Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 145 - Ethereal and Astral Planes

Episode Date: October 9, 2022

While there are similarities between the ethereal and astral planes in the way 5e and Pathfinder present them, there are distinct differences and they are located different places in the different cosmologies.  In this episode, we talk about the 4 planes and some unique characteristics and encounters you can find in them. #DnD #DungeonsandDragons #Pathfinder #GMTips #Ethereal #Astral Resources: 5e PHB & DMG Pathfinder 1e & 2e Core Rulebooks Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/races/elf/ghostelf.shtml https://dumpstatadventures.com/the-gm-is-always-right/the-planes-ethereal-plane https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Ethereal_Plane https://aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Ethereal%20Plane&Category=Esoteric%20Planes https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Astral_Plane https://aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Astral%20Plane&Category=Esoteric%20Planes https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/9x55k2/what_can_be_found_inside_the_astral_plane_what/ http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com/2016/03/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-ethereal-plane.html?m=1

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. If you get caught in one, the best you can hope for is that your journey will take longer. At worst, you could be ejected into a random location on a random plane that borders the ethereal plane. Welcome to episode 145 of the Taking20 Podcast, continuing the planer series this week all about the ethereal and astral planes. This week's sponsor, ghosts. I hear that ghosts tend to stick to themselves. I mean, they'd love to go somewhere, but they have no body to go with.

I know, I know, bad joke. But when you see me, feel free to give me a boo. I know, bad joke. But when you see me, feel free to give me a boo. For more information about the podcast, please come visit my website, www.taking20podcast.com. You can make episode suggestions, comment on episodes, and learn more about me and the podcast in general. Now, before I get started, I wanted to let you know that 1D&D Playtest number 2 has dropped. It revealed the four different class groups, the Experts, the Mages, the Priests, and the Warriors. And Playtest number 2 contains information about the Expert classes, the Bard, the Rogue, and the Ranger. It also contains some of the rules changes we can anticipate.

For example, you can heal with Bardic Inspiration now. Now, one of them I want to highlight is a change to the Inspiration rules. You now gain Inspiration when you roll a natural 1 instead of a natural 20. It kind of takes the sting out of that natural 1 that you rolled. At least you get a little something for the effort. The bard also is now more of a prepared spellcaster and got weakened just a little bit because it doesn't get as many bardic inspirations per long rest. Rangers got a buff, though.

I mean, if you listened to my Ranger episode, I was not a fan. Now they get prepared spellcasting at level 1 instead of level 2, and they get Hunter's Mark as a free spell, and a lot of their abilities are built around Hunter's Mark. Rogues lost a little bit since their sneak attack now only triggers on an attack action instead of all of their attacks. Some rules were tweaked, including conditions like Exhausted, which now has 10 levels of exhaustion. That sounds like a lot, but what I also learned is that if you get to 10 levels of exhaustion, you die. And believe me, I feel that. I miss sleep.

Finally, the ability score increases we're all used to getting to at level 4 automatically is now a feat that you have to take, but you get a lot more feats in one D&D. I think there's some interesting ideas in the playtest, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the rules on the warrior group, because I want to see how they balance the parity between martial and spellcasting characters. Head over to D&D Beyond and give the new 37-page playtest a read and tell me what you think. Now, Horror Month continues in this week, and we're going to talk about scary and spooky topics all month. But this week, it's all about the Astral and Ethereal Planes. Now, I'll be the first one to tell you that the Astral and Ethereal Planes are easy to get confused with aspects of each bleeding into the other in our own minds, especially when you're old and brain-addled like I am. I know when I first started gaming,

I really didn't understand the difference between the two, and my knowledge about the planes has waxed and waned through the years. I really spend a lot more time learning about them when I have adventures to run there. I try to cover information about both 5th Edition D&D and Pathfinder in this podcast. That might actually work against me in this episode, though,

because there are fine-line differences between Astral and Ethereal planes between 5e and Pathfinder. Because of that, I effectively have four planes to cover in this episode. I'm asking your forgiveness early on, because there's no way I'm going to be able to deep dive on any one of the four. Because time is short, let's get right to the 5th edition lore about the two planes. In 5th edition, the Ethereal and Astral planes are together called the Transitive planes, because they are two, the ethereal and astral planes are together called the transitive planes because they are two of the primary ways to get from one plane of existence to another. Now to cover the ethereal and astral planes in 5e, we need to first talk about a concept called

