Ethereal

A grey, misty border laid over the mortal world like a veil. From inside it the living world shows as faint shapes without sound, and walls do not stop anyone. One enters by spell, by certain rare objects or by a ghost’s touch, and the same means bring one back; further from the border the mist thickens and the world fades away. Ghosts drift here, and the things that hunt them.

Light
Dim
Going
Easy

Hear it

Hazards

  • The deep mist. Away from the border, there is only grey fog on every side and no up or down worth trusting. D&D 5e (House rule): Each hour spent away from the border, the guide makes a DC 15 Wisdom (Survival) check. On a failure, the party drifts and needs another hour to find the border again.
  • Coming back inside a wall. Leaving the mist where something solid stands on the other side is the traveller’s great fear. D&D 5e (House rule): A creature that returns inside an object or a creature is pushed to the nearest free space and takes 1d10 Force damage for every 1.5 m (5 feet) it is moved.
  • A crowd of the dead. The dead notice the living here. Sometimes dozens of them gather, faces pressed close. D&D 5e: Seeing such a gathering calls for a DC 10 Wisdom save, or the creature is Frightened; it repeats the save at the end of each of its turns, ending the fear on a success.
  • A muffled world. The living world is seen only in grey and close by, and none of its sounds come through. D&D 5e (House rule): Creatures here cannot hear anything on the mortal side, and Wisdom (Perception) checks to see into it have Disadvantage beyond 18 m (60 feet).

Adventure hooks

  1. A ghost wanders the mist looking for its house, which burned down sixty years ago. It wants the party to find the family that lived there and tell them one thing; the family is now the richest in town.
  2. A duke’s heir has lain in a sleep nobody can wake for a month, and a seer says his mind is adrift in the mist. The will is read in nine days, and his younger brother is in no hurry.
  3. A family of ghosts holds dinner every night in the mist that overlaps a living family’s dining room. The living want their room back; the ghosts want the living to stop eating with their mouths open.
  4. Scholars studying the border lit a great lamp in the deep mist to draw the drifting shapes. Something answered the light, and the scholars have not been heard from since.

What may happen

  1. Through the mist the party watches a family at dinner, laughing without a sound. The youngest child looks straight at them.
  2. A ghost who does not know it is dead asks the party to deliver a letter it can no longer hold.
  3. Fine strands of web glitter across the fog, stretched between nothing and nothing.
  4. The party walks straight through a castle wall and finds a treasure room with no door.
  5. A patch of the fog turns pink, then gold, and smells of a summer garden. It is the edge of somewhere else.
  6. A sleeper in the mortal world dreams so hard that the dream leaks into the mist: a small house, a dog, a song.
  7. Another band of travellers passes, faint and grey. They are as surprised as the party, and as careful.
  8. A sword hangs in the mist, slowly turning. Whoever lost it lost it on purpose.
  9. The mist grows cold around a spot where someone once died badly. A shape keeps falling, again and again.
  10. A long howl travels through the fog, and every ghost in sight flees the same way.

Creatures

Other planes

Feywild, Shadowfell, Astral, Elemental Fire, Elemental Water, Elemental Earth, Elemental Air, Infernal, Abyssal, Celestial, Hades

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 ("SRD 5.2.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

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