DEGRADER

 

Forms a rough companion to this, obviously.

You are a DEGRADER - a sophisticated, tech-assisted, forward attack operative, trained and equipped to function with limited-to-none external support. It is zero hour: a new zone of interest has just been opened up to interested parties, and you and an unknown number of adversaries have been deployed with an indentical mission: lock it down using lethal force, and prepare the way for acquisition and exploitation.

DEGRADER is a turn-based pbp wargame focused on misdirection, optical play and counterplay, resource management, and prediction/compensation. All players begin the game invisible, and unaware of the position and number of their enemies. They also begin with a Superlative Rifle, which can be used to immediately kill anything at any point on the map, from any other point, through all intervening material. If your enemies can see you, they can kill you. Best then not to be seen. 

The zone of interest is a vast industrial interior. It is still in operation and mostly pitch black, although some sections (those which once would have been staffed by humans) are brightly lit. A Degrader can navigate just fine in the dark, but will need to supplement their killing potential with sensors of various kinds, which can be set up and complexly linked inside the space. Sensors return data, data can be used to track movement, heat, sound, and other identifying traces. If a position can be locked, the Superlative Rifle will unerringly find whatever hides there.

You begin play with your Degrader rig, a Superlative Rifle, a 9mm beretta with 15 rounds, a combat knife, and a scale map of the zone of interest. You have 10 inventory slots, which can be filled with whatever you like from the stores list. As a Degrader, you do not need to eat, drink, or sleep, at least not for another month or so. Once you are happy with your loadout, you should give your Degrader a callsign, and maybe imagine what they look like under the rig. 

You can then choose your drop position on your map, and will be immediately infiltrated to that point using specialised interdiction technology. All of your opponents do the same, and then you and every other player will get a series of extremely rough and approximate positions for all drops into the territory. Count them, and mark them. 

You are now in country, and play can begin. 

The golden rules of DEGRADER: 

• if you end your turn inside enemy sensor range, you can be killed that turn. 
• If you end your turn outside of them, you probably can't be.
• If you move through enemy sensor range, or return pings of any kind, you are feeding information to them about your movements, whether or not they end up with a lock on your location.
• You probably won't know when you are inside enemy sensors, unless you can see the sensor itself. 

Movement and Actions

Each turn consists of a move, and and action. All turns take place simultaneously, with the exception that a Superlative Rifle can be fired before any other turns are resolved. All Rifles resolve their effects simultaneously. 

Moves can be sneaking, normal, or sprinting, which are noiseless but slow, noisy but fast, and very noisy and very fast respectively. You choose a movement posture per turn, and are assumed to be in that posture the whole turn. 

Actions are usually things like setting at removing sensors, laying cable, plugging in equipment, etc. Some actions will be free (switching something on if it is already installed, plugging a cable into an instrument or power source), and some will not (installing things, changing the settings on an instrument, piloting things). 

Navigating the zone of interest is mostly fairly intuitive (you can climb ladders, you can drop down from gantries, etc.), but you may want to try things that are risky. This is not really a game about tactical infinity, but your Degrader can attempt trpg stuff if you wish it - if you take a risky action (moving through moving machinery) roll a d6: on a 1, you fail and suffer the consequences (you die). For very risky actions this is a 1-2 or a 1-3, as determined by the DM. They will always inform you of your odds and the consequences of failure before you roll. You can pack traversal gear of various kinds that eats up inventory, but which will make certain things less risky. 

Nearly all instruments take an action to set up (you can set their settings for free during this action). As described above, it also takes an action to fire your Superlative Rifle, and it is recommended that you move in the aftermath, because the firing the Rifle is both loud and extremely visible to other enemies. 

If you stumble onto an enemy in the dark, both players must choose simultaneously wether they are going for their pistol or their knife, then roll a d6. If only one person chose pistol, then that person rolls at +2. If at least one person chose pistol, the altercation is as loud as a gunshot and will ping for everyone. Whoever rolls highest kills their opponent, and on a tie both are killed. 

If you are aware that someone is coming and have specifically prepared an ambush at least one turn in advance you instead roll with a +4 (a +6 if you use a pistol and your opponent does not). 

Whenever anyone uses their pistol, it uses d6 rounds. If you need to use it and don't have enough rounds left to make up the result on the d6, you resolve the combat at -2. If you want to take extra magazines you may do so - each takes up 1/3 of an INV slot. 

Power

Everything that requires power to function needs to be wired into power sources in the zone of interest - these are at fixed locations, and marked on everyones maps - or supplied with batteries you can bring with you. Small batteries take 1/3 of a slot and last 10 turns, large batteries take 1 slot and last forever. Some instruments are marked as 'low power' - these will run forever even on small batteries. 

The Rig

Your rig has its own integrated power supply which lasts forever, and which runs at enough surplus to count as one large battery on your person at all times. This means that you can power something - probably a sensor, but maybe something else - in your inventory, and it will move as you do. 

Sensors

Sensors are instruments that track a given stimulus, and then record and transmit that they have done so. The types of sensors are noise, movement, heartbeat, heat, electrical, with the special category of visual (really a live feed camera). Most sensors come in two models: short range, which take up 1/3 of a slot in your INV, and long range, which take up 1 slot. 

Note that ranges are not equivalent. A noise or heat sensor will by default have a much larger range than a heartbeat or electrical sensor, for example. 

Sensors can additionally be set to radial, with a short range, or directed, with a longer range. Directed usually mean a 90 degree cone, and about double the range (which would give you about 2/3rds coverage relative to a short ranged radial sensor). This is true of all sensor types.

Some sensors might expand their effective range 'bubble' over time, as they better attenuate to their surroundings and start to filter out noise signals. 

All events can be tracked by sensors, but there is no sensor that can track everything. A noise sensor will record something moving, but a heartbeat sensor will return nothing unless that thing has a heartbeat. It is your job to set up a network of sensors that will return enough data that you have useable target locks for your Superlative Rifle, and to avoid being detected and targeted in return. 

All sensors are equipped with a radio link to your Degrader rig. This signal means that you will get its pings from anywhere, but it also means that someone discovering a sensor will discover the frequency of your rig, and use it to track you. If you wish to avoid this, you can have your sensors transmit on other frequencies, and be picked up by consoles (which might be in safer locations, and relay from there back to your rig on your main frequency), or by wire that you can lay down, which cannot be detected except visually, or jammed without literally cutting the wire. All sensor radio output frequency, as well as your rig's receiving frequency, can be changed by you at any time, including remotely using a console.

Lights

Need power, and come in different sizes and intensities. In darkness, a visual sensor will need light to function. You also cannot see very well without light - your rig includes lenses that let you safely navigate your surroundings out to about 10ft, but you can't pick out figures or details in the distance. Light is binary, it's there or it isn't. If it's there everyone can make use of it. If you can see someone in LOS you can fire on them. 

Consoles

Catch all term for an instrument that can receive and display pings if set up do do so. They can relay pings via radio or wire (including to your rig, if you like), or simply display on a screen. They can also remotely control the setting on other devices they are connected to. They require power to function, and can be used to spoof radio jamming or tracking if you are worried about this.

Dummies, Drones

Dummies are devices that emit light, heat, noise, radio frequencies, spoof heartbeats, etc. They can be mobile or stationary, with stationary models typically taking 1/3 of an INV slot, and mobile models taking 1 INV. A mobile dummy can be remote controlled by radio (which will mean anyone with the frequency can give it orders), or by wire (range limited by length of wire). 

A drone is a mobile dummy that can attach a sensor or other kit. They are 2 INV slots (one of which is the drone's INV for carrying other gear). Attached sensors offboard data by wire or radio as normal, and if the drone is piloted by wire both these signals can travel along one wire. Drones can also mount lights and explosives, flares, smoke grenades, anything you can think of. 

Typically require power to function (some crude dummies may not). 

Trip Wires, Lasers

Crude 'sensors' that record a simple ping when crossed. Trip wires are triggered by anything physically dragging across them and do not require power, lasers are powered, and are triggered by anything that breaks the beam. 

Explosives

Detonator can be set to trip when taking input from sensors, or manually by wire or by radio. Can be attached to drones or dummies, or simply to walls or ceilings. Effective kill range depends on how much explosive material is in the package (generally either 1/3 or 1 INV worth). Can also be thrown. 

Jammers

Can be set to jam everything (no signal will be able to pass through the jamming zone) or just specific frequencies. Can also be set to ping the sending location of whatever is trying to send through the jammed zone. 

Boosters

Can be set to 'throw' a linked sensor's point of output to another point within its (the booster's) range.

Smoke

Throwable. 1/3 of a slot. Will obscure line of sight in a very large radius for 3 - 5 turns. 

Flares

Throwable. 1/3 to a slot. Will put out large amounts of light + heat for 3 - 5 turns. Also come in glowstick varieties: way less light and no heat, but 10 to a slot. 

Next post: a complete stores list, with all the different models and kit. Maybe a big zone map?!

