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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 342251" data-attributes="member: 5990">Preamble to my submission:Don't anybody steal this!  As this thread demonstrates, short descriptions of sketchy ideas are extremely rare and hard to come by, so  respect my creativitay!  Every letter of it is trademarked, copyrighted, classified, trade-secreted, all-rights-reserved, posted-no-hunting, and Arcane Marked to protect this valuable intellectual property, so don't mess with it people!1.  Core Ethos Sentence.   In the Chiasma, the struggle between Dream and Nightmare turns as easily on the shudder of a lidded eye as on the edge of a keen blade.2.  Who are the heroes?  Among the most noteworthy types:Marenjacks - Hunters of the manifold manifestations of Nightmare.Soladers - Crusading knights of the Sun who make the perilous journey to fight in Outreciel.Dreamhunters - Errant arcanists obsessed with understanding the link between magic and dreams, they have the means to vie with the Nightmare on its own turf.The Bunting Band - A professional organization, primarily of itinerant bards, peddlers, and tinkers, which secretly seeks to influence collective thought to counter the Nightmare.3.  What do they do?  The lands of the Chiasma are subject to disruptive manifestations of Nightmare, which can be as overt as an infestation of goblins or as subtle as the spontaneous debasement of the coin of the realm.  Marenjacks make a hobby or even profession of coping with these.  Dreamhunters often accompany Marenjacks so as to study the workings of the Nightmare up close, and they as well have the means to allow their allies to contend with the Nightmare from within a collective dream, the Intercubus.Many of the sunlit lands worship the Sun, and the greater part of these cooperate loosely to conduct a holy war, known as the Solade, in Outreciel, the natives of which are blamed (wrongly) for the depredations of the Nightmare and (sometimes rightly) for various other misfortunes.4.  Threats, Conflicts, Villains.  Among the chief threats to peoples of the Chiasma is the Nightmare.  The Nightmare is popularly conceived to be disorder, decay, denial, death: the Adversary.  This is apt in many ways, but the naive notion of the Nightmare as a single sentient entity itself is not quite on the mark.  One only understands the Nightmare when one recognizes that it is the counterpart to mind and thought.  Every dream, idea, thought or intention created in the mind, leaves a sort of void in the unconscious, and that is the Nightmare, by nature opposed to beliefs, desires, dreams, and aspirations.  When thoughts take on a popular collective direction, they naturally tend to engender a massive current of Nightmare in reaction; this tendency often gives the manifestations of Nightmare an eerie semblance of design.  The origin of the Nightmare lies in an ancient conflict forgotten by all but a few of the eldest gods.A more tangible threat though comes from a place rather than a somewhat abstract force of nature.  The world populated by humans and creatures like them is lit by the life giving Sun, which emanates from the heavenly region known as the Empyrean.  Above the Empyrean, beyond the Sun, is a place known as Outreciel, a land of eternal night lit only by starshine.  Its sky is dominated by the dark star Untungol, which many of the inhabitants worship.  The Sunworld and Outreciel are connected by several isolated and perilous routes, which climb through the jade vault of the sky.  These Viae constitute the strategic foci of the Solades, particularly the immense and often harrowing Via Galactica.  Several less known and far stranger avenues between the worlds are often the focus of hidden but no less intense struggles.5.  Nature of magic.  All creatures but the simplest touch magic in some way, though only those sorts possessing some faculty of thought understand this.  Only the most disciplined (3E's wizards) or, ironically, least disciplined (3E's sorcerers) of thinking creatures though can shape magic towards some design through their own will.  Magic is quite simply the influence of mind on form, on the shape of those things that are called "real."  However, that portion of mind which is turned towards conscious thought spends its creative potential on the organization of thought itself.  Only the swirling amorphous unconscious has the potential to shape the real directly, without the intermediary of sinew and bone through which conscious thought is constrained to act.6.  What's new? What's different?  The setting is built around oppositions which give it a fruitful source of action.  The nightmare/reality conflict touches on ideas which have been quite popular in recent speculative fiction (particularly anime and a number of RPG lines) but the world of the Chiasma treats this in a fresh way.</blockquote>

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