Plane of Shadow -- does anyone use it?

[Psion]

I'm unclear as to how the Ethereal Sea appears/looks like in Ptolus.

the Ethereal Sea is discussed in Beyond Countless Doorways. It essentially treats the ethereal sea as a cobbling together of the ethereal and astral planes.

Which sort of makes sense to me; for a long time it seems like many things that get attributed to the Ethereal should get attributed to the astral. I was happy to see the dreamscapes moved to the astral in 3e.

I don't use the ethreal sea this way... but perhaps I should.

 

[Ripzerai]

All of the stuff that's swell about the Ethereal Plane could be divvied up between the Astral and Plane of Shadow, with no one but a handful of people (including you) caring or possibly even noticing.

I find the Great Wheel's Limbo to really pale in comparison to the Far Realm as a realm of mind-bending chaos

Heh. You're the same one who thought erinyes and succubi should be merged into one monster.

You can merge whatever you want - lizardfolk and yuan-ti (why do we need more than one kind of reptile-person?), beholders and mind flayers (why do we need more than one kind of alien aberration?), fighters and monks, clerics and druids, sorcerers and wizards, rogues and bards, pegasuses and unicorns, mummies and liches, nuts and gum (together at last!).

But in my opinion simplicity is not a virtue (get out of the woods, Henry David Thoreau, and live a little), and variety is the spice of life. The Astral and Ethereal serve very different purposes, they're both distinctive and interesting, and other than an zeal to combine things for the sake of combining them I don't see any reason not to use both.

I'm not bashing you, by the way. I'm bashing Thoreau. Stupid Thoreau. Stupid Transcendentalism.

But then, YIaaUPF.

 

[Ripzerai]

I'm unclear as to how the Ethereal Sea appears/looks like in Ptolus. If it's anything more than a name, that is. We'd have to ask Monte if the name itself has a relation to Moorcock's limbo (with the travels of the Eternal Champions leading to their confrontation with Agak and Gagak). This is where my version comes from, originally.

The Ethereal Sea of Ptolus is described in Beyond Countless Doorways.

 

[Kunimatyu]

So uh, yeah, for those of you who have used the Plane of Shadow, what aspects/creatures/civilizations/races/spells/gods did you emphasize?

Shadows and greater shadows? Nightwalkers, nightwings and nightshades? Shadar-kai? Shadow demons? Shadow conjuration spells? Shadow mastiffs?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Heh. You're the same one who thought erinyes and succubi should be merged into one monster.

No, I'm not. I just thought that we didn't need both of them in MM1, and that one of them (the less popular -- erinyes) should be saved for a planar book, like the Fiend Folio.

You can merge whatever you want - lizardfolk and yuan-ti (why do we need more than one kind of reptile-person?), beholders and mind flayers (why do we need more than one kind of alien aberration?), fighters and monks, clerics and druids, sorcerers and wizards, rogues and bards, pegasuses and unicorns, mummies and liches, nuts and gum (together at last!).

Mmmm, passive-aggressive attacks at a position I never held. Thanks!

I'm not bashing you, by the way. I'm bashing Thoreau. Stupid Thoreau. Stupid Transcendentalism.

Yeeeeeah.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So uh, yeah, for those of you who have used the Plane of Shadow, what aspects/creatures/civilizations/races/spells/gods did you emphasize?

Shadows and greater shadows? Nightwalkers, nightwings and nightshades? Shadar-kai? Shadow demons? Shadow conjuration spells? Shadow mastiffs?

I like the weird shadow creatures in the Miniatures Handbook and Fiend Folio. But since I keep forgetting about them, next time I do anything with the Plane of Shadow, I'm going to drag out the shadow monsters (not just the template) from the Manual of the Planes.

 

[Ripzerai]

Mmmm, passive-aggressive attacks at a position I never held. Thanks!

No, no, no. Passive-aggressive attacks would be agreeing with you here and then griping about you in another forum.

Those things I were making were strawmen. Completely different.

And really, I'm just amusing myself here. I don't care what you do.

 

[Odhanan]

the Ethereal Sea is discussed in Beyond Countless Doorways. It essentially treats the ethereal sea as a cobbling together of the ethereal and astral planes.

Which sort of makes sense to me; for a long time it seems like many things that get attributed to the Ethereal should get attributed to the astral. I was happy to see the dreamscapes moved to the astral in 3e.

I don't use the ethreal sea this way... but perhaps I should.

Just checked out in Beyond Countless Doorways. Well. There you have it! That's extremely similar if not equal to my conception of the thing!

 

[el-remmen]

I use it in lieu of the Ethereal Plane, its super-boring older brother. (Seriously, except for the most hardcore planar fanatics, there's nothing intrinsically more interesting about the Ethereal than the Plane of Shadow, to the extent that I can't figure why it's necessary to even have the Ethereal around.)

Whenever there's a chance to use Etherealness, I use Shadow instead. It hasn't come up much (although it has come up, even when my group was level 1), but it will, more and more, along with the Plane of Mirrors, the other cool transitive plane. (Astral is OK, but it's way behind the other two, IMO.)

I have replaced the ethereal with Shadow and removed Astral altogether.

 

[Ripzerai]

Mmmm, passive-aggressive attacks at a position I never held. Thanks!

Seriously, I wasn't attacking you, or saying you held those positions. If someone did want to combine unicorns and orcs or whatever into one race, I'm fine with that. But I may be tempted to make a post defending the validity of orcs as their own race, if someone said they were boring. I may use analogies to do so. That is not mean I'm attacking you.

That also doesn't mean I think you don't like orcs. It's an analogy.

I don't, personally, feel an affinity toward the drive for simplicity that many DMs have, either in cosmology, in gods and pantheons, in available PC races, or anything. I embrace complexity. And I take this out on Thoreau because I think it's funny.

Believe me, being passive-aggressive is not one of my problems. The Thoreau thing was a joke and I really was talking to Thoreau, not you. That just seemed a good place to put it. Yes, really. Being sort of crazy may be one of my problems, but not being passive-aggressive. I tried to use what wit and resources I have at my disposal to make this clear. Apparently I failed. I don't want to make random internet enemies over stupid nonsense.