(Warning: all the text by Matthew is here, but I'll soon improve
the presentation for this page).

*** The Dream, sourcebook for Kult RPG, by Matthew *** 

--- Into the Dream --- 

Note: Parts of the dream sourcebook are taken WORD FOR WORD 
from the rulebooks; my intention in doing this is that 
people shouldn't have to search through multiple sources in 
order to have a complete picture. - Matthew 

The realm of dreams is a universe of its own. In dreams, we 
can be and do other things than in real life. The laws of 
physics don't apply there, time and space lose their 
meaning. But dreams can also meet our world and affect it. 

The realm of dreams is not a separate world, independent of 
reality. We create our own dreams, they rise from our 
unconscious selves. Forgotten people and events appear 
there, sometimes without being recognized. But all times and 
places in dreams have a direct relation to ourselves. In 
dreams, we meet things from our previous existences. 

Dreams can affect our world. We can create beings in dreams 
which step out into reality. We can grow in strength and 
power there, and then enter real life wearing our dreamed 
selves. We can change things in dreams, and thereby alter 
reality. 

-- The World of Dreams -- 

It is not normally possible to control what happens in your 
dreams. The Gamemaster decides this. The dreamed world can 
be more or less like your usual environment, and it is 
always influenced by your thoughts and your personality. A 
dreamer with low mental balance makes a darker, more 
dangerous dream world than someone with a high balance. 

Several people can have the same dream. Nobody knows exactly 
how this happens. Perhaps it has something to do with 
telepathic contact. They create the dream together, so that 
it is affected by all their personalities. 

The story of the campaign must determine what happens in the 
dream. Sometimes a dream may be far from reality, with 
flowing colors, weird perspectives, and a warped sense of 
time. Other times, it may be realistic and close to the 
waking world of the characters. If they are going to spend a 
long time in the dream, perhaps a whole game session, it is 
best to make it realistic because that makes it easier for 
the players to visualize and act in. 

- Time in Dreams -

Dreams are beyond time. Skillful dreamers can control time 
in their dreams so that it runs faster or slower than 
normal. But most of the time, the Gamemaster decides what 
time is like in the dreams. Usually, it is parallel to time 
in the physical world so that an hour of real time is an 
hour in the dream. There may, however, be vast differences 
sometimes. An hour in the dream may be equal to a year of 
real time, or vice versa. It all depends on what the 
Gamemaster has in mind. 

- Dreams and Reality -

A skillful dreamer can influence the waking world by opening 
portals or by hurting someone in a dream so that the 
physical body of that person is also injured. But there are 
other ways to let dreams work on reality. 

Characters may find clues in a dream, which can be used to 
solve a problem in real life. Perhaps the clues are deeply 
buried memories from earlier lives, or things they will find 
out in the future. Dreams aren't concerned with time or 
space. 

Precognitive dreams are such where the dreamer experiences 
something that will happen in the future. For a moment, he 
is able to see through the lie that time really is. It is 
not possible, not even for masters of dreaming, to 
intentionally summon true prcognitive dreams. Such 
experiences come of their own accord (when the Gamemaster 
needs them). The dreamer doesn't know if the precognition is 
a true prophecy until the event really happens. 

Messages can arrive in dreams from skilled dreamers and from 
creatures outside the normal world. Dreams are a way of 
seeing through the illusions and meeting characters from the 
other side. 

Characters can affect reality in their dreams, e.g. destroy 
a dangerous object which is the also destroyed in reality, 
or set someone free whose dream self is imprisoned, so that 
he can return to his physical body and wake up. Nothing 
stops dreamers from trying to affect reality, even if their 
score in the Art of Dreaming is low. The difference to 
skilled dreamers is that the amateur doesn't know whether 
his efforts have any effect or whether he is out on a wild 
goose chase. 

Sometimes, dreams and reality flow into each other so that 
we cannot tell them apart. This happens when a dreamer, 
consciously or not, has opened a wide portal between dream 
and "reality." The effect is similar to what happens when 
the illusions fade away in our world. Anything can happen. 
Everything flows. Strange creatures appear. 

But when the illusions crumble, we see into another world 
which (at least we think) is really there. When a dream 
merges with reality, it is because there is a person who is 
changing the world around us. The changes depend totally on 
the dreamer. If he or she is awakened, the disturbances go 
away. 


--- Dream Princes --- 

The eight dream princes and princesses are the most powerful 
of all dreamers. They have existed entirely in dreams for 
ages, and have built themselves empires of dream worlds. 
Their dreaming scores are 100 or more, and they are also 
masters of dream magic with almost as high scores. Many of 
the Wanderers have become servants of the dream princes, 
more or less voluntarily. 

The realms of the dream princes lie close to Vortex, where 
it is easy to create new dreams from the chaotic torrent of 
images. The eight principalities extend from the chaotic 
center toward those parts of the dream worlds closest to our 
reality, and they have an inner logic and meaning. Each of 
them consists of hundreds of dreams that flow into each 
other. 

The proximity to Vortex has affected the dream princes. All 
of them have become more or less insane from living in the 
chaotic border areas. Perhaps, a long time ago, their realms 
were fantastic and beautiful. Now, they consist more and 
more of twisted nightmares and insane hallucinations. 

The dream princes are involved in a long and bitter struggle 
for power over Vortex. Anyone who controls the source of 
dreams has power over all the dream worlds. No one has 
managed to control Vortex, but all fear that someone else 
will make himself master of dreams. thus, they always 
struggle and attempt to cut off each others' channels to 
Vortex. Madness has made them paranoid and unable to trust 
each other. If they can, they always try to damage each 
others' dream worlds. 

All the dream princes have connections in our world. Some of 
the stle between them is fought with human chessmen in the 
waking world. The dream princes can enter our world when 
they please, but it is uncommon that they do so. More often, 
they send their servants who may be wanderers or ordinary 
dreamers. There are permanent portals between the waking 
world and the realms of the dream princes in some places. 

- Hammad al-Sufi - 

The oldest dream prince, Hammad al-Sufi, has created worlds 
of stone, worlds of glass; nightmares follow his commands. 

No one knows how old Hammad al-Sufi is. He was the first 
dream prince. He himself claims to have entered the world of 
dreams in the same year that Noah was saved from the flood 
in his Ark. His dream realm is the largest of all. It 
stretches from absolute dissolution near vortex to a point 
where it almost merges with the waking world. In some 
places, notably a few blocks in Baghdad and Basra, al-Sufi 
has managed to merge his world completely with ours. Other 
dream princes fear that he may extend his influence over a 
larger part of the waking reality. 

