Dream Sequence
Now that you mention it, that bridge does look slightly familiar. In the case of Aragorn and Arwen, it was device to compress time, serving as a convenient excuse to restage the moment of their first meeting. For our pals Paladin and Necromancer, however, we’re compressing space. The bad(?) girl in black is still at Evil Party HQ, while our golden boy is out knight erranting it up in the far corners of Handbook-World. If you want that ship to sail in a world without cell phones, you need some kind of plot device. You need a dream sequence.
This mess is something you’ll see all the time in the MCU. When the script calls for an exposition dump, they tend to poke a forehead, have a mystic vision, and consult their dream journal. While it’s possible to overuse the technique, there’s a reason it comes up so often. When you need to advance you plot quickly it’s bloody useful.
In the context of a TRPG, it’s also a handy way to shift the spotlight. After all, it’s tough for Wizard to steal the show when the scene is happening in someone else’s head.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we share our best dream sequences? That includes all the divination sequences, divine revelations, and spirit journeys our characters get up to. So whether you experience a long-distance Vulcan mind meld or simply had a prophetic nightmare, let’s hear all about it down in the comments!
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dream nonsense is par for the course with mage: the awaking, whether it’s hunting down dodgy bits of abyss in someone’s mind, or making dodgy deals with the fair folk, oh that one required a wisdom check
Is there a specific mechanic for it in Mage? Every time I hear about the game it sounds like a blast from a flavor standpoint, but I know very little about its systems.
All I’m going to say right now is that today’s artwork is especially pretty – my compliments to Laurel – and I really like skills like lucid dreaming (3.x Manual of the Planes) and the Dream-spell. They can be very fun and useful tools, not just for a DM, but also for other forms of creativity. ^_^
I’m crazy impressed by her ability to fit three panels in a single panel comic. 🙂
I used a dream sequence for a mid-campaign one-shot for a party in a homebrew system once, reusing an old monstrous character as a “game show host” that would benefit whoever won the game in the dream world (in a way that would ultimately net benefit the host.)
I’m tempted to use another dream world for different reasons, though I’d probably avoid using the trope without a diegetic reason for it (e.g. Dream/Nightmare spells, prophecies, Bill Cypher, Quori, or another aberration with power over dreams).
You ever see that one episode of Voltron?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS1PmJvg4Iw&t=1s
I haven’t seen Voltron, but that clip was enjoyable.
It was closer to a race across an open sky with platforms and a bunch of different coin-tiles that did things based on the words on them, which triggered when touched or if blasted somehow with a ranged weapon or magic. The goal was to retrieve a bell from across the area. Falling into the sky wasn’t lethal; I forget how I handled it but it probably involved losing progress instead of dying.
Less “game show host” and more “weird psychic creature that ran a weird game/competition with some dream logic elements to it, with the prize of getting powers that if overused would slowly reduce the user to a husk under said creature’s control for use in Eldritch Schemes TM.” The game was a bit clunky to execute in practice, but it was definitely fun to GM.
My character in our Vaesen campaign picked up a Talent for performing seances to contact spirits for info. Given that his primary skillset (besides fisticuffs) is making friends, then calling them up for help with investigations, we joked that he’s got friends everywhere, even on the other side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g00kEcGh4j8
Possibly my favorite villain song, lol.
My best dream sequence came while the party decided to sleep under the watchful eye of a nothic; which I ruled gave them horribly twisted visions of their lives as the creature saw them.
The party cleric was an assimar both springing from and devoted to the goddess of the sun, who’s goal was to spread her goddess’s light and aid to everyone she could. She dreamed she was a candleflame struggling to keep the darkness at bay, as hundreds of people clung to her for refuge. But the darkness grew deeper and deeper; and as she burned brighter and brighter to hold it back, the people who clung to her caught fire and burned.
our DM used the dream thingy to prevent a TPK.
„drink this McGuffin potion before you enter there“ said the NPC shaman.
we drunketh and nothing happened.
well, a TPK happened and we woke up in front the door again.
With some clever positioning TPK was averted the second time we entered.
