Every time the Dreamland Discord or the Dreamland Facebook group reaches another 25 members, I write another Dreamland RPG blogpost like this one. This particular post was written in celebration of reaching 750 members on the Facebook group. If you’re interested in more long-form Dreamland info, please join the groups, and you’ll also be able to vote on what I post here next.
“‘I want you. I want your high spots. I want everything that’s made you happy and everything that’s hurt you bad. I want your first girl. I want that shiny bicycle. I want that licking. I want that pinhole camera. I want Betty’s legs. I want the blue sky filled with stars. I want your mother’s death. I want your blood on the cobblestones. I want Mildred’s mouth. I want the first picture you sold. I want the lights of Chicago. I want the gin. I want Gwen’s hands. I want your wanting me. I want your life. Feed me, baby, feed me.”
—Fritz Leiber, The Girl with the Hungry Eyes
There are creatures—if one can call them creatures—more powerful than any Dreamland dragon or demon. Some call them the Other Gods, some call them Great Old Ones, and dreamers call them Nightmares. Ordinary Dreamlanders pray to the Great Ones to save them from such forces, but weary sages and magicians know the truth: Nightmares are far stronger than the gods.
Nightmares are omnipotent and perhaps omnipresent beings who have reality-altering powers equal to or greater than that of dreamers. Each is tied to one or more of the Pillars of Dreamland—often Loathing or Mystery, but sometimes Faraway or Passion —and their attention can be drawn by calamitous Pillar Breaks in their domain. In addition to being able to destroy large swaths of Dreamland, each Nightmare can Curse dreamers, thereby manifesting in the waking world to cause doom.
Abhumans sometimes worship Nightmares with human sacrifice, and some Nightmares can turn humans into special abhumans who serve them blindly. However, there is little evidence that most Nightmares can even distinguish between humans and abhumans.
Since Nightmares’ manifestations often kill everyone on an entire continent, many living Dreamland cultures know nothing of them; other places, like the Five (formerly Six) Kingdoms, have the fortune or misfortune of having experienced just a bit of their power. Some Nightmares lie quiescent, only affecting those foolish enough to approach them, but others spread continuously once they appear, ravening from city to city like a disease. Only the infinite size of Dreamland (or, say the pious, the mercy of the Great Ones) has so far prevented the infinite malice of Nightmares from corrupting everything. Regardless, knowing intellectually that some other part of the world may survive is of little comfort to Dreamlanders being slaughtered by a Nightmare, turned into acres of bloody hamburger or squirming slime along with their city, their civilization, and everyone they have ever known.
Little is written about Nightmares, for people fear that to even mention them might bring their attention. These are a few of the attested entities whose names are written on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron, in the libraries of Babel, and other places heavy with knowledge. However, these are by no means all of the Nightmares in existence.
NIGHTMARES OF LOATHING
The archetypal Other Gods or Old Ones or ancient lore, Nightmares of Loathing are the most likely to have a monstrous physical form. Squirming masses of tentacles and wormlike tails, gigantic insects that leave a trail of hungry spawn in their wake, blind eyeless giants with greedy mouthes and the claws of savage beasts…these are the shapes of Loathing. But Loathing can also be something as subtle as an unearthly color that mutates and feeds on living beings, or a beautiful idol that drives those who see it to madness. Whatever their shape, they leave behind nothing but a trail of mangled corpses and entire landscapes reshaped into revolting corruption.
* Azathoth, the Daemon-Sultan
* Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos
* Noth-Yidik, the Star-Spawn
* Hlo-Hlo, the Spider God
NIGHTMARES OF MYSTERY
Mystery means darkness, silence and the unknown. The dusty stone and bronze idols of the gods of heaven are merely masks beneath which Dreamlanders propitiate Nightmare. Shadows with thousands of grasping hands which crawl across the landscape turning everything to dust, inhuman scribes for whom the world and its inhabitants are merely a book to be put away when its story is done, a skeleton with a scythe mercilessly cutting down empires and lives: these are a few of the shapes of Mystery. But the horrors of Time and Death also dwell in the little things: the shape crawling out from the darkness under the bed, the thing pushing itself through a keyhole, your imaginary friend from childhood finally showing its true face.
* Hypnos, Lord of Sleep
* Lathi, Eidolon of a Thousand Wonders
* Death, the Merciless One
* Trogool, the Thing Which is Neither God Nor Beast
NIGHTMARES OF FARAWAY
A seductive beauty, a spellbinding weirdness, is part of Nightmares of the Faraway. Some may be terrifying (a monstrous potter that blindly crushes and reshapes the clay of life, a cluster of swollen mouthes at the bottom of a well that exhale an intoxicating miasma) but others are surprisingly beautiful, taking forms such as an ornate pattern of fractals, a self-replicating crystal latticework insinuating itself in the walls of a city, or a lovely flowering plant. Nightmares of the Faraway grant your dearest wishes in a way that breaks your heart and saps your will to live. They reshape the world in a wild dance of chaos, heedless of the borders between cities, minds, bedchambers or the flesh of living beings.
* Bokrug, the Water-Lizard
* Duth, the Idol at World’s End
* Hydra, the Great Consciousness
The powers and game statistics of Nightmares (both specifically and as a group, since they share common traits) will be described in later Dreamland writings. I’ll also be running Dreamland playtests which involve Nightmares, please sign up for one when they’re announced!