Sunday 3 March 2019

Dreamlands D&D

Amongst grown up game players there is often great nostalgia for a time when we used to ride our bikes around to our friends’ houses and play RPGs all day and night. As adults this type of gaming is often lost to us as so called responsibilities eat up so much of our time. As a result, scheduling regular RPG sessions with the same group can be challenging. In the extreme.

This being the case, I’m always interested in framing devices for games that allow drop in and out play such as the famous West Marches or  the Flailsnails model. My own Grim North game was by, I hesitate to say design... means of fortunate accident known to function this way. New options are always welcome in this regard, who knows when they may come in handy.

Over the winter I had chance to read Ben L’s excellent zine Through Ultan’s Door which depicts a dungeon in his campaign world derived from HP Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. Up until this point I was not familiar with those works. Upon reading Ben’s zine I immediately consumed “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and was captivated.

The Dreamlands: Legit D&D as fuck


For I had found, probably a hundred years after everyone else, a perfect framing device for drop in D&D (or the other role playing game of your preference.) As dreamers the PCs need only to breach the wall of sleep in order to partake in fantastic adventures that are limited by only the imagination. Everyone knows that dreams are flighty and inconsistent, fantastic and often bizarre. PCs enteringvthe lands of dreams could easily move from one fantastic episode to the next withoutt there being any break in the verisimilitude of the campaign. If Dave and Andy can’t make it this week because they’ve got parents night or karate class, it is easily explained by their PCs fading back to the waking world and they can slot back into whatever is going on once they return to the land of dreams.

Judge this by its cover and try and withhold your joy...


I feel like I could go on at length about this, and I might, but I see the land of dreams as a Matrix like environment. Not every dreamer has enough control over their dream state to be an adventurer. Some dream mundane dreams of carpentry and scribe work. Others dream themselves fantastic heroes or terrible villains. Creatures from nightmare, self aware dream beings, gods and devils abound. Essentially anything goes as you pass from one dream realm to another. Want to run a series of unrelated modules? That’s fine. Slumbering Ursine Dunes to Deep Carbon Observatory to the Isle of Dread is no drama. Want to have some sort of over arching meta plot for the PCs to thwart? Well, I urge that you don’t, we prefer the emergent stories we get from playing old school rogueish games around these parts but if that’s your thing then have at it.

This has got legs in my opinion... Remind me to tell you about the Tavern at the End of the Multiverse some time too.

8 comments:

  1. I like the sound of this idea, and as a player, I'd probably jump at the chance if it were presented to me.

    I feel like this idea makes one thing easier for you as a GM, but also makes one demand of you too. Yes, you get to have episodic play with no reason to try create serial connections between the adventures (in fact, you have a good reason NOT to.)

    But the demand it makes is that these better be some out-there, gonzo dreamland adventures. It's not just because that helps fulfill your premise, it's because there's like a trade-off with your players - you're not going to let them "go back to" things they find important like they could in a sandbox, but in return, Mr Toad's Ride will indeed be Wild.

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    1. I agree wholeheartedly that these sessions suggest the fantastic in the extreme, and so I would have to strive hard to deliver. The fantasmagorical nature of Dreamlands adventuring appeals to me in the sense that it is almost the absolute reverse of the dark, low fantasy stuff I normally run. It would definitely be a challenge for me.

      However, there would always be scope to “go back to” things as there would have to be some degree of permanence to the Dreamlands, at least in certain areas, as for example recurring dreams are definitely a thing, and from a selfish point of view I would not want to discard material whole cloth once it has been encountered.

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  2. The idea of pick-up game PCs and dreamers is great! Such a simple idea, but so much potential! It cuts out a lot of the "how do these characters now each other and why are they together" problem, too.

    If you liked DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath, I heartily recommend "The Dreamquest of Vellitt Boe" by Kij Johnson, a modern revisiting of Kadath from the pov of a native of the Dreamlands.

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    1. Thanks, I’ll definitely check that out

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  3. My group in the 90s and early 00s tried this with Over the Edge. It worked quite well. OTE sorta inspires unusual/eerie games IMO, and I used it more for settings of my own creation than the provided Al Amarja. Sometimes you could go back, sometimes you couldn't. Dream logic can justify a great many things. While I was inspired by the Dreamlands supplement for Call of Cthulhu, the biggest inspiration was a friend who did this very thing in a Flashing Blades campaign. It provided a very entertaining 'side trek', before our characters woke with terrible hangovers and put it all down to an opium dream and bad liquor.

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    1. ...so I see no reason it can't be used with other games, e.g. a "D&D". It is something I had thought of revisiting with "Through Ultan's Door", but my IRL group is a bit overbooked with games to run. It might work with some online friends though. I've been looking at the Whitechapel supplement for 5E (or Whispers in the Dark), and thought that it might actually fit in well with that.

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    2. Wow, have no idea why that appears multiple times! Sorry!

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