Ethereal Plane: Domains of Dream and Dread 

Aren’t the Domains of Dread in the Plane of Shadow ?

For a bit of flavor, a DM may consider in dreams that all lights are on dimmer switches, because the mind cannot instantly render a scene. So you may think to make rooms seem bland or dark and filled with mundane objects who's details only reveal themselves when players are focusing on them. Perhaps bookshelves full of books that swap places when the players aren't looking and whose pages are scrawled with nonsense or totally blank. Or maybe a landscape that shifts slightly based off of intently the players are studying them. Just some flavor ideas.

Hiding a powerful item in a dream sounds really cool. It would have to be an artifact or something equally dangerous, something that must not be found, but you can't risk losing. Oh, or maybe a person. Or maybe even the dreamer themselves. What would happen if you brought the physical body of the dreamer into their own dreamscape???

AJ, these videos are such a rich resource for DMs (like myself) who enjoy taking their players into obscure and esoteric places. Thank you! And please keep up the great work!

If you're making videos on the domains of dread, may I suggest the one with the portal in Chult. I forget the name at the moment but its mentioned in ToA.

Another light snack, like a kind of brush-on glue ;)

"Quirky rules" like my dream of an incredible shop that sold hundreds of different types of soda, but the owner only speaks Welsh.

after this i look forward to the lore behind the astral plane.

Dreamlike realms always interest me. My own cosmology has a deity as old as the first sentient creature, born from the first dream. The incontestable ruler of the dream realms who longs to be in the waking world, and the rage from his inability is what makes nightmares. Mergos the Nightmare Fiend. I love all your "extra realities" videos and I look to them for inspiration. I wish you well, and I hope I can afford to support you on patreon one day.

Im get the exactly moment that you posted, and I'm loving the series of Etherial! You always made high quality videos!

Much love from Alaska man, your videos help keep me warm while I wait to bus to work. Keep up the great work

Now here is an idea: Just as the domains of dread are connected/apart of the shadowfell, maybe their is a feywild equivalent, where the ‘light powers’ scoop up paragons and create the domains of… dreams?

I've always loved the idea of a mindscape or a dreamscape, the best example I can think of is The Cell

1.) is that true for all principles: that if they did, their sleeping selves die, and their dreams have defense mechanisms against this? 2.) what happens if a principal leaves the dream? 3.) you just said powerful individuals. Does that mean good people can be taken to the domains of dread? 4.) how do you leave the domains of dread, or travel between them, and is it different for the principal of it than a random person? 5.) is it true that the black spelljammer is some sort of pirate constantly outrunning the ethereal mists as they try extending out from the crystal spheres to catch him? I thought I remembered something about that, but I can’t find it, so I’m wondering if I imagined it.

The Domains of Dread are like a terrarium or habitat, each one created for a specific pet. Think about it Each dark Lord is not only evil but irredeemibly Evil. each at some point made a choice that was not only evil but taboo for its own kind. A doppleganger doing murder is nothing. But a doppleganger killing it s elders is unthinkable. A dark Lord is unique, interesting to the Dark Powers. Each Dark Lord is then given its own domain but trapped and tortured in a way specific to it. Like the aforementioned doppleganger being unable to physically harm its victims directly. And every so often the mists drop in treats for the dark lords to feed on or play with.. adventurers.

Love this concept. Literally infinite possibilities 😀🍿

I've been waiting for this ever since the first time you mentioned these places. Our loremaster delivers once again! :D

Just so much more please. I wrote a tone-down adventure in Bluetspur and I'm excited to see how it stacks up.

Ulraunt's Guide to the Planes: The Shadowfell is a good book for domains of dread.

AJ’s videos are an automatic pick and click! 👉🏻💥

Love catching these as they drop

Damn. I need to watch over every part to count up levels of inception

One thing I would like to incorporate into dream realms is actually drawn from The Wheel of Time books. When characters are in the World of Dreams, they have to be cautious about entering someone else's dream, as they may find themselves becoming part of the dream and therefore under the control of the dreamer.

Yay!

