16 - Beyond the Dream

HE NIGHT SWEEPS MENACINGLY ACROSS THE WORLD, DRAPING FORESTS, MOUNTAINS, seas, and plains beneath its dark cloak. Its baunting semblance envelopes our cities’ facades, becoming the soil where our dreams can burgeon. We close our eyes, depart from our defenseless bodies, and slip freely into another reality - an existence beyond our captive, physical selves. Limbo, the domain of Dreams, is more a state of existence than a true location, a mosaic of memories and emotions welling up from our subconscious. It is a boundless universe, as transient as it is enchanting. Within it, we encounter a patchwork of elaborate vistas and reflections, which quickly fade from our minds when we awaken. They appear incomprebensible, shadowy yet wondrous. They are more than simple impressions, recollections, and images from our brains. If we would only dare to peer into ourselves, we might discover clues to our divine origins in this dream state. Here, deep within us, we can venture into others’ dreams, create worlds of our own, explore bidden things, and encounter beings and wanderers, who live in this existence beyond time and Space.

Once we circumnavigate Limbo’s first barrier, vault after vault are opened to us for all eternity.

OUR Ä°ANER UNIVERSE

Most of mankind is powerless in their dreams. We do not realize we are dreaming, and thus have no control over our new state, roaming aimlessly in the dream’s landscape, only to forget our experiences after we awaken. In order to take control of our dreams, we must first become aware we are actually dreaming. This ability is known as lucid dreaming. Having achieved this, you can try to steer your dream-self through your subconscious. Exploring the dream world always rÄ™uires passing through some sort of barrier, in order to continually sail deeper into your inner self:

Clawing open the dark, green wallpaper of your childhood home, allowing yourself to sink into the black, primordial sea beyond; pulling the red drapes aside, climbing over the sooty brick wall, and daring to enter the dark alley below; creeping back into the womb of the mother you never knew; turning over the yellowed tiles in the morgue; taking the elevator to the bottom floor, where the atrocities were carried out; finishing the last sequence in the arcane cypher; letting the razor cut away all that is human; taking the stage and disrobing before the leering audience; putting the revolver against your temple and pulling the trigger; forgiving the unforgivable; putting the key in the lock of the blue door and turning it…

DEATH AND THE DREAM

As you travel through Limbo, the dreams around you also change. However, as a dream wanderer, you must pay close attention to sudden shifts in the dream, as you may not be the true, or sole, source of these alterations. It may be you’ve strayed too close to the place called Vortex, or unknowingly slipped into someone else’s dream or a completely different world. Worse yet, some kind of dream creature may have entered your dream and its presence is distorting the environment. These changes are often dramatic and surreal:

Heaven runs dry, exposing what lies beyond; the bloodstain becomes a gaping aperture; birds morph into sharp knives; the sky explodes into a myriad of colors; the scent of hot asphalt fills your nose and dazzling lights spark before your eyes; bricks folding inwards, opening into a yawning portal; the cube held in your hand turns out to be featureless and two-dimensional; everything tips over and seemingly retreats away; blue nuances become a bitter taste on the back of your tongue; tears fall upwards and become stars in the firmament; a distant shriek turns into a hurricane; the scent of sweetness corrupts into the stench of sulphur; the telephone’s buzzing signal transitions into the sound of a train, thundering towards you…

Sometimes, you assume a completely new semblance. Your dream-self distorts and is recast, Limbo. while your clothes adjust to match the new world. You may regress into your childhood self, or assume the body of an animal or creature. It may take time before you understand you have been changed, as the dream often makes your altered form feel natural.

DEATH AND THE DREAM

Using the concept of Similarity, we can cross over into the comparable dreams of other beings. In effect, a dream about a forest exists in close proximity to any other dream about forests, making them easier to travel to. In contrast, dreams about urban environments are wholly dissimilar from dreams of the desert, making the journey more difficult. To move from dream to dream, you must alter and merge the dreams, repainting each in your mind, all the while progressing towards your objective. Sometimes, there are shortcuts to be found, such as portals, staircases, and passageways, which create portals directly between two dream worlds. These often occur when dreamers are closely tied to each other outside of Limbo.

When you traverse through others’ dream worlds, you invariably leave trails. As with the concept of Contagion, you infect their dreams with your consciousness, your memories of people and places surfacing in their dream world, lingering there. These psychic trails enable the perceptive wanderer to trace a trespassing dreamer back to his own existence. Occasionally, these trails spread like mental rot and can transform dream worlds entirely or fracture them into pieces. An adept dream wanderer tries to conceal their presence, but sometimes it becomes unavoidable to leave parts of one’s self behind.

ΟΕΔTΗ ΔΩΟ TΗΕ ΟΚΕΔΜ

Dying in the domains of dream is seldom dangerous. Typically, our “Ëœdeath”â„¢ startles us awake, but at other times we merely change roles and are tbrust into a new dream. On the other band, those whose waking bodies perish while they’re asleep can become mentally trapped in Limbo. Their disconnected souls do not move onwards, becoming ragged dream wanderers, who often do not even understand what has befallen them. Dreams also crisscross Time and Space, so you can slip into the dreams of someone who is dead in Elysium, yet still very much alive in

DEATH AND THE DREAM

A dream wanderer must learn a numher of diverse technioues in order to master their dreams and the subtleties of Limbo. Gaining true proficiency usually requires considerable time and training, but can also come naturally to some people.

Alter Dreams

With this technioue, you consciously manipulate and rebuild the weave of dreams. Smaller changes are simple, such as turning an iron tube into a crowbar or remodeling a wardrobe into a front door. More dramatic effects like tearing open a section of the sky, making bouses melt, letting the sea flood in, are difficult and potentially risky - particularly if you are changing others’ dreams.