Bonus alternate DEGRADER models:

• Has no Superlative Rifle, instead carries a Superlative Knife (it looks a bit like a box cutter), which instagibs anyone in a close contact altercation. Can sprint silently. 
• Has no Superlative Rifle but carries 30 INV of equipment - drones and bombs and smoke oh my! Cannot move at a sprint. 
• Isn't a Degrader at all: 10 human cops with ARs and flashlights, and no additional INV. You move all of them every turn. An AR can fire on anything you can see and kills on a 4+ on a d6. ARs have 30 rounds in the magazine, and fire d6 rounds per shot.

Like this. 

Optical Wargames

 

It's been a while since I did any non Barony non short fiction posting, and this is another one of those ideas that's been swirling around in my head forever and ever. 

Some short history: I used to play the very very great classic Unreal Tournament 99 a lot when I was a kid. I played its equally great, but quite different sequel UT2004 as well, quite possibly more than any other single game in my life (I never got on with UT3). 

In Unreal Tournament, there is a gun called the Shock Rifle - for my money one of the best deathmatch weapons ever designed. It's primary fire is a quick-firing hitscan beam that kills in three hits, and it has secondaries you can play with at closer range for higher lethality - it's a high skill/hire reward kind of weapon. There is also a mutator (game mode, for those unlettered in XTREME nineties naming cultures) in those games called Instagib, which gives everyone a shock rifle that always kills in one hit. What this does, obviously, is turn a deathmatch game into the most extreme form of rocket tag, where movement, aim, and reflexes need to be microseconds better than your opponents' at all times for you to have any chance of surviving at all. 

Now, I am not a good deathmath player really. I love deathmatch games to pieces, but I don't have the hand-eye coordination and twitch reflexes necessary for high level play - even more so now that I'm no longer 16. Even so, I was always absolutely fascinated by Instagib as a concept. What does it mean for the design space when every single person gets handed a sort of 'absolute' lethality from the jump?

One of the greatest ever. Oddly no Instagib gifs out there!

In modern warfare (I am an enthusiastic amateur reader of war theory but I am not a specialist, and I may well be wrong about specific points) there is a diagram called The Survivability Onion. It is pictured above, and what it aims to describe are the threshold at which one can be considered safe in a warfighting environment. The best thing to be is not there at all. The second best thing to be is not identified (seen), the third best is not acquired, etc. etc., all the way down to penetration and death. It is better not to be killed, and by extension, it is better not to be seen. If you are up against a sophisticated military threat, to be seen is breathtakingly close to being killed.

I am interested in this as a design space. When I was younger I used to fantasise about a specific type of first person shooter game - one in which everyone had some expy of the Instagib shock rifle, but which was played in nearly total darkness, inside a complicated and vertically arranged 3d environment. So you also have flares, NVGs, spotlights, triplines, sensors, alarms, traversal gear etc. - you have a bunch of tools that you have to make use of to facilitate target acquisition, and to make sure that you yourself are never acquired. Once acquisition has taken place, the actual firing of the weapon, the kill manoeuvre, is trivial - you could even abstract it out entirely and have the player press a button to kill the enemy once acquired, although I like the (now very old fashioned) insistence of having a trigger to pull on the supergun. 

This type of contest - effectively invisible (or at least very low visibility) antagonists with ultra-lethal capacities, trying to control a space using optical machinery (and spoofing tech) to acquire their enemies before the same is done to them - can be extrapolated into other designs as a formal model; it doesn't have to be a shooter. I had some wild ideas for an entirely optical RTS/adversarial citybuilder game at one point, which saw players (again, in pitch blackness) building logistical machines and assemblages to power and deploy their sensor apparatuses more quickly and efficiently than their opponents.

Is there a way to make this kind of combat interesting (to anyone other than Louis)? I suspect that many players would find the absolutely all or nothing approach a turn off - you are effectively playing the game until you are arbitrarily deleted, without knowing how or why it happened. Possibly the joy of arbitrarily deleting your opponent some of the time would make up for this, but I think it would be crucial for blind luck to play a minimal role in target acquisition. 

Another option: group PVE play, under strict time pressure - although what is it you're acquiring here? NPC bad guys? Part of the joy of this sort of play is knowing that a human is trying their best NOT to be seen. 

A rambling little post to say that this has recently been rekindled in my brain, and that I would like to try my hand at designing a little rpg/wargame system that tackles some of this. That system experiment is NOT in this post. Sorry :) But hopefully coming soon :)

 

The Maenads of the Third City

They can be seen during Rantine's highest summer, when the crimson sea smokes and boils, and when most of the population retreat to the shaded interiors of their homes and apartments, to share blood, or simply to wile away the days and escape the unbearable heat.

The Imperial garrison also stay off the streets on the worst days - it is true that the sun (low in the sky, radiant heat from surfaces, the solar disk itself almost black) can kill you, or drive you mad, cook you in your armour, blind you; but it is also true that people go missing on days like this, and Imperial soldiers are no exception. 

Maenads are often young, but not exclusively, and often poor, but not exclusively. Their skin is stained red by the smoke that boils off the chemical sea, which they bathe in to commence the transformation after swallowing potent and poisonous psychoactive chemicals. Most of them wear masks (and sometimes people will throw masks out into the street for them) to make themselves anonymous to friends, neighbours, lovers, and family while in under the influence of the summer madness - these are traditionally carved and painted in the likeness of the queen. They sing and dance in the streets, all of the ancient spiral dances, and they set upon whoever they come across and beat them to death with their red hands and red feet. They eat the viscera and tie the heads to their long staffs go parade at the front of the dance. You will hear them before you see them. The tradition is a very old one.

Maenads are technically criminals and murderers, and there have been many programmes over the decades to try to root out the tradition. In the early days the Imperial troops simply massacred them in the streets, but each year they would take higher-than-acceptable casualties doing so. They would also report strange things - naked commoners punching through breastplates, tearing off limbs, hysterical dancers shrugging off musket fire. Eventually it was decided that, since the phenomenon was contained to a few specific weeks of the year, and since the slaughter had no observable effect on the numbers the year following, further campaigns of this type would be wasteful. 

There are all sorts of reasons why a Rantine might decide to participate in the yearly dances. Sometimes they are battling black depressions, sometimes they are in mourning, sometimes they are lonely, especially the older participants, sometimes they are just very angry. Sometimes they simply want to kill someone anonymously. Some of them cannot explain themselves at all - there are years when the urge is known to spread through the population like a sickness. Most Rantines have taken part once or twice in their lives, and know the deep, bright, painful joy that the ceremony brings. 

Maenads who cannot find people in the streets will sometimes break into houses to get them there. Sometimes they break into garrisons. They game goes like this - they will knock on the door, and you must remain absolutely silent. If they hear you moving, or if you say something, they will beat their way through the doors and windows to get at you. If they knock three or four times and hear nothing from inside, they will move on to the next door. Rantine children and babies are typically drugged unconscious for the duration. 

Rantine Maenad

HD1, senseless battering limbs (as light weapon), unarmoured, movement: dancing, then sprinting, demeanour: laughing, singing, weeping, hysterical, unreasoning.

A Maenad's damage dice explode. They never test morale. When they are killed, flip a coin. On a heads, they stand back up and keep coming. This only works once. 

The Beast of Rantine will never attack Maenads, and has in fact been observed to join in their frenzied dancing. 

BAMBI WAS A BOY

Why speak of traps? There are none of them here; no snares, no false appearances, no formal betrayals, and no hunter tracing the vector from the long barrel of the rifle that he carries outwards to the body and the heart of his most gentle prey. 

-

The first thing to know about me is that you cannot put your hands on me, cannot catch or hold me, or stop me in any way. You might say my body is like smoke, or like a dream or a hologram — you can see me perfectly clearly, but if you reach out to touch you will find nothing but air.

Of course this or that rough or uncouth hand might get lucky now and then. It is impossible I think to be absolutely discreet in these things. But even if I am occasionally delayed this way it will only be for a few minutes — perhaps an hour at most — and then you will lose me again. And this is not so bad. There is no cruelty or cleverness in this dispersal; there are no exceptions, and no reason why anyone in particular ought to feel singled out. 

I say it again: there is no cruelty here. 

-

There is the body, which is illuminated in harsh spot lighting, and there is the space around it, which is lost in shadows. A brutal chiaroscuro, employed here like a scalpel to cut the subject from its ground. 

You take such joy in the complicated arrangements of the frame, your eye, the dark ground and the subtlety of the body before it. Normally you would say that the oversaturated subject was the more real and vivid, and that the opaque darkness behind was merely its substrate, the dream or the chaos or the negation, that forms its vital grounding.

But here I think that the postures are reversed. It is exactly by its vivid brilliance that the body slips away; it doesn’t quite vanish, but in any case it is no longer accessible, maybe no longer even present. 

And this means that even though the body is clearly visible it is also absent, and it means that what is still present, and was always present, in the wake of this complicated game of transparencies is the black obscurity of the ground, which is formless, disgorging monsters. 