The Moonstone dragon is usually found either in the realms of faerie(feywild) or the realms of dreams, and in its 5e lore it seems to visit people in their dreams as well. The connection you made between those two realms is really cool and perhaps showcases why the dragon prefers them. The thought of a Ravenloft/Dread equivalent Moonstonen-esque nightmare dragon is horrifying.

I’ve always wanted to make a domain that combines the lore of the fall of Atlantis with some southern gothic flare

The 5e description of Ravenloft seems to heavily tied to the shadowfell. I think it may even have said that Ravenloft is embedded in the shadowfell somewhere. Is the there a connection between the shadowfell and the deep ethereal? I guess there's that whole this about the plane of shadow being removed from the deep ethereal and being made into a parallel plane like the fewwild. I guess that would mean that even under that paradigm, the inherent nature of contemporary Ravenloft is of an ethereal one combined with the negative nature of the negative energy plane in the shadow fell.

he's got his orb

Impress me Warlock! And even if you don't I still appreciated your efforts!

I'm glad because of this video I will watch in detail later and make a better comment

Looking forward to videos on specific domains of dread because I know very little about them or their unique inhabitants

Anna's story is very sad and compelling. I want to add it into a game somehow. Maybe somebody hid a powerful artifact in her dream, and the only way to spit it back into the material plane is to end her dream, one way or another.

Adore how you've presented, writen and thought about this lore. Thanks so much AJ. I just watched Locke and Key awhile ago. So thought about scenes in that when you talked about hiding things in the dreamscapes.

Looking forward to the Domains of Dread vids.

What about a primary in the dreamscape capable of lucid dreaming? The god of their own realm and they know it, but unable to awaken and can't remember why.

Makes me want to create some type of "Even Horizon" adventure with defective magical transporters and hellish chaos tainting people, maybe a powerful Cleric or Wizard NPC sent to help who becomes the main antagonist after getting corrupted.

I definitively treat Barovia as if it were semi ethereal. When my players us illusion or animation magic, things don't tend to go as planned. I have a Creation Bard in my party. His 5th level Animate Objects spell is stable enough, but when he uses Dancing Object, well things tend to get fun. I let him animate the statue to Mother Night in the wolf cave. It betrayed the party. When ever he animates a normal object, instead of going back to an inanimate state, it just flys off to live a life of it's own. When my players use Minor Illusion I give it a semblance of of life. It's harder to dismiss, lasts twice as long, moves. The Cleric tried to show everyone a visage of Bluetspur frol her Divination and everyone took psychic damage. Fun times.

So the Domains of Dread are planes where the prisoner has great power but ultimately are trapped... I'm looking at you Asmodeus.

I think I heard in a video here on youtube that the dark powers are something like undead gods from long ago. But I can't seem to find anything about it myself. In any case, I have made 2 homebrew darklords myself, though one is just a DnD conversion of a character of mine that I came up with long before i got into DnD (but now got some influence from it). The other is a dracolich who is a lvl 20 wizard, and breaths a miasma that turns victims into zombie plague spreaders (a type of zombie from that guide to Ravenloft). I decided to ignore picking what type of dragon he was, and just had all his draconic powers be death related. He is an undead dragon of pure death and decay.

I've always entertained the idea that Cyre from the eberron setting is a newly abducted domain of dread. The nation abducted for the purpose of containing some horrid war criminal or some such. I got excited when I saw a mention of it in Van Richtens guide.