Currently running a (modified) Curse of Strahd game. Using dream sequences to connect my PCs with the dark powers trying to recruit them. So far they are taking the bait!
It’s all romantic and touching until Freddy Kruger shows up.
Do drug-fueled hallucinations count? Cause what’s going on here would be vary different if they on a mushroom samba.
Our recent Starfinder session had Desna doing dream vision stuff. We later went on to meet her in person. Pretty wild stuff.
And like most instances of “a god shows up in person”, it really makes you question the setting as a whole.
None of that was something Desna couldn’t solve on her own… and even if she needed mortal champions to avoid the evil gods doing retaliation bullying, she could have handled it better than she did.
DMs… Find a way.
I used dream sequences often when running Shackled City.
(Warning, minor spoilers follow.)
After one of my players gained lordship of Occipitus, they began to have dreams about the history of the plane. How it was once part of Celestia, how it came to rest in the Abyss, and how Adrimarchus, the former ruler, was imprisoned by Graz’zt.
It was a nice way to exposition dump on the party and help two players explore their characters.
Oh man. . . Where to start? Our entire campaign that my wife has been running since 2018 had an interesting “what-if?” Dream sequence. She did it as solo sessions with each of the players separately and asked that we not share the details of our dream out of character.
To add some background, our characters live inside a place known as The Storm. The boundary of our known world is surrounded by an ever churning hurricane. Once we made it some ways into the campaign, we discovered that the storm had an outside world as well, and we set about finding the 7 lost macguffins and the needed ritual to maybe take this Storm-wall down. It’s a high seas adventure on an elegant stolen pirate ship, our captain is a seemingly ageless changeling that lost her memory and appears to have come from outside the storm. One of the players is one of the most taboo things in our lore, a weather witch.
We’ve saved two out of the three most major kingdoms from utter ruin so far and have found 3 of the 7 amulets so far. Each one came with increasingly dire visions, usually warning us of potential futures.
So here’s the what if of the dream, “what if the weather witch didn’t join the campaign on session 1. What if he only joined later due to another set of circumstances?”
My character’s now-wife doesn’t stay on the ship, because the weather witch’s reassuring words were never said after she almost died. We never made it to the elven kingdom in time to save the Captain’s first mate (and lover, and heir to the throne as it turns out) because the weather witch wasn’t there to keep the wind at our backs during the trip, which cascades into every other problem to come. The Captain murders her killers (her lovers brothers), and the truth of the situation gets twisted into mass regicide on the elven nation and we’re branded traitors.
We never uncover the plot of a Veiled Master aboleth that staged the whole thing at the elven nation, so we never even suspect she’s responsible for corruption in the dwarven council. We had to break into the royal tomb rather than just get permission, which branded us enemies of the dwarven nation. And apparently we even get framed for the human King’s assassination in another country. One that we haven’t even been to yet in-game.
My character was now in a relationship with someone who was previously our captive (and sorta our first villain of the first major arc of campaign), the weather witch is looking for his son not to ask for forgiveness but to kill him because he didn’t find out the truth of his son’s situation, and our third character never worked out his depression and gave into drugs barely holding himself together.
All because we didn’t have favorable winds. . . All the revelations from this dream are still being felt over a year and a half later, as even though it didn’t actually happen, it did reveal several things about what was to come. It will probably continue to be one of the single most significant moments in the entire campaign.
…I haven’t actually HAD a dream sequence in my games yet. Huh.
In one campaign, a couple of sessions in, the GM had us tell each other what dreams we were having that night as we were resting in a dungeon. And then we’d run the dream again, but he’d jump in mid-scene as a demonic entity that was manipulating those dreams, turning pleasant dreams into nightmares and turning nightmares into a reason to give up the quest and GET OUT. It was really fun to be revisiting a tragic event in my backstory, and it planted the seeds for my evil character’s eventual turn to good.
