Revision as of 17:03, 2 March 2010

Visions

Description

Visions are the natural inhabitants of the Dreaming, and are thought of as dreams themselves. Visions guard the Dreaming against outsiders. They take an additional wound when struck by essence damage.

Beginning as a Vision

If you are playing a Vision, your character will either be a wanderer who has just come here from some other part of the country, or a newly created Vision who was just given birth by the Dreaming. New Visions do not know the current events of the Dreaming and must learn in-game about the presence of Fae. Note that many Visions dislike Fae and view their presence in the Dreaming as a kind of intrusion, though they are for the most part willing to put up with the Fae until they can reclaim their homeland.

On Visions

July 23, 1852. Journal of Archilino Dulcinari, (d. 1836) former member of the Roman Catholic Church, Official scribe of the Italian High Shaper.

Visions are an interesting specimen, perhaps the most interesting specimen that I have seen in this new world. Visions are not born like you and I, in our home plane. They are brought into being by the will of the Dreaming itself. Sometimes they are born for apparent reasons, like decay within the dream country, sometimes for no perceivable reason at all. It is their function to maintain the dreamworld. It is necessary for the Dreaming to continuously modify and reshape itself, as this plane is far more malleable than ours, and the agents through which this is done are the Visions. They serve a secondary function, as well, depending on the vision, in the form of quantifying, experimenting, and interpreting the vast amounts of data that they receive from the dreams of "wakes". Recently, they have adjusted to fit a third function, a function much like the antibodies in our body, fighting impurities in the Dreaming itself.

All Visions are shapers of the Dreaming, and the individual dreams of "wakes". Thus, visions are known from time to time to fabricate dream visions in the subconscious of other inhabitants of the Dreaming.

All visions are made of the Prime Material of the Dreaming, called Essence. If one can refine the metals of the Dreaming into a weapon crafted of Essence, it will severely damage a vision.

All Visions tend to share a custodianship for the dreaming, and most will support a Shaper. However, Visions are frequently xenophobic and will demand that this Shaper be a Vision, or at the very least a Dead God.

The Dreams of Visions

It is assumed that most of the time that a vision spends off-stage and out-of-game, they are in a sort of between-worlds zone where they become the Dreams of the waking world. What exactly does this mean?

When a wake goes to sleep, their mind drifts away from their body. Seemingly effortlessly, it crosses through the mists and into the Dreaming. There, it wanders aimlessly through the Dreamscape, eternal visitors and tourists incapable of resting or staying in one place for too long. Despite the tireless travel, the mind is not fatigued, but rather, invigorated and rejuvenated by its glimpse at the Waking World’s sister plane. Most of this voyage is unfortunately not remembered upon return to the familiar shores of consciousness.

While in the Dreaming, wakes often encounter Visions and other dreams. Visions have the talent of stepping inside a Wake’s consciousness and briefly crafting their reality. This can take place in two main ways.

A Vision is capable of walking with the Wake and describing a scene in a way that it becomes real to him or her. The Vision shares the point of view of the Wake for a time, and then departs. They will walk together for a while as the Vision narrates: “There is a bucket by your bed and a bat at the bottom of it. The bat is covered with ants. You are horrified.” Occasionally this narrative takes place in the first person.

While “phased out”, the vision is incorporeal. While in this state, he or she will skip from mind to mind, sometimes merely keeping pace with one wake, sometimes jumping from dream to dream like a stone skipping on the water. Within a mind, the Vision is the master-painter, a psychedelic director, and for a short time, a part of the Wake’s internal consciousness.

While within the dreams of wakes, a Vision has a fleeting glimpse of that person’s mind. This glimpse leads to curiosity, but Wakes do not stay in the Dreaming long enough for to satisfy a Vision's questions. The way that Wakes experience the world is entirely different from Visions. For a Vision, it’s somewhat like looking into a kaleidoscope, but in addition to seeing colors and shapes, the Vision sees contradictory opinions, memories and emotions all blended into one strange impression. It is a much more contradictory mode of experience than a Vision can imagine. When retracting from this image and returning to the Dreaming, the Vision must return to a world with fewer rules, less structure, and less tangibility. This can be frustrating, but it often provides a sense of purpose and direction.

