D&D 5e 2014 Cosmology, the Planes, and Supernatural Regions

Return to the Dungeon Master Guides hub for the full 2014 DM chapter map, including the session mechanics and campaign-design guides this chapter assumes you can already run.

Introduction

The 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide organizes the entire multiverse into four categories, gives you three named models for arranging them, and then tours roughly two dozen individual planes in enough detail to run a scene in any of them. This guide keeps that same shape: structure and travel first, then the tour, then the supernatural regions and phenomena where planar influence surfaces on the Material Plane itself, then how to actually use any of it at your table without turning every session into a planar field trip.

You don't need all of it. Most campaigns touch two or three planes across their entire run, and the DMG says as much outright: putting the planes into a coherent, fully mapped cosmology is an optional step, not a prerequisite for using any individual one. Treat this guide as a reference you dip into when a spell, a villain, or a player's backstory points somewhere specific, not a syllabus to memorize before session one.

The Shape of the 2014 Multiverse

The default D&D cosmology sorts every plane into four categories, built outward from the world the characters already stand on.

The Positive and Negative Planes sit outside this whole structure, enfolding the rest of the cosmology and supplying the raw forces of life and death that underlie everything else in the multiverse.

Beneath the categories, the DMG is blunt about how little of this any mortal can actually verify. No being in the multiverse can look down and see the planes arranged the way a diagram in a book shows them; the exact relationship between planes is "largely a theoretical concern," since the primary way of getting from one to another is a magical portal that links two specific points, not a journey across any real geographic distance. Sages have still built a few common models to make sense of the arrangement anyway.

The Great Wheel is the default. It visualizes the planes as concentric rings, with the Material Plane and its echoes at the center, the Inner Planes forming a ring around that (enveloped in the Ethereal Plane), and the Outer Planes forming another ring around and behind that one, arranged by alignment with the neutral Outlands linking them all together. This arrangement is also the one that explains why the River Styx strings Acheron, the Nine Hells, Gehenna, Hades, Carceri, the Abyss, and Pandemonium together like beads on a cord.

The World Tree situates the planes among the roots and branches of a single cosmic tree. The Norse cosmology is the clearest example: the World Tree Yggdrasil's three roots touch Asgard (an Outer Plane holding Valhalla and other realms), Midgard (the Material Plane), and Niflheim (the underworld), connected by the rainbow bridge Bifrost.

The World Axis stands the Material Plane between two opposing realms instead of nesting it in rings: the Astral Sea floats above, holding the divine domains that serve as Outer Planes, while the Elemental Chaos churns below as a single undifferentiated elemental plane, with the Abyss torn into its bottom like a hole in the fabric of the cosmos.

The DMG also names several lighter alternatives you might borrow a piece from even if you never run one whole: the Omniverse (a bare-minimum cosmology of one Material Plane, the Transitive Planes, a single Elemental Chaos, and an Overheaven/Underworld pair), the Orrery (all planes orbiting the Material Plane at varying distances, the model Eberron uses), the Winding Road (every plane a single stop along an infinite path, with no logical relationship between neighbors), and settings drawn straight from real-world myth - Mount Olympus, the Egyptian Solar Barge, and the Celtic Otherworld among them. None of these change how an individual plane works. They only change how you describe its position relative to the others, and inventing your own is explicitly on the table.

At minimum, the DMG says most campaigns need six things regardless of which model you pick: a plane of origin for fiends, one for celestials, one for elementals, a place for deities (which can double as any of the first three), a destination for mortal spirits after death (which can also overlap), and a way to travel between planes. Everything past that is optional detail you add when the campaign actually calls for it.

Getting There: Portals and Spells

Reaching another plane is usually the point of a planar adventure, not a formality you skip past. The DMG gives two main routes.

Portals are stationary interplanar connections linking one specific spot on one plane to one specific spot on another. Some function as simple doorways - a clear window or a fog-shrouded passage a traveler steps through. Others are entire locations that exist on multiple planes at once or flicker between them: circles of standing stones, towers, ships, even whole towns. Vortices join an Elemental Plane to a similar location on the Material Plane, such as a volcano's heart leading to the Plane of Fire or an ocean's depths leading to the Plane of Water.

Most portals sit in remote locations with thematic ties to their destination - a portal to Mount Celestia often turns up on a real mountain peak - and most are guarded by a powerful creature tied to the destination plane: a genie, a sphinx, a titan. On top of the guardian, portals rarely stand open all the time. They open under one of several common requirements:

Sigil, the City of Doors, is famous specifically for its density of item-keyed portals, and chasing down a portal's key, command word, or timing window is often an adventure of its own.