the inner planes. In 5th edition, the material plane, the plane called the shadowfell, and the feywild plane are all interwound with each other, considered both overlapping and adjacent to each other. Now these three planes are all adjacent to the ethereal plane, which is also adjacent to the elemental planes of fire, earth, water, and air. And all of these planes combined are referred to as the inner planes. The inner planes are surrounded by the astral plane, which extends out to the outer planes of existence. The fifth edition ethereal plane is a misty dimension that's sometimes described as the great ocean or the waveless sea. The plane is full of permanent fog that permeates the plane, sometimes called planar soup. Now, there are two major parts of the ethereal plane.

The part of the ethereal plane that overlaps parts of the inner planes is called the border ethereal, and every location on those planes has a corresponding location in the border ethereal portion of the ethereal plane. The border ethereal is a foggy replication of the adjacent plane with visibility limited to 60 feet by default. People or things in the border ethereal can peer into the adjacent world as if they're looking through a foggy window. You can see creatures moving, landscapes, and shadows, but details are smeared and muddy and muffled with only the loudest noises making it through the veil between them. Conversely, the vast majority of people living in the material plane don't even know about the ethereal plane's existence, and definitely cannot see into the

ethereal plane. On the ethereal plane, creatures can generally move any direction they want to, including up and down. Those on the ethereal plane, as I mentioned, can see into the material plane usually about 30 feet, but kind of depends on the creature. The other thing about that is, is that creatures on the ethereal plane are not impeded by physical objects or construction on the material plane. So that means those on the ethereal plane can walk or float through walls if someone from the material plane could watch them do so. Generally, creatures on the ethereal plane cannot attack those on the material plane, and vice versa. There are exceptions to the rule, usually listed in various creature and spell descriptions. For example, some magical effects extend into the

Border Ethereal part of the plane, existing simultaneously in both planes, especially force effects like Magic Missile and Force Cage, and that's why those spells can affect incorporeal creatures such as Ghosts and Specters. The vast majority of travelers to the Ethereal Plane stay entirely in the Border Ethereal. When you cast spells that majority of travelers to the ethereal plane stay entirely in the border ethereal. When you cast spells that allow you to view the ethereal plane, such as sea invisibility and true seeing, you're only seeing into the border ethereal and not beyond it. Most visitors to the ethereal plane stay entirely in the border ethereal, by the way, because the rest of the plane, the deep ethereal, is all kinds of dangerous. The deep ethereal is the rest of the plane, the deep ethereal is all kinds of dangerous. The deep ethereal is the portion of the ethereal plane that is not adjacent to a plane. These areas are very disorienting,

with no easily discernible directions of up, down, north, south, east, west. It's fog as far as you can see in any direction. And if that's not bad enough, the deep ethereal is also home to ether cyclones, which are powerful storms of ethereal matter that roam the deep ethereal is also home to ether cyclones, which are powerful storms of ethereal matter that roam the deep ethereal. These twisting cyclones can impose significant setbacks on travelers in the ethereal plane. If you get caught in one, the best you can hope for is that your journey will take longer. At worst, you could be ejected into a random location on a random plane that borders the ethereal plane. When traveling the ethereal plane, travelers with a passive wisdom score of 15 or more receive one to four rounds of warning before getting hit by one of these cyclones.

And before I leave these cyclones, if you want some interesting lore, go read about a permanent storm on the ethereal plane called the Keening Gloom. It's a storm from which no creature has ever successfully returned. Now, there are very few creatures that are native to the ethereal plane. There's a creature called the Meme that looks like a vaguely humanoid shape under a sheet. There's the Tween, which is not a mixture of, like, teen and twenties. They're actually parasites that bond with a host, preferably an intelligent host on the Material Plane, and they can actually mess with the host's luck in a radius around that host.

Other things you'll see on the Ethereal Plane, of course, ghosts. You'll also see nighthags that use the Ethereal Plane to get to the Astral Plane and haunt dreams of mortals. There are also thought eaters and their bigger cousins called thought slayers that feast on psionic energy and intelligence. Now here's the thing. The ethereal plane doesn't have farms and creatures that you can eat. There's no food or water except for what you bring with you.

