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 architectures and encounters, for if you simply need to generate some spaces for your intrepid oneironauts to navigate. 

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 good reason is dangerous, and all adventurers know this. 


Dreaming and Dreaming

Everyone dreams, and not all dreams take you to the Dreamlands. As explained in earlier posts, 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, or become trapped or tortured, in a dream, you immediately test to wake up. On a success you do so, with heart racing and horrible images in your mind - you get no bonuses or healing from resting for the night. On a failure, you are unable to extract yourself in time to avoid the sensation of being killed or mutilated. You get no bonuses or healing, and permanently lose 1 from each of your mental statistics. 


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' 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 in mind - usually meeting someone, but possibly also finding some information that is kept there, or a specific building or location. If you keep it 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 later in this document. Once you are in a nightmare, you cannot move back into a dream that night. If you slip into a nightmare on the way to what you're searching for, you must save WIS with disadvantage when you find it - on a failure, you haven't actually found it, just some weird fucked-up mirror version of it. Perhaps in the next room?

For each space you move through, 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 - in this case, it 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, that lets you roll your next location 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 does. 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 d26 beds in it, stacked and crammed 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 a prison cells bars, but composing the entire architecture. 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 tough 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 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 a green, 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 appear to be the interior of an iron foundry. Molten metal runs in rivers, and steam hammers work without cease. Everything appears 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 in bins (medium -1). 
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 - if you touch it, you take d8 damage. There are walkways hanging through the interior, and a small 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 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, and all 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 water. 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 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 carve a door into its 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. 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 fancy, 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. 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 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 waist deep. 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, 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 to kill time with. 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 90degree 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) with a small soapstone sphinx statuette on the desk, among miscellaneous and unbelievably 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, basted 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 impassive as statues along the edges of the room. 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. 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 taking 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, terribly fast. 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 stones 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 bespoke 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 and only interest 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 hunt you like prey.
• 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 for the death to stick - otherwise it's back again, sharpening its long, long knife, just behind the next corner. 
• 19: 2d6 Professionals, Orc operators, not at all like the usual soldiery. They 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 only work once. 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. In a nightmare, 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. 

The Third City

 

Far to the north of the Imperial territory, jutting out from the crimson alkaline shore of the northern sea and near to the impassable boiling jungles at the world's terminus, stands the ancient city of Rantine. It is called the Third City in official accounts, and, with varying degrees of disdain, 'The Exception' by Imperial subjects. To date it is the only state to have survived White City diplomacy with its political independence intact since the first Imperial campaigns of annihilation, nearly three hundred years ago. 

Rantine is large and populous, and very old. The architecture is quite unlike that found in the White City - the Rantines build in wood as much as stone, and they favour courtyards, one and two-story buildings, shadowed interiors, dark-tinted mirrors, and painted walls. It is called the Third City because in centuries past it was one of the three peer states that vied for supremacy in the region, alongside what is now the White City, and what was then the Old Capital. 

Rantine of old was a competing culture to those others. Its people were famous for producing and exporting dyes, fine lace, carved and treated wood, silk, and iron and brass mechanisms of great complexity and ingenuity. They kept a fearsome military, built around massed bombards and sophisticated rocketry, highly trained and disciplined infantry, and a famously pious noble caste of priests, officers, and administrators, known for their cultivation of miraculous, healing blood, and for the linked practices of blood-drinking and exsanguination on the battlefield.

Rantines are physically tall and bright-eyed, with pronounced features and especially large teeth and eyes. They will tell you that they are descended from the giants of the north. To their southern neighbours they are known as aggressive, loud, laughing, sexually crude, loyal to their friends and lovers, astutely observant, and impossible to lie to. They still file their teeth and dress in lace, and they still attach long streamers of coloured fabric to their limbs when they dance, although no longer when they go to war, because the Rantines have not fought a battle in centuries. Once a year the Great Bombard fires a blank charge, and once a year the 'army' holds a parade, during which the seven remaining 'Colour Exemplars' dress in their ancient harness and perform public displays of their martial and acrobatic skill. All of this is done to signal the exceptional status of the city, its defanged and neutered autonomy beneath the Damocles sword of the 'friendly' garrison of Imperial soldiery. 