Demiplane of Dread: Spawned from 1st Ed idea of Demiplane of Imprisonment, Manual of the Planes (Ethereal), and the Ravenloft mini-campaign module (great horror module that ran like a homebrew). That spawned the entire Ravenloft "universe" new canon after that. I believe that also inspired the Shadowfell and modified all undead beings to be only linked to the shadowfell and other negative materials, completely isolating canon mummies (positive material plane, thus harboring a cursed disease) from the original core and real-world based undead creatures as elemental Earth linked. I kept those when I broke from the evolving canon for my homebrew that locked into the early 2nd Ed before TSR was out of the picture and WotC spun that multiverse into WTF mode. The dreamscapes, I ran hours of missions in those. The one you addressed was just one dreamscape. It was totally solid and had its own solid demiplane because the girl was dreaming for so long. Dreamscapes are usually temporary demiplanes, almost impossible to find, and can only be accessed via the deep ethereal in ethereal form by someone who knows where to find said dreamscape. People physically in the ethereal entering said dreamscapes die quickly because of the nature of the dreamscapes, their bodies still subject to real-world matters in that chaotic scene while an ethereal form would manifest as if it was native to it. Like, the scene changes suddenly to be underwater if you are an air breather. You panic at first but realize you can still breathe and can swim really fast. As a physical person there, you are drowning. Also, you are suddenly in outer space. As an ethereal guy, you find that your feet are cold and you drift about. As a real-world person, your blood boils while your body freezing solid sprays out all the "cold steam" of your bodily liquids from its orifices and newly forming cracks. Invading dreams is primarily a feat that is only common in Night Hags and Gold Dragons can do effectively by actually being their instead of mere mind tricks. I would ramble on my Mirror Dimension missions here as an intersect point but I digress. Thank you for helping me catch up to how things changed over time, AJ. And revealing to me on how some things reverted back to how they were. Awesome video.

Interesting, thanks!

So, without getting into my campaign too much, is it reasonable to have a PC be the creator of a dreamscape without the party (including the PC) being aware that they are in said dream?

While listening I started hypothesizing myself. Fair warning: it's a long rabbit hole. What if the (original) mist-like Ethereal plane is the source of the mists that takes one to Ravenloft? My idea: The Ethereal mists respond to emotions. Succubi (lust) and Kuo-Toa (madness) both can either see into or travel into the plane. Furthermore, the mists that drop people into Barovia are more of a medium than an antagonist. They respond to the environment. Note those lost in Domains of Dread are bound to or rife with negative emotions. The Vistani can leave, and are the source of what few positive emotions exist in these places. So maybe the mists, and the possible Ethereal plane, behave like water. Emotions determine your buoyancy. Positive emotions float, negative emotions sink. Dread lords are so negative they are like anchors in this aspect, and are thus stuck in the Dread demi-planes, unable to float out. The Ethereal, then, becomes the unwitting highway to such planes, with only few getting out. The Feywild has a similar problem, as it is rife with high and wild emotions. It's a literal lighthouse for the Ethereal plane, which then forms pocket doorways between the Material and the Feywild where these emotions are high and the barrier is thin. Thoughts?

I feel like you'd like the Nightmare Lands boxed set that came out in Second Edition for Ravenloft. The Nightmare Lands are a dream themed domain of dread that has what appears to be multiple darklords and that can reach out through dreams to attack people outside of their domain. The boxset has a whole mini campaign basically in it and a rule set for adventures in dreams.

All this talk of the Ethereal has me thinking of those who who regularly visits these planes. Surly Planes walkers and those who are use realms like the ethereal or the plane of dreams to travel long distances. But what of characters who are almost always invisible to those grounded on the Material Plane? Psion Uncarnates at max level are always in ethereal form except for when they concentrate on becoming tangible. I can also see Teams of 'Hunter's of the Dead' taking regular trips into the ethereal to track down and obliterate incorporeal undead, or conversely a Team of 'Master's of the Shroud' entering the ethereal to "collect" new undead as minions.

The story of Anna reminds me of an episode of Star Trek Voyager with the creepy clown...

I had a two year campaign set in a dream realm imagined by a Demodand coopted by the dread lords to contain multiple self loathing powerful adventures, that one ended with the death of an elder god of the far realm.

Awesome video as always dude merry Christmas and happy holidays

The Domains of Dread are ultimately a gilded cage which makes me think of the other famous cage in DnD, Sigil, and following that bit of logic it's quite possible the Dark Powers aren't even all that dark. After all isn't the Lady of Pain's whole MO basically the same, toss someone into a Demiplane and throw away the key.

You mentioned Star Trek transporters. I've always considered Subspace to be the Ethereal plane and Star Wars' Hyperspace to be something like the Astral plane.

