Hello.
I've seen suggestions that the Ethereal Plane is the "blood of reality" and is a plane of possibility and probability in which multiverses form as bubbles, including the normal multiverse, the Far Realm, and the Keeper reality.
Does the Guide to the Ethereal Plane indicate this idea?
Does any other source indicate this idea?
What does everyone think of the idea that the Ethereal Plane, one of the transitive planes of the Great Wheel cosmology, is, in fact, beyond the cosmology?
Does this render the "Great Wheel," at best, a flawed model of the cosmos?
Plane of Probability
Tue, 2008-01-22 21:02
#1
Plane of Probability
Wed, 2008-01-23 11:42
#3
Plane of Probability
Much obliged for the dark, as always.
Have a nice day!
It presents the Ethereal Plane as the plane of possibility and probability, yes. The idea that alternate multiverses are found within ether gaps is from Bruce Cordell's illithid trilogy of adventures, specifically Dawn of the Overmind, although another sort of ether gap, apparently linked to the Far Realm, is found in A Guide to the Ethereal Plane.
It's worth noting that the key characteristic of the particular multiverse beyond the ether gap in Dawn of the Overmind is that it doesn't exist. It's a timeline that might have happened, but didn't. It has no inhabitants, thought, matter, or energy - it only exists in potential. It's a stillborn multiverse, compressed possibility and nothing else. However, the illithids have a plan to make it real, and exchange it for our own.
This may well be the sort of place the keepers came from (a theoretical plane that may not have been real until it was "discovered"), and Todd Stewart/Shemmy linked the keepers to ether gaps (though vaguely, with room for interpretation) in Dragon #353.
A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and Dawn of the Overmind are the main two sources, as well as "The Ecology of the Keeper" in Dragon #353.
That's one interpretation. It could be that there are ether gaps that join with multiverses as every bit as real as the Great Wheel (one of them seems to touch the Far Realm, which is real enough). However, this doesn't mean it's outside the cosmology in itself - it could just join to other Ethereal Planes (or the local equivalents) in other cosmologies. You could also equally easily assume that the Great Wheel is the only true cosmology, and the Ethereal Plane connects to "potential" multiverses that never did become real. Perhaps if one of those potentials were ever to become actual, they would join the Great Wheel rather than existing in some nebulous elsewhen. The Far Realm is an exception to that - one interpretation is that the Far Realm is a place composed of things that the Great Wheel cosmology (including the Ethereal) has no potential to create. The Ethereal, in this view, is the plane of potential and the Far Realm is its antithesis, the plane of the impossible.
No more than a globe is a flawed model of the Earth because other planets exist, or because the atmosphere touches outer space. It may be a flawed model regardless, however.