Commissioned to accompany the painting show Mourning Never Comes, for Gallery Bargum, Berlin, May 2026.  

Class: Psychic

Two Stories About Giants

The White City, that famed metropolis, has for its creation myth a story of ten giants and a human child, who built and administered the polis in its first days. In this story the invincible giants made a choice amongst themselves: to be subservient to the will of the child who would become Emperor. The intended moral instruction of this decision is debated. Their monstrous remains are said to be built into the curtain wall of the palace, that they might defend the empire even after their deaths. 

The Rantines of the north tell a different story. They speak of the Ten Heroes, the bloody-handed ones, the original sires of their race, who taught them blood-drinking, chemistry, dancing, and future sight. The Ten Heroes came down from the boiling jungles and found the Rantines living like mud eels in the flooded meadows and swamps that form its border. The Heroes showed them how to build fortifications, how to drain land and sink foundations, and instructed them to build a city that would never be vanquished from the earth. 

Then the Ten Heroes ventured south, each searching for their individual doom, and disappeared from the histories. 

Psychics

The giants of the northern jungles are know to possess precognitive and oracular powers. Their abilities originate in the third eye that sits in the centre of their foreheads, the place that the Rantines call the Crown. 

Very rarely, a Rantine will manifest something of this terrible power (and even more rarely, humans of the other races of the world - there are even some Baronials who have been observed to manifest 'the knack', presumably via intermarriage with the people of the Old Capital). In the old days it was a sign of great favour and fortune, and commoners who showed promise with the gift could be raised into the nobility. The military of the Old Capital made extensive study of the giants and of human psychics, and that research powered much of their terrible arsenal of war. In the current day, the White City requires that all psychic phenomena be reported and psychics registered, and takes pains to extradite them to the capital, and recruit them into its military.

Unlike the giants, whose gift is wholly concentrated in the Crown, human psychics rely on a distribution of energy through their bodies. They 'shape' or 'project' or 'read' energies and auras, and they shift these through nodes and channels in their respiratory, vascular, and neurological systems. This process is known to degrade the human body over time, but has many miraculous effects. It is not magic as it is understood in the Barony, and does not appear to have anything to do with entities. Many academics in the present day prefer to treat psychics as a myth, or an exotic traveller's tall-tale. 

Further north, their modern day reputation is something like a secret or military police corps: rare and dangerous White City spooks, whose presence betrays the active interest of the pragmatists. 

Psychic

When you create a psychic, you must choose whether you wish to play a White City Operative or a Rantine Supremacist. This will change your starting gear and skills, but has no bearing on your templates. Rantine Supremacy is extremely illegal, and if you are discovered to be one you will be hunted and probably sentenced to death.  

You might want to play a psychic of some other provenance - you are encouraged to come up with a different set of gear and skills with your DM, as appropriate. 

 

Skills: if you are a White City Operative, choose two from: moving silently, climbing, breaking and entering, silent takedowns, and playing the Image Game. You also have a handler in the White City military. If you are a Rantine Supremacist, choose two from: formal etiquette, history, forgery, avoiding notice in a crowd, poisons, or bloodlust (-1 to weapons damage for the duration of a combat if you have recently tasted blood from one of the enemies in that combat). You also have connections in the revolutionary underground. 

Gear: if you are a White City Operative, you have form-fitting light armour, a light combat knife, a White City Blaster, mirrored goggles, and d3 Intelligence Reports. If you are a Rantine Supremacist, you have a full set of Rantine Finery in addition to your usual clothing, a medium spiral sword or heavy spiral spear that you are proficient with, a steel tooth prosthesis, and a pistol with powder and ammunition for 20 shots. 

A White City Blaster is a sealed, single-shot steel pistol that fires as a blunderbuss. It is waterproof, smokeless, and fires with a quiet thwwpppp. Once used it is useless and can be discarded. The internal firing mechanisms are self-sabotaging, to forestall reverse-engineering. 

Intelligence Reports allow you to ask for a briefing on a specific character or region. The DM will provide you with an accurate, up-to-date sketch of the person or place, with any pertinent information included. You must declare what your reports are focused on at character creation. 

Rantine Finery will let you attend formal events in that city, and be taken seriously by its noble class. It can also be sold as a set for 300s in the White City, and 500s further south. If you take the time to carefully sell each piece individually, these are 400s and 650s respectively. 

You add Psychic templates/2 (rounding up) to your hit rolls. 

A: -1 hp, The Knack, Energy Sculpting, choose one technique, roll one technique, roll one doom.
B: -1 hp, Stillness, roll one technique.
C: -1 hp, Illusion Techniques, Breathing Techniques, roll one technique.
D: -1 hp, To Draw Wire from the Soul, choose one technique. 

The Knack: You have a single Psi Dice, which starts as a d4. Choose one technique from the following list, then roll an additional one - you gain additional techniques as indicated above. If you roll a technique you already possess, you may choose to step up or down one space until you get to one you do not possess. You must always roll your Psi Dice when using a technique, and you may always choose to make a maximum roll (which will deplete, as explained below in Energy Sculpting); if you do so, you immediately take d6 burnout damage. 

Techniques

1. To the Limbs. You focus on your extremities, their hardness and swiftness. Your fists and feet count as heavy weapons for a round, with an expanded crit range equal to [sum]. They can also be used as crowbars, hammers, vice grips, etc. for the duration. 
2. To the Belly. You breath deep down into your stomach, and gain [sum] temporary hp, which disappears at the start of your next round. 
3. To the Heart. The beauty of your soul manifests at your shoulder. [Sum] enemies in combat must save CHAR to attack you this round, and you give off golden light as a torch for the duration. 
4. To the Palm. If you can place your open palm on someone, you can accurately identify illness and curses, blind or deafen them for [sum] rounds, or transfer 1 point of hp between the two of you (in either direction) to a maximum of [sum/2] rounds. This cannot raise either person above their max hp, and contact must be unbroken for the duration. In combat, placing your palm on someone to facilitate this is an attack that deals no damage. 
5. To the Eye. The vision is like a scalpel, infinitely subtle. For a round, you can move anything that you can see via telekinesis. Your extensive self has a STR equal to [templates] x [sum]. Doing this in combat requires focus that precludes other action. You can also speak telepathically to anyone you can make eye contact with, up to [sum] words. They can't speak back. 
6. To the Lungs. Breath is the foundation of everything. You breath, and the universe breathes with you. For the duration of the round, you cannot be moved against your will, you are immune to fear damage and other mental effects, and you have damage resistance equal to [sum/2]. 
7. To the Loins. Let the seed of life fill you and drive you, like a white fire that heals where it should burn. You gain +1 attack in melee for the round, as well as +[sum] to hit. If you spend this round doing nothing but drinking human blood, you heal [sum/4] hp. You can't regain hp this way more than 2 + [CON mod] times per day - more than this you simply throw back up.
8. To the Mind. Like the tip of an arrow, like the sea, like glass, like flowing water. Your AC increases by [sum] for the round as you step between blows with inhuman grace and celerity. You shout with joy each time you do so. 
9. To the Extensive Body. The border of the self is not the skin. This round, ignore [sum] weapon attacks that originate outside of the extensive body (ie, not melee attacks). Where they strike this invisible barrier, it flares up with fire the colour of your soul. You can use this to shield others standing next to you. 
10. To the Expanded Self. Spend a turn stilling the mind, turning inward, and then allow yourself to expand. For about a minute, you can detect the presence of souls within [sum x 10] ft, and can hone in on any [sum] of them to read their surface thoughts. You can distinguish between sentient and non sentient souls.

Energy Sculpting: The maximum size of your Psi Dice grows once per template you gain in Psychic, from d4, to d6, to d8, to d10. You roll your Psi Dice every time you use one of your techniques - on a 1-3 it does not deplete, but on anything greater than a 3, it downgrades one 'size'. If your d4 downgrades, you lose your Psi Dice, and access to your techniques, until you can regain it. Meditating in the lotus position (for a spook) or with one hand raised in prayer (for a Supremacist) for on hour upgrades your Psi Dice one 'size', up to its maximum allowed by your templates, or gives you back your Psi Dice at d4 if you have lost it. 

Stillness: You are never surprised in combat. All attempts to read your mind or coerce you using magic fail. You cannot be scried on, and can choose to make your soul invisible.

Illusion Techniques: At the beginning of your turn, you may spend hp to create that many illusionary duplicates. All of you take a turn simultaneously, and then at the end of the turn you can declare which was really you. The actions of the duplicates are then undone. 

Breathing Techniques: You can hold your breath for up to a month without ill effect. 

To Draw Wire from the Soul: At any time, you can choose to take as many d6s in damage as you wish, and deal equivalent damage to all creatures within 50ft. You may choose instead to deal the damage only to a creature that you have eye contact with. You may also choose to lose 1 point of max hp to add an additional d6 to this damage, as many times as you wish. This template can only be used while your Psi Dice is a d10, and when you use it, you also lose your Psi Dice as though it was depleted at d4. 