That wasn’t the best part of the scene, however. One of my party members was an old Druid, coming to the end of his years (and his mind) and adventuring on one final quest while he still remembered that he *could* go on quests. His dream was extremely symbolic, with him traveling to a familiar place he couldn’t remember and falling into a hole there, just watching as his memories slipped away from him as he fell into the dark, returning to the earth and dissipating into the great unknown of the afterlife. And the demonic entity showed up, and it just…had no idea what form to take or what he could do to change the dream into a worse nightmare. The old Druid saw the entity in it’s true form, and just nodded to them. Friendly, acknowledging that it was there. And then the player declined the GM’s offer that noticing the entity’s true form was enough to jar the Druid awake. The Druid consciously chose in-character to remain in the dreamland to dream that dream once again, as they knew they would for the rest of their days. It was a very touching moment, and made the Druid’s eventual death at the end of the campaign all the more bittersweet.
Ever since Curse of Strahd and the temptations of the Dark Powers, the phrase “And as you sleep… you dream” has become a bit of a meme in my gaming circle.
Entirely separately, the plot of my main campaign is largely driven by one character’s visions of the Lady in White, who may or may not be a goddess. It started out with just one dream, but she later gained the ability to contact her through visions once every in-game month.
My favorite use of dreams involved my son’s paladin.
He’d hit 4th level (which in 2E AD&D is when you get your paladin mount), but they were still trapped in Castle Amber (or possibly Averoign). After the Black Lotus dust gave everyone dreams, he started having a recurring one, about a herd of giant elk from the point of view of a stalking predator, focusing on a particularly fine and majestic specimen. Each successive dream advanced the scene a little further, and his last dream had the unseen predator in hot pursuit of the elk.
The party was on the Isle of Dread by this point, and as they entered the tar pits region, a handful of giant elk rushed by the party, apparently fleeing something, and the paladin recognized a few of them as members of the herd in his dreams. He urgedthe party forward and they emerged from a copse of trees just in time to witness a massive sabre-toothed tiger catch the majestic elk, break its neck, and then discover that it was now stuck in a tar pit. It looked at the paladin and gave a plaintive ‘yowl’. The party rescued the big cat, and my son is now exceedingly pleased with it as his Holy Mount.
Has anyone played through the classic Dragonlance modules? Module DL10 has an extended semi-shared dream sequence in Silvanest. I’ve never played it, but it seems interesting.
Honestly, until the elk died, I thought the paladin was going to save the elk and the elk would be the mount. Either works. 🙂
So did my son. That was what I was trying to hint with the dreams. I think he really liked the twist, though.
He gives up using a lance, but gets a mount that can claw, bite, and kick for 1d4+4/1d4+4/2d6/1d4/1d4 = 14-36 damage. (He found a pair of arm bands that increase the damage of unarmed attacks by the limb their wrapped around by 3 – probably intended for a monk, now warn by his tiger).
Love, like the Mansus, defies boundaries 🙂
We use them a lot, nice way to talk long distance and good way to access places 🙂
I’ve got a link for you right here!
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?579196-One-of-my-finest-moments-as-a-DM-*Unmarked-Curse-of-Strahd-Spoilers!*
From a curse of strahd game I ran with some very enthusiastic players. Happened inbetween sessions as an email chain.
I always use them for gods and patrons to communicate with their paladins, warlocks, etc. I usually make them very deceptive and misleading.
When I converted In Search of Sanity (the first book of the Strange Aeons adventure path) into a stand-alone adventure, I leaned heavily into dream stuff, since the PCs were literally trapped in a building where the border between reality and the Dimension of Dreams had fallen apart. Whenever the PCs rested, I gave each of them a written paragraph of what they dreamed about. Some of these were deliberately trippy (like swimming through the building full of water), some of these were foreshadowing of future foes, and some of them were fragments of the amnesiac PCs’ lost memories. One PC later used a spell to enter a lucid dream, encountered some more memories, and then ran into the adventure’s Freddy Kruger analog, who viciously mutilated them. (They were physically fine when they woke up.)
In a somewhat similar vein, in a different campaign the PCs encountered a sage in the desert who can sort of see the future. They each got to ask one question (which usually related to their long-term character goals) and get an unhelpfully cryptic poem in response. It was a good time.