I've always liked Baernoloth (who have a penchant for experimental methods exploring the nature of Evil) and Ancient Baatorians (who famously faded away from normal existence early in planar history) as potential original Dark Powers... I've heard others who think they are belief-beings akin to (but distinct from) Gods. Official Lore, of course, is appropriately silent on the matter. There is evidence to suggest Domains of Dread are (on a planar scale) rather new planar phenomenon

This reminds me abit about a monster block i remember seeing in the book where it mentions something tantamount to a eldritch horror dreamed up or created by the dark powers. Perhaps it could be pale night given they have lore related to making evil entities that or maybe a sort pf cabal of evil/dark entities

But if you dream within a dream do you move to another part of the dreamscape? Or are there layers? What would be the ideal way to run an Inception like story through the dream realm?

Big guy hides in someone's dream would be a gr8 plot piont

I just thought of a all new villainous plot. A covetous mage steals a powerful artifact from a kingdom. He hides it in the dreamscape to cover his escape. His plan involved a poor soul trapped in a nightmarish dream induced state where the mage locked him in to a specific nightmare. It's also where he hid the artifact. To protect this, he created some monstrous entity to guard it. He made a mistake though, and the creature killed him as he tried to retrieve his prize. His soul is now trapped in the dream as well. The players, tasked with the artifact's retrieval, must uncover his plot, find a way into the dream and face his ghost and the creature of his undoing. I would probably give the artifact some dream related powers as well. To help throw in a few more plot twists......

Adding to my dnd playlist on my channel bub

How dose the ethereal and dreamscape interact with the phlogistion

Awesome stuff. I'm homebrewing a boss monster that "teleports" through the material plane by shifting into the Ethereal Plane to skip around. In the material plane it seems like it just jumps around instantly, and if you catch it in the Ethereal Plane you can kill it as it's vulnerable there. Any thoughts about this kind of idea? Makes sense or no?

Good video AJ

Hmmm interesting. I have a horizon walker, the campaign is FULL of portals to my domain of dread, and ethereal travelers. She has already discovered a few plots by dream walking. Im trying to come up with a good magic item that will benefit her talents. But I’m jus not sure...reached level 7 tonight. I said that the lvls will start creeping by at a slower pace now. As I love where the characters are atm, and want to give em some fun items to improve their classes. She already has a magic bow. I want to lean on something that will aid the eldritch secrets they are uncovering. Perhaps buffs for sanity checks.

Figured ethereal plane was bleed from Tharizdun's prison...

Something that has entertained me as a GM is a sort of demi-plane akin to the garden maze in the movie "Labyrinth" or the Hallmark version of Alice in Wonderland. You could have a Mazemaster similar to a dark lord or feylord, who would be the near-omnipotent god of the demi-plane, but whose mercurial, "chaotic neutral" personality would want to test and play with the PCs rather than help or harm them. The brilliant creatures of Jim Henson in Labyrinth served as a sort of blueprint for the weird and wacky characters the player characters would encounter: Cheshire cats (though this one is from Alice), creatures with three heads (funny not scary) who perhaps disagree with each other on when to eat the players and how to cook them (cf. "The Grail" by Monty), great, big, friendly fluff dragons ("The Neverending Story") on whose backs you can pass a couple of the thorny walls far below, but who have to set you down relatively quickly because of indigestion (they have to fart) and then forget all about you and fall asleep. Was there any mist obscuring the edges of the maze from on high? Did you see all of it? Not really, no to both of these questions. There was just too much too see and take in of this perpetual labyrinth, so that your mind couldn't process all of it. Like in Minecraft, more and more chuks just kept loading into your central memory cortex (or "mind" as us buff old, Tolkienista traditionalists would call it) so that you couldn't possibly process all of it. Too much for mortals. And then you were set down on a daisy-covered meadow in the middle (if it even has a middle) of the maze, reeling from thoughts and emotions, trying to categorise and understand the many tunnels and passageways you have just seen. Way out? There isn't any of course. There is just a way in: to its True Centre. There, with the proper keys you may or may not have picked up along the way, you may finally unlock and open up the portal (a bonfire? a pack of cards? a weather-proof wardrobe?) to reach your own World Primal... and if you haven't picked up all the right keys? Don't worry: you can always try to find your way back across the dimensionless leagues of grassy, sunlit pastures, though you never will, of course. Many, but by no means all of the verdant corridors shift and change like the ocean. You'll never find the same keys again, but certainly others that are just as good in places that are just as wonderful. Perhaps the Mazemaster will even take pity on you, because it is an emotion he has never savoured before, like a vintage wine that must be tested at least once, even for a Divine being, to be crossed off the bucket list. In the maze there is even a little wood, where merry Wood-elves live in perfect bliss and harmony though they were once taken from their Home World against their wishes by the Master. The only blight on their existence is that little tribe of smallish Orcs that pester and terrorise them so that they have to take precautions and perhaps even enlist the aid of some good-natured adventurers passing through their habitat. And then, there's the Green Dragon and the tyrannosaurus and the meat-eating plant (or its cousin) from the "Little Shop of Horrors"...