The Ten Dooms of the Bloody-Handed Heroes

1. The Doom of Fate. Gydorah cheated death, and then death, ever jealous, ever invincible, cheated her. You roll thrice on the death and dismemberment table and take the worst result. 
2. The Doom of the Solar Disk. Astopal built great, black wings that he might discover Heaven behind the sun. You take maximum damage from fire. 
3. The Doom of Ill-Made Stars. Belagrad discovered and made war on the dragons in the freezing void. He was bested. You cannot sleep on moonless nights, and take maximum damage under starlight. The Star People, should you ever be unfortunate enough to meet them, despise you above all others.
4. The Doom of Blood. Gorphrax drank from some tainted well, and cursed his line forever after to live as beasts. You cannot stomach rations that are not human blood or uncooked human meat. If you are ever deprived you have [templates] + [WIS mod] (min 1) days before you become an uncontrollable monster until sated. 
5. The Doom of Madness. Ashan Xiloc saw her lover torn to pieces, and never recovered. You invert your mental boni, and are illiterate and innumerate. You are also immune to gaze attacks. 
6. The Doom of Melancholy. Palan sailed out into the ocean in a small boat with no sail, and was never seen again. You cannot swim, and all healing is 1 point less effective for you. 
7. The Doom of the Dreamer. Cypromanter's body survived nearly two centuries without his mind. When it finally died, it is said that the flesh had turned to diamond. You can never travel to the Dreamlands, and if somehow you are forced to you will never leave under any circumstances. Roll a new character. You intuitively know the route west from the Lantern Berth, to the Islands Where the Sun Goes to Die. 
8. The Doom of Solipsism. Kryptos turned away from her companions, disgusted by their weakness, until finally she stood alone. You cannot accept helpful actions from others. You (you personally, not your party, as long as you are not doing the talking) have -2 to all reaction rolls with humans. 
9. The Doom of Weakness. Ensee could not protect the ones he loved, nor, ultimately, himself. Your panic threshold is halved. 
10. The Doom of the Seeming of Strength. Pelmander destroyed every foe that raised a hand to her and nonetheless died alone, in the most abject pain. Should you ever contract a disease, it is incurable. This includes magical cures. 

Rantine Nobles

Rantine Gear

 

A quick followup to this post, with some gear specific to the Third City. 

• Glass Knives. Frightening weapons that leave really nasty internal injuries, mostly used by hoodlums and street toughs to intimidate people. The hardwood club and glass knife are associated with the Rantine Mob, and with the bad ends of those they choose to move against. A glass knife is a light weapon that damage you as well as your target if you critically miss with it, regardless of proficiencies. If you crit with it, you instead break the blade off in the wound - thereafter the target will take d6 damage per turn that they move or take an action, until they spend a whole turn fishing the shard out of themselves, which also deals d6 damage. If you are a Rantine native, or have Fighter or Bravo templates, you can attempt to break the blade without a crit, which is a normal attack at -4. 
• Fang Prosthesis. A steel (or, if you are poor, a ceramic or even wooden) denture that replaces the teeth completely. They are fastened to the bone of the jaw, and hollowed and shaped to facilitate the draining of blood from a bite, down into the throat. If you have someone helpless, or if they are a willing participant, you can drink their blood like a vampire. If you were desperate, you could use them as extremely awkward weapons of last resort (as improvised piercing). There are some models that incorporate ingenious little injectors, and which can be loaded with poisons and other surprises. By far the item on this list most strongly associated with Rantine, and especially with its hereditary nobility. 
• Rocket Weaponry. It is the military artillery of the White City that forms the cutting edge of rocketry in the currently age, but the Rantines invented the art, and their weaponsmiths and artificers are still among the best in the world. Rantine rockets burn red, and fly in straight arcs, as opposed to the Imperial models (burn white, corkscrew). A rocket weapon is a pistol or musket which rolls to hit with disadvantage (and is slow moving enough to facilitate active interdiction or evasion by something with sufficiently quick reflexes), but which damages everything within 15 feet of the target if it hits. Even on a miss, half of those in the AOE will take half damage. On a critical miss for those without proficiency (Rantine natives, White Citizens, and Fighters have this by default), you centre the shot on yourself. Each individual shot costs about as much as a whole pistol or musket. 
• Rantine Spice. A thick, acrid, bright red spice mix that comes pre-mixed in pungent oil. Rantines put it on everything, and complain loudly about the flavourlessness of foreign food. Southerners joke that it is made from the poisons that accrete in the boiling sea. A very strong and difficult-to-acquire taste, but beloved by those who grok it. A small pot of Spice (1/3 INV) can be used to extend up to 20 rations, such that they count double, and last twice as long before spoiling, if spoilage is an issue. It will also sell for good money in the White City, and very good money in the Barony or the steppe. Rantine street toughs are known to snort back pellets of this stuff such that it coats the back of their throats - a practice largely intolerable to even the most die-hard southern aficionados. If you can pick up this trick, and do it without gagging or coughing (CON save at minimum), you have an easy in with Rantine hoodlums and Juggers. 
• Rantine Lace. This is what any Rantine of means will be dressed in day-to-day, and is the chief export of the Third City in the current day. Worn properly, a garment of Rantine Lace covers the whole of the body save the face. It features elaborate ruffs, sleeves, and corsetry, and is often subtly tailored to accentuate the classical Rantine height, slimness, and elongation. A bonnet or head-piece will cover the hair and build out the head, such that the tooth prosthetics and enormous eyes are most of what you see. In peacetime the ancient Rantine wore white lace, and in wartime they wore red - the wearing of red lace is currently illegal. Wearing the whole ensemble might get you some funny looks in the south by those who know what it is, but the individual pieces are highly fashionable and sought after. The Old Capital in particular was known to have an insatiable appetite for Rantine lace. 
• Treated Timber Proofing. They use various chemical treatments to build boats and barges capable of traversing their sea without damage. Essentially this treatment makes a piece of wood, paper, leather, etc, acid proof, at enormous expense. Proofing must be refreshed every five years or so. 

Vampire Hunter D. Yes, Rantines look like vampire-classic.

Bloodborne

A palazzo of some fantastic proportion...

I have written now and then about the Dreamlands - a sort of second campaign space in the Barony, where things are looser and more associative and susceptible to fairytale logic. The Dreamlands are where orcs and goblins dwell, where the Prince holds court, and where the (many) minds that have been broken by the world might rediscover a measure of peace and beauty.

The trouble with this sort of thing in play is that you often don't control when your players will want to jaunt over into the second space, and this means you need two campaign spaces going at the same time, only one of which will be seeing use at any given moment.

This writeup aims to address this structural problem. It lays out a dreaming procedure, some pretty dangerous encounters, and a couple of tables of rooms and moods, for when you need to generate an adventure space for your intrepid oneironauts to navigate on the fly. Note that this should not stop a determined DM from writing up bespoke dungeons and other locations in the Dreamlands!

It is assumed that your players will have a good reason for wanting to enter the Dreamlands at all - usually this would be a certain person or piece of information that they know the location of. Entering without a specific reason is taking on risk for no reward, and all adventurers understand this. 


Dreaming and Dreaming

Everyone dreams, and not all dreams take you to the Dreamlands. There are people who are naturally good at this, and they tend to be imaginative types and children. The Chemists of the Barony have developed safe and reliable drugs that allow anyone to make the trip. Cats, past a certain age, are natives of the Dreamlands, and travel between the two worlds at will.

When you sleep, by default you do so without any interaction with the Dreamlands. You can attempt to travel there, and must declare that you are doing so when you go to sleep for the night. Everyone who intends to travel must declare this ahead of time, and then everyone tests WIS. The ones who succeed arrive, the ones that don't are frustrated in the attempt.

If you fail your WIS check, you may force entry by testing CHAR. This means that you arrive, but on a failure, you turn the collective dream into a nightmare, with repercussions for everyone in the group, as laid out below.

Once the group is determined, you all arrive in the House of the person with the highest WIS, and may adventure forth from there. 

In Dreams...

Your:

• STR = your CHAR
• CON = your WIS
• DEX = your INT

At any time, you can wake up by testing INT. If you fail, whatever scene is playing out concludes before you can test again.

You are wearing the clothes and gear you are familiar with. You can will into being a number of objects equal to your CHAR modifier - these can be whatever you want. If your CHAR modifier is negative, you lose the use of that many limbs, at random. 

During the dream, you can declare that you ignore a number of hits equal to your WIS modifier. If your WIS modifier is negative, you take a proportional + to all damage inside the dream.

You can vanish out of existence a number of things equal to your INT modifier. If your INT modifier is negative, you must roll that many dice and choose the lowest when you test INT to wake up from this dream.

