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<blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 345582" data-attributes="member: 5990">Oh, that Nightmares and Dreams thing?&nbsp; Yeah, I've seen it - didn't really work for me.&nbsp; I gather that the conceit is that dreams in the real world were coming true in their campaign world and that some characters were connected to dreams in the real world, rather like the connections between some of the characters in the Dictionary of the Khazars, who dreamt each others' waking lives (I also borrowed the term dreamhunters from that, though their activities are different).&nbsp; It's a serviceable hook for connecting the real world to the game world, but don't see how the connection brings a useful dynamic into the game.&nbsp; Do you really need to add that layer to explain why fantastic things are happening in the World of Foo?&nbsp; From what I've read in the Mystic Eye blurbs, I couldn't see where it was anything more than window dressing as far as the actual gaming was concerned.What my setting did was make dreams into encounters, as well as more abstractly the source of magic. The appeal of this (to me) was that on the one hand, you can have a firm rule-based world in which most play takes place.&nbsp; However, you can also introduce occasional encounters in the dream realm that would actually mesh into the setting/plot, arising logically and having real effects on the gameworld.&nbsp; This would allow you to bring truly fantastic elements into the game via the dream settings without having to create highly improbable dungeons, have PCs wander into mysterious mists (e.g. Castle Amber, Ravenloft), or capriciously teleport the PCs to another plane, as has been frequently done in past adventures.&nbsp; I also had a rulesystem around the dream encounters that would allow players to take more risks in the dream, to let it all hang out, but alas I doubt it will ever see the light of day now. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />&nbsp; I guess my big complaint about most of the uses of this theme (and many other such themes) in RPG settings has been that they stopped at just saying dreams (or whatever) are connected with magic (or whatever) without actually making the dreams interact with the happenings of the game.&nbsp; Sure, it's easy to say something like &quot;all magic comes from swamp moss&quot; but what I'm looking for is how that actually changes the way players interact with the game, beyond changing &quot;spell slots&quot; to &quot;moss points&quot;.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="tarchon, post: 345582, member: 5990"] Oh, that Nightmares and Dreams thing? Yeah, I've seen it - didn't really work for me. I gather that the conceit is that dreams in the real world were coming true in their campaign world and that some characters were connected to dreams in the real world, rather like the connections between some of the characters in the [i]Dictionary of the Khazars[/i], who dreamt each others' waking lives (I also borrowed the term dreamhunters from that, though their activities are different). It's a serviceable hook for connecting the real world to the game world, but don't see how the connection brings a useful dynamic into the game. Do you really need to add that layer to explain why fantastic things are happening in the World of Foo? From what I've read in the Mystic Eye blurbs, I couldn't see where it was anything more than window dressing as far as the actual gaming was concerned. What my setting did was make dreams into encounters, as well as more abstractly the source of magic. The appeal of this (to me) was that on the one hand, you can have a firm rule-based world in which most play takes place. However, you can also introduce occasional encounters in the dream realm that would actually mesh into the setting/plot, arising logically and having real effects on the gameworld. This would allow you to bring truly fantastic elements into the game via the dream settings without having to create highly improbable dungeons, have PCs wander into mysterious mists (e.g. Castle Amber, Ravenloft), or capriciously teleport the PCs to another plane, as has been frequently done in past adventures. I also had a rulesystem around the dream encounters that would allow players to take more risks in the dream, to let it all hang out, but alas I doubt it will ever see the light of day now. :D I guess my big complaint about most of the uses of this theme (and many other such themes) in RPG settings has been that they stopped at just [b]saying[/b] dreams (or whatever) are connected with magic (or whatever) without actually making the dreams interact with the happenings of the game. Sure, it's easy to say something like "all magic comes from swamp moss" but what I'm looking for is how that actually changes the way players interact with the game, beyond changing "spell slots" to "moss points". [/QUOTE]

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