The way that a Vision interacts with Wakes is often a component part of that Vision’s personality. Some visions are called nightmares, and feel the greatest fulfillment from Dreams filled with horror and adrenaline. Some call themselves incubi or succubi, and enjoy dreams of an ‘indulgent’ nature. Most visions prefer to pick a specific emotion or concept to center a Dream around.

It is thought that Visions who spend too much time in Dreams can become trapped there, staring abysmally into the confusing mind of wakes. Meanwhile, Visions who do not spend enough time in Dreams find themselves without direction, without motivation, and occasionally, without emotion. These Visions seem to have lost a part of themselves and can often benefit from an extended meditation within the Dreamscape of foreigners.

Some Visions wonder if they are necessarily the “top level” of unconsciousness. Dreams lose consciousness too, and when they die, their essence is temporarily in Void. While they slumber, are the spirits of Visions being explored by some beings in the Void? None remember long enough to tell.

Fae

Description

Fae are a magical and mysterious people displaced from their homeland, Faerie. Fae are refugees in the Dreaming, hiding here while their homeland is consumed by war. Fae take an additional wound when struck by iron damage.

Beginning as a Fae

If you are playing a Fae, you are a stranger in a strange land. Some two hundred years ago, during the Waking World’s steam age, you left your homeland. You may have lived in the Waking World during the time the Fae call the Great Fade, when the last magic in the world faded out and all Fae went color-blind. You might have lived in Faerie, the Fae’s homeland, when the Fae were forced them out of their homeland. Or perhaps you were born in the Dreaming and have never known either Faerie or the Waking World. Now you wander the Dreaming, looking for a place to call home.

On Fae

Welcome friend, sit down and chat with me. The world of the dreaming is a rough place- sometimes it seems so drab and bleak. This place makes me miss my home more and more every day. But this is our home now, and I suppose all we can do is defend this, our last stronghold.

I am Tak, a Fae. I used to be called a Satyr, but after we came through the Rift to the Dreaming, our forms ended up being a bit more mundane. Now none of us have horns or wings or hooves - you can barely tell any of us apart! Me and my kin live in the woods here. We used to live with the other Fae, but the city world is drab and depressing and the in fighting is even worse.

Once, long ago, we lived in the land of Faerie where everything was bright and colorful, the world oozed magic, and what humankind viewed as impossibilities were everyday occurrences. Those days are gone now. We were driven from our home by the beasts of technology. Their golems, beast of steel and iron, forged into the shape of man. It is said they made their way into the great labyrinth, imprisoning our immortal king. Now our great land, once an endless forest, is a desolate desert or mines, trains, and other steam work abominations. It is less our world now then theirs. After the invasion, many of our kind died. Those of us who survived escaped through the Rifts to the Dreaming only to fight amongst ourselves.

And then there were our cousins in the Waking World. About the same time that the machines began their descent into our homeland, the Waking World was experiencing something called the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps it was this revolution which caused the machines to attack our world. Or perhaps both the Industrial Revolution and the invasion of faerie came from the same source. Steam work, strip mining, great clockwork beasts that reaped the earth and ripped its bones out of the screaming ground. The Waking World is black and white now- we called this loss of color the Great Fade. Humans still see the color for some reason, but I don’t think it’s there, not like it used to be. And with color faded magic, our very lifeblood. It was too sad to stay. So we left.

The Distant Horizon of Faerie

The Faerie ffolke have many things about them which seem strange to those that know only the Waking World. There are many traditions, rituals, and ideas that are bafflingly foreign to mortals, their gods, and their dreams.

