The Dreamlands

If your dreamlands don't look like Gustave Moreau paintings you are canonically doing it wrong.
Jupiter and Semele, Gustave Moreau, 1895. 

I wrote about orcs and goblins yesterday - it made sense to me that they were literally nightmare creatures inhabiting a place called the dreamlands. I've spoken about dreams in Barony before, and designed a class, the Chemist, that interfaces with them specifically. 

So what are the dreamlands?

They are a place that some people can travel to when they sleep. Many children do this naturally, and there are adults who can teach themselves to do it. Travel to the dreamlands can be induced with drugs or, less commonly, with magic. There are entities that are comfortable there but these are surprisingly few; most entities distrust dreams that same way that they distrust mirrors. Academics theorise that this has something to do with the impossibility of fixing images in the dreamlands; things slip from state to state, things are not what they are, the face is both itself and not itself, etc. 

The dreamlands are significantly architectural - most of the traversable space is composed of fantastic and nonsensical interiors. Broad streets bordered by blazing lamps, which run between the vaulted arches of grand cathedrals. Towers that dig downwards into the earth. A house that contains the city. 

The geographies of the dreamlands do not rearrange; new additions simply layer on top or cluster at the edges of the whole. The available space is infinite. It is known that particularly strong-willed and imaginative children build entire kingdoms here, and that these encrust and encircle one another. Sometimes dreamers will attempt to tear down the constructions of others, but this is rare, and considered a sign of mental derangement by most inhabitants of the dreamlands. Why tear something down when you can spend your time building?

Where there are exteriors, they tend towards the iconic; skies gone mad with frenzied storms; endless forests buried in mist; seas that churn and boil; lakes like mirrors, perfectly circular, perfectly still, perfectly reflective. A thousand different suns and moons, each of whose multicoloured light falls across different domains.

There are also beings native to the dreamlands. The Barony sees a lot of warfare, so dangerous nightmares like orcs are common, but they are not the only things that live here. There are talking animals, riddle-beasts, old friends and lovers wearing different bodies and using different names.

You can travel quickly in the dreamlands if you put your mind to it, and if you move beyond the human architectures and imaginings you will start to find more abstract zones at the borders. Children rarely think to go here, because building your own kingdom is more fun. Adult dream travellers call these borderlands the Blazing World - an expanse of fire that is also earth that is also air that is also intention. Ulfire and jale and octarine. It is hypothesised to be either the stuff that dreams are built from, or the form of the dreams of older things than humans. Some say that they can see cities that hang in the air beyond the wastes of the Blazing World but none can say that they have travelled to them. 

Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, 1876.

HOW TO USE THIS

In game terms, you can travel to the dreamlands any time that you sleep and take the appropriate measures to ensure travel. A Chemist can do this for you with hypnosis and sedatives, and you can also learn to do it yourself, usually with the aid of certain more specialised drugs. 

When you arrive in the dreamlands, you will always arrive in your House. Your House has a form that corresponds to your desires - most Houses are peaceful places, and many are very beautiful. If a Chemist is using their Travelling template ability to build you a dream space to explore, this space will be added to your House as an extension. 

Your House is always secret, safe, uninhabited, and restful. If you choose to remain in your house, you get an excellent night's sleep and wake refreshed, with no specific in-game benefit. Leaving the House is always a decision made by the dreamer - they can never be compelled to leave it against their will. 

Every House also has a Mirror. You access the Mirror by, naturally enough, stepping through any reflective surface that you choose to construct or encounter inside your House. The Mirror is exactly like the House but architecturally reversed; it is also inhabited. The inhabitants of the Mirror will depend on the dreamer - a frightened, traumatised, vengeful person may have a Mirror full of dangerous monsters. Someone at peace may have Mirror inhabited by friends, mentors, and other helpful NPCs. Your DM will populate your Mirror like they would any other dungeon.

Beyond the walls of the House and Mirror are the Dreamlands proper, and in this environment all bets are off. You are in a wild hinterland, and will encounter beings and environments of all sorts. The architectures around you are all technically the Mirrors of other dreamers, but smashed together into a contiguous space. There are dangerous minds and dead minds and safe minds. Dream beings roam at will. 

In the Dreamlands you act exactly as you would in the waking world, with the exception that all of your stats are replaced with your highest mental stat. If you die in the Dreamlands you awake immediately, and get no benefit of sleep. If you are tortured or otherwise seriously traumatised first, save WIS on waking - on a failure you lose 1 INT, WIS, and CHAR as your connection to and trust in pure possibility diminishes. 

You can travel vast distances very quickly in the Dreamlands. Simple concentrate for a full minute in front of a closed door, and picture where you wish to go - when you open the door there you are. Anything chasing you can also use the door that you have created.

With training you may be able to locate other people's Mirrors (never their Houses), and navigate them. This may provide you with useful information about that person. There are certain minds that are unbelievably dangerous to enter this way, most notably those of wizards and vengeful children.

If you travel to the Blazing World you will find nothing, but peacefully meditating there counts as resting in your House. Nothing will ever attack anything in the blazing world. Certain academics will swear blind that exposure to the uncolours changes people in fundamental ways, but there is no hard evidence for this.

-

DESIGN NOTES

the dreamlands are intended to give your DM the possibility of making dungeons from the minds of your PCs (always an interesting exercise), and to open up fun Inception style heist possibilities if your game skews that way, as well as Lynchian (RIP to one of the greatest ever) doppelgangers and strangely doubled architectures. The waking world in Barony is a few steps more grounded than a lot of GLOG material, so travel in the dreamlands is also meant to be a way to open up possibilities for fairytale logic, ultra-weird beings, and other gorgeous published material that might otherwise feel out of place. 

If it doesn't jibe with your campaign flavour just ignore it, and let the Chemist work as written in the original post. 

Gustave Moreau, The Chimaeras, 1884. Yes, this is where orcs and goblins come from.