Hammad al-Sufi himself dwells in an old rock city near 
Vortex. Ichthyrians hunt the narrow alleys that perpetually 
change and twist. The bodies of dead dreamers lie all over 
the ground and hang from the walls. Through narrow window 
slits, one can glimpse the veiled servants of al-Sufi, 
powerful wanderers who are as crazy as he is. In a rock 
chamber near a dried-up well sit al-Sufi and his followers, 
mumbling insane rhymes and incantations. 

Hammad al-Sufi has a score of 350 in the Art of Dreaming and 
140 in the Lore of Dreams. he knows all dream spells to 50 
and has several spells of his own. 

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego - The Triple Assassin of 
Hammad al-Sufi 

These three veiled killers are joined at the right hand; 
they walk in an endless rotation, face forwards. In their 
joined hands a wicked dagger gleams, completing two snaky 
curves. 

The Triple Assassin exists for a single purpose: to kill any 
potential Loci, before any worlds are destroyed. Hammad 
al-Sufi enters their razor-quiet domain only once in a 
generation. Understanding his presence, Shadrach, Meshach, 
and Abednego rip apart their joined hands, and commence to 
hunt the potential Locus. 

All three are silent, and all three have mastered the 
deadliest, most secret martial arts. There are cults in 
India and the Middle East, factions among the Hashishins, 
who worship the Triple Assassin as a god. The most fanatical 
among these may be granted a vision or a calling, demanding 
their aid in the capture of the Locus. 

There are three of them, identical veiled mysteries with one 
hand useless and torn open, in identical killing silences. 
They choose to capture the Locus, and execute her in a 
ritual manner, walking around her--when their hands join, 
they heal together, and the deadly dagger sweeps down from 
their joined hands. 

- Deride Aristides - 

Her dreams come to us from the 24th century, a 
claustrophobic future pressing back to the past of our 
dreams. 

Deride Aristides 

Aristides will be born in the 24th century, three hundred 
years into our future. But her dream worlds extend far back 
in time from when she will be born. Her worlds are 
influenced by her own native time. They are overpopulated, 
dirty city environments, rundown space stations and ship 
interiors which merge with each other. They are weird 
fantasies of cyberspace where people in the form of computer 
programs move in the darkness between systems. 

The dream worlds of Aristides are those that most resemble 
Metropolis and our large cities. This has made it possible 
for her to open portals from her realm into Metropolis. 
There are also portals to her world in Tokyo, Los Angeles, 
and in several space installations in our future. 

Aristides lives in a control room in the desolate remains of 
a space station near Vortex. Her servants, insane 
half-mechanical creatures, wander the corridors and shoot 
anything that moves. 

Her score in the Art of Dreaming is 200, and in the Lore of 
Dreams she has 80, with all spells to 40. 

- Aaron Greenberg - 

Insanely orderly dreamworlds, filled with endless repetition 
and alien bureaucracy. 

Aaron Greenberg 

Greenberg's dream worlds are the least chaotic of the dream 
princes' realms. He desires to bring order and meaning to 
the dream worlds, to make them more like our waking reality. 
In order to accomplish this, he moves physical people into 
his world. Thousands have been captured and willy-nilly 
transported to Greenberg's worlds. 

His dream realms are meticulously well-ordered places, full 
of nightmarish bureaucracy, pointless rules, and armies of 
guards and policemen who watch over the dreamers. Corridors 
and offices with clerks and administrators fill whole 
worlds. Other worlds are copies of middle-class, suburban 
residential areas with thousands of split-levels stretching 
endlessly toward the horizon. Some world are endless prisons 
with millions of identical cells. Greenberg likes to repeat 
patterns indefinitely. He has even reproduced people and 
populated dream worlds with thousands of copies of the same 
person. 

Greenberg's score in the Art of Dreaming is 180, and his 
score in the Lore of Dreams is 90, with all spells to 40. 

For one of the 20th century dream princes (the 'order and 
repetition' one), it sounds like Franz Kafka, George Orwell 
and G.K. Chesterton ("The Man Who Was Thursday") might be 
interesting. 

- Friedrich Koepfel - 

An occultist builds his shrine to the occult in the lands of 
sleep; walk into a Tarot card.... 

Friedrich Koepfel 

Koepfel began creating his dream worlds in the seventeenth 
century, when he was court alchemist to the Duke of 
Thuringen. He is probably the most skillful dream magician 
in the world. His dream worlds are formed in magical and 
alchemical traditions. They contain temples and subterranean 
halls for occult initiations, magical objects and huge 
libraries full of old manuscripts that Koepfel has brought 
into the dream world from our reality. Everything is woven 
with spells and magic. There are curses everywhere, ready to 
strike the careless. The dead come to life. The living are 
trapped in the borderland between life and death. Portals 
are opened to Metropolis, Inferno, and to other dream 
worlds. A dreamer without knowledge of magic can get in 
serious trouble in Koepfel's dream worlds. 

Koepfel himself resides in a citadel which imitates those of 
the Archons, close to Vortex. Here, he creates morbid spells 
and attempts to exert his power over other dream worlds and 
into our world. 

Koepfel has a score of 200 in the Art of Dreaming and 200 in 
the Lore of Dreams, with all spells to 70. He also has a 
score of 75 in all other magic lores, with all spells to 30. 


- Nikolai Makarov - 

Church-bells and crying statues abound in the dreams of this 
16th century monk; sometimes Binah incorporates this easy 
tool in her plans. 

Nikolai Makarov 

Makarov was a monk in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 
16th century. He was a dreamer already in childhood, and 
entered the realm of dream permanently at age 40. But 
Makarov has never abandoned his Christian faith. He regards 
himself as a champion of God, and seeks to tame Vortex in 
order to cleanse men's souls of sin. 

Makarov's dream worlds are colored by the symbolism of his 
church. They contain burning hells, majestic cathedrals, and 
vast monasteries. Some dreams are full of dim church 
interiors with beautiful icons, incense and whole labyrinths 
of altars, candlesticks and chapels. Those who enter his 
worlds are constantly reminded of the victory of Christ and 
the need to worship him by purging oneself of all earthly 
desires. 

Makarov himself usually dwells in a monastery near Vortex. 
Time there passes with infinite slowness, corridors twist 
and change. There are permanent portals to Makarov's worlds 
in the Kremlin, in the Holy Trinity Church in Istanbul, and 
in a basement that belonged to a now demolished convent in 
Prague. 

