[RPG] Does Cloak of Displacement hide your character’s location or do others see two bodies

dnd-5emagic-items

Description for Cloak of Displacement (emphasis mine):

While you wear this cloak, it projects an Illusion that makes you appear to be standing in a place near your actual location, causing any creature to have disadvantage on Attack rolls against you. If you take damage, the property ceases to function until the start of your next turn. This property is suppressed while you are Incapacitated, Restrained, or otherwise unable to move.

Does that mean the cloak makes your actual body unable to be seen and projects an illusion of your body nearby, or are both bodies visible?

Best Answer

In the Realms, at least, your true location is not visible.

The cloak of displacement is at least patterned after, if not made from, the hide of a displacer beast. (See the illustration on DMG p.158.)

Displacer beasts made their first appearance in Realms-lore in the book Darkwell, by Douglas Niles (1989). Here we learn they're made by the god Bhaal, jealous of the Earthmother's champions (The Pack, The Leviathan, and Kamerynn the Unicorn). Bhaal snags deer, panther, bear, octopus, blink dog, owl, and eagle to use as base materials for his champions: Thorax the Owlbear, a flock of Perytons, and Shantu the Displacer Beast.

Later in the book we have it definitively, when a pack of blink dogs help fight Shantu:

The blink dogs, conversely, snapped at no apparent foe, their teeth closing on apparently empty space, but as they pulled back, the image of the displacer beast snarled. (Emphasis mine, commas all his.)

Or, later:

the great moorhound was confused by the monster's location, but when the blink dogs managed to hold the creature at bay, the hound made a shrewd guess and lunged in, clamping his jaws over a place that seemed to be in midair. Sharp fangs sank through skin. (Emphasis mine.)