The Promise

The Rantine pacification was the first major campaign that the White City fought during its ascendant rise from regional- to super-power status, three centuries ago. The modern Imperial war machine did not exist at the time, and the invasion forces were mostly comprised of drugged and surgically-treated 'myrmidon' citizen-soldiers, shod in bronze and fighting with heavy spears. The campaigns to subdue the Rantine were bloody and attritional - the two cities had been variously allies and enemies of convenience for as long as either could remember, but neither had ever seriously considered extinguishing the other permanently. Something changed at the moment that the White City military were, after decades of war, able to finally destroy the famous Rantine city walls - they were suddenly thrust into the novel position of dictating terms with total impunity. 

The king of the pre-imperial White City found himself unable to order their extermination - there was too much shared cultural history, and too much mutual understanding. The famous Image Game, which would be developed over the centuries of warfare that followed, is said to have its genesis in a Rantine board game played with glass beads, and popular in the White City at the time. He decreed instead that the Rantine nobility would govern independently, as the 'special friends' of their conquerors, and then organised a series of brutal purges in the military leadership, the complete disbanding of the Rantine army, and the crowning of a new and pliant puppet-king. This state of affairs has continued to the present day. 

Rantine of the present is a city held in a curious state of suspended animation. The political machinery is guaranteed by a foreign military, and all essential foreign policy decisions are made by the White City. Internally, the celebration of Rantine culture has taken on a sort of existential importance for certain elements in the city, and the old forms and rituals, which once formed a proud, vital, and living cultural practice, have been exaggerated in a vacuum, for effect. A large part of the economy of the city centres on the performance of this trapped/dead culture for curious onlookers from elsewhere in the empire - the dances, the blood-drinking, the rocketry, the elaborately layered lace clothing. 

Beneath this gaudy performativity, Rantine is a wealthy and often-idle city. It is 'kept' by the Empire as proof positive of Imperial tolerance, and as such its populace live mostly comfortable lives, free of the labour expectations of other Imperial subjects. The weather this far north is unbearably hot for much of the year, and at the peak of the summer months the dead, ultra-saline, crimson sea begins to smoke and burn, releasing a smothering stench that burns the eyes and throat. The red sunlight brings strange dreams; makes one loud, laughing, blunt, aggressive, sexually crude. The city is the only place in the Empire where Imperial law technically has no jurisdiction, and for this reason its sprawling districts are often used as safe-houses or staging points for Flare Children and other anti-Imperial elements. This concentration naturally leads to a high number of anti-insurgent and other irregular Imperials making their base in the city, and in the Empire it is said that the Rantine bathhouses host more spies, agents, desperadoes, revolutionaries, and thief-catchers than they do Rantine civilians. 

The Queen

The current queen of Rantine is named Sysophene. She is fourteen years old, and by all accounts a shrewd and capable administrator, and a good friend to the Empire. She is around six feet tall, with the socially required over-large eyes, long fingers, and thin, wide lips. She dresses in the formal Rantine style of the old aristocracy (white lace, since it is peacetime, built out to cover the whole of the body) and has had her teeth and fingernails replaced with white steel prosthetics. At fourteen years old she is also devoid of empathy, and monomaniacally dedicated to preserving the culture of her ancestors. Rantine blood-drinking is practised between noble worthies (they drink from one another), and on captives and criminals (all one way). Sysophene regularly organises elaborate blood feasts, exsanguinations, and public mutilations, and when she appears in public with her entourage she will endeavour to have the red-stained mouth, hands, and clothing that befit her station. 

Sysophene is also the secret carrier of a genuine miracle - the healing blood of the old aristocrats, thought to be extinct. She herself is unaware of this, because none of the nobles who have fed from her have been ill when they have done so. The discovery of the healing blood would be a political event of huge importance, and the Empire would work very hard to keep its existence a secret. 

