Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gez" data-source="post: 445444" data-attributes="member: 1328">It's French.Rêve de Dragon (which could be translated to Dragons' Dreams) is a game, and a world, akin no other. It's author, Denis Gerfaud, labelled it asa RPG of "oniric fantasy" (rather than heroic fantasy).I'll describe it (relatively) shortly, yet try to make the game justice.The world is a dream, collectively dreamed by creatures called "dragons". Noone ever saw a dragon or even know what they actually look like, but they are usually depicted like everyone depict dragons.The land itself is shattered between the various dreaming dragons. For example, you may have a small country, just one city state, some farmlands around, a sea, and a big forest all around. What is beyond the forest ? Nothing. You'll eventually find mists that will move you to another dream.Everyone is dreamed by a dragon. If you die, you'll appear in another dream. With another life, completely distinct, usually.Characters are not always conscious. Most of their life is not actually lived, just remembered. The semi-consciousness periods are called "grey dream". Usually, you make boring things during these grey dream period, and you just retain hazy memories of these boring things.Magic works strangely. PCs and NPCs alike are all fictitious characters, living only in the unconscious imagination of the dragon. But even fictious characters acquire a personality of their own. Novel writers knows that sometimes a character escape their control and make the story advance in an unplanned way; this is the same for dreamed characters. Magicians, called High Dreamers, are able to access a more abstract layer of the dragon's subconscious to alter the dream in which he live.Magic is divided in four ways. Oniros, Hypnos, Narcos, and Thanatos. Oniros is pure dreaming and allow the most blunt alterations, like making stone transparent or changing fire into wood. Hypnos is more subtle, and allows all sort of what D&D would label illusions and enchantment. Especially illusion. Narcos is how you make thing dreams, in other words it allows you to create magic items. And finally, Thanatos is everything that hurt the dream and provoke nightmare. This range from horrific effects (like necromancy) to blatantly unnateral effects (like polymorph) that shatter the dream and awake the dragon.Remember that everyone is a dream. When a dragon awaken, all the people and creature he dreams of die. And everyone a person is violently killed, the dragon is awaken by the nightmare.Once the dragon fall asleep again, the killed one will get a new life, in an usually different context.When the character themselves dream, they remember some of their past lives. This allows them to increase their skills, by remembering how they used it in a past life. Stressful events brings more vivid nights, so you gain more experience from adventure than from day-to-day life. However, you can also train to increase your skills.From a RPG point of view, this game is a bounty. You need to reunite a party ? They all awaken from grey dream together. Someone get killed ? Not a problem, he can be back at the next adventure. You want to lead them to another place ? They can stumble onto a mist, a bluedream zone, or just have made the travel in gray dream. You want to remove an unbalancing item ? The character lost it. Probably during grey dream. To the contrary, you want to give something ? It was acquired during greydream. The party makes something ABSOLUTELY stupid and you get a TPK ? They awake together and can start again.In other games, these things would seem heavy-handed and cheesy. In RdD, it's just the contrary. It don't break the suspension of disbelief, because it is how things works here.On the system itself, it is IMHO nigh perfect. A bit complex (it is simulationnist), but always consistant and logical. Once you know it a bit, everything is intuitive (if not fast, especially for combats, a bit lengthy).I'll add that the adventures written for the game are masterpieces and give it really a beautiful ambiance. The game is poetic and oniric, truly (even if it can be played like a mere hack'n'slash, like all RPGs); and so without being boring or unfun.</blockquote>

Verification