Spells offer a more direct route for characters who can afford them. Plane shift needs a small forked metal rod, tuned to a specific destination and costing at least 250 gp to craft, and even researching the correct specifications for an obscure destination like Carceri can spark an adventure by itself; without specialized knowledge of the exact arrival point, the spell only lands the caster in the general vicinity of the target. Gate opens a portal directly to a specific point on another plane, bypassing most of the guardians and trials a physical journey would involve, but it's a 9th-level spell out of reach for all but the most powerful casters, and a sufficiently powerful entity can block a gate from opening within its own dominion. Etherealness carries a traveler into the Border Ethereal, and astral projection sends a character's consciousness into the Astral Plane, from which the Outer Planes become reachable.

The Astral Plane

The Astral Plane is the realm of thought and dream: a great silvery sea, the same above and below, streaked with swirling wisps of white and gray among motes of light like distant stars. Most of it is vast and empty, though travelers occasionally stumble across the petrified corpse of a dead god or another chunk of drifting rock. Far more common are color pools - shimmering, rippling pools of colored light roughly 1d6 x 10 feet across, each one a gateway to a specific plane. Locating the right color for a desired destination takes about 1d4 x 10 hours of searching.

Creatures native to the Astral Plane don't age, hunger, or thirst there, which is exactly why humanoids who live there, such as the githyanki, keep outposts on other planes for their children to grow up in. The githyanki's floating city, Tu'narath, drifts through the Astral Plane on a chunk of rock that's actually the body of a dead god, and their reavers raid astral travelers and planes touched by the Astral Plane alike. Movement here happens by simply thinking about a destination, though in combat a creature's walking speed in feet equals three times its Intelligence score - the smarter the creature, the more precisely it controls its own drift.

A character who travels bodily to the Astral Plane has no silver cord, but one who arrives via the astral projection spell trails one back to their physical body. Death on the Astral Plane, or on whatever plane the projection reaches, causes no real harm through that cord - only severing it (most commonly via a psychic wind, or the legendary silver swords the githyanki carry) or killing the character's helpless body back on the Material Plane causes a true death. That safety margin is exactly why high-level characters sometimes prefer astral projection to a portal or a more direct spell for reaching the Outer Planes.

Psychic winds are the plane's signature hazard: a storm of lost memories and stray thought rather than physical weather, first sensed as a darkening sky before it batters travelers with buffeting and shaking for a few rounds. A failed DC 15 Intelligence save against the wind can divert a journey, blow it off course, strand the party somewhere other than their destination, or fling them through a random color pool entirely - on top of a separate mental effect ranging from a short stun to psychic damage to outright madness. Beyond the winds, travelers who linger too long risk a run-in with wandering angels, demons, devils, night hags, or yugoloths passing through on their own business.

Wildspace and Spelljamming

Spelljammer: Adventures in Space builds an entire travel and adventuring layer on top of this plane rather than replacing it: Wildspace is where the Astral Plane overlaps each world's own Material Plane, and the Astral Sea is the connective ocean a spelljamming ship crosses to travel between star systems entirely. That book owns the practical travel rules this overlap adds - air envelopes, gravity planes, and ship-to-ship combat among them - so they aren't duplicated here. See the Spelljammer guide's wildspace rules for those mechanics, and the Spelljammer hub for the six new player races and the setting's one detailed location, the Rock of Bral.

The Ethereal Plane

The Ethereal Plane is a misty, fog-bound dimension whose "shores" - the Border Ethereal - overlap the Material Plane and the Inner Planes at every point, so any location on those planes has a matching spot here. Visibility in the Border Ethereal runs to about 60 feet; push into the plane's depths, the Deep Ethereal, and that drops to 30 feet of swirling mist and fog.

From the Border Ethereal, a traveler can see into whatever plane it overlaps, but the view is muted and indistinct, like looking through frosted glass, and limited to 30 feet. The reverse usually isn't true - the Ethereal Plane is normally invisible to creatures on the overlapped plane without magical help. Neither side can normally attack the other, solid objects on the overlapped plane don't block movement in the Border Ethereal, and gravity doesn't apply there either. That combination makes the Border Ethereal a natural fit for reconnaissance and moving around undetected, which is exactly why phase spiders and ghosts show up here so often.

Reaching the Deep Ethereal takes a plane shift spell, a gate spell, or a magical portal. Scattered through it are curtains of vaporous color, each one leading to the Border Ethereal region tied to a specific plane - the Material Plane's curtain runs bright turquoise, the Shadowfell's dusky gray, the Feywild's opalescent white, and each Elemental Plane its own shade, with the Elemental Chaos marked by a swirling mix of colors. A trip through the Deep Ethereal takes about 1d10 x 10 hours regardless of where it starts or ends, since distance is as meaningless here as it is on the Astral Plane, though creatures still move at normal speed once combat starts.