If you would die in a dream, you wake up with your heart racing and horrible images in your mind - you get no bonuses or healing from resting for the night. If you are actively tortured to death you get no bonuses or healing, and additionally permanently lose 1 from each of your mental statistics. 

You never get rested bonuses when waking from a nightmare. 

The Dreamlands

The following locations are encountered one after the other, using dream logic, such that a house might open onto a castle might open onto a garden might open onto the surface of the moon - everything follows everything else, and the threshold is the point at which the 'scene' or 'room' changes. Some scenes will last hours or days, but you should narrate through the days as quickly as the minutes. Time is strange here. Nothing you find will travel with you outside the Dreamlands. 

People usually enter the Dreamlands with a specific goal. If you keep this thing firmly in mind you will get there eventually, but you must first adventure through d10 - [highest WIS modifier in the group] (min 1, make sure this number is hidden from your players!) of the following rooms before you do so. 

Some rooms reference 'moving into a nightmare'. Rules for nightmares are found on the encounter table below. Once you are in a nightmare, you cannot usually move back into a dream (there are rare exceptions). If you find the thing you are searching for and you are in a nightmare, you must save WIS with disadvantage - on a failure, you haven't actually found it, just some weird fucked-up mirror version of it. Perhaps in the next room? Roll another room, which will contain the thing you are searching for, which will be susceptible to corruption via the same roll. This can continue forever if you roll poorly. Nightmares are horrible things. 

Each time you enter a room, roll an encounter die on the table below. Encounters have a normal version, and a nightmare version. 

Most rooms are similarly navigable by everyone in a group, but some reference a specific thing happening to an individual. These things only happens to the person with highest WIS, the Dreamer, whose House you all arrived in - everyone else are background figures to the drama. 

Beyond the safety of the House, you find:

