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!
It feels a bit odd to use the Other Gods as an alternate name for Nightmares, instead of an example of a Nightmare. The pattern of people turning them into some sort of grouping, including Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, and a number of other deities, has always felt strange to me, and doesn’t feel like it benefits any of the involved gods, only distracting from what makes each interesting. With all that said, this is a fantastic way of adapting the basic idea behind the Other Gods into a more general concept, and while I prefer them as a nightmare horde of grinning bat-gods, this is much more interesting than just using them as a different name for the outer gods. They tend to get overlooked when people aim to depict elements of Lovecraft’s stories, I’ve only seen them in a single piece of art, and the Cyclopean games, and as they’re the main antagonistic force of Lovecraft’s longest fantasy story, it would have been nice if they were used here, but if they are going to be turned into a general grouping, this is a good way of doing it. Outside of the use of the term Other Gods, I really like the idea of Nightmares, and I’m looking forward to seeing more about them.
To share a quote that I think is fitting:
““Randolph Carter,” said the voice, “you have come to see the Great Ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose name no lips dare speak aloud.
“When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kla to see the Great Ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were there, and they did what was expected. Zenig of Aphorat sought to reach unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom I need not name.”
Thank you so much for the comment! I am actually fond of the ominous sound of the phrase “the Other Gods”, it gives the feel of “*those* (scary) gods”, the gods outside of the normal. Despite that, I went with “Nightmares” as the primary in-game term because it is more flexible; as a category it could include supra-cosmic gods like Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, or more minor nightmarish creatures or even things which are more like ‘effects’ than entities. From dreamers’ perspective, they’re all Nightmares. As a general rule I’ve tried to keep some ambiguity about the ‘order of the cosmos’ in the RPG, I want it to be a world where different parts of Dreamland might have really different religions and it isn’t immediately obvious what the truth about the universe is. And different regions might also have different (imagined) divisions of the gods or different names for them, and could even be unaware of the scary ones like Azathoth. For the planned first setting book for Dreamland, tho, covering places like Ulthar and Dylath-Leen and Celephais, it’s going to follow something of the traditional Lovecraftian theology where people are aware of the existence of the Other/Outer Gods and really want to avoid their attention.
I agree that Nightmares is a fantastic name, and I’m glad you chose it. It’s appropriately evocative, while encompassing a wide range of terrors, and not sounding like a category. It’s a really good choice on your part, and very appropriate for the RPG. While I would have preferred it if they were an example of a Nightmare, instead of another name for Nightmares, I do understand why you’d want to use the phrase the Other Gods as an alternate name for them. It’s a delightfully creepy phrase, that perfectly evokes that sense of otherness which in part defines them, while calling up imagery of the mythical, and highlighting their connection to earth’s meek gods, and if it isn’t being used for anything else, it might as well be used for something.
My comment was mostly about the Other Gods being used as another name for Nightmares, instead of one of many examples of Nightmares, which is a choice that I don’t love. In my opinion, the idea that the Other Gods were originally meant to be some sort of loose grouping, or were Lovecraft’s version of the outer gods, is a misinterpretation, and I don’t like how popular it has become, so whether or not that’s an opinion you share, I feel that the decision to use them as another name, for a group of unrelated horrors, contributes to a larger pattern which I don’t love, while missing out on the potential of using them as one of many Nightmares. This seems to be a fairly unpopular interpretation, so I will give my reasons for believing it, and being very confident in it, after I finish this paragraph. I find the portrayal of them in Lovecraft’s stories, especially Dream-Quest, to be very compelling, and I feel that a lot of what makes them interesting, is lessened if instead of being a single thing, they’re a group of loosely connected deities. Portrayals of them like that can still work well, but to me it seems like a strange choice, and it diminishes what made them effective in the original stories. Of Lovecraft’s recurring nightmare deities, they’re the ones most heavily connected to dream, so it feels like there’s a lot of potential for using them in an RPG like this, and while I’m certain that it will be great without them, I do think that their absence from it is a shame.
I understand that this isn’t a common interpretation to have, so I’ll give some of my reasons for being confident in it. I’ll also provided some quotes to help illustrate one of my points, but this is already long enough, so feel free to skip them if you don’t have the time. The first point I’ll make, is that there are no examples of any named god being said to be one of the Other Gods, and there are a lot of examples of the Other Gods being listed alongside Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, as if they were different things. It’s possible that that could just be an example of Lovecraft’s style of mythic references, often listing Azathoth and Nyarlathotep separately thanks to their importance, in the same way that Kadath is always in the cold waste, and Ulthar is always beyond the river Skai, even after those things have been repeated so much that you almost certainly won’t forget it, but the way they get separated makes me think otherwise. They are always spoken of as if they are separate terrors, and in combination with the portrayal of each within stories like Dream-Quest, I think they’re meant to be viewed as distinct from each other. Throughout the appearances of the Other Gods, across various different stories, the only bit of writing which seems like it could imply that Azathoth and Nyarlathotep are Other Gods, is one in Carter’s meeting with Kuranes, and to me that feels more like listing out different terrors, than it does like giving two examples of Other Gods. To give some examples of what I mean:
“And before the day was done Carter saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West, beyond which simple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of earth’s dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outside the ordered universe where the daemon-sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.”
““Randolph Carter,” said the voice, “you have come to see the Great Ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose name no lips dare speak aloud.”
“It was a song, but not the song of any voice. Night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.”
This becomes even more notable, when in later stories, things that are described almost identically to the Other Gods, appear with details as specific as being called bat-things. You could argue that those are new horrors, but you can only have a certain amount of mindless, shapeless, shadowy things, which madly dance and flop to the insane music of flutes, around Azathoth, before they start seeming like different descriptions of the same concept.
Finally, they seem to almost always get described collectively, and a lot of the language used to describe them, makes them seem like a single thing. The meek gods of earth are said to have spoken to the Other Gods, the Other Gods often dance atop Hatheg-Kla, the Other Gods have a seal, larvae, and a will, when Barzai the wise climbed Hatheg-Kla, the Other Gods were there, and when the mild gods of earth abandon their duty atop Kadath, it is the upsetting of the Other Gods. They could just be a group of closely aligned deities of the outer voids, but to me this all reads like they’re a single thing.
With all of that said, obviously I could be wrong, and it’s perfectly fine if you disagree with me. This isn’t exactly a common interpretation, I’ve seen some people talk about it, there was a recent piece of art that used it, and it looks like the second Cyclopean game is probably going with it, but I doubt that most people have even considered it. I think that the popularity of the interpretation of them as an outer god adjacent grouping, probably has more to do with Call of Cthulhu than it does with Lovecraft, but I could just be set on the interpretation I had when I first read the stories, and missing something obvious. Whether or not I’ve managed to convince you, I’m really liking how Dreamland is going, and thanks for taking the time to read through this.