Ether cyclones are the Deep Ethereal's hazard of choice: serpentine columns that distort and uproot anything in their path, giving about a round or two of warning as a deep hum to anyone paying close attention. Most of the time a cyclone just extends the length of a journey; less often it blows a party into the Border Ethereal of a random plane, and rarely it tears a hole straight into the Astral Plane instead. Beyond the Border Ethereal's Material Plane encounters, most Deep Ethereal meetings are with travelers from the Inner Planes - elementals, genies, salamanders - plus the occasional celestial, fiend, or fey passing through.

The Feywild

The Feywild, also called the Plane of Faerie, is a realm of everlasting twilight, glittering faerie lights, and an ever-setting sun that never actually sets or rises, holding stationary and dusky low in the sky. It exists in parallel to the Material Plane, occupying the same cosmological space but turning every feature into something more vivid and strange: a volcano on the Material Plane rises here as a mountain crowned with skyscraper-sized crystals glowing with internal fire, a muddy river becomes a winding brook of striking clarity, and old ruins might put a traveler at the door of an archfey's castle.

Two courts hold sway. Queen Titania's Summer Court leads the seelie fey; the Queen of Air and Darkness's Gloaming Court leads the unseelie. The split doesn't map cleanly onto good and evil - many seelie are good and many unseelie are evil, but their rivalry comes from the queens' jealousy, not abstract morality - and creatures like fomorians and hags mostly reject both courts outright. Sylvan life fills the plane: elves, dryads, satyrs, pixies, sprites, centaurs, blink dogs, faerie dragons, treants, and unicorns in the lighter regions; hags, blights, goblins, ogres, and giants in the darker ones.

Fey crossings connect beautiful or mysterious Material Plane locations - a clearing, a pool, a ring of mushrooms, the space beneath a tree's trunk - to a near-perfect Feywild mirror, usually opening only under specific and often obscure conditions, and closing for good if the land on either side changes too much. Two optional rules mark extended time here: a failed DC 10 Wisdom save on leaving strips a creature's memory of its visit entirely (fey creatures and anyone with Fey Ancestry succeed automatically), and after a full day spent on the plane, time can warp unpredictably back on the Material Plane - anywhere from minutes to years passing for every day spent in the Feywild, undoable with a wish spell on up to ten creatures.

The Shadowfell

The Shadowfell, also called the Plane of Shadow, is the Feywild's grim counterpart: a dimension of black, gray, and white where most color has leached out of everything, under a starless black vault with no sun. It overlaps the Material Plane the same way the Feywild does, but twists the reflection instead of exaggerating it - a mountain here might read as a jagged, skull-shaped rock outcropping or a crumbling ruined castle, and a forest's branches snare passing cloaks while its roots trip travelers on purpose. Shadow dragons and undead haunt the plane, alongside gloom-loving creatures like cloakers and darkmantles.

Shadow crossings work like fey crossings in reverse: thin points between the Material Plane and the Shadowfell that form in places touched by death - battlefields, graveyards, tombs - and manifest only in darkness, closing the instant light touches them. In remote corners of the plane sit the Domains of Dread, demiplane prisons created by beings called the Dark Powers to trap history's cruelest villains as "dark lords," often catching innocent mortals inside along with them. The valley of Barovia, overlooked by Castle Ravenloft and ruled by the first vampire, Count Strahd von Zarovich, is the best known. See the Ravenloft setting hub for the full Domains of Dread framework, character options, and DM toolkit built from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

Extended stays risk Shadowfell despair, an optional rule the DMG allows once per day at most: a failed DC 10 Wisdom save triggers apathy, dread, or madness, each with its own mechanical penalty and roleplaying flaw, curable with a calm emotions spell or a DC 15 Wisdom save after a long rest. The plane's best-known settlement is Evernight, a dark mirror of the city of Neverwinter where mad necromancers and corrupt flesh-peddlers make up the living minority, and shambling undead under the rule of intelligent, flesh-eating ghouls make up the rest.

The Inner Planes: The Elemental Planes

The Inner Planes surround and enfold the Material Plane and its echoes, providing the raw elemental substance every world is built from. The four Elemental Planes - Air, Earth, Fire, and Water - form a ring around the Material Plane, suspended within the churning Elemental Chaos.