If you were to somehow drink a litre or so of Sysophene's blood (this would take you a minute at minimum, unless you drink blood regularly), you would be healed to full HP and cured of all disease. If you were to do this every day for a week, you would regrow missing limbs and organs. If you let her drink your blood, she will bestow on you an ancient royal blessing, which no longer has any effect.  

The Rantine Nobility

The old ruling classes of the polis, now sadly reduced. They still practice blood-drinking, and many of them claim to keep the old martial traditions of the Colour Exemplars alive. Many now make their living showing curious citizens around their ancient estates, although some have also organised themselves into trading and export consortiums, and are fantastically wealthy as a result. There are various factions in the nobility, which mostly break down into two very broad camps: the modernists, who wish for a greater degree of cultural assimilation into the White City, and the traditionalists (who the White City supports indirectly) who wish to keep the ancient forms 'alive'. There are also those who argue for the rearming of the polis, and for a second independence, but they are not taken seriously by either their Rantine peers or the Imperial occupation. 

A Rantine noble is usually around seven feet tall, with the characteristic 'Rantine look'. A traditionalist will have tooth and nail prosthetics, designed to better facilitate blood-drinking. They will be dressed in layers of white lace, and will generally have an elaborate lace bonnet or hair piece to make their head look larger than it is. They carry the old weapons of office - the spiral swords and spiral spears - openly in public, and have the legal right to use them if offence is given. When they have committed themselves to some deed or course of action, or when they dance, they will strip away their many layers of lace until all that remains are simple cotton wraps around the genitals and waist, and then tie off their limbs with coloured streamers which float behind them as they move. 

Spiral swords and spiral spears are simply medium swords and heavy spears whose strange design means that class proficiencies do not apply to them. 

The Rantine Mob

The population of Rantine are famously politically involved, hot-tempered, proud, and dangerous. When the city was first subdued, the White City took almost as many casualties in the sacking of the city as it did in the field battles outside its walls. Many royal lines and noble houses have been cut short by armed bands breaking into their estates and putting them 'on display' - a Rantine term for public hanging, crucifixion, or disembowelment. The mob are capricious, but in general they are: patriotic, jealous of their privileges, and concerned with taxation and the cost of living. They will assassinate nobles who they perceive as being insufficiently traditionalist, or unfair or cruel to their workers. They will sometimes even kill Imperials, which always causes a minor diplomatic incident - they are very difficult to effectively police. 

Various institutions have formed around the mob and its vagaries. Semi-professional fighters and demagogues who cultivate factional sway are known as Juggers, and they can be hired to keep you safe, or to prosecute your enemies, if you know how to contact them. Many nobles keep a small staff of Juggers on retainer, to give advance warning of flash points that might erupt, and to keep the pulse of the streets. There are also complex local laws around the right to build and maintain walls, which can make a noble house difficult for the mob to storm - the legal right is generally extended and retracted by the queen and her advisors, and there are gradations of wall-right. Architects of complex crowd-dispersing traps and other anti-intruder contrivances make good money in Rantine, especially when the price of bread looks like it might increase. 

The Rantine mob have stats as commoners, and fight with crude wooden cudgels, garrottes and binding ropes, glass knives, and sometimes with paving stones, roofing tiles, and other improvised weapons of convenience. They wear wooden and paper masks when they organise their pogroms, and will often try to burn down buildings with their quarries inside. When there are least 100 of them fighting, they are fearless until fifty percent of them have been killed, after which they automatically break and flee. 

A glass knife is a light weapon that inflicts damage on both the target and the wielder on a critical miss. On a critical hit, the blade breaks off inside the target, and will deal d6 damage per turn it remains embedded if the target moves or takes an action. It takes one turn of fishing around in your guts to remove the shard, which also deals d6 damage.  

A Rantine Jugger is HD2, masked and armoured as leather, and armed with a sword or spear and a pistol. They will not engage in combat with the mob that they lead if they can avoid it. They all have an excellent sense of crowd psychology, rhetoric, when and who to bribe, and in what quanitites. A Jugger will generally keep a small retinue of experienced street fighters with them day-to-day, and all of them have connections in the nobility. 