For one, there are many diseases which plague Faerie. Humans are used to diseases which physically attack the body. The Faerie have diseases like these – the (un)common cold, hayfever, tourette’s syndrome, and the bubonic plague, to name a few in common. They also have an entirely different family of diseases which are affective in nature. These diseases effect the mind and the emotions, not the body. One example of this disease is the Scarlet Rage, a sickness that is perforates the mind and agitates it towards violence. Much like one might catch a cold by not putting on a coat before going outside, people catch the Scarlet Rage by feeling overwhelmingly frustrated or hopeless.

This disease is common especially among Redcaps. When affected by extreme cases of Scarlet Rage, the sick Faerie sees everything with a red filter over it. People seem to be indistinguishable black silhouettes. Only those that the Faerie really trusts seem to be in focus, and then only briefly. When confronted with one of these hateful black shadows, the Faerie is unable to withhold from violence. The Scarlet Rage is only curable by deep focused meditation, spread out over a long time. Violence, unfortunately, only inflames the disease, but with the brief-lived satisfaction of scratching poison ivy.

When the Faerie came to the Dreaming, it seemed apparent that other races could get the Scarlet Rage (as well as other affective diseases, such as Sadarrhea, the Inappropriate Giggles, and Chronic Goth Syndrome) as well. Many beings laughed at this notion – those silly Fae were thinking that people’s natural emotions were a contagious disease! --And perhaps that is true. But still, the Fae Elders warn against being consumed with violence – it does not cure the Scarlet Rage, it only makes it worse. You may destroy yourself, in time. Ffolklore tells a few stories of Faerie that succumbed to this rage and became beasts themselves.

The Redcaps instead hold that this disease is a sacred tradition called Bloodlust. When at the height of Bloodlust, a redcap will drink the blood of his foes and dip his cap in it, making it as red as his anger. This is a spiritual and personal moment characterized by pride, glory, hubris, and a sense of communion with oneself.

The Fae have no notions of many things that are natural to the joyless people of the Mortal Realm. Fae do not dream, and Fae do not think about the Afterlife. They do, however, have a few emotions that mortals do not have. One particular emotion is called amaloom. This feeling is a sense of distance from home and deep homesickness which words cannot describe. When a Faerie notices that another Fae is feeling particularly amaloomful, they will try to help out. The most common way of doing this is by giving the amaloomy Fae a gift that reminds them of Faerie. Leaves and flowers are common, but poems, drawings, kisses, and dirty limericks are also popular choices. Many Fae report feeling Amaloom in since they moved to the Dreaming. Oddly enough, some think this emotion may also be a disease which can be transmitted to the youth. Many Fae who were born in the Dreaming feel Amaloom as well, but have difficulty identifying or explaining it.

Dead Gods

Description

Dead Gods were once worshiped in the Waking World, but their followings have been lost. With few earthly worshipers, they are sentenced to wait in the Dreaming until The End of the World.

Beginning as a Dead God

If you are playing a Dead God, come up with some background information about your life. You were worshiped in the Waking World at one point, probably by a long-lost culture such as the Babylonians, Sumerians, the Celts, the Native Americans, or any number of African or South American cultures. Or perhaps you're a newer God, someone who was worshiped in more recent times. Once you were no longer worshiped or believed in, you lost your power and drifted into a long coma. Some time later, (could be a year, could be a few millennia) you awoke in the Dreaming. This place is a kind of purgatory to you - you're waiting for someone to worship you again, or Ragnarok, the time when all Gods will walk the Earth again. You do not need to be a historically accurate-god; you can make up a God, but the culture you come from must be real, or at least sound real.

On Dead Gods

I am Koracotl, Forgotten Toltec God of medicine and healing. One day, I shall return.

One day, I shall return. That’s the phase you will repeat over and over again as a Dead God. It gives you hope. Sometimes, a little hope is all you need to go through with your day-to-day life. Sometimes, all the hope in the world isn’t enough.