Alter Dream Self

While dreaming, you usually possess your normal appearance, unless you have a differing perception of yourself in the dream world. However, it is possible to make minor changes, such as facial features, hair color, and even gender, without much effort. Reconstructing one’s entire semblance is very difficult outside one’s own dreams, such as morphing into another being or açuiring unusual properties like supernatural strength, the ability to fly, or beightened senses.

Invoke Dream Beings/ Dreamers

The wanderer can extend their perceptions into Limbo, and invoke an entity or another dreamer, summoning them into your dream world. There are always great risks in this, especially if you bappen to draw the attentions of something undesirable. Dream beings can function as guides and fonts of knowledge, usually ręuesting payment in the form of memories and dream fragments.

ASTAROTH

In Limbo, you can explore the memories of your past, gain insight into the collective unconscious of humanity, uncover secrets in other people’s dream worlds, or find the pathways and keys leading to your divinity. This search requires crossing many barriers and approaching Vortex. Memories and insights often assume the guise of objects with which we have a personal connection, such as notebooks, laptop computers, dolls, or melodies. Aspects of our psyches assume symbolic form in the realms of Limbo. Occasionally, you must search for your memories, as they may be bidden in the deepest basement, buried in your father’s coffin, within an elusive film clip on the Internet, amongst a pile of unopened letters, recorded on an old VHS tape, or stashed away in dusty archives. Here you can bump into forgotten traumas, childbood joys, and crusbing sorrows collected in a splintered mosaic. The naive dreams of childbood, abandoned and raped by the undertakings of adult life, wait to be rediscovered.

Open Portal

It is possible to open a portal from Limbo to Elysium or the other realities, and then step through as one’s dream self. This is something bard, strenuous, and very dangerous - more so when employing an inhuman shape. Exiting directly from Limbo into Elysium or other worlds is something only the most powerful dream wanderers can accomplish.

ΒΕΡΟΩΟ TΗΕ ΌΡΕΔM

Within Limbo’s inner depths, we can travel beyond our own dreams. Here, we can find the source of all dreams, shattered dream worlds, and entire domains ruled by deranged despots. Purposefully venturing bere is to be born into a new and deeper existence.

Vortex

there is a place deep within us where our spirit mixes with all the souls of humanity. Vortex is the source of infinite wisdom and insight, which stems from our collective unconscious - a majestic whirlpool of chaotic images, emotions, and impressions. The closer we approach its boundaries, the more our souls are laid bare. We can perceive more dimensions and unlock many of the shackles the Demiurge has placed upon us. Memories from previous existences rewind and flicker before our eyes in a cacophony of impressions:

Faint semblances of beasts lick at your hand in submission; a gigantic, brass clockwork; a skinned hide you once bore; a rust-coated ring of keys; a machine heart, pulsating; a marble throne from which you once ruled; a weapon you once used to take your own life; the ashes from a scorched world; feathers from ragged angel wings; an aborted fetus who was you in another time, tiny and fragile in your hand, returning your gaze.

If you venture to the rim of Vortex, dreams rapidly supplant one another, none of them enduring for more than a moment. new scenes appear, creatures change shapes or disappear, perceptions become distorted as time itself proceeds irregularly. Slowly but surely, you are torn asunder, extinguished, or transformed into an insane dream creature. To acquire insight into Vortex’s mysteries, one must voyage into the dream worlds closest to the tempest, which endure like exotic islands. The most stable of these realms belong to the Dream Princes, or are the dying remnants of tattered dreams. In these sanctuaries, you can sip from Vortex’s well source without being drowned in its flash flood.

Tattered Dreams

As you approach the genesis of dreams, you encounter shattered dream worlds orbiting Vortex like dead planets, each replete with lost wanderers and forlorn beings. This virtual macrocosm of worlds consists of humanity’s dreams long forgotten, crusbed, or slowly fading away. Existing solely in Limbo, these quasibeings have been created out of our memories and yearnings - forlorn semblances which are neither alive nor dead. They are our abandoned children, meandering aimlessly through the labyrinth of Limbo until they wither and fade away.

From time to time, these forsaken worlds drift into our dreams by accident, or we may encounter them while traveling. Some of these tattered dreams are well known to dream magicians, described in ancient writings, or mentioned on Internet pages about dream interpretation and sleep research. Some of the incalculable numher of tattered dreams include:

The sun is a blood-red sore upon an ash-grey sky. Old women dance naked amid rusty skewers and hooks, their wrinkled bodies, hanging breasts, and aging joints moving to a jerky rhythm. Eyes, white-grey from glaucoma, stare upwards - toothless jaws hanging open. When one of them collapses from exhaustion, she is dragged towards the sacrificial bowl, so she can vomit liquid gold, sizzling in the chilly air and scalding her lips. Should they catch a dreamer’s scent, they howl hoarsely, drop to all fours, and hunt her down like wild predators.

The building is infinite, a tower with no end, an insane architectural nightmare of stairs upon stairs. Tall windows veer towards a grey haze. Birds, no more than silhouettes, writhe against the dusty sky, screeching in futility and dashing themselves against the glass, leaving a trail of down, blood, and swirling feathers.

The small Mexican hamlet has houses with white-limed walls.

The living heat sets everything quivering. The skies and stars are fanciful and impressionistic - like a painting by Van Gogh. Here and there, the buildings are smudged. You can almost smell the oil paint and turpentine. Every step you take causes the world to corrode and discharge, everything turning rancid in the blazing sun. Uncontrollably, you retch and your stomach contents smear the colors further. When you arrive at the tavern, its interior is in a state of decay. You almost sink through the gas-bloated floor. On the table there waits a revolver. There is a bullet. The dream has no other exit.