The Protectors of the Polis

One of the sadder spectacles of the city - the Protectors of the Polis, also known as the Colour Exemplars, are what remains of the ancient Rantine army, once feared by all. They are seven men and women who dress in brightly coloured mail, tie their limbs off with streamers, and leap and dance with their ancient spiral-spears in the city squares. The old martial techniques are very visually impressive, although some historians will tell you that what was once a murderously effective martial art has been almost entirely supplanted by a series of stylish flourishes of no real use of the battlefield. 

Once a year the protectors are fed the blood of Queen Sysophene in a great public ceremony, and each is sworn anew to defend the ancient rampart - a fortification that was never rebuilt after the first conquest. 

If it ever comes to it, the Protectors have stats as men-at-arms, and are armoured in chain and armed with heavy spiral spears. They are capable of great leaps and bounds - twice that of a normal man - and take half damage from falling. 

If all seven fight you at once (each has their own colour), something of their ancient dignity returns, and each receives an extra attack and an extra HD for the fight. 

The Great Bombard

The Great Bombard is an enormous iron siege cannon, a relic of the centuries-long Rantine supremacy in siegecraft. It was once a wonder and terror of the whole world, and the Rantines used its fearsome reputation to force the surrender of competitor cities without spending the lives of their soldiers. The cannon and rockets of the White City have long since outstripped those of the Rantine (indeed the Imperial models were built with the expertise of their ancient foes), but the Great Bombard is still fired once a year, in celebration of independence. 

The iron chasis is nearly three times the size of the buildings that surround it. They don't make shells for it any more, but if you could find something to load it with, and sufficient powder, you could fire iron shot to a range of three hexes distant, with good accuracy. 

The Beast of Rantine

During the so called 'highest summer', when the crimson sea smokes and boils, the citizens of Rantine find their dreams invaded by ancient lethargies, and by a terrible inhuman anger. In this period the nobles drink blood and eat offal to hold the weird blackness away, and the poorer workers withdraw from the streets, into shadowed interior rooms and the reflections of black mirrors, to wait the season out. 

During the highest summer something haunts the nighted streets of the city - something that tears its victims to ribbons and screams, high and horrible. It sings too, it the same high and awful voice, the ancient battle songs of the old royalty. Those who have seen it describe as something like a giant: a great man-like beast, covered head to toe in wet and shining gore, wrapped in bloody coloured rags, with long steel teeth and steel claws, and staring eyes, filled with fear and confusion. It is said to hunt those that are insufficiently loyal to the queen, but sober analysis of victim patterns shows little support for this. Many have hunted the beast, and many have claimed to have killed it, but none have ever been able to display the corpse, and the killings continue. 

The Beast of Rantine

HD6, armour as chain (blood slick, oddly tough hide, pain tolerance), 2x steel claws as heavy weapons + steel bite as vorpal heavy weapon, speed on all fours: as horse, speed on two feet: as human, disposition: screaming, vengeful spirit, will kill anyone it encounters. 

If the Beast of Rantine is killed, it comes apart in a fountain of blood and is reborn at the next highest summer. 

The Oubliette and the Iron Mask

The dungeons below the palace of Queen Sysophene and not often full - criminals are more usually drained or executed than held in detention. There is a single exception. A woman of about the queen's age, kept in a state of squalor in a lightless room, with an iron mask clamped over her face such that none might see her face. 

This miserable prisoner does not know why she is held, and has no memory of any other place. She eats when she is fed, and sleeps, and amuses herself as best she can. 

When she sleeps, and the air is heavy and foul with the reek of the sea, and the sunlight that she cannot see falls red and black over the ancient city, she dreams of the streets above, which she will never see again. She dreams of nobility and impunity, of a terrible body, slick with the blood of her subjects, of steel claws and steel teeth, and of a dynasty birthed in creation of the world. 

If you were to somehow drink the blood of this prisoner - a litre or so would do it - you would be healed to full HP and cured of all disease. If you were to do this every day for a week, you would regrow missing limbs and organs. 