Nikolai Makarov has a score of 110 in the Art of Dreaming, 
and 50 in the Lore of Dreams, with all spells to 30. 

The legend of Boris and Gleb is almost endlessly re-enacted 
for spectators who weep to see the child-hero butchered. 
Connection with Binah Icons Raskolniki wine flows freely 

- Samara Nyeme - 

Her dreams are all African nightmares of cursed villages and 
cities with insane inhabitants, famine, disasters, and 
interminablecivil wars, dark gods who despoil everything in 
their path. 

Samara Nyeme 

If time is to be trusted, Nyeme is an ancient dream 
princess. Her worlds are thousands of years old. She has 
wandered between our world and the realm of dreams for 
millennia. She was born somewhere in Africa, and her dreams 
are all African nightmares of cursed villages and cities 
with insane inhabitants, famine, disasters, and interminable 
civil wars, dark gods who despoil everything in their path. 
Her worlds open in many places in Africa. Nyeme has no 
permanent abode; she always wanders between the worlds. Her 
score in dreaming is 250 and her skill score for the Lore of 
Dreams is 150 with all spells to 50. 

The enigmatic and powerful Madame Koto, witchy, plump as a 
mighty fruit, who runs the local bar, a place always 
undergoing fabulous mutations, where every day is a 
celebration, an affirmation of her legend. Prepared to 
sacrifice all to her burning ambition and subsequently 
becomes a little too involved with the local political thugs 
and the evil side of the spirit world. Has followers. 

If a character dies in this dreamworld, she just shows up in 
a different village 

Death?s house. Eight hours from the crossroads. No one on 
the road. Death tends a yam garden. A small rolling drum on 
the verandah, whose strings follow Death?s orders. 
Centuries-old skeletons. Burning bones as wood, using skulls 
as basins, plates, and tumblers. Offers guests a bed made 
with human bones, then enters late at night with a club to 
thrash out the guest?s head. 

The complete gentleman dazzles men and women who follow him, 
but all his body parts are rented from others. Bottom to top 
he disassembles himself as he walks through the endless 
forest, returning each piece to its rightful owner and 
paying a rental fee. Ultimately he is reduced to a skull, 
humming with a terrible voice. His house is an underground 
hole, where thousands of other skulls live, using large 
frogs as stools. They roll along the ground. They have a pit 
filled with magic cowries, which are the source of their 
power. They tie a rope with a magic cowry around the neck of 
prisoners; the cowry makes noise if they try to escape. The 
prisoner cannot speak or eat until the cowry is removed. 
There are two magical plants, one whose leaves, if eaten, 
restore the speech, the other whose leaves loosen the rope 
making the awful noise. 

A character?s thumb swells, then bursts; out comes a boy 
talking like a ten-year-old. Within the hour, he grows to 
more than three feet. He asks his mother if she knows his 
name, then his father; he identifies himself as "ZURRJIR," 
which he says means "son who would change himself into 
another thing very soon." ZURRJIR knows everything the 
characters know; he eats obscene quantities, leaving 
everyone else to starve. He?s physically powerful, able to 
beat dozens of people to death at once. He still considers 
the PCs his mother and father. He survives damage, just 
getting more burned and beat-up-looking. 

In the bush: wormlike white creatures with a smooth skin, a 
quarter of a mile long, with one mouth at the end. Travel in 
packs of around a hundred. Their flesh is clammy and cold. 
They try to rub up against people for warmth, while 
endlessly saying "coldcoldcoldcdolcdold." If the characters 
light a fire, the creatures will circle it and leave the PCs 
alone. 

A sign on the road says "Unreturnable-Heaven?s Town." 
Hundreds of crazed, violent people swarm the PCs, beating 
them. They are brought before the king, who orders that 
their heads be shaved. Using pieces of broken bottles, the 
townspeople shave the PCs? heads, then beat them some more. 
Holes are dug, and the characters are buried to their necks. 
They are flogged about the head some more, then an eagle 
flies overhead. The townspeople run away at this omen. 
Shortly after, it begins to rain, loosening the dirt around 
the characters. 

Song, Dance, and Drum are the personifications of music and 
dancing. The most contagious singing, the catchiest rhythm, 
a dance you just wanna be a part of. They wander around, 
attracting people to join them in celebration. 

Wraith-Island. Actually a benevolent place. A friendly town 
where everyone is starving. Weeds grow preternaturally fast 
here, to full size in a matter of minutes, so nothing they 
plant can grow. If the PCs investigate, they?ll find a tiny 
man without a name. The king had to give everyone a name, 
but this two-inch-tall man couldn?t attract the king?s 
attention, and so he was never named. He?s been making the 
weeds grow; if the king would only give him a name, he?ll 
stop making the weeds grow. 

A market filled with strange creatures. One creature, which 
looks like a shriveled purple jack-o?-lantern, is immortal; 
it will try to buy your death from you. He can pay up to 
eighty pounds for it. Should a character sell, he or she 
will gain an extra hero point. 

The tree is stark white, with a pair of human hands 
extruding from it. The hands beckon the characters to come 
in. If the characters climb into the tree, they?ll realize 
that they?re in a big house, in a big beautiful town. A 
woman named Faithful-Mother will come and take care of the 
PCs. 

Abiku, or spirit-children, are ghosts in Nyeme's dream who 
are always being reborn. They consider life much too 
painful, and make a pact to die as soon as they can if they 
get born. 

Cats can talk. 

- Nicolette Pasteur - 

From a sickbed, Pasteur dreamed this universe of feverish 
despair, from a child's eyes. 

Nicolette Pasteur 

Pasteur was born in Paris at the end of the 18th century. 
She was bedridden from birth and suffered from a painful 
nerve disease that gave her horrible hallucinations and 
nightmares. Pasteur's dream worlds are paranoid places where 
the ground, the houses, objects, and creatures are all out 
to get you. Nothing is steady or reliable. The ground 
vanishes under your feet, trees tear you to pieces, walls 
grow arms that grab you. All of Pasteur's dream worlds, even 
those nearest to our reality, are fragmentary and chaotic. 
There are no permanent gates into her worlds, but portals 
can open anywhere at any time. Pasteur herself is close to 
Vortex, at the center of her own paranoid creations. She 
lies abed in an 18th century room, identical to the one she 
occupied during her earhtly life. She never leaves this 
room. 