You are a child; your realm is the wardrobe in which you are

hiding. You hear quarreling in the world outside, but inside the wardrobe you are safe. You can rest your head against the thick, winter jacket, nuzzling the teddy bear’s soft fur. The pillow is soft beneath you, and the flashlight is there in an emergency. Then, you hear footsteps approaching. His steps. You wet yourself. The night is thick outside the winter palace. A crescent moon bleeds its content over the sky - you can almost taste it. In the ballroom, distorted mammals ferment and swell. The orchestra has stopped playing. From the top floor, there is the sound of nervous laughter. There the tsar and his court crawl across polished floors and flip coins of cracked jade.

White rocks cover the beach, polished by millennia of waves.

The sea moves in heavy, murky swells. The giant woman sprawls out like an oblong island in the waves. She lies sideways, only one of her eyes protruding over the surface of the water. Her gaze is hateful. Her mouth is wide open, and the water surges from it. She can only stare, seethe, and allow her waters to drown the world. Year by year, she devours ever more of the countryside. There is not much solid land left. The old lighthouse keeper can tell the whole tale. He has been here forever.

Rusting industries where ageless beasts have dug their dens, and adorned them with bones and broken altars. Hungry children wander, walking over slivers and shards with tattered feet. They bleed from every wound and their skin resembles old parchment. Bliss and biblical truths seep from them up toward a sky filled with an eternity of stars. Every sacred stanza makes the stars flow and churn, as they dance to the Creator’s will. Those who wander here without stigmata or blood sacrifices for the God and the Cosmos awaken the beasts, which slumber with their heads buried in their clawed hands.

On a pedestal stands an old computer. The screen is thick, it’s once-beige surface is discolored, and the monitor flickers with a green glow. A naked, old man hangs from a noose in the ceiling. He swings to and fro in an imperceptible wind. You approach the computer’s screen and look at it. The green text against the black backdrop asks, “Do you want to play a game?”

Shards of futuristic megacities, space stations, and virtual worlds circulate around you. Each alien landscape is torn asunder and obliterated before your eyes. The air resounds with a cacophony of roars, white noise, and screeching metal. In a cryogenic chamher beside you, there lies a woman with electrodes on her forehead. The electronic display reveals she is dying. Her every faint heartbeat is like a hammer against an anvil, smashing the world into pieces.

The Dream Princes

Dream Princes are people who have abandoned their bodies in Elysium and, via their Art of Dreaming, have created personal realities close to Vortex. Skillfully crafting the architecture of dreams, they’ve created safe passages through Limbo to reach their dream realms, located right next to Vortex’s border. These sprawling, cumbersome constructions are not torn asunder by the whirlpool’s violence, so long as the Dream Prince continues attaching and replacing dream worlds in exactly the right formation, much like pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Yet, even with the limitless resources of Limbo, the Dream Princes remain locked in an eternal power struggle, as their territories bleed right into each other.

The Dream Princes are tragic beings. They’ve escaped the Demiurge’s constraints and machinations, and can sense their lost divinity. But, even in Limbo, they remain faint shadows of what they could become. Their continual conflicts have turned them tyrannical and cruel, and they’ve fallen into feverish madness, desperately trying to maintain their disintegrating worlds, all the while striving to elevate and glorify themselves. They’ve become so entwined with their dream realms, it is difficult to view them separately.

The World of Archaic Knowledge and Omnipotent Minds is a dream where magnificent marble monuments, columns, and statues stretch toward a clear, blue sky. Ancient cities lie in verdant, pastoral landscapes, and the ocean’s scent and the sound of waves are ever present in remote areas. The dream world is modeled after the idealized concepts of Atlantis. A perfect society. A perfect world. Few beings are found here, as its inhabitants have been systematically expunged time and time again, whenever the Dream Prince, Friedrich Köpfel, has grown dissatisfied with their progress. He is currently in the process of breeding a new population, which will match his strict ideals. Formerly, a court chemist in the service of the duke of Thüringen, Köpfel started creating his dream worlds back in the 17th century.

The World of Stone Temples and Feverish Suffering is a dusky dream, replete with an overwhelming soundscape - a background murmur of ethereal music, buzzing insects, mumbling in forgotten languages, terrified whimpering, and the first cries of newborns. The dream is sickly hot and stinks of ash, blood, and sweat. Visitors to this dream feel groggy and bloated, many soon begin bleeding from the eyes, mouth, and genitals. Everything seems to vibrate and tremble. Creatures initially appear two-dimensional and colorless, only to become painfully alive without warning. In a moldering temple hall at the dream’s heart lies the Maiden of Torment - blinded, genitally mutilated, bloated from pregnancy, and writhing with maggots, which crawl from the infected wounds of her amputated limbs. She is surrounded by grotesque apsara, which detach from the walls on which they have been carved, and dance on quashed feet around her bloody, stone bed. The Maiden wants everyone to suffer as she has suffered, filling her fevered nightmare with undead children, pregnant torture victims, and bestial demons in ivory masks.

This Dream World of Captivation and Godliness is rife with snow-clad forests, frozen rivers, mountains, and steppes, which are crisscrossed by meandering pilgrim routes, where cortèges of monks dressed in black march, carrying gilded crosses and blood-dripping icons. In the villages, people gather in timbered cottages and spend their dread-filled nights huddled around fires and sooty grease candles, lost in prayer to their punishing god.

