The techniques for running horror encounters and games, as presented in Chapters 1 through 3, apply equally well to turning dreams into nightmares. So long as you start from a sufficiently dreamlike starting point, perhaps using the above techniques, the nightmare should maintain its unreal quality while still evoking as much dread as any other horror encounter.
DREAMS AS PLOT DEVICES So what to do with dreams in a horror game? Certainly they’re interesting enough to include simply for the sake of character development, but that’s hardly the only use for them. Besides contributing greatly to the mood, dreams can have a major impact on the plot of a story.
Prophetic Dreams Common to myth, modern fantasy, horror, and even certain real-world spiritual beliefs is the notion of dreams that somehow predict the future. Working prophetic dreams into a game is simply a matter of describing a character’s dream and letting the players figure out on their own that it was a forewarning of things to come. You might decide these dreams are warnings from a deity, or the work of a long dead but still concerned relative, but they need have no source at all. In a world of high magic, which covers most D&D settings, such things simply occur. Use them to enhance the mood of a story, or when you wish to give the characters an opportunity to prepare themselves for something that would otherwise catch them unawares. Omens: Omens in dreams are symbols and metaphors; they foretell the future, but they aren’t obvious about it and require some interpretation. For instance, if a character dreams of falling to the ground amid a pool of blood, this probably suggests that she will be badly injured or even slain in the near future. It does not, however, tell her how or when. And it might not even indicate literal injury. It could instead suggest that the character is going to fail at something. On a more symbolic level, a character might dream of a raven attacking a lion—slashing its talons across the lion’s throat, pecking out the eyes, and feasting on the corpse. This dream
CHAPTER 3
Turning Dreams into Nightmares
seems meaningless—until the character later realizes that the orcs that are about to invade his kingdom are united under a raven banner. And the king’s ensign is a rearing lion. . . . Omens are relatively easy to work with, as far as prophetic dreams go. You just need to rough out a few events likely to occur later in the campaign and take a moment beforehand to couch them in vague, symbolic terms. After all, the interpretation is up to the PCs. If they guess wrong, they can’t expect to recognize the event when it happens. You can, if necessary, tailor the event to better fit the symbolism or their interpretation of it, if this would produce more interesting results than your initial plan. Clear Visions: A far more difficult type of prophetic dream to pull off, a clear vision isn’t couched in metaphor. It clearly shows a future event. A dreamer might see herself riding through a specific valley, only to be ambushed by troglodytes and taken to a sacrificial chamber, where she is fed, piece by living piece, to a horrific demon. Or he might find himself on a battlefield, in the midst of unthinkable carnage, watching as his fellow soldiers and even his queen fall one by one to the enemy, until he eventually becomes buried and suffocated beneath a pile of dead companions. A clear vision is a tool for inspiring dread in your players. If you have described in great detail a dream in which each of them was picked off by an unseen opponent while walking down an ornately decorated underground hall, rest assured that when your players recognize that hall during a dungeon crawl five sessions later, they’re going to be very, very worried. Such a dream enables you to drop hints to your players about the nature of threats they might face, particularly if the foe has only one specific weakness. (Even in an otherwise clear dream, you might wish to couch that weakness in symbolic terms so as not to make it too easy on them.) It even allows you to play up a villain to the extent that your PCs might be reluctant to face her—despite the possibility that she might not actually be as dangerous as they believe. The danger in placing clear prophecies in dreams, of course, is that the players might not act as the DM anticipates. What if the PCs decide not to enter that valley? What if they manage to find a way of averting the war with the orcs, or they never go down that corridor and thus skip that portion of the dungeon? While you can design the adventure to encourage PCs to go a certain way, forcing them to do so only results in frustration and resentment. Fall back on creative description and flexible placement to make prophecies work in some way other than what you originally intended. Save the description of the valley that the PCs did not enter and use it on the next valley they pass through. Tell them once they’re inside that it’s starting to seem familiar. Maybe they succeed in averting the war for now, but it flares up again several years down the road (possibly even in a different campaign). Perhaps the symbols on the dungeon hallway are the mark of a cult that could just as easily pop up again elsewhere. On the other hand, sometimes it’s appropriate to let the prophecy go unfulfilled. After all, the characters had advance warning, so maybe some action they took headed off the event before it could happen. It should not be possible to avert every prophesied happening—horror and fantasy are rife with examples of people trying to escape their fate and bringing it down upon themselves all the harder (for a classic
A HORROR CAMPAIGN
A Ridiculous Detail is Accepted as Commonplace: Dogs talk. The dreamer fights his foes with an empty hand, as though pretending to use a sword; each time he strikes, it takes the foe a second longer to drop, and the dreamer knows that sooner or later, the enemy will realize he doesn’t really have a sword and will stop falling altogether. It is always day or always night. Time flows abnormally quickly or slows to a crawl. The Dreamer Recognizes a Person or Place for Something It’s Not: The dreamer is walking with her husband, but in the dream her husband looks like a totally different person. The dreamer is wandering through his family’s home; he knows it’s his home and knows his way around it, but it does not actually resemble his family’s home from real life. The DM can choose to revisit a place the PC has been to earlier in the campaign. Start by telling the player, “You find yourself back in Castle Shadowmere.” Then describe rooms and halls as you choose, making no attempt to have the description match up to the PC’s earlier visit but not calling attention to the differences either. Wait for the player to notice that the location does not appear the same, rather than making that fact overtly clear.
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