- Caren Birchlime - 

Nightmarish, drug-sodden visions from the youngest of the 
dream princes. 

Caren Birchlime 

Caren Birchlime is the youngest of the dream princes. She 
was born in Manchester in the 1950s. In the 70s she worked 
as a chemistry engineer in London, specializing in 
hallucinogenic drugs and tranquilizers. She was very 
interested in how drugs affect our dreams. That was how she 
learned the Art of Dreaming. With the aid of drugs, she 
progressed much faster than anyone before her. In only a 
couple of years, she had built hundreds of dream worlds. But 
the drugs had unforeseen side effects. Birchlime lacked 
other dreamers' natural caution near Vortex. She created 
dream worlds closer to chaos than anyone had done before. 
And she lost her sanity quicker than any of the other dream 
princes. 

Birchlime's dream worlds haven't slowly been deformed; they 
were dark nightmares from the very beginning. Into them she 
lures her victims, to kill them slowly or drive them insane. 


Her dreamworlds are distorted images of the hospital where 
she performed her drug experiments. They contain sick rooms, 
operating theaters, morgues, autopsy rooms, padded cells and 
tunnels in an endless labyrinth. Here and there, these are 
intersected by other worlds created from Birchlime's 
memories: run-down residential blocks and schools from her 
childhood, echoing college halls, slum environments which 
had provided the people she experimented on. 

In a soiled room with tiled walls, near Vortex, chained to a 
bed and constantly drugged, lies Birchlime herself. From 
there, she creates and reshapes her dream worlds. 

Birchlime has an ability to find people with weak minds and 
lure them into her dreams, where they are slowly bereft of 
their minds, or killed. She lets her servants, impersonal 
Wanderers in white frocks armed with surgical instruments, 
hunt and kill her victims. In rare cases, she may leave her 
bed and go after a victim herself. She prefers driving 
people mad to killing them. When they have lost their 
senses, she can bind them in her world and make them her 
servants. 

She possesses drugs which can be given to the dreamed self 
to prevent it from waking up. The dreamer is bound to the 
dream world, and within 2d10 days his sleeping body will die 
unless it receives medical care. 

Birchlime's dream worlds are open to all hospitals and 
institutions. There are permanent portals from those 
hospitals in Manchester and London where she used to work 
before she disappeared into dreams for good. 

Caren Birchlime is a short woman about thirty years old, 
with short red hair and glasses. She wears a white hospital 
frock and has marks from hypodermic needles at her elbows. 
Her pupils are always enlarged and her eyes bloodshot. When 
she hunts through dream worlds, she assumes the shape of a 
large, gaunt dog with no fur. Both forms have the same 
abilities. 

Kiff 

"Kiff" is a new drug Caren Birchlime has introduced in the 
streets of Miami, via a dreamer named Renee Deladier, a 
Haitian immigrant. Unlike most mind-altering drugs you smoke 
from a pipe (marijuana, hash, dmt) kiff is highly addictive. 
It brings darkness--not a fearsome darkness, but warm, 
wombing, wet, a comfort in darkness, world without end. 
After a while, however, all the positive, supportive 
feelings begin to disappear from the experience, and it 
becomes only more and more deeply oppressive. The use of 
Kiff actually attracts the wandering nightmare known as "The 
Living Darkness," and gives it ingress into the user's 
waking mind. After only a few months' using kiff, an addict 
has gone hopelessly insane, dying in a dry need or consumed 
by relentless, molesting shadow, 

Deladier herself seems immune to kiff's harsher effects. 
This is due to the fact that the nightmare has invaded every 
pathway of her mind, and its strange sentience controls her 
every movement. She has become a nightmare walking, and 
possesses monstrous, nightmarish powers, even in the real 
world. Just by touching someone, she can physically pull her 
or him into the world of dreams, where the Living Darkness 
is ready to shroud them in a suffocating scream; and she can 
also bring the Darkness here, sending it pouring from her 
mouth, eyes, nose, and the twin spaces between her legs. She 
can produce a cloud of the Darkness large enough to cover a 
house, and in the morning the house will be gone. 

Deladier seems sane, most of the time--she'd have to, to run 
even a small drug cartel successfully--but incomprehensible 
thought processes shine behind her eyes, and an insane 
hunger to drown the world in darkness drives her. 

- Henchmen - 

Dreamers have nearly absolute power within their own dreams; 
this has led many ambitious dreamers to their doom. 
Overconfident, they make rash decisions that often have dire 
consequences. Many of the more mature dreamers, and all of 
the Dream Princes, have learned the value of an advisor who 
speaks her mind. Most often, these advisors were once human; 
they have little or no power of their own, and their 
lifeforce is tied to that of their dream master, thus 
ensuring their loyalty.

--- Dream Landscapes --- 

-- Cartographies -- 

Vortex is the origin of all dream, the source that Jung 
called our "collective subconscious." From this place, we 
fetch the images of our dreams. No one knows what the Vortex 
really is; some believe that it existed before humanity, 
others say that it has been created by suppressed emotions 
that are imprisoned in this narrow reality. 

Vortex is a chaotic mix of images and feelings. It is a 
maelstrom where all our dreams, nightmares, and thoughts 
flow together and dissolve in nothing. To journey near 
Vortex is a sure way to lose one's sanity. No consciousness 
can handle the disorganized torrent of emotions and 
impressions which is mixed there. Only the mentally very 
strong can go near Vortex. 

But Vortex is also a source of power. The mightiest dreams 
are created there. Those who are able to approach it can 
create great worlds of dreams. Ichthyrians and psyphagi 
dwell there and enter even those chaotic places where no man 
or woman can go. 

When your dream becomes twisted and nonsensical, you are 
approaching Vortex. What was originally an image of your 
waking world, or of memories from your past, is distorted so 
that colors, angles, and perspectives look like nothing from 
conscious reality. The creatures that dwell close to Vortex. 
What was originally an image of your waking world, or of 
memories from your past, is distorted so that colors, 
angles, and perspectives look like nothing from conscious 
reality. The creatures that dwell close to Vortex are rarely 
three-dimensional, more commonly two or five. In dreams we 
can see multi-dimensional things, even though we are unable 
to visualize what they looked like when we wake up. 