At their innermost edges, closest to the Material Plane, the four elements mingle roughly as they do at home, forming recognizable land, sea, and sky - just with one element dominating the mix. Aarakocra, azers, dragon turtles, gargoyles, genies, mephits, salamanders, and xorn populate this inner ring, and all of them can reach the Material Plane if they have the magic to get there. Push further out and the planes turn increasingly alien and hostile: solid earth, blazing fire, crystal-clear water, and unsullied air in their purest, least mixed forms, populated by elemental spirits barely recognizable as creatures and the Elemental Princes of Evil - primordial beings of pure elemental fury who don't need food or sustenance in their own domains. At the outermost extent, the pure elements dissolve entirely into the Elemental Chaos, an unending tumult of clashing energies where elementals rarely linger and reports of native hybrid creatures persist without much confirmation.

The Plane of Air is an open, wind-swept expanse dotted with drifting earth motes - remnants of failed Plane of Earth invasions, some vegetated, some solid enough to support towns. Its Labyrinth Winds range from stiff breezes to gales that can tear a creature apart, and skilled navigators learn to move with them rather than against them. Hidden among the winds sits Aaqa, a lawful-good domain ruled by the Wind Dukes and guarded against the Elemental Chaos's encroachment; nearby, the Sirocco Straits and the Great Conflagration mark the plane's hot, ashy border with the Plane of Fire, while the frigid Mistral Reach marks its cold border with the Plane of Water's Frostfell.

The Plane of Earth is a chain of mountains taller than anything on the Material Plane, airless at its highest peaks and reached mainly through caves and caverns. The dao's capital, the City of Jewels, sits in its largest cavern and is built almost entirely from precious stone and metal the dao mine obsessively - theft there is punishable by death, extending to the thief's relatives. The Swamp of Oblivion, a horrid border-region bog shared with the Plane of Water, is infamous for swallowing anything cast into it for at least a century, which is exactly why desperate souls sometimes throw dangerous artifacts there on purpose.

The Plane of Fire cycles through a 24-hour sun from blinding noon to a deep red midnight, and most business at the efreet capital, the City of Brass, happens during the darker hours. Fierce winds and stinging ash sweep the Cinder Wastes, where salamanders and azers clash, while the volcanic Fountains of Creation house the azers proper. The City of Brass itself, ruled from the Charcoal Palace, is arguably the single best place in the multiverse to buy rare magic items - if the efreet's price, often a favor rather than gold, is one you're willing to pay.

The Plane of Water is an endless sea called the Sea of Worlds, dotted with atolls and coral reefs, its storms occasionally opening temporary portals that drag Material Plane ships into its waters. The sunlit Sea of Light hosts aquatic humanoid civilizations and the marid emperor's Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls; the lightless Darkened Depths below hold kraken and other leviathans. At the plane's cold edge, the Frostfell (also called the Plane of Ice) forms an endless, blizzard-swept glacier shared with the Plane of Air, home to yetis, remorhazes, and white dragons.

The Outer Planes

If the Inner Planes are raw matter and energy, the Outer Planes supply direction, thought, and purpose - many sages call them divine, spiritual, or godly planes, since they're best known as the homes of deities. Sixteen of them correspond to the eight non-neutral alignments, split into two tiers: the Upper Planes, home to celestials like angels, couatls, and pegasi, hold an element of good; the Lower Planes, home to demons, devils, and yugoloths, hold an element of evil. The planes in between host their own unique populations - modrons on Mechanus, slaadi on Limbo. A creature whose alignment clashes with a plane's dominant nature feels a real, persistent dissonance there, one the DMG can turn into a mechanical penalty (usually a level of exhaustion after a long rest) if you want the pressure to matter beyond flavor.

Most multilayered Outer Planes are visualized as a stack of related realms - Mount Celestia has seven, the Nine Hells has nine, the Abyss has a number nobody has ever finished counting - and most portals from elsewhere land on the first layer, which functions as that plane's arrival gate. Distance is close to meaningless: adventurers could tour all nine layers of the Nine Hells in a single day if the powers there allowed it, or spend weeks crossing just one layer if they didn't. Two features thread through several planes at once: the River Styx, whose waters inflict a feeble mind effect on anyone but a fiend who touches or tastes them, flows through the top layers of Acheron, the Nine Hells, Gehenna, Hades, Carceri, the Abyss, and Pandemonium, with fiend or ghost-piloted ferries willing to carry passengers between them for a price; and the Infinite Staircase, an extradimensional spiral stair whose nondescript doors turn up in dusty, half-forgotten places across the planes, guarded by devas, sphinxes, and yugoloths.

