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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 9796314" data-attributes="member: 58172">Your post explores many topics. Power sources suggest a Theory of Everything. I will add thoughts that come to mind.The 5e 2024 Fey Plane differs from 2014. It involves many animistic themes including landscape, plantlife, animallife, ancestors, and so on. But unlike animism is "somewhere else", more like a twilight zone alternate reality. What makes animism animism is it relates to what can be seen, touched, smelled. It strictly refers to the material world, even if a mind can explore it outofbody.  I have been thinking about how to reconcile the otherworldly Fey concepts.One way to understand Fey is to compare Shadow. Norse traditions are famous for "hel", a gloomy unraveling underwold realm of the dead. Many D&D tropes about Shadowfell derive from the Norse hel. At the same time, many ancient cultures share analogous animistic concepts and these inform D&D as well. These dead remember the objects when they were living and continue to use them, but also observe them decaying in the living world.Nordic cultures intermingle Norse, Saami, and Finnish, especially where the regions overlap. Saami and Finnish traditions describe the underworld with gloomy dreadful regions but also bright delightful regions. Recent archeology determines the bright and lively aspects of the underworld exist among the diverse burial traditions of the Norse as well, relating to the ship-shapes of the stone boundary marker (hörgr) around a grave, the horse-meat food offerings, and the textual traditions about the Vanir nature beings.In animistic worldviews, humans dont really die. They shapechange from a living body into a dead corpse. They become a different species of nature being (vættr), and remain mindful persons. A corpse in a grave is a natural feature of the landscape. When descendants visit a grave, the ancestor is physically present and aware. Loved ones form a kind of personal relationship with the living. The mindful soul of a corpse can project outofbody to observe, influence, even interact with the world around, but retains a connection with the body. The physical corpse is who one is.The underworld is any grave with a corpse, and because the minds of corpses can extend out to form relationships with each other, the underworld is every grave collectively. The relationships among the dead weave a world made out of the memories of when they were alive and current observations of the living world. This grave world is the universe with its landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes - but from the perspective of the grave. In this sense,  the location of this world is literally underground in any grave. The sacred areas of nature that ancestors interacted with, entangle the underworld, especially a location where a family tradition goes to commune with nature.In certain Saami and Finnish regions there is lore about lakes that have two basins. A subterranean spring supplies freshwater to the lake, but this underwater tunnel actually leads downward to an other lake underneath, upsidedown. To swim out of this lower lake walks on to an otherworld that is an upsidedown mirror image of the living world. This is the underworld where the ancestors go about their afterlives. The underworld is actually the living world but a bit more ideal and painless. The fish are healthier and fatter. The locations are the living world locations, albeit viewed from the perspective of the ancestors, who go about their lives. There are dreadful areas in the underworld, the ordeals of shamanic journeys and areas of punishment. But most of it is vibrant, abundant with life, and loving. The nature beings of each feature of the living world are also seen from there as well. These lakes of two basins sometimes have the unusually healthy fish swim thru the tunnel to explore the living world.For a D&D setting, the underworld realm of the dead includes both Fey areas of delightful positivity, as well as Shadow areas of dreadful negativity. The underworld is the living world but seen from the perspective of the minds of the corpses.On the one hand, the experience of a Fey location feels like "somewhere else". But actually, it is the normal world, that living humans see, touch, and smell. There are magical interactions between the two perspectives. Persons with second sight experience both.</blockquote>

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