Near Vortex, different dreams merge. No dream lasts for more 
than a moment. New scenes constantly appear. Creatures 
change shape, disappear or appear. Time goes haywire. If you 
get so close to Vortex as a human can get without going mad, 
you are surrounded by a cacophony of impressions which all 
seem to relate to something you cannot quite remember. You 
desperately want to put them together into something that 
makes sense, but all cohesion is dissolved as quickly as it 
is formed. If you get too close, you lose yourself. Your 
identity comes apart, you die or become insane. 

-- Dreamsnuff -- 

Three dreamers began it, in the late sixties. They began to 
abduct the dreamselves of models, dancers, and actresses, 
bringing them to a pair of dreamworlds where they would be 
raped, tortured, mutilated, and killed, for the sadistic 
pleasure of their masters. The women would live on without 
their dreamselves, but the spark that made them human would 
be gone. Instead of aspiring to the role of Antigone, a 
young actress would find herself shooting heroin in dark 
corners or selling her body cheap to all takers, as part of 
an effort to soothe her wound, her constant sense of there 
being something missing. 

Allen Turgow runs an acting agency in Hollywood; Pierre 
Moirane a school for modern dance in Salzburg; and William 
Templer a modeling agency in London. When they meet a woman 
they consider appropriate--beautiful enough, vulnerable 
enough, helpless enough--they leave a mark on her dreamself 
that will allow them to track her down in the dreamworld. 
The girls usually put up no fight. 

Turgow, Moirane, and Templer have been creating a 
virtual-reality system that would allow clients to pay a 
large sum for the opportunity to torture and kill the dreams 
of these beautiful dreamers. It's not operational yet, but a 
number of corporations want in on the action. 

There are three dream-worlds in this snuff operation, Camp 
SS5, the Inquisition, and the Volcanic Island of the 
Cannibals. In addition, there are the viewing chambers, from 
which the three dream masters observe the carnage. 

Camp SS5 is a vast, Nazi-style realm where young women are 
tortured and abused. Women arrive in crates, as the cargo of 
a black train, hundreds of women at a time. They are 
promptly stripped, shaved, and showered, and then given a 
demonstration of authority with electric prods. They are 
sent to one of three destinations: the Lab, where doctors 
perform experimental surgery, uterus transplants with 
animals, and test the limits of the pain threshold with 
flames, blades, and electricity; the Torturers, under the 
guidance of black-leather lesbian dom Madame Eva, who 
subject them to electroshock, whippings, beatings, wire 
suspension, verbal dominance, and forcing them to have sex 
with animals; or to the Barracks, where they are mass-raped 
by vicious soldiers, beaten savagely, and sent to die in gas 
chambers or vats of boiling oil. Every now and then, some 
women escape from the Torturers, taking Madame Eva hostage; 
the escapees are unaware that this is just part of the dream 
script, that Madame Eva is there only so she can get her 
comeuppance, only so the superiority of men over women can 
be reinforced as the men of SS5 quickly recapture the 
escapees and rape them before returning them to their 
tortures. 

In the realm known as "the Inquisition," women are tried as 
witches. They are asked to confess, placed on stretching 
racks, subjected to the thumbscrews, burned with hot pokers, 
burnings at the stake, tested to see if they can sit in 
boiling water, and their breasts are crushed in breast 
presses. If they aren't burned at the stake, they're given 
over to the care of sadistic lesbian nuns who keep them in a 
dungeon, brand them, cut off their nipples, until the nuns 
crucify them and brutally sacrifice them to the devil. 
Throughout all this, the wome's torturers lecture the women 
about purity and virtue, accusing the women of sin. The 
women argue, but they argue against a pointless, circular 
logic. 

gut-munching, bloody traps, limbs sawn off, rodentsat the 
vagina, meals of shit, mutilations, hooks thru breasts, 
skinning, flaying, breasts ripped off and eaten dartboard, 
poker chips, table.

-- Alcheringa, or the Dreamtime -- 

Thuwathu and Minyindagarr The Rainbow Serpent and the 
Suffering Man Thuwathu and Minyindagarr together are one of 
the Living Gods, a giant two-headed sea turtle. They?ve been 
sleeping in Gaia at the bottom of the sea for millions of 
years; Australia is their dream. Each struggles for 
dominance against the other, Thuwathu trying to bring 
Metropolis to their dream, Minyindagarr trying to bring 
Gaia. 

There are places--physical locations--where the conflicting 
dreams of this double power clash with such intensity that 
the reality can be physically dangerous. These are known 
among the Aborigines as "Sacred Story Places," and only 
someone who has been assimilated into the landscape can 
enter without causing meteorological disturbances. 

Minyindagarr created sacred bonds with the early Aboriginals 
of Australia--the Ancestral Beings of the Kaiadilt, 
Yangkaal, and the Lardil. He bound them to the land of the 
Dreamtime, so they would always keep it at the threshold of 
Gaia, and so they would always be reborn as the protectorate 
of the natural world. Thuwathu, seeking allies, reached out 
of their own dreamworld and found them: Europe?s lictors, 
who agreed to send their countries? lepers, madmen, and 
criminals to Australia. 

People who come to Australia often fall ill, as neither head 
recognizes them and so they send out a kind of psychic 
antibody to repel them. Thuwathu will accept anyone who 
stays in the cities long enough, but to be accepted in the 
outback one needs to re-enact the sacred rituals that bound 
the Ancestral Beings to Minyindagarr. 

No other dreamworlds can be accessed through Australia; 
someone who tries will find themselves floating above a 
surreal simulacrum of the continent, where the sky is an 
infinite, breathable ocean, and they are staring in the 
immense shut eyes of Thuwathu or Minyindagarr. 

--- Dream stories --- 

Teeth of Your Dreams 

Malkuth wants to destroy Nahemoth, the Defiled World, the 
Death Angel who personifies despair, dissolution, stasis, 
apathy. She has set a plan in motion: she will force his 
citadel to incarnate inside the illusion, and then destroy 
it, thus killing him. 

His incarnate will be a building. Its architecture must be 
perfect, its inhabitants must follow certain specifications. 
The building needs to be a manifestation of despair in our 
world, a tenement where all the tenants gradually succumb to 
a totally dispirited state. Once every tenant has given up 
hope, the building will work as an incarnation of her enemy, 
and she will destroy it and him in the process. 

She's already been working on this for decades; there is a 
tenement in Detroit that corresponds, somehow, to Nahemoth's 
true proportions. To walk through the shadow of this 
building is to wonder what the purpose of your life could 
be.... inside, rats roam freely over the tenants, who just 
don't care. They just don't care that they are hungry, or 
have open wounds; they can't be bothered to walk across the 
room to defacate, so they just sprawl in heaps of their own 
excrement, while bacteria infect their sores. It's almost 
perfect. 