Magnificent cathedrals with onion-shaped domes and secluded monasteries clinging to mountains serve as hubs of light in this dark and inhospitable world. In dark church rooms with images of saints, choking incense, and thousands of iconostases, the sinful flog themselves in ecstasy until their backs are raw and smeared in blood. The Dream Prince, Nikolaj Makarov, wanders through his domains as the new Messiah, doling out blessings and spreading God’s word to the faithful, and punishing those who are not sufficiently subservient.

The World of Cold Cities and Perfect Order is a copy of our modern world, but idyllic, false, and meticulously organized in infinite, repetitive patterns. Suburbs of detached houses with perfectly groomed lawns stretch endlessly towards the horizon, surrounding pristine urban centers devoid of litter and graffiti. Hidden from sight, prisons with tens of thousands of identical cells loom, waiting to be filled. People who have been drawn into the dreams are reproduced into countless copies, all identical and banal. The world’s bureaucracy is draconian, the ever-present paranoia crushing all thoughts of rebellion. Every citizen remains under continual surveillance, monitored by cameras, drones, subdermal GPS implants, and informants. The Dream Prince, Aron Greenberg, wants to bring order and meaning to Limbo, shaping its entirety into something more akin to our waking world. He ceaselessly monitors his society of subjugated proles, and constantly issues new laws and decrees.

The World of Fairytales and Full Moons is a transient and dark world of myth, rich with primordial forests full of wild roses, hedge labyrinths, ruins, and stone bridges. These fantastical wilds are populated with unruly wanderers, dire wolves, seductive satyrs, and other fairytale beings. It is a world with elvish nights, moon shadows, and blood-red twilights where distant music, ghostly sobs, and sonorous laughter are heard in the distance. Nothing is certain here. The ground can rupture at any time, trees and walls can grow claws to snatch at you, the weeping child can turn out to be a straw doll, and the food you eat may be filled with larvae. Many of those who are pulled into this dream world are children, and some of them will never wake again. Close to Vortex, there is a large, rococo-style castle where the Dream Princess, Nicolette Pasteur, entertains her guests, as lavish and capricious as any fairytale queen. Her eerie and sweet dreams disseminated from here over the ages. Now, curious beings, fallen angels, and envoys from strange worlds arrange masquerade halls in the expanding labyrinth of dolls, drapery, and enormous four-poster beds.

The World of Contagion and Doom is a world of bloodstained, African dreamscapes, which have coalesced with a labyrinth of squalid hospital wards, culverts, morgues, and padded cells arranged in frustrating discord. Leopards stalk amid rows of rotting corpses and patients wail into their respirators, which have been cracked open from within by flowering vegetation. Everywhere, loose electric wires hang and spark, while creepy semblances lurk behind dirty, plastic curtains. Figures clad head to toe in protective gear and breathing masks hunt in determined, sinister silence for fleeing people and creatures, armed with flamethrowers, lobotomy drills, and hypodermic needles. The Dream Princess, Jolainne N’Gem-bo-Mouanda, is a physician and chemist from a global pandemic in the world’s near future, and occasionally stretches her influence into the midnight wards of Elysium’s clinics and psychiatric hospitals, in order to drag staff and patients into her spastic, burgeoning dream.

The World of Madness and Mazes is a dream filled with ashes, cliffs, shafts, and wondrous constructions of stone, metal, and rust. Everything is agglutinated in an unfathomable labyrinth, which meanders in all directions, extending from the absolute disintegration near Vortex to places where it subtly bleeds over into our waking world. In some locations, such as the chaos of Baghdad, Kabul, Mosul, and Basra, you can accidentally stray directly into this dream world. The labyrinth constantly twists and distorts, while ichtyria crawl everywhere, feasting on the bodies of dreamers who died during privations or were sacrificed by the Dream Prince’s veiled servants. At the center of the labyrinth, atop a ziggurat of midnight-black basalt, the Dream Prince, Hammad al-Sufi, sits on a dusty throne, mumbling deranged incantations while servants, wanderers, and the insane bow and worship him as a god, faithfully recording his commands and surahs.

The World of Secret Rooms and Tainted Passions is a dream centered on a Japanese palace, which resembles a carnival of colors and impressions with hot baths, rice lanterns, and paper-walled rooms populated by a broad cast of characters, from the young and unsullied to the dangerous with their many knives. Outside the palace walls, other dream worlds sprawl outward, populated with shabby sex clubs, strip joints, and narrow alleys. It is a melting pot of desires and perversions. In smoky chambers and behind elegant shoji screens, naked, oil-drenched bodies take hold of each other, body fluids are ejected, meshed, swallowed, and generously smeared. Everything is crimson, sticky, and sordid. The Dream Princess, Yōko Sakai, often saunters through her glamorous empire, accompanied by an entourage of servants and slaves. She demands everyone desire and love her.

WHEN THE DREAM SHIFTS

The gamemaster can use the Moves listed below whenever a player character sleeps, is traveling in Limbo, or when they explore dream magic, dream wandering, or the forbidden domains of the Internet and come into contact with Limbo.

- Sleep Paralysis

The person awakens, able to hear and open their eyes enough to look around, but has no control over their body. Their consciousness remains stuck in dreams, yet they can also see and experience things around their physical body. Often one feels deep panic, has difficulty breathing, and senses other beings in the room with them.

- A Dream Come True

The dream defies Time and Space and you experience and see events that transpired in the past or will bappen in the future.

- Sleep Walking

Although asleep, your body moves around on its own, eyes open and apparently conscious - even being able to talk and carry out complex actions. This can occur when you are under the temporary control of a dream being or the body’s unconscious or primal instincts are taking hold.

- Shift Dreams

You drift into someone’s dream world or a tattered dream, or pull some other sleeper into your dream world.