Most things that you encounter on the plane will be traveling from one plane to another. But I want to latch onto that food and water thing for just a minute. Frequent travelers of the ethereal plane get tired of lugging days of food and water with them. So sometimes they'll set up fixed places for supply drops and makeshift shelters made of the stuff that drifts around in the plane. That sounds like an interesting aspect of an adventure, by the way, that would take place on the ethereal plane. The group to survive has to find one of these supply caches and then maybe defend it from others who would take it or choose to share what they have, potentially risking starvation later on.

Any potential traveler into the plane for an extended period of time will need to bring their own sustenance or find one of these caches. One last thing before I move on to the astral plane, though, is the ethereal city known as the Radiant Citadel. This city snakes around a crystal of impossible size that serves as a beacon of hope for the lost, the displaced, and the inquisitive. It's orbited by crystals that allow travel from the ethereal plane to other planes of existence. Oh, and did I mention that the entire city is built on the fossil of an enormous creature that coiled itself around the crystal? For more about this interesting city, by the way, see the adventure path Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, which has adventures for parties as low as level one on the ethereal

plane. Now there's one old resource I want to tell you about, and they are ghost elves. The last time I saw them in print was in D&D 3.5, so it goes back a few years, but I've always been fascinated by these concepts. Thousands of years ago, during the Elven Civil War that led to the fall of the Drow, the group of elves that became ghost elves tried to remain neutral in the conflict. They tried to be Switzerland. After the drow retreated to the Underdark, though, they became bitter at their cousins who remained neutral, so they returned and virtually wiped out the entire group. The ghost elves reached out to their elven kin for aid, and the elves turned their back on them. They got desperate, and so they turned to an alien entity calling itself Thule,

who offered to save them in return for their service. The leaders agreed, only to find out they'd been tricked by a powerful pit fiend. They worked for this pit fiend for centuries in what the ghost elves called the Tempering. Eventually, the pit fiend grew bored or stopped paying attention to them, and they used the cover of The Blood War, see episodes 79 and 105 for much more about that demon-devil conflict, to murder the Pit Fiend and escape to the Ethereal Plane. This isn't exactly canon for 5e, but I've always been fascinated by their history and what kinds of protagonists and antagonists that can be made because of it.

Years ago, I made a quick one-shot with ghost elves and their struggles at the heart of it, and I need to dig out my notes and update that to 5e one of these days. Now, if ghost elves spark your interest, go give them some research. I think you'll enjoy the read. But enough about the ethereal plane, let's move on to 5e's astral plane. I talked about the astral plane in episode 140, but that was five whole weeks ago. I'm sure a lot more detail has been released by Wizards of the Coast since then. What? It hasn't. Well, shit. Scratch that, then. Let's quickly recap.

The astral plane is the plane that connects the inner planes to the outer planes in 5e cosmology. It's broken up into two general parts, wild space, which is close to the material planes where the weird shit happens, and the astral sea, which is the part of the astral plane that is farther away from the other planes where really weird shit happens. The astral plane is timeless and infinite in size. It has no air and no native gravity outside of subjective directional gravity. The astral plane is the realm of thoughts and dreams where visitors travel as disembodied souls to reach the outer planes. The line between thoughts and reality on the astral plane is perilously thin. It looks like a great silvery sea with swirling wisps of color, distant stars poking through the whirlpools.

Occasional bits of solid matter will drift by, like chunks of destroyed planets, dead gods, etc. just floating right on by. The astral plane is sometimes called the space between everything, and it can take you anywhere you want to go, and a hell of a lot of places you don't. Many creatures that pass from plane to plane, like diva, devils, slod, bibliths, etc. will traverse the astral plane, getting from their outer plane to plane, like Diva, Devils, Slod, Bibliths, etc., will traverse the astral plane, getting from their outer plane to another destination, prime material, or other plane of existence. Interestingly, the astral plane seems to be full of stuff like fish and jellyfish and whales, some as big as planets. Why? Beats me. I haven't done that much drugs in my

life to come up with that idea. The astral plane is the original home of the Gith, Githyanki, and Githzerai. They were enslaved by Mind Flayers, another of the plane's regular visitors and or inhabitants, depending on which version of the lore you believe. I could easily get lost here, much like on the Astral Plane, talking about the features of that plane, the history of the Gith and Mind Flayers, but since I talked about some of that five weeks ago, I'm already starting to run way long. I'm going to move on to Pathfinder lore at this point. For more details, check out some of the resources I'm going to include in the description of this episode. Okay, let's shake off 5e for a bit and move over to Pathfinder.