Only one thing is preventing it from being Nahemoth's 
incarnation: Don Fornshell, one of the tenants, has gone 
into a stupefied waking-dream, where he roams innocently 
through a beautiful, silly, Oz-like fantasy world.... This 
fantasy world actually exists; if it didn't, she'd just wait 
for him to succumb; but as it is this man is an inhabitant 
of two worlds. This dream-world is over fifty years old. It 
was created by a child who was a gifted dreamer and an 
inmate at Theriesenstadt, the childrens' concentration camp. 
Its creator is still alive, writing childrens' books, and 
living in solitude. Malkuth needs to destroy this 
dream-realm to complete her assassination of Nahemoth. 

So the Archon sends dream creatures to destroy this 
dreamland, to turn it into a bleak, despairing place as 
well. Entering the dream, they are shaped by the psyche of 
the original dreamer into his original nightmare: Nazis. 
Giant, fire-breathing Nazis. They run rampant over a land of 
fuzzy bunnies and talking rainbows. 

The PCs--who have never met outside of dreams--all used to 
daydream about this fantasy realm, when they were children. 
They all thought it was the product of their own 
imaginations. Now, years later, a PC wakes up in the middle 
of the night, realizing she is in the bed she used to sleep 
in, when she was a child. She notices: she really is a 
child, the child she used to be. Okay, this must be a dream. 
She has this intuition--no, this knowledge, really--that 
there's a secret passage in her closet. She opens the closet 
door, pushes out the back wall, descends a stone staircase 
that spirals down to a stream, where a rowboat is waiting 
for her, piloted by a very dapper walrus in a tuxedo, who 
sings operatic arias. The boat takes her to the fantasy land 
she inhabited as a child. 

All her old fantasy playmates are there, as well as all the 
PCs (as children), but they're worried. Something from 
another world is coming to destroy the land. All the 
children who used to dream of this place have been called 
here to save the world from the monster. What monster? The 
six, heavily armed, giant nightmare Nazis who breathe fire. 
But they are just children. 

When they wake, they don't put much credence in the rambling 
visions of their night; but the minions of the archon have 
begun to hunt them in their waking lives. They are followed; 
their phones tapped; approached by strangers. Everywhere 
there is a sense that they are being watched. 

The next night they go back into the dream world; they 
watch, in a magic pool, as Prince Hero, astride his white 
stallion, confronts the Nazis. Prince Hero is the noblest 
warrior of the realm. The Nazis shoot him and he dies. 

Over the next few days, the characters struggle desparately 
to understand what is happening to them. They see their 
childhood dreams devastated. They are hunted, at their jobs 
and at home, by some hireling thugs and a Skinwalker. If 
they're smart, they'll exchange information in the dream, 
and they'll be able to find each other in the "real" world. 
If they aren't smart, you can prod them. 

They can go on a quest, trying to figure out a way to defeat 
the Nazis in the dream world, but they are children up 
against some powerful obstacles. Every night they can try to 
complete some aspect of their dreamquest, and then the next 
day they go about their daily lives. Except... the servants 
of Malkuth are hunting them now, trying to find them and 
kill them. 

They might be approached by a hooker who has been possessed 
by Na'amah, a creature of Nahemoth who is identified with 
prostitution. Na'amah is almost powerless, and she will be 
destroyed with Nahemoth too, if his citadel is destroyed. 
Na'amah will possess a hooker, and give the characters 
obscure leads if they pay her. She eats the money, and a 
croaking voice comes out of her vagina, saying things like: 
"On that tree, the abortions kill from their fog of black 
fire," and "If he hadn't eaten pomegranate seeds in Detroit, 
then only children would dream the dreams of children." 

If the PCs track down the creator of the fantasy world--he 
has a Wizard of Oz role in the dream realm--they can find 
him in the real world, living in immense isolation, caught 
between painful memory and beautiful fantasy. If they don't 
do it quickly, Malkuth's servants will have killed him. If 
he's killed, the PCs might find his obituary in the paper, 
and read how this man, a concentration-camp survivor, had 
written children's books with some familiar characters. 

Either way, his house is full of portals to his dreams--a 
secret passage behind the bookcase, a door in the basement, 
etc. Through these passageways, the PCs can come into the 
dream world with their adult stats; they can bring guns, 
binoculars, and other equipment that should give them a 
fighting chance against the nightmare Nazis. 

The Nazis are emanations of six aborted foetuses, kept alive 
by scientists at one of Malkuth's dream-research labs, 
Thornber Laboratories in Detroit. Thornber Laboratories and 
the tenement are both owned by Watkiss Industries. If one of 
the Nazis is killed, we see it shrivel to fetal proportions, 
and an image hangs in the air for a moment: a fetus hung 
like fruit on a tree. 

If their efforts fail, the dream world will be destroyed, 
forever. They will come out of the dream standing in front 
of some strange building. Then the building will explode 
into flame, killing all the occupants--as well as Nahemoth, 
who doesn't even defend himself. Maybe the PCs are able to 
see through the Illusion long enough to see that it's a body 
burning, what looks like a young man in 19th century german 
garb, a _Sorrows of Young Werther_ type, burning, he looks 
like he's in pain but he doesn't even struggle. Nahemoth is 
dead long before the firetrucks arrive. Dozens of people are 
dead. It is declared to be arson, but the case is never 
solved. 

If they get there before the place is torched, they come in 
to a building that's halfway into Inferno already.... 

If the players kill the nightmare Nazis or destroy the lab, 
or if they just go in and rescue the tenants of the 
building, the dream world survives, the building survives, 
the Death Angel of Despair survives, even if he doesn't care 
to. Somehow the PCs should learn what they've done--saved 
the life of Despair, and earned the enmity of one of the 
most powerful beings in the cosmos. 