1. A broad arcade of stone, covered by vaulted arches. Trailing plants of some foreign species hang along its length in terracotta pots, suspended on thin chains. 
2. A courtyard with a sunken, tiled pool at its centre. The floor of the pool is worked with elaborate mosaics whose designs fail to cohere under your eye. The tiles surrounding it are very white, and very hard.
3. A two-storied house of white stone, with black, empty spaces where the doors and windows should be. The house inside is bare stone and wooden boards, and the whole place smells strongly of lye soap. If you leave the Dreamlands from inside the house, it counts as having been tortured, per the rules above, even if nothing happens.
4. A well-tended garden between low stone walls. There are ripe tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, and various herbs, all growing vigorously. 
5. A wide gallery with a high ceiling and enormous windows along either side that let light flood in. Between the windows are hung paintings of various kinds on canvas, tile, and board. The pictures are beautiful, and very peaceful, but the actual details and subjects are impossible to see clearly. 
6. A tall, narrow stone tower, with each floor comprising a single room. Each room is furnished to live in, with a cot and dresser, and a water trough and rough wooden table. At the very top is a spyglass, which you can take with you, and which that lets you roll locations on this table with advantage if you have a high vantage point from which to spy. 
7. A banquet hall laid out with a sumptuous feast, piping hot, delicious-smelling. If you eat the food, you go to sleep, which of course means that you wake up in the real world having had a sound and restful sleep.
8. A broad meadow of long, lush green grass, which smells like crushed grass in summer. Off in the distance a low fence and sty. A long line of beings of unclear form (animals? Large humans?) moves slowly along the horizon behind you. If you walk towards the beings, you feel yourself moving into a nightmare. If you instead walk towards the sty and fence, you approach a new threshold. 
9. A small dark room, wood panelled, with an iron claw-footed bathtub at its centre. If you look inside, it contains a thick, dark liquid, which smells foul. You can shift into a nightmare by getting any of it on you - save WIS to avoid this and clean it off. 
10. A circular pit into the earth, with a stone stairwell around its edge, spiralling down and down. Descending is oddly peaceful. If you fall instead of using the stairs, you float, Alice in Wonderland style - just as peaceful, and quite a bit more fun.
11. A broad street with stone paving, and iron lamp posts. The street is on top of a tall hill, and look down over a shining city of identical streets. It doesn't matter how long you spend walking along this street, you will never get any closer to the city. You find the threshold by turning around and walking back the way you have come. 
12. A charming cottage built on a cliff overlooking a sparkling ocean. The water is very different from the usual Baronial colouring, dark blue water, almost black, and oddly iridescent. The cottage is built from timber, and has four rooms. There is a bed in every room. A cramped basement has 2d6 beds in it, stacked and crammed in around one another. 
13. A long corridor in some gorgeous stately home. French windows along one wall open onto a balcony with wrought-iron railings, and large gilt-framed mirrors are hung on the opposite wall. The corridor extends for about a mile. The exterior balcony looks out over a dark and dreary garden, well kept, wreathed in fog. 
14. A strange corridor made from iron bars, like prison cell bars, composing the entire structure. The corridor branches and twists around - you can see through it to other corridors like it, all of them are hanging in blackness. Test CHAR in this space or fall into a nightmare as you search for the exit and try not to slip through the bars of the floor. 
15. A white stone plinth at the centre of a city square, bordered by high apartment buildings. The plinth is empty. Anything you place on it disappears. If you sit on the plinth you wake up immediately.
16. A music hall, with an entire chamber orchestra's worth of instruments left in situ, beside chairs and music stands. Currently empty. Soft music hangs in the air; it seems to come from the next room? No obvious way out, but searching will eventually reveal a large hole in the floor (how could you have missed this?), which you can exit through. 
17. Don't roll an encounter for this location. A maze, which begins as a hedge maze open to the sky. As you explore, it becomes a sealed stone labyrinth, and then a series of boxy iron corridors. After a few hours (the layout is nonsense, not traversable using logical deduction), you come to the centre. A large man with horns greets you. He reeks of blood and offal. He is very polite. He advises you to wake up, and gives you pills for the purpose. His face is like a shadow. If you take the pills, you wake up refreshed. If you refuse, you slip into a nightmare. His is very angry and will try to kill you for refusing his simple, polite request. He has stats as a Bugbear, but with HD4, and will scream the most horrible vulgarities at you as he tries to pull your head off. 
18. A glass vitrine, like a shop front. Pleasant and inviting, tastefully furnished. You are selling some sort of product? But you can go now, if you wish. If you look down at the counter you can find d6 items, whatever you want, 'for sale'. You can buy them with your hp, 1 hp per item. If you steal them you slip into a nightmare. 
19. The insides of a great steel engine. If you came from our world you would recognise some elements of a combustion engine, but to a Baronial it all looks like sci-fi greebling. If you are very careful you will be able to navigate it without taking damage - test DEX and INT, and take d6 damage for each failure.
20. A pit dug in sodden earth, full of corpses. You are not yet in a nightmare, the corpses are only people, only things, nothing more. You can climb your way our with difficulty. You will get wet and filthy. Or you can choose to stay, perhaps dig downwards? If you stay, you will slip into a nightmare. 
21. The shore of a calm lake, planted with neat rows of cypress trees and olives. A house in the distance, and boats on the lake. You should be getting home. It's late in the day. The house on the lake is not your home. 
22. A grand old theatre, all plush red carpets, dark wood, and gold detailing around doors and seats. You can explore the theatre entire, the bars, the store rooms, the back of house spaces. There is no one here, no one will stop you. You can take the alcohol from behind the bars, you can steal money from the registers, you can trash the rooms. Eventually, no matter where you go, you will find yourself standing at the edge of the stage. The lights switch on, they nearly blind you. The stage is the threshold. 
23. Two large white stone houses facing one another. Both are identical. If you enter one, you will find it handsomely furnished. You will see, in glimpses, a figure much like yourself moving through the second house. If you are with companions, and they try to enter the second house while you are still in the first, one 'group' ie everyone in one or the other of the two houses, chosen at random, will wake up. 
24. Endless stone tunnels beneath the earth, a warren, a tomb, guttering torchlight, the ragged breathing of the others like you, smells of blood, petroleum, fear at the edge of panic. You are now in a nightmare. There is something chasing you: if you turn to face it, roll an encounter at +10. If you instead flee, test WIS to hold you nerve long enough to find a threshold, or be caught and wake as though from torture.
25. A tall, silver tower, with smooth sides and no doors. There is a single open window about six stories up. If you have come to the Dreamlands with a specific goal in mind, that goal sits on the other side of that open window, if only you can reach it somehow.
26. A white-paved courtyard with a fountain in its centre. The water is sweet and cool, totally clear. Large, shady trees have been planted around the periphery. 
27. A cheap timber box maze: endless airless wooden rooms, stacked on top and around one another, full of soiled bedding. It takes about an hour to get to the edge of this horrible territory. 
28. The stern of a proud ship on a glittering sea. You move at a good clip. The wooden figurehead looks like someone you know (but who? You cannot quite place it), and is very talkative. After several days of sailing you arrive at your destination, a green and pleasant shore...
29. A great causeway, built on titanic stone arches like an aqueduct. Their bases are invisible in the clouds that swirl below you, and other identical causeways can be seen above, below, and beside this one. Two ways to go, both identical. 
30. A garden of beautiful flowers, layered and dense, hung with lattices and pots. A small white-pebble path leads between the verdant growth. Huge butterflies and other nice insects flap and buzz around happily. A humming tone at the edge of hearing makes concentration difficult. 
31. The bottom of a large iron cylinder, canted slightly such that the interior walls are (barely) climbable. The iron is hot, and the air is hotter. 
32. A steaming, putrid swamp, hard to walk through. Detritus surrounds you, some of it recognisable. You sink in up to your thighs. It smells bad. Mosquitoes buzz around your head. You seem to lose things as you push through - shoes, bits of armour, your weapons, etc. Save WIS or lose d3 of your most important items by fiat of the DM. You can turn back to get them, but if you do so you enter into a nightmare. 
33. A parade of faceless people that you push through - they are going one way, you are going the other. They are waving flags and screaming slogans in nonsense languages; there are marching bands, men and women on horseback, marching soldiers. You have to push through it all. 
34. A small stone room, which contains a single window with a softly blowing white muslin curtain, and a loaded bear trap in the centre of the floor. You can exit out the window, and the bear trap does what you expect. 
35. Timber framing, as if for the installation of plasterboard dry wall, arrayed through a large interior of unclear origin and materials. The frames have been built as a maze, but because they are empty you can simply see and walk through them. There is a door on the far wall, but it takes you a long time to get there. There are other things in the maze with you, fleeting shadows, who are not cheating by stepping through the empty spaces like you probably are. Try as you might, you cannot get a good look at them.
36. You are underwater, but don't need to breathe. You look upwards and the friendly sunshine, which falls around you in spears of light. You can swim upwards if you wish, and break to surface, breath the good air, but you are in no great hurry to do so. You can also fall back down into the soft silt at the bottom and gaze upwards, at peace, with nothing to do, which means that you eventually wake up refreshed. Things swim around you in the darkness, minnows and weird bugs and little eels, and other bottom-feeders. 
37. You are in a dark room, and you all have the same face. You are joined by a group of people just like you, also with the same face. These others begin mix in amongst you, to tug at your clothes and look into your faces, searching for something, with jerky, anxious movements. You are not quite yet in a nightmare, but if you don't wake up immediately you will be.
38. A tiny island, mostly taken up by a white marble mausoleum, and a small wooden dock, with a boat tied to it. You can leave by descending down into the tomb, or by taking the boat out onto the dark green lake, which is dead calm, flat as a sheet of glass. 
39. Something about you is different. There are various surgical and optical devices on the table in front of you. You look around: you are in an operating theatre, currently empty. The floors and walls are heavy white tile, and the drainage channels have been scrubbed clean of any discolouration. You can use the implements on yourself without doing any permanent damage. You won't be able to find the thing that is different. Take as much time as you need. The door is right there. 
40. A street of wooden houses, all empty of furniture, with vividly stained-glass windows. Each contains the sounds of singing from outside its windows, a different song for each house. Even the most vicious nightmares will parley inside the houses. 
41. The edge of the architectural spaces, the empty, burning, multicoloured sands of the Blazing World. If you choose to make your way out into the sands, your adventure pauses - there is nothing out here. It will take you exactly as long to make your way back to the built-up spaces as it did to walk out. Not many know this, but you can instead choose to stay here. For each year you spend in the blazing world, you permanently lose 1 WIS and 1 INT, but gain 1 CHAR. No matter how long you stay, you will wake up the next morning as normal, pleasantly refreshed. 
42. An empty house, cramped, airless, and depressingly bare. All the exits and windows are barred shut - you cannot leave this way. Several human shapes lie beneath sheets in the main room. Above the stove, such that you must climb up on top to access it, is a filthy mirror - this is the threshold. 
43. What appears to be the interior of an iron foundry. Molten metal runs in rivers, and steam hammers work without cease. Everything is automated, or at least unattended. It's not directly dangerous if you watch you step. If you search around a bit you can find hundreds of poor quality iron swords (medium -1) and crowbars in bins. 
44. A human body the size of a large hill, putrefying. You have to climb its flank somehow. Better not to look at the face. If you do (you really have to work for this), what you see wakes you as though by torture. The threshold is an incongruous black hole in the sternum. 
45. A huge bird cage, about the size of a cottage, built from wood and wire. Hundreds of bright-plumaged birds sit on the perches, looking at you. The external wire is electrified - it hums audibly, and if you touch it you take d8 damage. There are walkways hanging through the interior, and a small wire door at the bottom, which you must open, and which is also electrified. If you make any noise at all, the birds will start squawking horribly until you stop. If you do it again, they will attack in a rainbow frenzy of wings and beaks and talons, and deal d4 damage per turn that they do so. There are far too many to kill. 
46. A long, flooded stone tunnel, lit softly with unclear, omnidirectional luminescence. You have to swim to the end. You feel some urgency in this, but your breath seems to hold forever. The tunnel will take about an hour of swimming to traverse. 
47. A series of tiered gardens, wound about by cobbled streets, and watered with tiny stone aqueduct-channels. The long, trailing plants are red and dark purple, unlike anything you have seen before. 
48. An enormous stone bridge that spans an equally enormous river, rushing by beneath you with incredible violence. In fact, if you look down, you will see massive chunks of ice, clods of earth, trees, even pieces of buildings rushing by in the tumult. The whole world is in the river, shaken apart. The evening city squats mute and dark on both sides of the bridge. 
49. The interior of a great cathedral, with soot stains twenty metres high on its vertiginous walls. The great pews have been heaped up for firewood and burned, and there are petrol stains on the floor. The congregation seem to have been stacked neatly in rows in the centre of the main gathering space - many thousands of bodies. There is a sound outside, like iron geared machinery. Somehow, this is not a nightmare. You can descend into the crypt, or leave via the front doors, into absolute blackness. 
50. A forest with a softly moving canopy, and gentle light between the boughs of the trees. The trees are enormous; each must be at least a century old. The ground between them is covered in soft, bright green moss, and houses limpid pools so clear that they are nearly invisible, even where the light falls through them. You know that the roots of the trees are as as gigantically spreading as the boughs above. If you drink from any of the pools you will wake up refreshed - otherwise it takes a day or two to traverse the forest. Any  encounters here will be as dreams, even if you have already fallen into a nightmare.
51. A huge tiled pool, full of black water. Large enough that you cannot see the other side. There are strange oily patches on its surface, and further out outcrops of something like black stone emerge from the dirty surface. You know that if you enter the water, you will enter a nightmare. Behind you is a dark forest, with a red light in the trees - you could exit that way. Or you could follow along the side of the tiled pool, for three or four hours, before coming to its edge. 
52. A dark home, like your family home from when you were a child. In fact it is that house, even if subtly changed. If there are more than one of you, you all perceive this space as the one that you grew up in, which can lead to amusing situations like doors appearing where there were none, and room proportions changing violently. There are two people in the biggest room in the house, with faces that are hard to see. They won't speak or interact with anyone in any way, but if you roll a hostile encounter here, instead of whatever you rolled these two figures start grinning horribly and try to strangle you. They have stats as bugbears. 
53. A maze-like structure, with red curtains and a black and white tiled floor. Strangely specific. If you roll a hostile encounter here, replace the encounter with hostile and insane mirror versions of the party, and change the dream into a nightmare. If your doppelgänger kills you, your character in the real world becomes an insane NPC controlled by the DM. All experienced dreamers know of the Red Room and its dangers, and will try to wake up or flee if they stumble upon it. 
54. A warm summer's day, in a hazy wooden loft with someone you love. Neither of you have anything to do. They desire you, and you them. It is so simple. Transforms a nightmare back into a dream. 
55. A wind-blown promontory of dark rock, jutting out into the sea. It is totally bare, and you have nowhere to go. The threshold is the sea and its infinite volume, which will become clear to you if you let your mind go blank for a minute or so. You will swim downwards for hours and days. 
56. An ancient stone table, set in a meadow flooded with water. The sky above is strangely coiled. You can leave the way you came. A promise made on the table is binding: everyone in the dream knows this with absolute clarity and certainty. There is no in-game or magical effect, you just know. 
57. A vertical sheet of ice stretches up in front of you, clear and blue and infinitely deep when you look into it. You can walk up its surface as though it was the floor, or you can squeeze your way into one of the several person-shaped holes in its surface - both function as thresholds.
58. The belly of a whale, but a cartoon version, with ribs for a ceiling, lakes of stomach acid, and a busted up pirate ship broken up below the hanging tonsils. WE ARE ALL GONE has been gratified into the boards of the ship. You can find everything a ship would have inside it - rope, hammers, muskets, whatever. You can also find a rowboat, which you might row to freedom up and out of the whales mouth. You could also travel deeper in, and find a gory door carved into its still-beating heart. 
59. A small apartment that looks out onto a deserted stone square. You cannot find the door out, but you can leave by the window. There are many other apartments, identical to the first, looking onto the square, which you can enter and explore through their windows. To exit the scene you must leave the square itself via a huge wrought iron gate. 
60. An iron box, small enough that you cannot stand. You are in a nightmare. The only way out is to wake up. WAKE UP
61. A warm summer's day, in a hazy wooden loft with someone you love. Neither of you have anything to do. They desire you, and you them. It is so simple. You ask them to look at you. They won't. You try to turn their face to yours but it won't move. No matter what angle you get on your lover, you only see the back of their head. Even if they rise to their feet and start walking towards you. You are in a nightmare. 
62. A jewel shop! No one is around - take whatever you want. You can leave by the back exit. The street outside is burning. 
63. You find yourself beneath a great stone aqueduct, somewhere outside the city. The vegetation is pleasant and the wind is cool. You know that the aqueduct does not only move water - this seems important but you can't remember why. If you go up to check you will find that it is blood. You can follow the aqueduct in either direction through the forest to find a threshold after a few hours of walking. 
64. A small beach town, empty of course. You could spend hours wandering the charming streets, and breaking into houses, should you fancy. But it is late in the day. Soon the sun will set - not yet, but soon. The threshold is any door you want, once you have decided to leave.
65. You are a hero! Fighting villains! You wave around your prop sword, and you fall over, and they fall over, then you both get up and switch roles, and do it again. The stage for this epic conflict is some sort of pillow dimension, all soft furnishings and mothballs. You automatically have a combat encounter here, but no one takes any damage, and the whole thing delights its participants. If you are in a nightmare, it all functions exactly like a normal combat except that your opponents don't expect it to, and sob and weep in terror and confusion as you kill them.
66. A broad street from that you remember well from your younger years. All your friends are here with you, just like they were back then. The threshold is behind you, but you have to leave all your friends behind to access it. 
67. An Escher staircase of white stone, hanging in the empty firmament. Walk around and around, and when you get tired of that, drop into the void - you will find the descent drifting and pleasant. 
68. The front of the gallery. You can see the show installed inside, but the place is locked up, everyone has gone home, you're (only just) too late. The drawings are odd little things - they remind you of spiders, or of the way that flatworms move. You can leave by turning back into the evening city and other pursuits, or you can smash the vitrine, push past the drawings, further in, to the backrooms where the true game played, in total silence, without prejudice or mercy. 
69. A brass dome at the top of a building so tall it scrapes the sky. You are slipping across its surface, trying to land safely on the narrow lip at its base. You have to inch your way around to a doorway into the dome itself - text DEX or fall. If you fall, wake up immediately as though you have died. Inside the dome is a pleasant little dwelling that houses whoever you are seeking, if indeed you are seeking a person.
70. An endless scaffold on an endless rampart. Empty nooses hang every few metres, swaying in the breeze. Some terrible noise of battle and strife comes from behind you, from the ground beneath the rampart. If you descend into it, roll an encounter at +10 and enter a nightmare. If you instead walk along the rampart, you come to a threshold after several hours. If you hang yourself from one of the nooses, you immediately wake up as if tortured.  
71. Back stage somewhere, indistinct rooms full of machinery and contraptions, hidden beneath sheets. Uncovering them reveals extreme complexity and little obvious function. All of them are unique. If you search around a bit back here, you can find a costume wardrobe which contains literally anything you like to wear. Outfits count as disguises in the Dreamlands - if you dress as a lawyer or a soldier, the inhabitants will treat you as one. In a nightmare these disguises never work, but your persecutors will lead you along for a minute or two before revealing their hand. 
72. A very old dream for humanity, that of being hunted and chased by something faster, smarter, and stronger than you. You burrow into the earth and pray that it will not find you. Flip a coin - heads you lose, and wake as though killed. If you have a Terror Bird in the party they can go out to parley, which lets you flip the coin twice (the bird PC has to as well, traitor that they are), and take the result you want. 
73. You are walking on the ceiling of an enormous hall - the ceiling is vaulted, so this is more like clambering and sliding down the inverted vaulting. If you look up (down) you will see hordes of people moving around on the ceiling (floor), intent on some complex task requiring their full attention. Traverse the ceiling to find a door on the opposite side. If anyone or anything dies here, they immediately fall up (down) into the air and hit the ceiling (floor). The people working will ignore the falling body completely. 
74. A charming white stone courtyard and timber pergola, one of many similar, built into the side of a mountainous region of stark beauty. The door is behind you. 
75. A garden full of beautiful flowers, each the size of an oak tree. Violets, jasmine, daisies, oh my! Wander around them for a spell and you will find a rose that has fallen to earth; nestled at the centre of its petals is a doorway. 
76. A panelled room without windows, with a circle of chairs placed at its centre. No effect if you sit int them, they're just chairs. The door is across the room. 
77. A steel chute at the lip of which you stand. It smells foul, and you can feel hot air blowing up from it. You can jump into it, or turn away. If you turn away, you find a threshold after a few minutes of walking through airy nothingness. If you jump, you land in a nightmare. 
78. A simple waiting room. There is nothing to do but be seated and wait - in fact a sign on the wall will tell you this specifically: THERE IS NOTHING TO DO BUT WAIT. Any encounter here will be delayed, as all participants sit down for the duration of the waiting. After a few hours have passed, a small bell rings, and a previously hidden door swings open - the threshold. Your encounter then occurs as it would have, unless you have somehow forestalled or diffused it by chatting while waiting.  
79. A vast butcher's floor, with carcasses hanging on hooks designed for giants. The bodies are far, far too big. The floors are slick with blood, but there is no one about. If you wish to, you can cut some good rations from the hanging meat. 
80. You arrive at work - some old work you had before you gave it all up to become an adventurer. What was it you did? You can't really remember the specifics, but there was a cheap uniform and a cramped changing space, and there are people around you now, talking you through it with kind and understanding voices. You walk from space to space, coughing dust, trying your best. It takes eight hours. Test CON, and if you pass you find the threshold. If you fail, you lose 2 CON and work another day. 
81. A dark field, strung about with lacerating wire hung from iron cruciforms. The only way out is through, and you're surrounded anyway. You don't fall into a nightmare as long as you don't get caught up in the wire. If you do, you take d8 damage per turn you are entangled. It's really hard to traverse razorwire without getting tangled, but specialist tools and ingenuity will help. You need to cross 2d20 lines to proceed. 
    