"Monkeys who playfully throw large pinecones"??????? Our monkeys throw shit, lololol That said- this sounds very much like reality, romanticized, sigh.

My Question is for whoever wants to answer: in a very few words, talking about your own homebrew domain of dread and its dark lord. I just love reading other people's work.

I like to think the dark ones that created the domains of dread are actually multiple factions of such beings working together I'm a symbiotic relationship. Some are portions of the minds of gods and such beings that want to punish. Ether from a sense of justice, vengeance or even evils own self destructive and self serving nature. That then split off from the original. Then there's other older things that build the domains that the first group drags souls into and acts as jailers for.

Are there any named dark powers/gods thay we know made a domain of dread?

Yup! Feywilds can be frightening as Shadowfell/Domains of Dread as dome people tends to forget.

hmm dream walking has always been interesting but boy am i glad i never tripped into some of these places

Oh yeah finally in the first 10 commenters, absolutely love this. Can't wait for more

Im thinking for me the domains are a subconscious dream space of deities. As we know the infernal and abyssal forces keep each other in line. But these other potent malicious forces need a check of their own so to speak. This way other powerful beings can keep an eye on things in a way, and perhaps in some esoteric ways be gaining something for themselves. After all, the entirety of suffering and death that occurs in the domains would likely keep some sadistic being well entertained. Perhaps some domains are secretly lorded over by a sort of limbo minded entity, toying with fresh adventurers and wayward souls called to the mists. Almost like an anti kelemvor or something?

Where does Dal Quor, the plane of dreams, fit in this? Or is Dal Quor only a plane in Eberron?

Is the Örb a portal to Ethereal? The lore deepens...

I am just imaging a dreamscape of pokemon from the Ash is in a coma theory

I thought that this world be completely about the relatively new concepts of domains of delight (and domains of dread). I like the integration though

Wow this was intriguing

Took me a while to realise you were talking about dnd

Thank you

This made me think on what type of realms Neverland and Alice in Wonderland realms are.

Does the Ethereal Plane overlap/border the Feywild?

MOM WHERERERS MY MEADDDDDD

Hi AJ. So could the dream.scape be used in a similar way to the movie "Inception" with Leonardo Dicaprio? BTW your kickstarter mat's are working fantastically, thank you!

Now I’m once AGAIN super confused about where the astral plane begins and the ethereal ends

where is the wisdom score becoming base str score come from? Source?

@6:55 Oh. Oh it's *that* place. This is one description from 3.5 (the DMG, wasn't it?) that has uncomfortably stuck with me *forever*. Speaking of disquieting things, if we're talking about Van Richten's Guide, then one cannot recommend enough finding copies of 3.5's Heroes of Horror, and the third party 3.0 sourcebooks for the Domains of Dread. They...magnify what you will find in Van Richten's, significantly. Just a content warning for Heroes of Horror is all; 3.5 is less careful about subject matter than 5e at times.