- Caught in the Dream

The barriers of Limbo close around the person, ensnaring them into the dream world. They cannot wake up or escape, unless the prereouisites change or a new exit can be found.

-Create a Realm of Dreams

A world comes into existence close to Vortex. The dreamer can be caught up in their own dream world or draw other dreamers into it. This world can exist long after the dreamer has died and also grow and change outside the dreamer’s control.

- A Portal is Opened

A portal into or from a dream world is flung open. It can be anything from a door materializing in a wall, an entrance found in a wardrobe, a floor drain yawning open, a painting springing to life, a mirror you can climb through, or something completely different, such as a garment that transports you to another dream world whenever you put it on. Portals are usually temporary or only surface at specific times, but occasionally they can become permanent.

- Attract Beings

You attract a being from the dream world or create one out of your own dreams or fantasies. It can be born out of the person, appear through a portal, or manifest in the room or the local vicinity.

- Attract Dream Prince’s Attention

A Dream Prince’s attention sets upon the character, and they can choose to pull the wanderer into their domains, dispatch subjects against them, or simply contact them.

- Leave Traces

Whenever you wander in a tattered dream, dream world, or into someone else’s dream, you invariably leave traces of yourself behind. However, in this case, the psychic trail is significant and soon grows powerful. Maybe it consumes the dream, causes something to shatter, lures something after you, or leads to something else unexpected.

- Discover Insight

In the dream, you may gain insight and knowledge lost to you, such as an old memory or a clue you have long mulled over. Your unconscious mind pieces together things you repressed, and you can view things in other places and times. Occasionally, these dreams are very chaotic and when you awake, you must assemble the pieces yourself. You can also find answers to Questions about your own nature; however disagreeable they may be.

CULÆS

ASTAROTH

Ties to Powers: Primarily the Dream Prince Friedrich Köpfel, but also nikolaj Makarov and Hammad al-Sufi.

Members: Those who have been born into the Collective, tracing their lineage back several generations. Also those who are drawn into the cult after reading its literature and pamphlets, usually men and women in their twenties.

Agenda: To eternally escape into the dream world and live in God’s bosom.

Moves: Lower Someone into Sleep, Sleepwalking, Invoking Dream Beings, Fanatical Members, Children as Shields, Innocent Exterior.

The cult was founded in the 1970s and mixed radical leftist opinions, Hinduism, Buddbism, and Christian nonconformist mysticism with drug experiments, meditation, and occultism. They are now isolated in the countryside where they, and their many children, live in a large collective. They have neither television, radio, telephone, nor an Internet connection and all the children are bomeschooled with a strict curriculum. Most of them work in agriculture and, like the Amish, strive to become self-sufficient. They also produce esoteric literature about dreams and dream wandering, and youths from the cult distribute pamphlets at local market places and outside malls.

With the aid of drugs and medication, they explore the dream world collectively. Their leader and founder, Rupert Stillwater, is in a state of sleep during most of the day. Within the cult they await ‘The Rapture,’ when they will find their way to a consummate, celestial home in Limbo and transfer their souls there, leaving the physical world and its shackles of materialism behind.

Black Sails

Ties to Powers: Insight into several Dream Princes and dream beings, but the largest insight into, and contact with, Aron Greenberg, Yōko Sakai and nicolette Pasteur.

Members: Hackers, computer programmers, bloggers, and activists; most of them are in their twenties.

Agenda: Keep the Internet free. Contact the net’s bidden entities.

Moves: Hacking, Acquiring Information, Changing Existing Information, Planting Backdoors, Closing Down Websites, Spreading Rumors. this network of backers, programmers, and whistleblowers consists of explorers and self-proclaimed prophets on the Internet. They work in close collaboration with sites such as Wikileaks and the Anonymous network, but have adopted an almost religious view of the Internet as a divine entity. Among their members, many argue it will awaken and become humanity’s new God. In their exploration of the Internet’s domains, they have encountered curious code seouences, web pages, and domains. Some believe these are signs of Artificial Intelligences (Als) awakening. In truth, they are actually encountering the expansive consciousnesses of the Dream Princes. The Black Sails actively try to back deeper into these constructs, and have noticed how several of them have even started talking back. Recently, some members have disappeared and there is growing paranoia the authorities are actively seeking the group. They do not realize these members have been drawn into Limbo - usually unwillingly.

CREA&URES

We would be naive to believe ourselves safe in our dreams. Age-old beings exist in Limbo’s darkness, eager to feed upon us like parasites. There are creatures born out of our worst nightmares, assuming the semblances we fear the most and baunting us every night. Some of these night terrors can even slip through the cracks into our waking world. Who truly knows what abominations and shadows watch over us as we sleep? What is stirred into life in the nooks and crannies, under the staircases, up in the attics, and down in the basements? We awake in cold sweats and realize we have been touched by some amorphous being far beyond our comprebension. But the Illusion soon reestablishes its grip on us and any knowledge and any insight we may have gained disappears beyond the veil. The more you explore the dream world, the more you expose yourself to its dangers. In your own dream universe, you are relatively secure in your innocent ignorance, but when you start to wander in the dreams of others, consciously manipulating their creations, you attract unwanted attention.

Ichtyria

Ichtyria are born of Vortex and only exist in Limbo. Outwardly, they resemble myriapods with segmented bodies, spindly legs, and fragile antennae. They can grow to be several meters long, and emit a distinctive, rustling sound from their bony plates and antennae as they crawl. They have circular, leech-like mouths running along their underbellies and can wrap themselves around beings, attaching to them like parasites. Ichtyria have the ability to create connections between dreams and reality, so victims who are tortured or slain in Limbo also suffer the same fate in the waking world.