82. The bright uncolours of the Blazing World, the sharp edge of the built environment of Dream. There is a strange scorched track of wreckage carving out the sand, visible from the line of buildings that you stand in. You can choose to explore, or turn back and away. 
83. A great palace of red stone, with many hundreds of rooms. The whole of the ground level is flooded with waist-deep water. You can find many things in the palace - coinage, weapons, armour, tools, all of it made from the same red stone, and unusable for its weight. There are many thresholds in the palace - any of the doors will serve, and there are also deep flooded pits on the ground floor. You can leave whenever you wish to. 
84. A black shore and a smoking sea. The sky wheels insanely above you, nights, days, storms, seasons. Reroll the mood of the dream (see below), if you are using one. The threshold is the sea itself; you need to look away from the sky, which makes you so sad you feel that you might die, and walk into it. 
85. A long, long stair up the side of a sharply slanted pyramid of stone. Wooden signs in a language you can't read every fifty or so stairs. Strange fluted music from the apex, but when you arrive the music is gone, and there is no one there. 
86. You are inside some kind of iron oven or furnace, packed with coal, not yet lit. You need to leave as quickly as you can. Force the door (save STR, +1 per person helping you, try again each minute), or curl up under the coals and wait to burn to death (wake up as if tortured). The oven is lit after d3 minutes. 
87. Another street, like the others, another stone street. You think you've seen this one before. The city (you must remind yourself that it is not a city) wheels around you. Something off in the distance (the street is very long) is running towards you, sprinting, on all fours, very fast but the street is so long that it will take a long time for it to reach you. You are running towards this thing as well, sprinting - how could you have missed this? Make an effort of will to turn away from this suicidal confrontation (save WIS), otherwise you wake as though killed the split second before you see the terrible face of the thing sprinting towards you on all fours.
88. A small, square room with iron walls and floors, all smeared with bleach and shit. Dim lighting from a single small oil lamp. The air is gaggingly foul. You are now in a nightmare. An iron bolted door on the opposite wall leads to an identical room, and from there another identical door leads to another identical room. It takes you hours to find your way out of this hell. 
89. The park at the centre of the city where you live. It is early evening but still bright, and the others have yet to arrive. Actually you got here early, just to sit and enjoy the sounds of the city around you, the movements of people going about their lives. Eventually it gets dark. You can leave whenever you want to. 
90. A tower built from blue glass. You can see to the bottom! It's a long way down - something like looking down the biggest telescope ever, or a cartoonishly oversize rifle scope. It'll take you at least a day's walk down the glass spiral staircase. Hope you brought some friends with you to kill the time! After the first six hours the glass turns green, then yellow, then finally red at the base.
91. A great brass orrery, which you must traverse by leaping from sphere to sphere. Someone with a knowledge of astronomy will know that this device does not map the skies of the Barony. Test DEX or INT to succeed and reach the threshold on the opposite side, or fall and wake as if killed.
92. You are looking down the muzzle of a gigantic cannon, loaded and primed to fire. There is no one around. If you have something to light it with, you might use it to fire on something chasing after you. It's loaded with white phosphorus and fires in a 90 degree cone, to a range of 50ft. Everything in the AOE takes d10 fire damage until it dies - you can't put the fire out. 
93. An office (a bit like a seedy PI's office in your favourite noir film) with a small soapstone sphinx statuette on the desk, among miscellaneous and extremely tedious files. It can tell you things about yourself, and about other things as well, if you ask it. As you favourite oracle spell, but each question you ask prompts a roll on the encounter table - the sphinx is known to the inhabitants of dream, and they are jealous of its gifts. You can ask the sphinx to send you into or out of a nightmare and it will do so. You can leave the room whenever you want to. 
94. A stinking mangrove salt flat that stretches out in all directions. You can smell the sea, but you can't see it. A wooden house built on stilts in the distance - it is well stocked if you search it. It takes a day of walking to leave the flats behind.
95. A great boundary wall that separates one section of the Dreamlands from another. At its foot, a deserted street with trash blowing in the wind, blasted asphalt, faded street signs. A friendly Orc in a busboy uniform sees you and asks if you are lost - if you say yes, he offers to help you find your way. Come out from a nightmare, and reduce the number of rooms required to find what you are looking for by one. If you offer to pay him he winks roguishly and tells you that this is his job, and that tipping is not required. 
96. A huge room that looks like a crypt, lit by a central oil fountain that has been set ablaze. Large, four armed humanoids sit along the edges of the room, crosslegged, impassive as statues. They are living things, but you can attack them, carve them up, and they will sit impassively and bleed out. Their faces are impossible to see clearly. The door is on the other side of the room, and takes about an hour to reach.
97. Some great armoury, kept by a wealthy prince. Racks of +1 weapons and armour of exquisite craftsmanship line the walls; anything you want you can find. Take what you wish, or what you can carry, and leave by the door behind you. 
98. You are surrounded by dense walls of roots and thick, bastard thorns. Easy enough to hack or burn your way through, but the going is slow and bloody, and after hours of it you will have taken d3 damage by hundreds of small cuts and abrasions. 
99. Look up at the sky and see the brightly pointed star above you. Bright enough to be clearly visible in the daytime sky. See it growing, minute by minute, horribly quickly. Find a way out from this dream, because an hour from now it will be obliterated, no matter how many rooms you have put between yourself and that terrible star. If this happens you will wake as though killed, and be unable to sleep again for d8 - [WIS mod] days. 
100. The grand palace of the Prince of Dreaming. Some dreamers search for it their entire lives, without success: children need but click their heels together and wish. The palace looks like a garden and a big white house, with thousands of rooms. The guards are proud and tall, and they wear brightly coloured jackets and ostrich plumes, and carry shining swords and spears. Pennants move in the breeze. If you were in a nightmare, you are immediately delivered from it. The Prince will hear your request, honoured visitor that you are, and offer his council, should you wish it. You immediately find whatever you were looking for - it was here all along, naturally. If you have done him some service, the Prince will also award you with medallions of safe passage, which turn all inhabitants of the Dreamlands friendly as long as you are not in a nightmare. 

