What are naturally ethereal creatures like on other planes?

[Toliudar]

I'm embarking on a plane-hopping game, and some of the possible PC's are ghosts, or otherwise have the ability to become ethereal. So...if a creature is physically on the ethereal plane, and appears incorporeal on the material plane...what are they like on the astral plane, or Limbo, or the Plane of Water?

I'd be happy for either RAW answers or discussions of reasonable houserules.

[Drynwyn]

RAW? Exactly the same. Incorporeal, as a subtype, has no rule saying that you must have access to the Ethereal Plane to use it.

[Toliudar]

It's true that you don't have to have access to the ethereal plane to be incorporeal, but that's at least in part because etherealness isn't the only way to be incorporeal. Wraiths are incorporeal everywhere, for example.

But it seemed clear to me that the description of ghosts is that they are corporeal on the ethereal plane.


A manifested ghost remains partially on the Ethereal Plane, where is it not incorporeal.

So if there's no ethereal plane, where is the body?

[Jeraa]

From the 3.5 FAQ:


The Ethereal Plane is only coterminous to the Material Plane. So if a ghost encountered a planar curtain on the Ethereal Plane, or if it could cast planeshift, could it go to another plane? If so, would it be manifested and incorporeal or solid on any other plane?

A ghost can’t become ethereal from any plane but the Material Plane, and it cannot exist ethereally on any plane not coterminous with the Ethereal Plane. Also, a ghost can only manifest (that is, become non-ethereal but incorporeal) by going from the Ethereal Plane to the Material Plane. Thus it can’t “manifest by default” when going from the Ethereal Plane to some plane other than the Material Plane, and it therefore can’t travel to other planes (besides the Material Plane) from the Ethereal Plane.

The only option a ghost on the Ethereal Plane has is to manifest to the Material Plane, which renders him incorporeal but not ethereal. Once manifested on the Material Plane, the ghost could travel to other planes (just like anyone else), but it couldn’t become ethereal while on such a plane.

And from another FAQ entry:

Remember that the Ethereal Plane isn’t coexistent with any plane other than the Material Plane. Adventures on other planes don’t allow ethereal scouting or infiltration, and thus make good changes of pace for high-level characters used to such tactics.

You must have access to the Ethereal plane to become ethereal. Those powers/abilities/spells/whatever that allow a creature to become ethereal only work on the Material plane and the Ethereal plane.The Ethereal plane simply does not exist on the outer planes.

However, the FAQ is still partly wrong. A ghost never fully leaves the Ethereal plane when manifesting. Since it is always partly on the Ethereal plane, it should be able to go only where that plane exists, which is limited to the Material plane. A ghost shouldn't be able to travel to any outer plane then.

[Phelix-Mu]

I agree with the conclusion that normal ghosts can't go beyond the ethereal under normal circumstances. But couldn't a ghost be fully on the ethereal and then use one of the portal-things (curtains were they?) to leave the ethereal and end up somewhere else?

Moreover, if they have access, astral projection might be an option, as long as it was cast from the ethereal plane. With enough high-level spells, you can pretty much manage anything. I bet you could miracle a ghost to wherever you wanted, for instance.

Keep in mind, even if the ghosts can get to these other planes, their ghost abilities will be very hampered.

Alternately, I believe I read somewhere alternate cosmology that implied that some very powerful beings or some very large planes sometimes generate a separate ethereal unique to that plane/layer. You could certainly have your world's planar makeup operate with this in mind.

Similar redesign could be done using some kind of variant of the super Deep Ethereal to travel to some other reality.

[Toliudar]

Thanks, Jeraa and Phelix. Good ideas, both for the basic rules and how we might best expand them.