Originally, we were all real Gods. We were worshiped by Sumerians. We were worshiped in Babylonia. We were worshiped in the dark parts of Africa and South America. The early peoples of North America. The Druids of Europe. Scores of others. But since our glory days, we have been cast aside as false or just plain forgotten. With no faith left in our power, we come here through a painfully long slumber.

They call us the Dead Gods. And however depressing it is, we are Dead, in a way. Of course, it is a purely mortal concept that life stops at death. There is hope- if they begin worshiping us again in the Waking World, we’ll get a chance to return. And when cometh Ragnarok, the end of the world, we will walk the Earth again as the Gods we were. And are.

When we come to the Dreaming, we fall into a deep coma-like sleep. This sleep can last thousands of years if we have no will to come back. When we finally wake up, we are powerless husks of our old selves and the world has changed so much we doubt they’ll ever worship us again. It’s tragic, really. We’ve serve our purpose, and the Dreaming is like the waiting room before we get our power again. But that doesn’t mean we’re passive residents here, we avidly participate in the politics and drama of the Dreaming, we just don’t feel it’s our destiny.

We get along fairly well with the Visions, as they do a good job of taking care of us until we can return to our full power. No specific problem with the Fae either; they’ve lost their homeland too. The Lost Souls are a sad people I don’t entirely understand, but we, of all people, can sympathize with wanderers who haven’t reached their goal.

Now the trouble with us is that we’re pretty easy to kill while we’re on the Dreaming. If you cut us with a weapon, it challenges our power, decreasing our Faith. Once all our Faith is gone, we disappear from the Dreaming to float through the Void of nonexistence. Our curse is that we always come back.

Every one of us has an Altar, somewhere. It could be an elaborate temple or just a spot in the woods. It’s a good idea to hide your altar from everyone except your close allies, as if someone knows where your Altar is, they have a certain degree of power over you- they can cut you back out of the Dreaming when you materialize, they can ambush you when you are being worshipped, and they can sure-as-Ragnarok make you wish you could move the damn thing.

That’s another trouble with us: all our power comes from the Faith that people have in us. In order to gain more, we need people to come to our altar and worship us for a while. It’s a good idea to create a Verse that your followers can repeat over and over again to glorify and praise of your might, wisdom, power, et cetera. Most of our powers do not serve ourselves, but our followers, creating resources, protecting them from combat, that sort of thing. But this works out because without our followers, we are nothing.

So we sit and pass time in the Dreaming. Some mortals believe in a place called Purgatory where those who have not succeeded or failed in life are destined to wait until they can rejoin their afterlife. Maybe it is the mortal’s relatively recent belief in Purgatory that has caused us to awaken here. Maybe it is the destiny of all Gods to die and wait here, as karmic punishment for being the greatest beings in the universe.

The Divine Brotherhood

The Gods of the waking world thought themselves to be without rival until they learned that their power was equivalent to their followers’ faith in them. This sudden vulnerability came late in life. Much like a football player who receives a back injury and must forsake his destiny, the Husks of Gods have a sense of greatness that circumstance has whisked from them.

One of the most daunting thoughts that most Gods have is the notion of unimportance. For their entire existence in the Waking World, the Gods thought themselves the masters and creators of the universe. They may have known of other pantheons, but each God regarded them as false – mere pretenders and false idols. Most Gods believed that their pantheon was unique, cosmically important. Many believed that members of their pantheon did indeed create the universe.

And though all these nations may be true, in the Dreaming, the graveyard of the Gods, they face threats to their own faith in themselves. Gods are suddenly confronted with others of their previous stature. They see mortals who outrank them, and beings which do not fit into their models of the universe (“Who are all these foreigners in Morpheus’ realm?” some Greek gods ask themselves with a combination of frustration and disbelief).

