The Darkest Realm in the D&D Multiverse

 What's the worst place you could possibly go in the D&D multiverse?

There are a lot of answers. One could easily throw out "Hell," by which of course you mean The Nine Hells (or Baator if you're old-school or trying to avoid the Satanic Panic). But then, what about the Abyss? Or Hades? Moving away from the Outer Planes, what about the Negative Energy Plane, a realm so hostile to life that merely trying to enter it usually causes a Nightwalker to emerge in your place? What about the Shadowfell, and particularly the Domains of Dread, where Darklords and innocents alike are trapped in an endless cycle of horror?

And maybe, depending on your philosophy, it's the Prime Material Plane. Hell is empty, and all of its devils are here.

The truth is, if you'll join mere here behind the DM screen, is that it depends on the story you're telling.

So, while this isn't meant to be a look at any specific campaign or game, there is a bit of a spoiler here for Baldur's Gate 3. So we'll do a spoiler cut.

BG3's second act has its own sort of three-act structure, and the culmination of its second act, its "plot point two" (sorry, I studied screenwriting in college) is the moment where you journey into the Shadowfell. It's a point of no return, and depending on various choices you make along the way, you either deny the second act's main villain his greatest power by killing an innocent person or by freeing her.

Shadowheart is at the core of this quest, because in her ambition to become a Dark Justiciar in service to the goddess Shar, the ritual of killing this person, known as the Nightsong (though we find out her real name and nature later - turns out she is the aasimar demigoddess daughter of Selune, the moon goddess and sister of Shar that the goddess of darkness despises) is what she has spent her life building up to doing. How that goes, again, varies (with a little online guidance, I trusted Shadowheart to make the right call, which spared the Nightsong but also made her an apostate) but the point here is that the Shadowfell is presented in a particular way:

Specifically, the Shadowfell in the game is a swirling void of darkness, with fragments of earth floating above a vortex.

Act two takes place primarily in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, which are basically your classic haunted woods, with a powerful magical effect that makes it difficult to safely progress until you complete a few important quests, and can potentially render any unprotected person immediately undead.

Especially when you get the utterly creepy siblings of the act's big bad showing up in the haunted town in this region, the entire thing becomes a kind of heightened gothic horror show.

The mere influence of the Shadowfell is what has transformed this place into such a horrific place.

The thing is, if you were running a campaign of your own, this entire segment could simply take place in the Shadowfell itself. As presented in the DMG, the Shadowfell is more of a dark reflection of the prime material plane, even physically mirroring it, such as having the same basic geographical features but, for instance, in place of a familiar city like Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms, you could have Evernight, which is a spooky, gothic burg.

Indeed, I think the entire Planescape setting runs on this.

In most D&D campaigns, merely having some connection to a plane like the Abyss or the Nine Hells would be utterly catastrophic and terrifying. You could easily have a campaign villain's big bad working to unleash a horde of demons upon the world as the big plot that needs to be stopped.

But in a Planescape campaign, you could also easily start the whole thing off in a dive bar somewhere on the Plain of Infinite Portals (the first layer of the Abyss) and have the party trying to save up money to get themselves ported to Sigil, maybe with an allied demon bartender who is looking out for jobs they might do.

In a weird way, the lack of tonal consistency and even kind of lore consistency is an asset for D&D. The whole joy of this game is the way that DMs and players get to collaboratively come up with a story together.

Halloween was my favorite holiday as a kid, and so I could even imagine running relatively low-stakes adventures in a largely friendly (if a little dreary) town in the Shadowfell - if that was the campaign I wanted to run.

But I could also imagine using the Shadowfell as the scariest, worst place imaginable if that was the sort of campaign I wanted to run. Thinking both about Alan Wake II's Dark Place and even a barely-alluded-to but very much relevant realm in the book I'm writing, both could represent more or less what the Shadowfell is if they were placed in a D&D context.

The point of all of this is to say that the canonical D&D stuff is basically like a big buffet to pull from. And with the same ingredients available to you, you can make wildly different meals.