Moods

Just in case you need one. Keep the mood throughout the whole of a dreamlands jaunt, and switch it if the PCs fall into a nightmare (or, blessedly, back out from one). 

Dreams

1. A kind sun, a vigorous breeze, a sky as blue as a precious stone. 
2. Sunset, rose-coloured, with slanting arrows of dying sunlight and the warmth of the day still caught up in the surfaces and cobblestones. 
3. A summer night, fresh wind on your skin, the stars above you very clear.
4. Morning, cold and brisk, fog on the ground, the stirrings of life. 
5. Hot afternoons with nothing to do, trees bustling with cicadas, birds in the air, a feeling of calm certainty. 
6. A chilly spring day, bright yellow sunlight that throws facades into relief against a slate grey sky, infinite promise.  

Nightmares

1. The dead silver moonlight that changes everything it touches into something else, something totally alien, even though they look exactly the same as they did before. 
2. A day when every surface you look at has the texture of sheet metal, when dust blows through the city and scours its surfaces, when thoughts move like lead, when every small argument becomes cruel and sly. 
3. No sun in the sky, only a red flicker on the horizon. It lights things, barely, like a photographic darkroom. 
4. An eclipse, or something like an eclipse - purple and yellow and green shadows and an edge to eye contact with anyone. Mania, paranoia, the unsettling of the order of things. The light is wrong, and you cannot see the sun anywhere. 
5. Weak, brown sunlight that falls down from the sky like liquid, and that barely illuminates the contents of a small room. It stinks of desperation, of the worst sort of compromise. 
6. Light so bright that every shadow comes out black. The whole sky glows white light a giant's neon sign, and presses down unbearably close. Nothing can survive like this for long. 

Encounters

Each encounter has a dream and nightmare variant. Nothing follows you through scenes in a dream, but they do in nightmares. Once you are in a nightmare, it is nearly impossible to get back into a dream - there are a few exceptions in the 'rooms' listed above. 

Note that for the purposes of these tables, the rules in this post that imply infinite numbers of orcs and goblins do not apply. I should never have written those damn rules lol. 

In a dream, hostile creatures are trying to kill you. In a nightmare, they are trying to torture you to death - this does not happen automatically; they will need to actually physically subdue you and render you helpless before doing so, so you can 'save' yourself by making them kill you in the attempt. 

For each new room, roll a d20 and consult the table below:

• 1 - 10: Nothing. You are alone for now. If you are in a nightmare, nothing, but roll further results on this table at +2. 
• 11 - 14: No encounter, but something in the scene is animate that shouldn't be, or you have some weird feeling of being seen and marked. Perhaps the flowers sing for you, perhaps the wall is listening. Further encounter rolls are made at +1. If in a nightmare, further rolls are made at +2, and additionally d3 objects in the scene attack you in some way (animate objects typically have HD1 and deal d6 bludgeoning), or, if there is nothing to animate, you take 1 damage per minute you spend here as the hostility in the air wears into your mind like a blade. 
• 15: A dashing Cherubim, eager to help with your quest, should ye be of noble heart (she can tell). If you are an evil bastard, she will disappear, and may try to kill you as you make your way through the dream. If you are in a nightmare, this encounter is instead a Cherubim cornered and maimed by a group of 2d6 Orcs. If you do not intervene, they will cook her over a fire and eat her. If you do intervene, they will do the same to you. 
• 16: 2d4 Goblins, doing goofy mischievous shit and having fun breaking and stealing things. Goblins are a bit like dumb teenagers, and can be quite a good time if you know how to talk to them, but they will knife you without a second thought if you give them a reason to. If you are in a nightmare this is 2d8 Goblins, whose current fixation is torturing you to death. 
• 17: 2d6 Orcs, manning a checkpoint. They will demand papers if you wish to pass by them, further into the dream. If you can't produce them, they will tell you to wake up or face the consequences, which in this instance means getting speared to death. If you are in a nightmare, there are 2d12 orcs and they will dispense with the formalities and instead hunt you like a prey animal.
• 18: 2 Bugbears, extorting passers-by for their valuables. They'll take whatever you give them, as long as it is shiny, or valuable to you. If you have nothing, they'll take hands and feet. In a nightmare they are basically slasher villains, and every time you kill one you need to save WIS with disadvantage for the death to stick - otherwise it's back again, sharpening its long, long knife, just behind the next corner. 
• 19: 2d4 Professionals, Orc operators, not at all like the usual soldiery. They have HD2+1, dress in dark suits and tinted glasses, and carry black-bladed sabres and 50/50 silenced pistols and silenced tromblonjs (tromblonji? as blunderbusses - the silencers look like trumpet mutes). They will inform you that the area is restricted, and that you need to go around - you can do so with a simple reroll on the room table, and the addition of d3 rooms to the number required before you reach your goal. In a nightmare there are 2d8 of them, and they will instead hunt you down like Seal Team Six and blackbag you, which is one of the worst things that can happen to you in dream. You wake up as though tortured, and additionally cannot sleep at all for d8 - [WIS mod] days. 
• 20: A Dreamlands Eater, kind, knowledgable, and terrible to look upon. It is accompanied by a strange iron contraption, which it will not acknowledge. If you touch this machine, it will start screaming and try to kill you. This encounter is identical in a nightmare.
• 21+: Nightmares from the future. The air gets so hot that begins to literally cook you, and the sky is too terrible to look upon. You take d6 damage for each minute you spend in this room, and if you die here you wake up as though tortured, and additionally cannot sleep for d8 - [WIS mod] days.