The universe seems to be a strange and alien place to a God who has freshly woken from the Sleep of the Forgotten. Furthermore, there are other gods which could not possibly exist! There are even Gods who now walk the Dreaming which were momentarily worshiped by school children, the insane, and fictional characters in books! If Gods are actually the lords of the universe, how is it that every time mortals meet in mass, they have the potential to spawn another deity, another seemingly omnipotent being who, if even temporarily, seems to them to be the One Powerful Essence in the sky?

As such, many Gods regard humans with a mix of confusion and awe. These creatures are clearly more powerful than the Gods first thought – powerful enough to craft a being as perfect as the Gods themselves! And on the other hand, it is almost humiliating to take orders from them. They are mortals, after all.

Gods are often struck with pangs of desire to belong to a pantheon. The Gods, over time, can learn to see their peers in the Dreaming not as competitors, but as members of the same family. The interactions and relations with that family, no matter how mundane, are an important part of that God’s personality – a living mythology.

Some Gods take it quite personally when a mortal worships a god that they don’t consider part of their pantheon. When receiving faith from this mortal, it will feel dirty and impure. The faith will also feel tainted if the mortal’s heart was not into worship when praying to that God.

Gods in many Dream Countries have created a ritual which welcomes a god into the pantheon of that Dream Country. This usually involves a sort of initiation rite in which the god is given the faith of the mortals of that Dream Country and then slain by the other Gods. If the neonate God returns to the Dreaming and is reborn in a day’s time, it means that the God is accepted into the Pantheon. If the God fails to materialize, it means that fate has chosen that this God should move on.

Other Gods form smaller pantheons, consisting of only a few of their divine brethren. Everyone in the pantheon must select a mentor (or parent), an ally, and a nemesis from within the pantheon. These relationships often do not make sense, but their existence is crucial to the Gods notion of purpose. These Gods then try to play out mythology and maintain these relations with the other divine beings of their extended family.

Until a God belongs to a pantheon, they are permeated with a feeling of meaninglessness and a sense of being out-of-context.

Lost Soul

Description

Lost Souls once lived in the Waking World, but died and got lost on their way to the Afterlife. Now they reside in the Dreaming. Lost Souls take an additional wound when struck with silver damage.

Beginning as a Lost Soul

If you are playing a Lost Soul, you were once a mortal that lived in the Waking World. After your death, you wandered towards a distant light-- usually, mortals are guided to the afterlife, but since the Labyrinth has been overrun, you had no guide to bring you there. You wandered off the path and ended up in the Dreaming. You have fragmentary memory of your life. There are large holes in your memory. You may sense that you may have some purpose to fulfill, but you can’t remember what it is. Some Lost Souls see their time in the Dreaming as another chance to live. Some, however, are very depressed that they cannot be where they belong- their afterlife. Lost Souls do not always look like they did at the end of their life- so you could have died at age 75 but appear as a 22 year old.

On Lost Souls

When the car hit me, I died, though my "life" never ended. I believe that while on Earth, my name was Jacob Cadmire, I walked with my wife along a...beach? Now I walk along side gods and walking dreams. They call me Drathor. This is my story, though the details are foggy and few ever since entering this country.

Let me start over.

You're hungry for something other than food. You're restless but you can't physically sleep. Welcome to your new home.

You came here through those mists. That cloudy, immeasurable road filled with cold, still air and the echoes of horrific laughter? You didn't hear it? Maybe it was just me, then. And they call us Lost Souls. As if we had any other place to go. We're here. Call it trapped, call it blessed, but there's no getting out.

You've come here just like I did. That stuff about the car? I'm not too sure - I just kind of hope that, you know, the car was what killed me rather than who ever it was that was chasing me. Look, I don't know about the afterlife, I've never seen Heaven or Hell, and whenever I mention it to one of my new comrades, they give this sly, sarcastic smile, like they know something that we don't.

I don't know why there are dead humans wandering this...dreamscape thing. Think of it as you will, but whether this "place" is the end of your journey as humans, a punishment for what you've done, or your last chance at redemption, you're not leaving the same way you came in.