Ichtyria exist in more dimensions than we are accustomed to or normally perceive. A dream wanderer viewing an ichtyrium from certain angles can see its true form: a mass of folded layers of skin, which move bypnotically like a sea anemone in an invisible current of water. The wanderer can enter its fleshy interior, crawling through these wet layers of skin, past corpulent outgrowths and pulsating veins, until they reach right into the creature’s eye. This turbid pearl, large enough to bold in your band, can be pulled from its sinewy roots, and the belpless ichtyrium screams and rots away as a result. Everything the creature devoured remains conserved in the eye - all the memories, thoughts, wanderers, and predictions.

Psyphagoes

Psyphagoes do not originate from Limbo. Instead, they have remained trapped there after losing their physical bodies lifetimes ago. In the dream world, the psyphago resembles its original appearance, but its existence in the dream world contorts, twists, and shreds this former semblance over time. Age-old psyphagoes are gravely distorted and grotesoue monstrosities to behold. Each also carries the traits of previous vessels they’ve attacked. These beings bunt and overcome the sleeping, in order to experience the euphoria of possessing a corporeal body

The seamstress’ own dream world is a large, residential Quarter in a French suburb. All the humans present are

The Moth Child has a cumbersome body, asb-grey and naked. Moths with powdery wings crawl over its flesh, feeling their way forward with their antennae. They grow in cocoons inside the Child’s body and squirm out of round, soft openings. FreQuently, the Child claws open its veins with sharp talons and feeds its rustling brood with its blood, inciting them to swarm in frenzy around the wounds to drink. The creature moves silently and carefully; its voice is no more than a whisper, almost drowned out by the moths’ restless wings. The Child selects solitary victims and baunts their dreams. As its prey sleeps, it crawls out of Limbo and into Elysium, where it makes an incision and greedily feasts on the victim’s blood with its warm, red tongue, while the room fills with moths’ lulling buzz. When the Moth Child intrudes upon your dream world, you begin to bear the moths’ fluttering wings. Soon, you can see the Child behind mirrors and reflective glass, as it approaches and tries to find you. Once the victim is baunted, it also starts attracting moths in €lysium. Scores of them hover around any source of light and settle outside of windows. and Quench their overwhelming desire for physical experiences. So excessive are they in their bedonistic pursuits of sex, violence, intoxication and other bodily sensations that a psyphago can ruin its bost body in a matter of a few months. Meanwhile, the possessed person’s dream self is beld captive in the psyphago’s dream world, which can be anything from a dungeon to a locked nursery. Should the dreamer somehow be liberated or manage to find a way to break free, they can resume control over their body - although they may have some explaining to do for their strange bebavior.

BEYOND THE DREAM

Dream beings are tragic creatures, Quasi-beings created from our fantasies and longings. Some are resuscitated night after night, becoming helpless puppets in our internal dream plays. Others dissolve into oblivion and stare out from Limbo’s dark corners and shadows - in the desperate hope of being noticed. A few lucky ones acquire power and insight, and become predators or parasites feeding on us. These latter beings, we should truly fear.

The Moth Child

The Moth Child The Moth Child has a cumbersome body, ash-grey and naked. Moths with p forward with Child’s body the Child cla rustling broo around the w carefully; its by the moth baunts their and into bild intrudes upon your dream world, you bear the moths’ fluttering wings. Soon, y the Child behind mirrors and reflective approaches and tries to find you. On is baunted, it also starts attracting m sium. Scores of them bover around light and settle outside of windows.

”

As the Seamstress approaches, pain starts spreading across your body. You sense a bumming melody, the scent of camphor, and how the light appears faint and sooty. When she is finally beside you, your body splits into pieces. Your internal organs spill out in a slurry over the ground, and insects and birds descend to feast on them while you are still alive. The Seamstress offer to stitch you back together, requesting an odd payment: to be told about your life in the waking world. As the dreamer talks, she collects their organs and begins sewing their body back together with a needle and thread - but she always keeps one organ. Soon she demands additional services from the dreamer, promising to return the pilfered body part. she demands additional services from the dreamer, promising to return the pilfered body part. V Onill

The Scamitress

dead. Their bodies have been ransacked and stitched together, cotton emerging from the cavities. They move at her command and attack all intruders in zombie-like fashion. At the road’s end, deep within an unassuming bouse, lies her sewing chamber. Furnished with textiles, sewing machines, needles, and scissors. There, in her larder, floating in liouor, are the organs she has stolen from dreamers.

ASTAROTH

Home: Limbo. Creature Type: Powerful creature in Limbo.

Abilities

• Domain: She has a connection to her domain and immediately notices if someone would remove one or several of the organs, even if she is not there.
• Pact-weaver: This being can seal pacts with humans. See Chapter 21 Pacts and Magic.
• Dreamer: Can alter dreams, travel between dreams, and find people in dreams.

Combat [3], Influence [3], Magic [4]. Combat [Considerable]

• Command her human dolls.
• Stitch together limbs [1 Harm, +1 Avoid Harm].
• Rip open wounds [3 Harm, +1 Avoid Harm].

Influence [Considerable]

• Tell a convincing lie.
• Offer something in return for a favor.
• Know where something is located.

Magic [Powerful]

• Manipulate the dream.
• Tear someone apart by will.
• Repair a living being.
• Create and control human dolls.

Attacks

The Seamstress alters the dream, distort patbways, and separates individuals from each other. In ber domain she lets them become distracted and later attacks them with her stuffed human dolls. She attacks with her razor sharp fingernails to rip open deep, bleeding wounds. She may also sew orifices and limbs together with a large sewing needle, rendering victims defenseless.

