes from each other is The Weave. As a side effect of that decision, an anti-magic field would merge Ethereal creatures (not sustained by a spell) onto the material Plane within an AMF. The veil that separates the two would be removed and there would be no separation between Material and Ethereal. I haven't decided if that means Ethereal become solid or remain incorporeal, but i believe the logic will work to be the latter. Since the veil has this one-way mirror effect, I've decided that the magical nature of the weave is more evident on that side of the veil. So if one did a detect magic in the Ethereal plane, it would be useless.
MechaTarrasque
Hero
I figure it is something like this: there is a multiverse, and between similar locations in different universes (even if they have different names), there is a "dark space" (must trademark that quick before the physicists get to it) that can't be perceived except by magic. This "dark space" is the Ethereal Plane. The closer you get to a specific location in a given universe, the clearer it gets, but if you get too deep into the "dark space", the conflicting details from the different universes mush together as a mist.
The benefit of this is that if the PC's get lost in the mist outside of FR, you can have them wind up in Greyhawk or Dark Sun.....
The benefit of this is that if the PC's get lost in the mist outside of FR, you can have them wind up in Greyhawk or Dark Sun.....
Yaarel
He Mage
The four elements − Air, Water, Fire, and Earth − each have their own plane.
Ether is the fifth element, being "spirit", force, that unifies all four elements within it. The other four elements emanate from Ether, and operate within Ether. Similarly, the Ethereal plane emanates and contains within it, the four elemental planes. The world of matter, the Material plane is in the center of the four elemental planes, and is also in the center of the wider Ethereal plane. As the Ethereal plane overlaps the Material plane, it is possible for observers in the Ethereal to see the Material, in a ghostly whispy way.
Where the elemental planes are ‘horizontal’ around the Material, the planes of Feywild and Shadowfell are above and below the Material, respectively, and are likewise within the Ether as well. Both Feywild and Shadow fell are Ethereal, made out of the spiritual forces of Ether.
Positive energy Feywild, and negative void Shadowfell, are both aspects of the Ether − at high and low frequencies of energy, respectively.
Where the Ether overlaps the Material world, both formative Feywild spirits, and dissolutive Shadowfell spirits, can manifest within the Material World, depending on the "frequency" that dominates that particular area of the Material.
Ether is the fifth element, being "spirit", force, that unifies all four elements within it. The other four elements emanate from Ether, and operate within Ether. Similarly, the Ethereal plane emanates and contains within it, the four elemental planes. The world of matter, the Material plane is in the center of the four elemental planes, and is also in the center of the wider Ethereal plane. As the Ethereal plane overlaps the Material plane, it is possible for observers in the Ethereal to see the Material, in a ghostly whispy way.
Where the elemental planes are ‘horizontal’ around the Material, the planes of Feywild and Shadowfell are above and below the Material, respectively, and are likewise within the Ether as well. Both Feywild and Shadow fell are Ethereal, made out of the spiritual forces of Ether.
Positive energy Feywild, and negative void Shadowfell, are both aspects of the Ether − at high and low frequencies of energy, respectively.
Where the Ether overlaps the Material world, both formative Feywild spirits, and dissolutive Shadowfell spirits, can manifest within the Material World, depending on the "frequency" that dominates that particular area of the Material.
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