If we die here, we stop "being" for a while, but then we come back. Immortality's a sugar-coated imprisonment, I'd say. In the transit between the Waking World and this one, I lost something - my hopes, the memory of my wife's face, the sound of my favorite song. We keep killing these... Monsters, and they can kill us...but then we both come back.

I think maybe it's some kind of games that these Visions are playing. They're an odd bunch, like ants that are never out of touch with their omniscient queen. The Gods? Pompous manipulators, but at least they're comforting, I'll give 'em that. The Fae are okay, I guess.

So, anyway, call me Drathor. I'd shake your hand, but there's no real feeling in either of us. Don't mind all those fuzzy images of people walking around - they're still alive. I think. Well, see ya 'round, watch your back, because there's some crazy stuff to look forward to.

Dreams of the Dead

Many humans who have found themselves between worlds have a difficult time adapting to their new plane. It can be a confusing and disorienting place. Many ideas such as eating, sleeping, and dreaming are things which mortals think is essential and universal, but are in fact are only facets of their home plane, the Waking World.

The most striking differences between the Dreaming and their old hometown is the distorted sense of time. Days seem to drift by without notice, and at the hour when people first start going to sleep, the Dreaming slows down as if it is magnifying its focus. At no point, however, does time actually seem to slow down or speed up.

Upon entering the Dreaming, Mortals are struck with a frustrating sense of simultaneous bizarreness, coincidence, and nostalgia. They are finally seeing with fresh eyes a realm which they only know by intuition and fragments of memory. Humans spend a third of their lives in Dream, but few have the presence of mind to look around. Now that they are here, they can finally take a close look at what has been in their peripheral vision for decades. They find that they often hear voices, feel intuitions, and get flashes of knowledge or memory that would have made them think they were crazy in the real world. They also have trouble distinguishing between internal and external monologue, so many humans find themselves speaking their mind or babbling without noticing.

Mortals spend much of their time pacing the vaguely familiar fields and halls of the Dreaming. They like to observe people’s lives played out in dream. Many Lost Souls notice that Wakes have the same dream every night. These are people who haven’t died yet, of course, but seem to act like they have. These people go to sleep every night and have another dream of class, work, an uneventful night at home, partying with friends, and an eventual sleep which transitions perfectly into them waking up in the Real World.

This is a troubling notion. These poor wakes seem to have little ambition – even their wildest dreams just take them to their job in the morning. Furthermore, they don’t ever notice that what they are living is dream. Lost Souls wonder how much of their past life they have spent in a similar haze.

Lost Souls also pick up on cultural undercurrents and archetypes that they were previously unaware of but were vastly influenced by in life. The natural cycles of the seasons, the unconscious cultural energy behind popular music, the themes and emotions of each holiday – these things are enormously present to Lost Souls. They in many ways replace the vague sense of purpose and pack-mentality that many of them had before Death. Most Lost Souls find themselves getting really deeply into the Christmas spirit, the Easter spirit, and even the Rosh Hashanah spirit, even if they didn’t previously belong to a religion which celebrated it.

The presence of the Dead Gods in the Dreaming is a wholly unsettling notion to the Lost Souls. The gods cause the Lost Souls to question their mortal faith, and thereby question what really was in store for them in the afterlife.

When talking to gods, Lost Souls are filled with a sense of wonder and awe, like they are staring into a pool that is far deeper, older, and more mysterious than they can fathom. Simultaneously, they often feel compelled to follow the advice of the gods. The gods’ wisdom resonates inside a Lost Soul and can cause him to become enthralled by the gods’ words.

Some Lost Souls are angry with the gods, seeing the gods as challenges to their world-view. These Lost Souls have difficulty giving faith to any god that they do not personally commune with through intimacy, discussion, or suffering. When a Lost Soul falls in love with a God, it can be one of the deepest and most profound feelings the Lost Soul can feel. Gods, unfortunately, rarely return the favor.