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Dream Army

Genre

Fantasy

Theme

Modern Fantasy/Horror

Dream Army is set in the modern world, for all intents and purposes, right now.  Imagine that you are one of only a few who wake up one dark morning.   You find that the world has stopped, that almost everyone else is still sleeping, and that while the world wastes away in sleep, nightmares walk the Earth, feeding.  You are one of only a few people who are awake, and you find that your dreams, which now come to you while awake, give you power to resist the darkness.

Background

 You have yet to find anyone who really knows what's going on, but you are beginning to put things together.  Days before the Slumber began, there were terrible storms sweeping different parts of the world.  Many blamed it on global warming, but in the background, you remember a few climatologists saying that the storms were impossible.  It was as if the sky was too full, too wild and alive; as if the sea was rising up to swallow the land.

Then everything went dark.  The power went out in most places, and everyone assumed it was on somewhere else.  It took a while to realize that most of planet Earth was without electricity.  There were riots, doomsayers, cult suicides and terrorist attacks.  Though the sky lightened, the sun never shone through the clouds.  Eventually, everyone went back to sleep.

They are still asleep, but the darkness is far from quiet.

Antagonists & Conflict

 The nightmares feed on those who are asleep.  When they come, they drain life out of their victims.  A doctor's examination would tell you they are very much alive, but they look different.  Empty.  Used up.  Gray and colorless.  The victims pass from sleep into something deeper, like living bodies housing dead souls.

These nightmares take any fearsome shape the human mind can conjure up.  They are made of fear, of dread, of hopelessness.  They drink cold sweat and breathe violence.  It is as if every demon was exorcised at once from humanity, and given form, and let loose.

There is no question that the nightmares are up to something beyond their obscene feeding rituals.  They are working together.  They hunt in packs, or alone, but if you watch them (and who can look away?) they move and act with a purpose.  There is someone, out there in the dark, and whoever it is has a plan.  Some call him the Master, or call her the Mistress.  They say s/he...no, It...is behind everything.

Special Features

 Look around you - that's the level of technology.  Only, unplug everything, turn off every light switch, and blot out the sunlight in a layer of low-hanging cloud that seems, impossibly, to cover everything.  Now that's what you're dealing with.

There is no magic, but there are nightmares.  It started with your own personal fears.  They would come for you in the deepest darkness.  Mostly they made you afraid, made you remember things you wish you'd forgotten, but some had teeth.  Claws.  Knives.  Now, everyone's fears are loose.  They seem to fear only bright light, and there is precious little of that anymore - only what generators and salvaged car-batteries can provide.

There are also dreams.  You have always been a dreamer, living too much in your head, staring off into space, scribbling, doodling.  You were only interested in things no one else cared about.  Imaginary things.  Things no one would ever pay you for.  You never fit in the waking world.  As the world slumbers, it seems people like you are all that's left.

It is possible to harness your dreams, to make them manifest just as your nightmares have manifested.  It's hard as hell to do, though, and you're running out of time.  Others around you struggle to do the same thing.

PC Role

 You are a hero, or you could be.  Shit, you're one of the only ones who are even awake.  If anyone is going to do something, it has to be you, right?

Your dreams, it seems, are just as real as your nightmares.  The guy who goes to all the conventions in his Jedi robe now has Force powers and a real lightsaber - cut through a Datsun truck like butter.  The pimply kid down the street who plays D&D?  He casts spells now, like the hourglass-guy from the Dragonlance books.  The nutjob religious guy who shouts at you when you go to the mall?  He raised this woman from the dead after a nightmare got her.  And the radical Libertarian pamphleteer is building some kind of army...

The ones who are asleep are who used to be the useful ones.  The hard workers who kept their noses to the grindstone.  The up-and-comers.  The middle managers.  The Valedictorians and football players and cheerleaders and Chamber of Commerce members.  The dreamers, the losers, the dropouts are what's left.  And that's you.  But you're all that's left, and the world is getting darker by the moment.  What are you going to do about it?

Comments

Sea-of-Stars's picture

Interesting

Submitted by Sea-of-Stars on Sun, 04/10/2011 - 19:04.

It has potential. I certinly like the frame.

Heh, thanks :) It was my

Submitted by robosnake on Sun, 04/10/2011 - 20:40.

Heh, thanks :)

It was my NaNoWriMo novel a few years ago, and I've since run it as a two-part Changeling: the Lost story; it had it's genesis in a Mage: the Ascension game years before that. It's fun when these way-back entries, before we had even selected a setting or a system or anything, when for the most part entirely different people were involved, get resurrected by spam-bots.

It's definitely a very vivid,

Submitted by Magicdealer on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 08:19.

It's definitely a very vivid, engrossing concept. The idea just grabs hold of you and makes you really think about it for a minute. *shudder*

This is something I would love to see expanded on.

Well, I definitely wouldn't

Submitted by robosnake on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 23:32.

Well, I definitely wouldn't inflict my NaNo 'novel' on you, since I'd like to earn some respect, but this is definitely an idea that has stuck with me for a few years. I'm not so sure it is a game on it's own, but it worked well as a Changeling or Mage adventure, and I might do other thing with it. Cool to know I'm not the only one it grabs :)

Good questions. I left a lot

Submitted by robosnake on Sun, 11/15/2009 - 00:22.