The Upper Planes

Mount Celestia rises as a single sacred mountain from a shining silver sea, its seven plateaus marking seven heavenly layers of justice, order, and mercy - one of the few places on the planes where a traveler can actually let their guard down without regretting it. Bytopia, the Twin Paradises, pairs a tamed pastoral landscape against an untamed wilderness across its two layers, embodying the satisfaction of honest work done well. Elysium offers tranquility so complete that visitors risk never wanting to leave, a bucolic refuge for travelers seeking a safe haven. The Beastlands is nature unbound - forests, jungles, and plains thick with wildlife, speaking to the animal instinct in every living thing. Arborea runs hotter: violent moods, deep affections, and extravagantly massive, beautiful terrain guarded by nature spirits that brook no infringement, home to elves who fight evil with the same intensity they feel everything else. Ysgard is a rugged realm of soaring mountains and windswept battlefields floating above icy caverns that hold entire kingdoms of giants and dwarves, where any creature slain in battle (short of a construct or the undead) rises whole again at the next dawn to fight another day.

The Lower Planes

Limbo is raw, will-shaped chaos with no gravity, where a simple-minded creature might have less than a minute before its surroundings dissolve, while disciplined githzerai monks build entire monasteries by force of mind alone. Pandemonium is a plane of madness carved from howling wind-tunnels, cold and lightless, where conversation only carries about 10 feet and the incessant noise has driven most of its exiled inhabitants insane. The Abyss embodies chaos and evil made physical, its virtually endless layers spiraling ever downward into more appalling forms - Demogorgon's savage Gaping Maw, Orcus's undead-choked Thanatos, Lolth's web-strung Demonweb, Baphomet's labyrinthine Endless Maze, Graz'zt's decadent Triple Realm, and Yeenoghu's blood-soaked Death Dells among its most notorious named layers, each ruled by a demon lord whose personality shapes the whole territory. Carceri models every other prison plane in the multiverse, its six layers of bog, jungle, desert, mountain, and black ice holding traitors and backstabbers who essentially can't leave without a wish spell. Hades is three joyless glooms under a starless gray sky, home to unclaimed mortal souls who eventually degrade into larvae, harvested by night hags, liches, and rakshasas for their rituals. Gehenna is the volcanic birthplace of the yugoloths, its slopes pitched at 45 degrees or steeper, its culture built on suspicion and greed with no room for mercy.

The Nine Hells of Baator is the ultimate plane of law and evil, ruled bottom-up by Asmodeus at Nessus, the ninth and deepest layer - reaching him means descending all eight layers above in order, fastest via the tributary of the River Styx that runs through every level. Each of the eight upper layers has its own archdevil and character: Avernus (Zariel's rocky wasteland, also Tiamat's prison and the arrival point for most visitors), Dis (Dispater's iron canyon-city), Minauros (Mammon's stench-ridden bog metropolis), Phlegethos (Belial and Fierna's volcanic fortress-city), Stygia (Levistus's frozen, lightning-wracked realm, also home to the fallen Geryon), Malbolge (Glasya's crumbling mountainside), Maladomini (Baalzebul's ruin-choked wasteland), and Cania (Mephistopheles's ice-locked citadel). Every archdevil answers to Asmodeus and schemes against every other archdevil simultaneously, which is exactly how Asmodeus has stayed on top.

Acheron is four layers of enormous iron cubes floating in an airy void, colliding endlessly and echoing with the sounds of the eternal wars fought on them - a plane defined by strife for its own sake, where orcs loyal to Gruumsh and goblinoids loyal to Maglubiyet clash with the spirits of fallen soldiers who never stopped fighting.

The Neutral and Lawful-Good Planes

Mechanus runs on absolute order - interlocking clockwork gears calculating a purpose no deity can fathom, populated by modrons and their creator, a godlike being called Primus. Arcadia channels that same lawfulness toward good instead of pure mechanism: perfectly straight roads, ruler-lined orchards, and weather governed by four allied demigod Storm Kings, sheltering dwarven kingdoms beneath its unblemished mountains.

The Outlands, Sigil, and Other Planes

The Outlands is the neutral plane sitting at the theoretical center of the Outer Planes wheel, a circular disk of prairie, mountain, and river holding a little of everything in paradoxical balance. Sixteen gate-towns ring its outer edge, each built around a portal to one of the sixteen Outer Planes and shaded by the character of wherever its portal leads - which is exactly why a celestial and a fiend sharing a bottle of wine in an Outlands tavern isn't as strange a sight as it should be. A campaign can center on the Outlands entirely without much planar travel at all, since you can ride a horse there from a heaven to a hell.

At the Outlands' center rises the Spire, a needle-shaped mountain whose narrow peak holds up Sigil, the City of Doors - a ring-shaped city built on the inside of its own ring, so a street-level traveler can look straight up and see the far side of the city hanging overhead. Sigil is a trader's paradise for goods, information, and especially portal keys, ruled by the enigmatic Lady of Pain, whose true nature - fallen creator, ancient warden, or something else - nobody in the setting claims to know.