NPCs 

Non-Dream NPCs 

* The Skin Walker An assassin in Malkuth's service. The Skin 
Walker cuts people open, carves them out, then climbs into 
their skin. It's almost impossible to distinguish him from 
someone he's imitating, but glass always frosts over before 
he enters a room. His stats are only slightly above the 
norm, most of the time, although a fatal wound doesn't kill 
him, it only destroys the skin he's wearing. He slips out of 
the skin and stands exposed, shivering muscle and exposed 
bone. He can't survive too long without a skin, so he 
usually flees when his has been destroyed. The Skin Walker 
likes to have the advantage of surprise on his side. He 
likes to attack dressed in the skin of a loved one, or 
failing that, a cop or a child. He keeps his "masterpiece" 
in his lair, along with about fifteen spare skins. His 
"masterpiece" is a boa constrictor with twenty pairs of 
human arms and a shark's head, that he'll climb inside if 
cornered. It has a lot of handguns, and ambulates like a 
centipede. The only way characters would stand a chance is 
with Miss Cummins' help (see below), or with explosives and 
fire. The Skin Walker is informed of the characters' 
whereabouts by telephone; at the other end of the phone, 
someone has placed a kind of psychic "trace" on the 
characters, so for gaming purposes, the Skin Walker can 
always find the characters whenever the gaming feels slow. 

* Bryan Watkiss A wealthy, elderly, legless businessman who 
does whatever Malkuth's lictors tell him to. His assistant, 
Miss Cummins, is actually an azghoul. When he was a young 
man, he was involved in the occult; he and some of his 
friends tried to summon a demon, but they had the wrong 
name. The demon (azghoul, actually) showed up and began 
slaughtering them all. Watkiss panicked and began trying all 
the other names he could find, while climbing a ladder to 
escape. She reached up and tore his legs off, just as he 
finally found the right name: Krentzschapiutl. She's been 
his servant for four decades now, and made him rich, but 
he's terrified of what's really out there. When there's any 
hint of powers he considers "otherworldly," he instantly 
capitulates. Watkiss can be convinced to tell his story to 
PCs who seem curious. He might even give them some leads. If 
he does, the Skin Walker will kill him. 

* Miss Cummins (Krentzschapiutl) An azghoul in Watkiss' 
service. Does whatever he tells her to. If the Skin Walker 
kills Watkiss, Miss Cummins will join the characters in an 
effort to avenge Watkiss' death. Once the Skin Walker is 
dead, she'll return to Metropolis. (I include this, just 
because I can't see any other way the PCs would be able to 
stand a fighting chance against the Skin Walker in his 
"Masterpiece" skin.) 

* Death Magi Well, there have to be Death Magi performing 
the spell that would drag Nahemoth's Citadel from Inferno 
into the Illusion, but I haven't detailed them at all yet. 
Feel free to invent some Death Magi when you need them. 

* The Abortion Tree, wombed in a fog of black fire 

Six aborted fetuses attached to a machine, each inside a 
kind of jar that's pumped with amniotic fluids and strange 
drugs. They've grown to about the size of 18-month old 
babies. They are kept in Thornber Labs, in Detroit; four 
scientists work on the project, but it's rare for more than 
two to be with them at a given time. If PCs attack the lab, 
the abortions will sense the hostile intentions and force 
them into a dream, a waking dream of living in a lightless, 
burning endlessness. EGO rolls galore, to remember there way 
through the room, to take a step, to swing blindly at the 
jars or the delicate machinery that keeps them alive. 

* Pawel Antschel Holocaust survivor, Romanian jew, 
children's book author. His house in Ohio is a crossroads 
between the Illusion and Labrionalla, the dream world. A 
quiet, kindly, distant man. 

* Na'amah Inferno creature. Almost powerless. Na'amah wants 
to help the PCs, in order to save herself, but she needs to 
be paid. She speaks through prostitutes, but only when paid 
to do so, and even then what she says is often cryptic or 
paradoxical. * Don Fornshell An unemployed 20-something 
whose life has fallen apart. He lives in a hellish slum in 
Detroit, where he daydreams incessantly about Labrionalla. 

Labrionalla, the Dream World Pawel Antschel dreamed up the 
original country; since then, children have come in at all 
times, and added characters of their own imagining, and 
pop-culture appropriations from their time. So Labrionalla 
has a starting-point, where Antschel as a boy dreamed, and 
then it radiates in layers of time. A PC in her forties 
wouldn't remember a dream NPC who only showed up in the 
1980s. Most of the characters in the dream are cute. But 
then again, most will die gruesome deaths. 

* Donnie Don Fornshell's dreamself, is a child in 
Labrionalla, just like the PCs. He works with them, behaves 
like them, but he no longer can understand what they mean if 
they mention a world besides Labrionalla. The PCs might 
notice that Donnie is always there before they arrive and 
after they leave. One of the female characters may have had 
a crush on him when they were little and dreamed together. 
Good roleplaying can convince Donnie to become more aware of 
himself, and his predicament; a PC who chooses to ask 
probing questions about Donnie outside the dream might 
provoke him to realize what's going on for him, which in 
turn could help the PCs puzzle everything else out. 

1940s dream characters 

* Prince Hero Handsome and heroic, on a white stallion, 
spends his time killing dragons, fighting ogres, beheading 
black knights, etc. He's the first one to have any contact 
with the Nazis. He rides up to them, overconfident, and 
challenges them. They shoot him, and one breathes fire over 
his dying body. 

* Miss Emmaline Thistlewhite Beautiful but misfortunate, 
Prince Hero's one true love. She spends her time as a 
scullery maid, cleaning spitoons, etc. She dresses in rags, 
and whenever she and Prince Hero are about to declare their 
love for one another, someone calls him away to battle an 
evil duke. 

* Luciano Bottlestrop Aristocratic, opera-singing, 
stuffed-shirt walrus. 

* The LollyPopUp Girls A field of lollypops; when you lick 
one, it turns into a 40's pinup model. 

1950s dream characters 

* The SoapBubble Cowboy 

The fastest draw in the Spaghetti West. He's made of 
soapbubbles. He'll arrive in town for the shootout, get the 
draw on them, and empty both his six shooters before his 
opponents are ready. The result? Twelve soapbubbles float 
through the air. The Nazis , who were stunned by the speed 
of the attack, begin to laugh. They shoot and shoot, until 
only a soapy puddle is left. 

* Elvis Bottlestrop Bouffant hair-do, pink bodysuit (with 
ten-inch garden hose), Elvis-imitating walrus. 

1960s dream characters 

* Comrade Sergei Ivanovich Nikolai Pyotr Lubbledeebumpkovich 
Cartoonish Soviet superspy. The PCs remember him as an 
enemy, whose plans they always had to thwart, but now he 
fights the Nazis too. He'll pester them, with all his James 
Bond gadgets, and his cartoon-spy ability to hide behind a 
piece of string--and he actually does carry a gun. He may 
even be able to kill one of the giant fire-breathing Nazis. 