In Pathfinder, the ethereal plane is sometimes called Ghost World, the 2001 comedy with Thora Birch and John Malkovich as stars. That's not right. Pathfinder's ethereal plane is called The Space Between Spaces. Like 5th Edition's ethereal plane, the Pathfinder one butts up against all the neighboring planes. It's a place of ever-shifting mists with very little hard matter on it. Like 5E, when you get close to the neighboring planes, you can look into the other plane, and movement between them is relatively easy with the right spells or abilities. Pathfinder's ethereal plane has no gravity, so creatures are weightless and time passes normally on the plane.

Similar to 5th edition, force spells work both on the ethereal plane and other planes in areas where the planes are close. Effects can bleed over between the two, magic missile, force cage, and so forth. By using spells like etherealness and ethereal jaunt, you can enter the ethereal plane. And just like 5e, normally creatures on the ethereal plane can't attack those on the material plane and vice versa. Also, most creatures on the material plane can't see or interact with creatures on the ethereal plane without some sort of true seeing or psychic sensitivity. Now here's the difference. In 5e, the astral plane is considered the realm of thoughts and dreams, but in Pathfinder, the ethereal plane is where your consciousness drifts when you dream.

Anything you dream is formed out of the plane's mists, and because of this, sometimes those creatures take life and can bleed into other planes. Ghosts, night hags, phase spiders, and the militaristic all-female ancestry of the Zil, which are four-armed humanoids with red skin, they all live on the ethereal plane. The Zil, by the way, are constantly at war with phase spiders, and for some reason, the subterranean Destricons. I need to deep dive into the reasons why and the history between those two seemingly unrelated species and why they hate each other so much. Now, the vast majority of the ethereal plane's inhabitants are twisted remnants of mortal souls.

Some creatures, upon death, remain tethered to the ethereal plane because of the way they died, the tasks they left unfinished, or other emotional distress. These souls remain stalled in their journey towards the afterlife, gradually sliding towards the negative energy plane and eventually manifesting as incorporeal undead. Ghosts, wraiths, specters, and worse. Because the ethereal plane twists itself to the thoughts and dreams of creatures, that includes some of these ghosts. Now, ghosts will sometimes remember parts of their past life. They'll travel to their old home, for example,

but the ethereal version it sees is closer to what they remember when they were actually alive. Sometimes their memory can be strong enough to make a physical location on the ethereal plane, but if the creature is ever slain, that location gradually dissolves and returns to the mist. Finally, the ethereal plane in Pathfinder is home to countless demiplanes, sometimes private living spaces of powerful spellcasters, playgrounds of the gods, experiments of powerful extraplanar creatures, or even prisons of powerful creatures that must not be let loose. Moving over to the astral plane, travelers to Pathfinder's astral plane can bodily travel there with spells like Planeshift, but as you can imagine, that is very dangerous.

Most visitors choose instead to travel by manifesting their souls with spells like astral projection. Manifested souls, by the way, look like translucent outline versions of your physical body, surrounded by a soft blue or maybe purple glowing light, a nimbus if you will. While on the astral plane is a manifested soul, there's a tether of resilient incorporeal energy known as the silver cord that connects your astral body to your unconscious physical body. Now, if your astral body dies, the silver cord retracts into the physical body, returning the soul back to that body with two negative levels. That silver cord is very resilient, but if somehow the tether is broken, the creature immediately dies, and the astral form housing its soul is cast adrift on the astral currents,

pulled inexorably, though, towards the place of judgment. The realm of the goddess Phrasma, called the Boneyard, which extends up to the astral plane from the surface of the outer sphere. By the way, if you want to learn more about the Boneyard, tune in next week. As a realm of thought, the astral plane is home to entities that represent concepts, myths, and legends spawned entirely from mortal thoughts. So the sky is quite literally the limit on what you want to put there. The astral plane has subjective directional gravity,

meaning that each traveler chooses the direction of gravity's pull. Creatures can move normally in any direction by imagining what down is near their feet and falling in that direction. In this way, a creature falls 150 feet the first round and 300 feet each successive round. Movement is a straight line only, but gravity can be changed or they can stop by making a wisdom check. Now as you enter the astral plane and you start distancing yourself from the inner sphere of planes, the inner sphere fades into the background and looks like a distant star. As you drift out in the astral plane, you may start