For a full character-and-DM toolkit built specifically around Sigil and the Outlands - two backgrounds, seven feats, all twelve of Sigil's factions, the city's altered magic rules, and every gate-town - see the Planescape hub. This section's Great Wheel framing stays the DMG-sourced baseline for the whole planar structure above; the Planescape cluster builds the Sigil-specific mechanics on top of it rather than replacing it.

Two more categories fall outside the named planes above but come up often enough to keep on hand. Demiplanes are extradimensional spaces born from spells or natural folds in reality, ranging from a single conjured chamber to an entire realm like Barovia, sealed under Strahd's rule inside its own pocket of the Shadowfell. The Far Realm sits entirely outside the known multiverse, possibly a separate universe with its own physical laws; where its energy leaks into another plane, matter warps into shapes that defy ordinary geometry, and creatures like mind flayers and beholders either originate there or were reshaped by its influence. Its only well-documented portal, opened by ancient elves inside a mountain called Firestorm Peak, is long lost along with the civilization that built it.

The Material Plane and Known Worlds

For all the strangeness beyond it, the Material Plane is where the philosophical and elemental forces of the wider multiverse collide into the tumbled, physical existence of mortal life. It's the starting point for most campaigns and adventures, and the rest of the multiverse is defined in relation to it.

The DMG names several published campaign settings as examples of what a Material Plane world can look like, and it's explicit that any of them is yours to reshape once your campaign takes place there. On Toril (the Forgotten Realms), fantastic cities stand amid the ruins of ancient empires across the central continent of Faerûn and beyond. On Oerth (Greyhawk), the Free City of Greyhawk anchors a region called the Flanaess, rife with scoundrels, archmagi, and the looming threat of the evil demigod Iuz. On Krynn (Dragonlance), the return of the gods is overshadowed by the dragon queen Takhisis and her armies plunging the continent of Ansalon into war. On Athas (Dark Sun), the gods have abandoned a desert world where water is worth more than a life and sorcerer-kings rule as tyrants. On Eberron, a war has just ended, dragonmarked houses rival kingdoms in influence, and elemental-powered vehicles make the far corners of Khorvaire reachable. On Aebrynis (Birthright), scions of divine bloodlines carve up the continent of Cerilia while balancing rulership against abominations born from an evil god's blood. And on Mystara, warring empires and savage monsters collide under the meddling of the Immortals - former adventurers raised to nearly divine status.

Dragons and the First World

Fizban's Treasury of Dragons adds one more layer to the Material Plane picture above: the myth of the First World, the original creation from which every world of the Material Plane is said to have splintered. Bahamut and Tiamat, the primordial dragons, are described as its creators - and that origin is exactly why they don't fit neatly into the Outer Planes structure covered earlier in this guide. Most deities are native to the Outer Planes, drawing their power from realms built around alignment and belief. Bahamut and Tiamat aren't: they share the same fundamental connection to the Material Plane as every other dragon, which makes them ontologically distinct from the gods around them even while they occupy Outer Planes addresses - Bahamut on Mount Celestia, Tiamat in the Nine Hells, since the First World itself no longer exists to house them. Worshiped as gods by mortals on many worlds (Paladine and Takhisis on Krynn, among others), they're viewed very differently by dragonkind: metallic dragons treat Bahamut more like a king than a deity, and chromatic dragons hold a similarly wary, sovereign-like relationship with Tiamat. Neither reads as worship in a dragon's own mind.

A handful of other dragons command similar reverence without claiming true divinity - Aasterinian (a brass dragon sometimes honored as a god of invention), Chronepsis (a black dragon associated with fate), and Tamara (a silver dragon linked to life) among them. Gem dragons add a fourth figure to this list: Sardior, the long-dead Ruby Dragon, whose fractured consciousness some gem dragons believe still echoes within their own minds. An entire faction, the Inheritors of the First World, has built a doctrine around the belief that Sardior's return will eventually inspire Bahamut and Tiamat to reconcile and resume the work of creation.

Tied to the First World is dragonsight - a dragon's latent, developable awareness that every one of its kind exists as an echo on every world of the Material Plane simultaneously, versions of the same fundamental being shaped by each world's own history. Some echoes barely differ from each other; others diverge radically in personality or even alignment while remaining bound by the same underlying fate. A sufficiently old dragon can cultivate dragonsight deliberately, eventually coordinating its echoes' actions across multiple worlds at once - the mechanism behind the Chamber's schemes on Eberron, where its members study the Draconic Prophecy for the same reason they study dragonsight: both are ways of mapping cause and effect across a scale no single mortal lifetime could otherwise observe. Dragonsight is also the reason a dragon's corruption into undeath can ripple outward to afflict its counterparts on other worlds entirely. For a DM, dragonsight is a clean way to let a dragon the party already knows resurface on a different world with a different personality without breaking continuity - it's the same character, refracted. For the full framework around running an individual dragon, see the Running Dragons guide; for how the five gem dragon families connect back to Sardior specifically, see the Dragon Types guide.