Fingernails like razors: Cut up [3] [Distance: arm, +1 Avoid Harm].

ASTAROTH

[Distance: arm, the victim gets caught in a sewing thread, Act Under Pressure to get loose. If the victim rips and tears the threads to get loose it automatically takes $1$ Harm - the threads go deep.]

ASTAROTH

room, Keep it Together to not get torn asunder, alive but totally belpless. This attack can only be made if one listens to the melody she is humming]; Distort surroundings [-] [See Through the Illusion to orientate yourself]; Surround with human dolls [1] [the dolls try to grab the victim, Act Under Pressure to get free].

Wounds & Harm Moves

Wounds: - $00000000\stackrel{\otimes }{\times }$

• The attack penetrates the Seamstress’ body without a visible effect.
• Seams on her body burst open exposing cotton soaked in blood.
• Knocked prone by the power of the attack, the Seamstress calls on her human dolls to come to her aid (see Surround with human dolls).
• One black glass eye falls down and rolls away on the ground, leaving a bloody bole in the creature’s head.
• She backs away and tries to offer a deal.
• A body part is torn off, but the Seamstress picks it up and starts to sew it back on again [+1 on next roll against ber].
• Seams burst and her body starts to fall apart. She is weakened for the rest of the battle [+1 ongoing on all rolls against ber].
• The Seamstress is reduced to a pile of bloody skin and cloth (and her human dolls fall lifelessly to the ground). She is dead - at least for now.

The Yearning

The Yearning itself is spellbinding with pale fingers, thin bands, painted eyes, and long eyelasbes. It sings songs in every language, and can guide you by the hand through Limbo, as well as to foreign places and worlds. As real as it may appear, the Yearning is only a dream - a fantasy created by an insane person’s vehemence and appetites, yet it has a fervent desire to join the living. If you spend time with it, you Quickly realize bow vapid it is; the same phrases are repeated and the same gestures and smiles used, as though it is pantomiming. Sorrow resides in its beautiful eyes and behind its melancholy smile. However, when it dances, time itself appears to stop, and rust-red pollen drifts through the air, spreading the scent of saffron. It follows you silently through your dreams and makes observations, trying to protect you from dangers, if it can. As it approaches your dream, parts of Limbo are fringed and broken, exposing passages to a realm of red-resplendent shadows, fireflies, and the sound of waterfalls.

The Child Collector

Late at night, a wardrobe’s doors slide back, and the shadows emit the lilting melodies of a music box, or colorful images sparkle on the computer or the TV. In this fashion, the Child Collector lures children into its dream world. In the morning, parents find empty beds, their little ones vanished without a trace, leaving only vague and anxious dreams from the night before. The Collector’s dream world is a nocturnal waterfront choked with rusted vessels, where fish float bloated and rotting in the bay. On an oil platform, wreathed in mist, the children are kept captive. The creature feeds them and forces them to play with it. Hide and seek, peek-a-boo, dress up, and charades. During these moments, the Collector is truly bappy. It wants the children to always remain its friends, but they always betray it by becoming adults. When this bappens, the creature screams in sorrow over the victim’s treachery, tearing them apart and devouring them in front the other captives. The Collector constantly measures the children’s beight, pokes and prods at them, sniffs their skin, and feels around to see if they are starting to develop breasts or pubic bair. Cunning children can conceal these signs of puberty for a while, but are only prolonging the inevitable. Some have succeeded in escaping back to Elysium, although the Collector never stops searching for these traitors.

The creature itself is pale, bald, and has large teeth, which are deformed, square, and constantly grinding and ruminating. It has no eyes, but uses its sense of smell and bearing to make its way around. Sometimes, its body is so large it stretches into the sky, and its every footstep makes the ground thunder. At other times, it is small, curled up, and bides in the shadows. It can disguise itself by wearing human bides, concealing its entire grotesque appearance for a while. When the Collector penetrates into your dream, you smell the scent of saltwater and decay, and can bear a music box in the distance.

nachtschreck

A nachtschreck is a nightmare, which has been brought to life. It assumes the form of whatever the dreamer fears the most, infecting their dreams with rot and decay. nachtschreck can move out into Elysium and live there, feeding on terror and urban myths. nachtschreck have all kinds of unioue forms, and each one finds its own way of reaching its victims - often spawned from the dreamer who gave them life.

One of them lurks behind misty mirrors, at the fringes of reality, somewhere on the edge of the hypnagogic state, hunting those who fear sleep.

Another manifests itself as a dusty, dark-blue mist upon all the blackness, slowly taking form. Is that a face in the gloom? Suddenly, the mist cracks open and you hear it: the roar of machines, the creaking of metal, and the stench of motor oil and decay spilling into the world. You cannot see anything, but feel something cold and corporeal step into our reality. The presence is awful and menacing, little more than a black shape in the dusk. Every night, it draws a little closer and leaves stinking trails of oil and blood in the room until the victim is eventually found, strangled in his bed or having taken her own life.

Blindmaiden.com is a web page only available during certain times of night, serving as a direct portal into Limbo. On the site, you find grotesque images of dismembered and tortured people, and the deeper you venture into the site’s horrors, the more you look and read, the closer the nachtschreck comes. Finally you reach a page where it says “New content coming soon” and then the nachtschreck manifests in your room. It gives you a choice either it will slay you immediately, or you must kill and maim a someone else (a stranger, a friend, your child…). Those who have been killed in this way turn up as new content on the webpage.

The black-eyed children with pale skin wander on the city’s outskirts, wait in abandoned houses, or hitch a ride on the freeway. They often gaze downwards in order to hide their raven-black eyes from giving them away. When they talk, they sound strangely grown up and often ask for a ride, to be let in, or receive aid. If they are turned down, they venture onward, but may come to follow or haunt certain people and areas for an extended period of time.

