Nightmares are native to the Dreamlands, but no one knows what causes them. There are many superstitions around how to avoid or attract them. You can feel them a nightmare immediately - the wrongness in the light and the alien charge in the world. The familiar contours of the dream become mad. Nothing has changed but they are mad; seething. To see the face of one that you trust in a nightmare is to feel that face change utterly - to see your friends and lovers become alien things.
Most people immediately wake themselves up when they sense themselves falling into a nightmare. You attempt this once, as soon as you realise what's happening. Check INT - on a success you wake without ill effect, on a failure you are trapped, and your mental stats are at -2 for the duration of the dream.
Alternatively, you may attempt to master your fears inside the nightmare. As above, this can be attempted only once. Check CHAR - on a success, all checks in the dream are made with advantage. On a failure, all mental stats are at -4 for the duration of the dream.
During the nightmare itself, you will be attacked by something. It will first manifest after d10 minutes, can follow you anywhere, and will attack every round. It will look like someone you know, or like something that hurt you recently, or that humialated you, or made you feel small. No one else will be able to see it. Every time it attacks you it crits, because you are in a nightmare. Every time you attack it, you will do a single point of damage, because you are in a nightmare. If you look into its face you will be frozen with fear, so you have to attack with disadvantage unless you can fight blind for some reason. Every time you attack the thing, check WIS. On a success, it takes 1 damage and retreats for d10+[WIS mod] minutes. On a failure it laughs at you, or screams painfully in a voice that you recognise.
Nightmare
1HD, fists/knives/guns/teeth (one attack per turn, for d6), armour: unarmoured, speed: just a bit faster than you, disposition: nightmare logics of persecution.
 |
| Untitled (Tiger), by the very great Aleksandra Waliszewska |
-
Cooking Machines
You see them now and then, dotted throughout the vertiginous architectures of the Dreamlands. The forms are always similar, but no two are identical. They are all built from rough iron, about as tall as a person, with bulbous iron compartments, complexly interlinked with flues, piping, chimneys, and other linkages. The sit on iron feet, atop boilers, furnaces, or cauldron-vats. They are of no clear purpose, other than that they are obviously built for cooking something, for the transmutation and melting down and separation of matter into its baser elements. Sometimes, rarely, steam and smoke will pour from the piping and metalwork that crowds from their upper compartments. You cannot open them up. Many have tried, and burned and scalded themselves in the attempt.
The cooking machines appear now and then in the scriptures of the church, signifying some great historical event that has not yet taken place. For the church this is a matter of doctrinal faith. Angels and demons that encounter the machines become agitated. They cannot remember them, as hard as they try. They cannot remember their purpose. Their minds are precisely occluded; a great, collective dark point in the timelines that they work to maintain.
 |
| Cooking Machine |
No comments:
Post a Comment