Supernatural Regions and Hazards

Planar influence doesn't only reach the Material Plane through a portal. Tasha's Cauldron of Everything adds two toolkits for locations that are strange on their own terms - supernatural regions, areas soaked in a preternatural force that keep producing effects as the party lingers, and magical phenomena, more contained set pieces the party can stumble into once - plus a handful of natural hazards that give ordinary terrain teeth. Several of them are the everyday face of the cosmology above: a Far Realm region is a thin place in reality, a mirror zone forms where planar energies converge, and an unearthly road works like a portal that happens to run along the ground.

Supernatural Regions

A supernatural region is an area - as large as a kingdom or as small as a single room - permeated by a force strong enough to reshape what happens inside it. Each region below comes with its own effects table in the source material and its own list of triggers for when a roll is warranted: resting overnight, casting a spell, disturbing something specific to the region's theme. Roll only when a trigger actually happens in play, and feel free to reskin any region's flavor to fit the location you're building.

Blessed Radiance. The grace of the Upper Planes touches this region, producing effects that lean toward healing, protection, and minor blessings rather than danger - useful for a consecrated grove, a saint's tomb, or any ground touched by a celestial power.

Far Realm. Some entities that die find their way not to the Astral Plane or an Outer Plane, but to the Far Realm, where eons twist them into alien shapes governed by rules the Material Plane doesn't share. The Far Realm's influence leaks through thin places in reality or through invasive, alien thoughts, and its effects table leans unsettling and reality-warping rather than simply harmful - fitting for a region touched by an aberration, an eldritch tome, or a rift no one fully understands.

Haunted. Homes burdened by dark deeds, sites of mass killings, and places where someone died in powerful fear, sorrow, or hatred all qualify. A haunted region echoes the past onto anyone who lingers, and its effects work best when tied to a specific tragedy the party can eventually uncover rather than left as generic spookiness.

Infested. Insects already outweigh larger creatures in raw biomass on most worlds; an infested region is where that balance tips visibly. Population booms, magical manipulation, or interbreeding with something otherworldly let insects become the dominant force in an area - overrunning structures, building elaborate hives, and forcing anything else living there to adapt or leave.

Mirror Zone. Where planar and magical energies converge, a mirror zone forms - a place of reflections where what a creature sees isn't always trustworthy. It's a natural fit for a Feywild border, a place touched by illusion magic, or any location that should make the party question their own senses.

Psychic Resonance. Strong emotion combined with magic use, or the lingering presence of psionic creatures, imposes strange effects on both creatures and objects in the area. A psychic resonance region works well layered over a site of an old magical battle or a place psionic creatures once called home.

Unraveling Magic. Magic itself is damaged or corrupted here, producing unpredictable results whenever a creature casts a spell. These regions form where a potent ritual went wrong (or right, if the ritual itself was destructive), where a cataclysmic magical battle left scars, or where an artifact was destroyed - a good fit for any location built around magic gone catastrophically wrong.

Magical Phenomena

Magical phenomena are smaller, more concrete than a supernatural region - each one usually plays out as a single encounter or discovery rather than an ongoing regional effect.

Eldritch Storms. When magical currents get trapped amid wind and cloud, the result is a storm with effects well beyond ordinary weather - a good complication for a wilderness trek or a dramatic backdrop for a climactic scene.

Emotional Echoes. A place infused with the powerful emotions of everyone who once lived, worked, celebrated, or suffered there - a room as small as a single chamber or as large as a forest - typically carries one dominant emotion. A creature who expresses even a hint of that emotion within the area risks being magically compelled to linger and act it out further, which makes an emotional echo a strong tool for a location the party is meant to feel pulled toward or trapped by.

Magic Mushrooms. Fungus suffused with mystical energy - especially common in places like the Underdark or the Feywild - can produce a wide range of effects when eaten, some beneficial and some very much not. A patch of magic mushrooms is a classic "curiosity with a cost" discovery.

Mimic Colonies. A single mimic imitating a chest or a door is common enough; a colony of mimics that have learned to cooperate is something else entirely. A mimic colony can reshape itself into buildings, bridges, statues, or even an entire fake village, and a colony smart enough to recognize it's outmatched would rather bargain - offering information, hidden treasure, or one of its own young - than fight to the last. A hostile colony that does choose to fight can act as one additional creature on top of its individual members when judging encounter difficulty.