Additionally, if you give her your blood to drink, she will, with ancient words she does not understand, give you her royal blessing: a terrible, burning vitality that manifests in a brightness of the eye, growth of about a foot in height, and dreams of black, reeking smoke on the surface of the sea, calm like a sheet of glass, of dark mirrors and coloured glass beads, of rockets tracing their arcs of fire across the skies of battlefields and charnel houses, of red, terrible sunlight: in game terms, you gain +d6 max HP. 

Folk Hero Redux

 

The Flare Children of the Imperial hinterlands wage a thankless, bloody, and unending insurgency against the soldiery of the White City. Most were born under occupation and have no personal experience of anything else, but they all grow up nurtured by stories of the cities and cultures that have been so violently denied them, and of the great and undefeated heroes who have fought and died to keep their memory and their dignity aflame. 

Folk Hero

You are an insurrectionist and captain of the hundred million doomed children of the hinterland. You have more experience of war and its horrors than most mercenaries, and have been actively hunted by the Pragmatists from the moment you became a symbol to others like you. On bad days you cannot tell if your memories of the city of your birth are real or fabulated. 

Skills: one civilian trade (what you did when you had a life outside the forever war), one choice and one roll on the Dead Cultures Matrix abilities table - if your abilities have rules appropriate for NPC allies but not PCs your DM will come up with something appropriate. 

Gear: nondescript clothing, light weapon that conceals well, identity documents for three distinct aliases, one choice on the Dead Cultures Matrix gear table - if your gear has rules appropriate for NPC allies but not PCs your DM will come up with something appropriate.

A - Natural Selection, Tradecraft, Black Mirrors, Raider Captain
B - Lobster Cracking
C - Now and Forever
D - One Life

Natural Selection: Millions of people like you have contested the City and died badly for it. You are the product of pressures and hostilities unimaginable even to most professional soldiers. You have +1 to all derived stats, and are immune to fear damage. 

Tradecraft: You can move silently, avoid notice in a crowd, and forge documents.

Black Mirrors: You are immune to any and all mental effects produced by the cultural apparatus of the White City. You can choose to take either -2 or +2 to reaction rolls with White Citizens or their military. You are resistant to poison and radiation, and can choose to make saves against psychoactive and chemical compounds with advantage. You may also choose one of the following skills: mathematics, logistics, chemistry, the Image Game, poisons, ignoble murder (+d8 damage against in melee against enemies who are unaware of your presence). 

Raider Captain: Hirelings and other followers get a +1 bonus to their morale while you lead them. If they are fighting for reasons other than pay, this is instead +[templates]. On a surprise round, you and [templates] hirelings under your command attack twice in melee. 

Lobster Cracking: You may choose for your melee attacks to ignore armour (hit against AC10), or to reduce an enemy's AC by 1/2/3 if light/medium/heavy, to a minimum of 10, on a hit - choose which before you roll. Your crits destroy armour, appropriate to your weapon size, one additional time, regardless of which of these options you choose. 

Now and Forever: You are joined by a young Flare Child retainer, who is perfectly loyal and who trusts you with their life. If you die, they immediately gain their A template in Folk Hero, and your gear (if appropriate to the circumstances of your death). If you want them to, they can also gain your name and heroic reputation, Dread Pirate Roberts style. 

One Life: Your dignity is unimpeachable, and your cold and bottomless hatred is supplemented by an unassailable reserve of calm. You can choose to be unaffected by pain, which gives you +1 damage resistance against all physical damage, and makes you immune to torture. You are also immune to mental effects of all kinds, unless you wish it otherwise. Once ever, if you die, you can instead choose to survive with 0 hp. The City will fall.

The Imagoes

 

Trace a line in the shape of a human body. Generally they are life-sized or slightly larger, but there is no firm rule. Compose its interior space with whatever you wish - what you use to compose the interior is of no importance whatever. If you trace the line on a brick wall, the interior space is composed in brick. If you bring flowers to decorate the surface, the interior space is composed in flowers on brick. If you smear it with shit or with quicklime, if you put down wire inside it, if you paint the interior surface in bright colours - none of this is important. Then you erase the line.

The imagoes are bad omens, and can be dangerous. People shouldn't make them, but they sometimes do. Sometimes the process doesn't work (it is not clear why), but when it does the number of imagoes in the world increases by one, and, as far as anyone knows, this number never drops. 