I wonder if Ravenloft could be used as a bridge between the Shadowfel & the Faewild. Every Dark Lord eternally trapped in their "Tragic Backstory," I can also picture other large bergs of Ravenloft separated from the "Core" lands that fo the AD&D (AKA 2nd Edition) version, ones in which the technology level is sufficiently different. Imagine a Cyberpunk Techno-Dystopia with Vampires thrown in & an Undying vampiric CEO doing everything to try to keep the ONE person he cares about alive like Mr. Freeze in Batman. The CEO's quest for everlasting life led to them discovering a necromantic bloodborne virus that transformed them into a vampire, but in a frenzy they attacked the one person they cared about & did everything for, & now are desperately trying to keep them alive as the vampirism doesn't seem to work for them or would twist them in a way that would shatter him. I can also imagine a small rebuilt city that's closer to Gama World within an irradiated Wasteland & in which a baron tries to hold a rebuilt city together by day ala Auntie Entity in "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome," but stalks the wilderness as a werewolf that's a mutated monstrosity that's three times the size of a regular werewolf under the full moon, & thus being the biggest threat to the settlement they strive to keep together. This could be them repeating the pattern that brought about the wasteland, just as their rage caused them to launch the nukes. Just a few non-standard settings for Ravenloft domains.

I heard somewhere that the domains of dread are created by the shadowfell because as an anti-emotion plane it reacts strongly to strong emotions likely to snowball into more (like strahd being rejected) & seeks to contain them

Youve done a ton of lore on the realms but have you done/considered other settings like grey halk, brithrite, ect

When discussing travel into a dreamscape, I believe he's talking about doing so with some kind of projection. I don't believe it's possible to take your physical body into the dreamscape, as entering the rainbow curtain from the deep ethereal (if you've managed to get out there) just results in you returning to the boarder ethereal.

on an adjacent note is it possible to bottle up phlogiston and bring it to the material plane to use as explosives? the only info i can find on the forgotten realms wiki is that it evaporates away inside a crystal sphere. is there any info on how that works when sealed in something like glass?

So...much...more...ideas!!!

Do you have a list of the dragon magazine articles/other sources you drew from for this video? I’d really love those to refer to

I have 2 questions. The first kinda random but, in the elder scrolls the theory concerning existence is that all the elder scrolls universe exists in a Godhead. Is it possible for a lucid dreamer to create a fully functional existence universe in the deep borders of the deep ethereal & the dream realm with the lucid dreamer as the godhead? The second is a bit less meta but, some people are said to have a deep spiritual or soul bond or psychic connection. Can two dreamers with such a deep & profound bond have there dreamscapes so intertwined that a visitor can go from one to the other simply by entering thru one of the dreamer dreamscapes?

I wonder if Vecna could shed some light on the Domains of Dread. Especially since he escaped.

The campaign I'm running takes place in Etharis (Grim Hollow setting) and the players are trying to keep it from becoming a new plane of dread. Easy right? But there are some powerful beings who have vested interests in this planes vulnerability. Demons and devils, angles and gods where do we find help? The far realms? Perhaps a new layer of reality? Time to think outside the box, the walls are closing in. Good times ;). Oh yah, Merry Christmas everyone!

I actually liked the extended domains of dread best of the whole ravenloft setting, I think I have a theory on a way to escape the domains via Hazlan

Isn't there a pyramid mummy type domain of dredd

Still really interesting that the domains of dreams is in the Ethereal plane (plane of physical possibility) as opposed to the Astral planes (plane of the mind). Perhaps an interesting interpretation of this is the distinction between the physical mind - i.e., your brain, and your spiritual mind - i.e., your soul. Which one makes you, you?

Can I go in to Ravenloft as a Chaotic Evil Blackguard and cleave my way through and overthrow Strahd and become lord himself of the domain? Then raise an army of undead and other like and do a crusade against other domain of dread, to expand my kingdom. If I succeed other would follow the same fate...

Could the dream born be considered the same as material plane denizens without the being born part since the ethereal plane is the thing that makes material planes? Are demi planes soon to be material planes/material plane like environments even if their super waky?