Primal Fruit. Wild places brimming with nature's power, gardens tended by eccentric wizards, and groves touched by divine providence can all produce fruit-bearing plants that store primal magic in their fruit - marked by vivid or shifting colors, a glow or sparkle, a faint hum, or a strange feel to the touch. Eating a piece produces a random effect, and an identify spell can reveal a fruit's beneficial properties in advance, though never a curse or side effect hidden inside it.

Unearthly Roads. Invisible, artery-like currents of magic connect distant lands, and the greatest of them form persistent paths known as unearthly roads - functioning like planar portals that let a creature cover roughly twenty-one times the distance it would normally travel in the same time. Some serve as open trade routes; others shift with the seasons, the phases of the moon, or a specific ritual needed to open their gates.

For a giant-themed campaign, giant enclaves are their own distinct catalog of magical, giant-built locations from Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants - see the Glory of the Giants guide for how they fit alongside the phenomena above.

Natural Hazards

Beyond the dangers already covered in the Dungeon Master's Guide, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything adds a few more ways for terrain itself to threaten a party.

Avalanches. A typical avalanche or rockslide covers a wide swath of ground and moves in bursts each round until it runs out of momentum - anyone caught in its path is swept along, knocked prone, and made to save against being battered by the slide. Once it stops, buried creatures are blinded, restrained, and under total cover, gaining a level of exhaustion for every few minutes spent trapped unless someone digs them out.

Falling into Water. A creature falling into water or another liquid can use its reaction to attempt a controlled landing - hitting the surface head or feet first on a successful check halves the fall damage it takes.

Falling onto a Creature. When a falling creature lands in the space of another creature (and neither is especially small), the creature underneath risks getting knocked down and takes a share of the falling damage itself, unless it's significantly larger than whatever just landed on it.

Spells as Natural Hazards. For a DM who wants a quick mechanical stand-in rather than building a hazard from scratch, the source material also maps a set of existing spell effects onto natural-hazard equivalents - ball lightning, blizzards, earthquakes, falling debris, floods, fog, lava bombs, lightning, meteors, mirages, pyroclastic flows, smoke, swamp gas, tidal waves, toxic eruptions, volcanic activity, whirlpools, wildfires, and windstorms all have a suggested spell or two whose existing rules can approximate them without new bookkeeping.

Mix and match freely: a haunted mountain pass prone to avalanches, or an unraveling-magic ruin hiding a patch of magic mushrooms, both work fine using these tools together. For traps, dungeon features, and the rest of the DM's on-the-fly environmental toolkit, see Unusual Environments and Traps.

Using the Planes in Your Campaign

The planes work best as destinations your campaign earns rather than a setting bible you build before session one. A single portal, a single archdevil, a single named layer of the Abyss is usually enough material for an entire adventure arc - you don't need the full sixteen-plane Outer Planes roster mapped out before your first planar-touched NPC shows up at your table (building the creatures and hooks themselves is its own kind of prep).

Hot Take: Most tables never need the full Great Wheel. The DMG itself frames a coherent, fully mapped cosmology as optional, and lists only six elements every campaign actually requires - origins for fiends, celestials, and elementals, a home for deities, a destination for the dead, and a way to travel between planes. Building out all sixteen Outer Planes before your players have asked a single question about the afterlife is prep spent on a diagram nobody at the table will ever see from above; spend it instead on the two or three planes your story is actually going to visit, and let the rest of the wheel stay theoretical exactly the way the book says it can.

Optional planar rules deserve the same restraint. Nearly every named plane above carries at least one - alignment drift on Bytopia, exhaustion in the Nine Hells, corruption tables in the Abyss - and running every single one at full strength turns a memorable setting into a saving-throw gauntlet that slows the table down without adding much story. Pick the one rule that reinforces what makes a given plane feel like itself for this particular scene, and let the rest of the chapter stay flavor text you can reach for later if the campaign lingers there.

Once you know which planes your campaign touches, the travel method usually falls out of the story you want to tell. A portal with a guardian and a riddle makes the journey the adventure. A well-researched plane shift or a hard-won gate skips straight to the part where the destination matters. Either way, the planes are one of the few places in D&D where the DMG hands you this much named, ready-to-use material and then tells you, in its own words, to use only as much of it as the table needs.

Related Guides

For the campaign-scale planning this guide's planar hooks slot into, see Creating Campaigns. Return to the Dungeon Master Guides hub for the full 2014 DM chapter map, including the session-running rules the optional planar effects above build on.