Good questions. I left a lot open in the brief treatment but I see the gross conflicts of surviving without a lot of technology and surviving being hunted by roving nightmares. There are also subtle conflicts around staying safe or venturing out, figuring out what has caused what happened and conflict between the wakeful themselves. I also see political conflict between rival factions of geeks with superpowers, each responding to the world catastrophe very differently. The Big Bad is also out there with some kind of plan behind it all

The strengths of this setting

Submitted by chado on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 12:27.

The strengths of this setting remind me of "Wraith: The Oblivion." In other words the setting as a whole really grabs me, but I'm really curious what game play would involve.

What would players do? I'm not asking so much here about mechanics, but rather the action of the game. What's the conflict? I'm having a hard time seeing beyond 'fight the nightmares.'

Author

robosnake

Setting Concept Score

3.275
3.275
Read review by cptbeefalo
Posted 1 year 49 weeks ago
by cptbeefalo
4
4
5

The concept is not entirely novel, but well formed here. I like the idea of everyone being able to create their own powers, though that always leads to questions of "how can we nerf them to reasonable expectations?" I do like the simplicity of the concept, though that can play against us in that it doesn't always have the hook that draws in certain players. I also like the potential open-endedness of the horrors, very good. Leads to expansion packs and players coming up with good answers.

I certainly find myself inspired to make a couple characters for this system, though I can't begin to count the number of goth "Crow" types this genre SHOULD create if this really happened, heh. Part of this system that is going to be hard though, is really the power creation system. It's easy to say "you can do anything!", and very hard to quantify what happens when a lightsaber tries to cut through adamantium. *shrug* I think this could be helped by taking the lead of previous more superhero style of system like Aberrant, Trinity or Marvel Superhero, something like that.

The writing is brief, but carries the concept across. I'd like to see some more flesh on the bare bones, though, just to see some other thoughts on how we could take this concept.

Read review by Fenris
Posted 1 year 49 weeks ago
by Fenris
2
3
3

This sounds like a Stephen King hommage. Not bad all in all, but not that innovative, either.

It is a nice idea, but sufffers from a few drawbacks: First of all. people got nightmares from the things they see and know and are mostly uncreative in their fears, so realistically you would see a mot of movie monsters and the like around - movie monsters who are most likely trademarked.

The other thing I don't like is the lack of Redshirts you have in this setting which is not a good idea in a horror game. So, if the DM wants to show how scary a particular monster is, he has the only choice to severely hurt or kill a PC, and that is usualllynot the best idea.   

Read review by trinchen
Posted 1 year 50 weeks ago
by trinchen
2
3
2

Nice idea overall, but it feels a bit as if this setting doesn’t really know what it wants to be. For a horror game, super powers are pure poison, and for a super power game the general coma is a strange idea, but at least a novel one.

It is also a bit thin on explanations and details and needs more explanation about how things came to pass.

 

Read review by chado
Posted 1 year 50 weeks ago
by chado
4
3
3

As a concept Dream Army has a great deal of potential.  I really think this concept could go in some very interesting directions.  Although I like the open nature of the description, I really think some key details need to be added.  The write up for the concept is part of the reason I think some of these details are a bit vague.  

Read review by matt.banach
Posted 1 year 51 weeks ago
by matt.banach
3
4
3

I really like the big idea - a world asleep while nightmares stalk the streets.  And I like that the players could be whatever they want, as they are empowered by their dreams.

I'd like to see some more details about why this happened, or even if that is left a mystery deliberately, some more details about the Nightmares which are the antagonists.

Read review by mikeb
Posted 1 year 51 weeks ago
by mikeb
2
5
3

I definitely like this from a creativity sense. I think it would be tricky to write for though since the possibilities are really only limited by imagination.

Read review by Satyr
Posted 2 years 1 week ago
by Satyr
3
4
3

Yes, a setting were people are suddenly all alone and can watch their loved ones slowly starve in a coma would indeed be a truly horrorful occurance - desperation, isolation, solitude and especially helplessness are great topics for a horror game.

The nightmares are a neat additional threat, and can add to a certain additional horror (especially because it brings the PCs to act and do something) and it is a good way to introduce all kinds of weird appearances, so that's a good idea as well.

What I didn't like though and somewhat ruins the mood of a horror game  is the idea to give the PCs ome kind of super powers. I would also be careful to make the setting not to much focused on some kind of morals, idealising socially arkward people to be especially visionary. That sort of things often feels like a moral sledge hammer with a tad narcicism.

Read review by Zack Faust
Posted 2 years 14 weeks ago
by Zack Faust
4
4
4

I have to say first of all, damn it! I had a similiar idea in the back of my head for the past week, and you've already gone and made a setting for it, and what's more, made it much cooler! :) I love this setting, it blend mystery, horror, and fantasy all while not being in some far away land, but in our own backyard! I like it, perhabs the only problem I forsee is mechanicaly, making rules for manifesting these dream powers might be tricky. I really want to know what caused this though, what it is! All in all, very well done!