Home: Limbo. Creature Type: nachtschreck stirred into life by nightmares and urban legends.

Abilities

Cold hearted: Cannot be influenced or charmed. Combat [3], Influence [2], Magic [1].

Combat [Considerable]

• Surround someone [-1 ongoing].
• Hunt someone until they are caught.
• Burst out in sudden, senseless violence.

Influence [novice]

• Play cat and mouse.

Trick someone.

Magic [Weak]

Travel between Limbo and Elysium.

Attacks

The black-eyed children thrive on their victims fear. They pursue their victims for hours, days, or even weeks.

Sharp objects: Sharp tools [1] [Distance: arm]; Drag to the ground [1] [Distance: arm, victim is pulled to the ground]; Cut off body parts [2] [Distance: arm, victim must be prone].

Wounds & Harm Moves

Wounds: ০০০০০০০ One of the black-eyed children is knocked out of the way.

• When one of the creatures’ faces is bit, total blackness appears under the ripped skin.

One of the children dies, but gives an opportunity for one of the others to come up behind the attacker.

• The black-eyed children become enraged (they do +1 Harm from now on).
• Your attacks push the creatures to the ground creating a possibility to flee [+1 on next roll].
• As sudden as they appeared, the blackeyed children disappear (you are safe for now…)

DREAM WANDERERS

Dream wanderers are people who have, over a long period of time, shifted their consciousness to Limbo, and assumed a permanent form there - while their physical bodies wither away and die. They have the ability to roam between dreams and can manipulate and distort them.

John M. Chivington

Colonel Chivington was a former Methodist priest who took part in the American Civil War. During the conflict, be acquired a taste for violence and conouest. When asked to force Indians off the Sand Creek Reserve to make room for the white settlers, he did so with the greatest gusto and brutality. no lives were spared, and be and his troops butchered men, women, and children, taking trophies and adorning themselves with scalps, genitalia, and fetuses carved out of women while they were still alive. This orgy of violence and euphoria was forever etched into his mind, and at night be replayed the massacre over and over again. In time, be completely stepped over into Limbo, leaving his body behind. Chivington worships netzach, and one of the Archon’s Incarnations regularly appears before him in the form of President Theodore Roosevelt, manipulating his propensity for violence towards netzach’s enemies. Chivington has slain a bost of dream wanderers and dream magicians, and has even ventured out into Elysium to seek ‘justice’ there.

Yōko Sakai

Yōko Sakai was a geisha in 18th-century Japan, who started exploring her dreams with the aid of opium. She is now a Dream Princess, ruling over a dream world where her power is absolute (see above). Her dream world opens up to red-light districts around the world, where people who are fully awake can accidentally step into her perverse realm of feverish desires. She wishes to be worshipped and feared. She is curious about other dream wanderers, and usually offers them a personal audience in order to exchange information and find out who they are. Between the rice-paper walls in her palace, courtesans serve tea according to age-old rituals and offer trays with opium pipes, syringes with beroin, and the crystallized blood of angels. Mistress Sakai assesses her guests, and those who do not observe proper reverence and submission are captured and used as slaves. Those who enrage her in particular get to see her true countenance, and are flayed and woven into the palace’s rice walls. However, those who display their submission, charm ber, or have goods to trade may receive insights into Limbo’s mysteries, be tutored in dream magic, or are led back to €lysium or into other dream realms via meandering alleys.

Yōko Sakai

Home: Limbo. Creature Type: Dream Princess.

Abilities

• Domain: Has a connection to her domain and immediately notices if someone new enters her palace.
• Dreamer: Can alter dreams, travel between dreams, and find people in dreams.

Combat [2], Influence [5], Magic [5].

Combat [Considerable]

• Attack with bidden bairpins.
• Summon reinforcements.
• Folding fan cut.

Influence [Exceptional]

• Demand respect.
• Influence people and organizations in Elysium.
• Offer supernatural objects or knowledge in exchange for payments.
• Accumulate forbidden knowledge.
• Stage a complex plan with many moving parts.

Magic [Exceptional]

• Alter her dream world by will.
• Master in the lore of the Dream.
• Powerful dream wanderer.
• Reveal deep insights into Limbo.
• Move someone’s physical body into Limbo.

Attacks

Yōko Sakai’s power over her dream world is absolute and anything entering her world is at a clear disadvantage. If she were to be lured into other parts of Limbo or even into other dimensions, Yōko would probably surround berself with servants capable of protecting her against any threats.

Hidden hairpins: Surprise attack [2] [Distance: arm, the victim can only Avoid Harm].

Folding fan: Cut up [2] [Distance: arm, may affect two victims within reach].

Magic: Alter the dream [1-3*] [Distance: field, Keep it Together to resist power directed at self].

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Wounds & Harm Moves

Wounds: ००००००००० &

• The attack leaves only scratches.
• Yōko deflects a projectile with her folding fan, launching it onto another victim [Avoid Harm].
• Yōko alters the surroundings, forcing inanimate objects to attack her assailants like living creatures [ $2$ Harm].
• One of Yōko’s servants offers her life to save her mistress.

Yōko alters the dream to regain life force and heal berself $1$ Wound per Wound she inflicts [Keep it Together to resist the magic].

• A rip opens in Yōko’s kimono, exposing blood trickling over the white skin.
• Yōko shouts in pain as the attack cuts up an open wound.
• The dream princess is knocked prone, unable to get up for some seconds [+1 to next roll].
• Yōko disappears as her dream world starts to unravel and rip apart.

CHAPÆER 17 HHE UNOERMORLO