Etherealness: Where There’s a Wall, There’s a Way

Usable By: Bard, Cleric, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard

Spell Level: 7

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Self

Duration: Up to 8 hours

Components: V, S

You step into the border regions of the Ethereal Plane, in the area where it overlaps with your current plane. You remain in the Border Ethereal for the duration or until you use your action to dismiss the spell. During this time, you can move in any direction. If you move up or down, every foot of movement costs an extra foot. You can see and hear the plane you originated from, but everything there looks gray, and you can’t see anything more than 60 feet away.

While on the Ethereal Plane, you can only affect and be affected by other creatures on that plane. Creatures that aren’t on the Ethereal Plane can’t perceive you and can’t interact with you, unless a special ability or magic has given them the ability to do so.

You ignore all objects and effects that aren’t on the Ethereal Plane, allowing you to move through objects you perceive on the plane you originated from.

When the spell ends, you immediately return to the plane you originated from in the spot you currently occupy. If you occupy the same spot as a solid object or creature when this happens, you are immediately shunted to the nearest unoccupied space that you can occupy and take force damage equal to twice the number of feet you are moved.

This spell has no effect if you cast it while you are on the Ethereal Plane or a plane that doesn’t border it, such as one of the Outer Planes.

At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 8th level or higher, you can target up to three willing creatures (including you) for each slot level above 7th. The creatures must be within 10 feet of you when you cast the spell.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Oh lord do I have controversial opinions about infiltration and stealth magic. Etherealness is the king of subtlety magic; you are offered a tool to move over eight hours in any direction through walls while imperceptible. That not only is cool as hell, it makes your rogue specialized in infiltration look entirely useless!

This is another spell where its up-casting radically changes its usefulness. Having a single person with Etherealness limits its uses more to information gathering, espionage, and light theft missions. Having three or six people ethereal opens up mass infiltration and ambush set ups. However, Etherealness also runs into the problem of being party size dependent to change how powerful it is. There aren’t many spells where this is a glaring problem, but by changing from one ethereal person to three makes it so if you’re only playing with two other players, everyone can be ethereal on an 8th level cast, where as if you’re playing in a group with four or more players, somebody has to be left behind. Even casting it at 9th level in larger groups can strand one or two players out while the rest get to go on a wall-hack cheating esque journey through three dimensional space.

Beyond its problems with party size, Etherealness can be a major issue to DM with. Opening up the world to allow any player to freely fly around through walls undetected can have problematic side effects that heavily gate the kinds of adventures the DM can run. To combat this, magic is needed to detect and interact with ethereal players, while that same magic isn’t required to interact with traditionally ethereal monsters like ghosts. In essence, the DM has to disable Etherealness through ethereal warded walls and detection monsters or otherwise shape the entire adventure around one or more creatures being able to move through the entirety of the world unimpeded. It has the potential to be frustrating for all parties involved.

If you want to take Etherealness, work with your DM on it ahead of time. It’ll be helpful to establish the boundaries for the spell in the world, and help keep all parties interacting with it satisfied with the scope of its use. The spell is a game warping kind of powerful, and won’t work at every table. If only there was a book where we could put problematic multi-planar spells for people who are looking for that kind of experience instead of classic fantasy adventuring! Put it right alongside Plane Shift and Astral Projection, it’d be great! But alas, it's baked into the PHB, so it requires an address anytime a player gets access to 7th level spells.

5e Spells

Etherealness: Where There’s a Wall, There’s a Way