invading the dream of a child
a note about creepiness: it’s horror, and I’m basically into using children as a source of horror, especially since the conditions of youth tend to outline a society; and what better means a society of horror? that being said, I don’t intend to involve any sexual themes in this context in my own game or any of the stuff on my blog.
this is all in the context
of an underground city fed by a unique ability to invade the dreams of children.
contents of a child's dream:
1) the child themselves, usually, who invariably are dazed and have some ongoing, worsening headache.
2) potentially, food, or at least things that are edible that can be stolen. anything edible-looking will be stolen, including sentient beings, if they can't defend themselves. every so often there is a great deal of edible material inside a child's head, and rarely, and perhaps if the interim ruling class manages their hypno-farm right, there will be something like a feast of actual food which can be gobbled and stolen. ofc there's the many occasions when said food is actually a trap of the decietful child's mind and it's all zombie vampire bats waiting to bite, but again, these can be eaten too usually
the dream child would be food too, but what invariably happens when the child, clutching their head, is pulled out of their own corpse, is that a bunch of mouths open up everywhere on the child's skin and there's a lot of biting. you can eat that, and you do it by boiling it down till it's all hard and you can scrape some marrow out of the joints. it's good eating, but it's not a big meal ?what is? and anyway it's sort of not worth it. because Yeongweol-gun and Figs are gonna have bite marks all over their fingers from handling it, and the pot will stink even more for a week.
3) the other ppl forcing their way into the child's head. it's doubtful you can go out if you can't find the way you came in.
from the more distinguished houses, there are those who are sort of dream-knights, proto-dream mercenaries, who pride themselves on this sorta work and have dedication and maybe even some specialized tools.
(beyond the obvious one, which looks like a specialized, oversize juicer)
it’s a common aphorism that invading dreams is basically like caving, if you should do one you should be able to do another. this is a joke
4) contents of the child's dream. varies. sometimes, occasionally, lethal. often has nothing to do with food. although they try, to entice them to think of, spices or something, they'll bring in the smells nearby the asleep victim. so you see a lot of sandy banks, burning things. often because it's an underdark child, it will be dark, but there usually is, instead of light, an awareness of things.
some dreams:
- familiar places with lots of extra rooms
- bright blue interior cave with thousands of colorful rocks forming a planet, large nightmare-like creatures shiver and jump between backwards-hanging trees
- footwide space between two endless blankets, creasing various textures, occasional trap and nightmare-hypoxia
- caves with shouting family members just beyond vision, approaching means slowing down like in nightmare, spatiated previous invaders, in these cases hoping the dream dies down and they can go and reach those family people (probably a dud idea)
- segmented lava-dream with giant cats and people faces
- child has tried to dream of food but has instead dreamed of smiling, mumbling rocks shaped as food. there are however a lot of panicked dream-overseers
- infinite field of wheat, loops up a hill and near a stream. crawly fish among the wheat
- everyone is standing around babbling
one notable thing is that the actual social-situation going on in the dream may be inscrutable to invaders. dreams tend to be remembered as a series of narrative events but being inside a dream is not narrative. you are in an environment, perhaps as large of the world, where things are happening, or not. the actual “narrative” of what’s going on, especially since the headache, is probably unknowable.
5) you can add in nightmares, which you should. nightmares aren't embodiments of anything. they're their own thing, and they're fairly summarizable as "monsters". or "pariahs".
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PARIAHS FROM "VEINS OF THE EARTH" THAT ACTUALLY SPEND TIME IN CHILDREN'S DREAMS:
the phantom head of gargas, still-tor-men, tachyon troll. the rapture, of course. the oneirocetacean is pretty much always there, but it knows how to leave, and it's rarely obvious. phantom shrimp have made appearances, and yeah, derro show up, but what where they doing there?
dream-derro are actually magnetically faceless beings that never seem right no matter how bizarre the situation they're in. they will head for the hills usually, after being directly confronted.
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PURELY-NIGHTMARE PARIAHS:
there's a lot of them which are sort of indescribable thing, like presences, usually, but with bonus extra qualities in the mind's eye: these, out of the head, are more like chemical-gas attacks but tend to disperse quickly.
then there's the more stable chimeras, who are almost all hunted before they have much to do.
then there's the more subtle influences like people, who can defend themselves, who come back out. these are never real-people, not really, they are usually false; and the falseness of their being is the same whether inside the head or out. those ones are the more dangerous and are often shunned but they have a way of forgetting, everyone involved in this.
6) treasure (not edible):
- things that look like things that should work, but do not: these do work in other people's dreams, though.
- just general stuff; tends to be unreliable. gold coins are almost never real and silver never is. there's a standing issue with the unstandardizability of dream-stuff, as it's never just one thing, usually accrues in unexpected ways, unreliable....that being said there is a trade in the sale of potentially useful dream-things, so watch out for stuff which is half-realistic and how a child imagines a thing and is manufactured in a ways that don't make sense.
- bizarre objects no child should think of: these are really real things and more of a mystery than anything else. thought of, sometimes, as plaque, or lucky, or both.
.lastly. the child dies.
dreams don't last awful long. at the top end it might be a couple of hours, it might even go into the day, longest one ever was a day and a half
roll a d6 to determine die, d4 d6 d8 d10 d12 d20, then a d3:
1. minutes
2. turns
3. hours
you'll know it’s ending by the last two (units).
alternatively, just do d50 minutes. i like that better
when the dream is dying:
1. blood up in the floor
2. thrumming and high pitch at the end
3. organ-creatures start bursting in through the walls
4. npcs start acting unusual
5. the exit closes and everything just starts to rot
6. delerium tremens
if the child is harmed: generally, not a problem, but roll the time limit again; if the new time limit is lower, but not too low to already have passed, that's the new time limit.