You would see a shape on the wall, or against the sky, or in the rock wall of a cave, layered across the bad surface of the wild grass on the hill - the shape is of a human, and its interior space will show some other surface, irregular, not congruent with its surroundings. A patch of brick in the sky, of stone on the surface of the sea, of flowers and softly curling spring leaves on a sheet of perfect glass. They move about, change their postures, appear and disappear, when no one can see them. If you look at them you get an odd vertigo; something like seeing paintings in caves from tens of thousands of years ago. Or maybe something like seeing the dead body of someone you knew in life, reduced to object-hood. Or like looking up into the sky and feeling yourself oddly vulnerable to its monumental scale - not only the sheet of blue, but the freezing volume of vacuum that it covers. 

There are more of them underground than there are on the surface. They appear to be very old - cryptic references to the imagoes can be found throughout recorded history. The tracing around the body can be done as well with a stick of charcoal as it can with a freshly cut pen-tip. 

If you can see an imago, you have CHAR mod rounds (min 0) before it starts doing permanent damage. Once this process begins, you test CHAR every round you are exposed, or permanently lose 1 from each of your mental stats for each failure. Closing your eyes or looking away protects you. If you touch the surface of an imago, you lose (or it steals) one point of max HP per turn with no save. 

Everyone knows not to look at, touch, or acknowledge imagoes. The polite thing to do is to turn your back, and pretend that the thing is not there. Maybe, when you turn back around, it will be gone. 

Some Postural Diagrams

Yesterday I put together some preparatory diagrams for the Image Game, working through the basic 'loop' of play, in terms of the selection, synthesising, and deployment of images. This resulted in some excellent stress testing in the glog server, as well as a good deal of spirited play between the worthies. 

This is turn got me thinking about the postures of the game - the building blocks that players internalise (usually as children), and which constitute its semi-formal 'grammar'. There are basic postures and advanced postures, as detailed below. 

The most important posture is also the most fundamental and straight forward. An image makes a claim (the claim can be just about anything), and a second adversarial image attempts to deconstruct or nullify that claim. Crudely, it might match or cancel a claim, but what players really want to do if show that a claim was always actually something else, ideally its opposite. 

This sounds complicated, but it's a common critical posture in our own academic/theoretical and contemporary art cultures - it's the reason many 20th century theorists are so obsessed with the rhetorical form that asserts that something is both x and not x. It is a very powerful critical move to assert this convincingly, because it puts the reader (or your adversary, if you're a Citizen) in the position of trying to work your apparently contradictory position out from first principles, ie they must demonstrate that they are already behind you. 

A claim of this kind can (and nearly always does) have content; it is not only a formal stance or posture, and is contingent on what it actually advances - nonetheless, the postural flex or terror move of asserting that something is both x and not x cannot only be understood in terms of content. 

I am not claiming (and do not believe) that these assertions are vapid or cynical - critical writing that advances past a certain threshold of abstraction often needs to invent concepts and small, contingent language games to get at its object. I likewise do not think of the Image Game as vapid or cynical (you might have a different opinion); it is imagined as a complex cultural artefact that serves a social function, but which also gives its players (the entire population of the Citizenry) a very dangerous set of critical/discursive tools that allows them to see 'around' and 'through' the cultural claims and norms of their subject states. Contemporary art training and practice is a complicated thing, tied into various colonial and class terror systems (see, as just one example among hundreds, the recent artwashing of the atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon), but also capable of producing images and concepts of great and lasting beauty. YYMV on whether you think that 'the production of images of great and lasting beauty' is encouraged or hindered by the labyrinthine critical and discursive machinery that has come to characterise the production of sophisticated contemporary art. 

So, what you are trying to do is assert your claim convincingly, such that your adversary (and any witnesses) say something like 'yes, that's true.' And what they are trying to do is advance their own position such that they demonstrate, convincingly, that your position was in fact analogous to their position all along, and to do this in a public setting, such that everyone else knows it, and back and forth it goes.  

More diagrams!