seeing untethered astral bodies of the dead flowing towards the boneyard along what's known as the River of Souls. Now, during this process of traveling along the River of Souls, gradually the things that make you unique are stripped from you. You basically become the core of your soul minus a large chunk of your memories. Now the gods of the outer sphere consider the River of Souls inviolate, meaning you do not mess with it ever. They'll even sometimes send celestial and infernal outsiders to support the psychopomps that are stewarding the wayward souls towards judgment and delivery to their afterlife of reward or punishment. Pathfinder's astral plane contains some creatures that feed on souls,

like night hags and astrodamons, but if they get too greedy, the gods will sometimes send hunting parties to take them down. Other inhabitants of the astral plane include enormous astral leviathans that float through the silvery seas, sometimes with passengers or even semi-permanent settlements on their back. Like imagine a giant jellyfish or beholder the size of a planet, maybe with a city of interplanar humanoids that's eking out a life for themselves on the seemingly oblivious or uncaring creature. Now what are some tips for using these planes of existence?

Now here's some that I have used in the past that have made my ethereal and astral adventures a little bit better. One, on these very weird planes, use a location like the Radiant Citadel or a settlement on the back of a space creature as a quest hub or port of call for the PCs on an ethereal or astral plane. This will root at least part of the adventure into something that is much more known by the players and something that they can understand a lot easier, rather than drifting into nothing. 2. The ethereal and astral planes are fucking weird. Make your descriptions weird and soak in the weirdness. You travel by thought or wisdom checks. There's no food and there may not be solid points of references for days of travel in any direction. You could be hovering in one place and see no

landmarks or areas to go in any direction as far as the eye can see. Come up with some crazy situations and some crazy things that players can find out there. I mean, cities on floating crystals? I'm sorry, let me restate. Cities on corpses surrounding floating crystals? Or maybe cities on the back of a giant whale? Think about stuff like that and throw stuff like that at your players. Three, if your adventure takes the PCs to one of these planes, play up that danger of failure and the risks to the characters. Creatures of thought and night hags looking for souls to eat, mind flayers looking for potential slaves or hosts, strange motionless gods tumbling by that

might be dead, or when the players get close, their eyes could snap open and be seen by these extremely powerful creatures. Four, any action on the astral plane that interferes with a river of souls will draw the ire of, theoretically, damn near every deity existence. How about a high-level adventure where the PCs accidentally cause that flow of souls to stop or divert, sending them on the run from some powerful immortal enemies? to stop or divert, sending them on the run from some powerful immortal enemies. If they're captured, they may be imprisoned in a demiplane that floats through the astral or ethereal plane forever. That is, unless the next party rescues them. 5. Encounters on these planes can be batshit crazy. Imagine the party's been traveling for three days when they see a glint of something in the distance. As they get closer, they find that it's a solid chunk of mithril with a lone dwarf who's clearly gone insane from loneliness and has proclaimed herself the queen of the astral sea. She has information that the

players need, but they've got to pay proper deference. And six, since these planes can contain the dead traveling to their eternal destination, how about an adventure where the PCs see a loved one they didn't realize had died and maybe try to rescue them? The ethereal and astral planes are home to some scary, incorporeal creatures that can drain your life, your strength, and leave you drifting aimless in an infinite abyss containing almost nothing. For the ill-prepared and ill-equipped, the plane can mean a slow-wasting death until they drift into something that either captures them or consumes them, not just their body, but their very soul, wiping them from existence. In the description of this episode, there are a ton of resource links that I was able to find. I would encourage you to read up on these planes

for your game system and set sail for adventure on the endless starry seas. I bet you and your players will have fun doing it. I hate asking for donations, but these episodes take a lot of work to put together. And while this is a labor of love of mine, it does take a long time to research, produce, and edit these episodes. Please consider making a donation at ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast it would greatly help me to keep this podcast going by the way tune in next week when as promised I mentioned Phrasma and the Boneyard

we're going to talk about the afterlife and the dead in 5e and Pathfinder but before I go I once again want to thank this week's sponsor Ghosts if you live in a haunted house keep a close eye on your liquor cabinet. You'd hate for more spirits to get out. This has been episode 145, The Ethereal and Astral Plains. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.