* Tie-Dye Sky A guitar-strumming hippie longhair with beard. 
His beard has grown into the grass, and the sky above him 
really is tie-dye in color. He warbles atrocious folksongs 
about peace, even as he's being shot to death. When he dies, 
the sky behind him goes out. 

1970s dream characters 

* Ranga A boxing kangaroo, Koo's rival. Personality based on 
George Foreman. 

* Koo A boxing kangaroo, Ranga's rival. Personality based on 
Muhammad Ali. 

* Jock Bottlestrop In a white suit open to show gold chains 
and a hairy chest, the disco walrus. 

1980s dream characters 

* Mad Mary Mullamoo Chained to her desk. Mad Mary is 
actually from our world, the illusion; her name is Michelle 
Calcagni. She worked for a publishing company, and fell 
asleep while reading one of Antschel's manuscripts. When she 
woke in Labrionalla, she was chained to her desk, in the 
middle of a field, while rabbits playing at a nearby pool 
table talked dirty to her (or at least a child's idea of 
dirty). She has always insisted this isn't real, just a dumb 
children's book, which is why the characters here think 
she's mad. She can tell the PCs Antschel's name. 

* The Singing Ninja Spoons A barbershop quartet, very 
well-trained in ninjutsu, only--they're about three inches 
tall. 

* MC Macky Genghis Bottlestrop The rap walrus, carries a 9 
and an uzi. The Nazis will probably have ravaged all of 
Labrionalla before they get here, so they're likely to be 
overconfident: the first few musically-inclined walruses 
they encountered didn't put up much of a fight. 

* Platoon of giant, fire-breathing, nightmare Nazis All they 
want to do is kill and destroy, though they might stop to 
gang-rape the LollyPopUp Girls and Mad Mary Mullamoo. As 
they are a congregate of Antschel's fears, their guns never 
run out of bullets, and they never get hungry. They are not 
immune to the effects of their own fire: the first time one 
breathes fire, he chars his own lips off, and the next time, 
his gums, so his teeth fall out.... 

Locations 

Locations in Labrionalla * The Sea of Lost Socks 

* The Tie-Dye Sky 

* Antschel's House 

* The Spaghetti West 

Locations in the Illusion * Watkiss Industries, Manhattan, 
Upper East Side offices 

* Skin Walker's lair in Detroit (if he travels to another 
city, he brings his accoutrements with him--spare skins and 
the "Masterpiece" could show up in an apartment in any town) 

* Antschel's house, in rural Ohio 

* Tenement in Detroit, where Don lives, that's becoming 
Nahemoth's citadel 

* Thornber Labs, in downtown Detroit, where the abortion 
tree is kept 


-- The Art of Hunger -- 

A psyphagus kidnaps the dreamself of one of the PCs, 
preferably a female character with high comeliness; if there 
are no female characters, she will go after the male with 
highest comeliness. 

The psyphagus had been human once, a woman with an eating 
disorder who starved herself out of the waking world. When 
she has control of the pc's body, she will starve again, 
except for the drinks men buy her in clubs. 

The pc, meanwhile, remains imprisoned in the world of 
dreams. Her prison is in the shape of an enormous mouth--the 
floor is salivating--except there are steel bars where the 
teeth would be. Behind the bars, an awestruck crowd watches 
her with perverse admiration while a carnival barker shouts 
out facts about "the hunger artist," a la Kafka, who has 
gone seventy, eighty days without eating. The pc's dreamself 
begins to wither. 

Meanwhile, the psyphagus is doing more and more 
self-destructive things with her host-body. The other pcs 
are bound to notice she's acting strangely, but they won't 
understand the reasons. She goes to a club one night and 
agrees to join five men for a gang-bang. While there, she 
learns something she isn't supposed to know, and they kidnap 
her. 

Eventually, the pc will try to escape the nightmare's mouth, 
where she's held captive. If she goes to the back of the 
tongue, forces her way down the throat, the dreamprison will 
vomit her out--it is, after all, bulimic. Now she can take 
control of her body again. 

Yes, take control of her body, held captive by Le Coq Rouge, 
because the dream that was possessing her learned something 
that the pc doesn't know. Take control of her body, already 
weak and withered from a few days' debauchery and 
starvation. 

If the other pcs aren't hot on her trail by this point, then 
you should allow her to make contact with them; they can 
rescue her or help her escape, but it shouldn't be possible 
for her to escape without assistance. 

But even once she has escaped, hitmen are sent after her and 
the pcs. The pcs need to realize that some powerful people 
think they know something that they don't. 

They need to return to the dreamworlds and confront the 
psyphagus--what did she see? She'll only tell them if they 
agree to find another body for her, a skinny one--any player 
with a sense of irony will enjoy this later on, in 
famine-stricken Nigeria. 

The men who gangbanged the psyphagus were hitmen. They'd 
been given a contract to go to Nigeria and kill a man named 
Maoro Nakemi, a charismatic African leader and an 
inspiration for the Pan-African movement. When Nakemi 
disappeared in 1954, he wasn't a young man, so it seems 
strange that someone would go to all these troubles to kill 
him. 

It isn't strange. Nakemi was the envoy of the archon Chesed. 
When Nakemi vanished, so did the archon; and now 
Gamichicoth, as Jonathan Hayward, wants to make sure Chesed 
doesn't return. 

Maoro Nakemi was a man of action and also a man with a 
dream, a dream of a unified Africa. But the dream also had 
its despair, its nightmare, in which Africa was torn with 
civil war, devastated by disease and hunger. He slipped into 
this despair, and found its mirror in the dream worlds of 
Samara Nyeme. He's been there for almost fifty years now. 

The psyphagus can give the pcs a vivid image of all the 
hitmen who were dispatched to kill Nakemi, which will prove 
to be a great advantage. She can tell them the name of the 
village where the hitmen went. She can also tell them that 
she's seen Nakemi before, somewhere in dreams. 

If the pcs go to Nigeria, they will learn how inhospitable 
the country is to foreigners--pickpockets, corrupt police 
and officials, armed bandits on the roads who ambush 
travelers. Luckily, the hitmen--who had a few days' 
headstart--have encountered these same travails. 

The village they're heading to is different. It's a 
crossing-point between the waking world and the world of 
dreams, Samara Nyeme's dreams. Starvation is widespread here 
(anybody wanna find that psyphagus a new body, a skinny one 
on the edge of death? She'll see her lean, emaciated arms, 
and thank you for it before she dies). Hauries abound, and 
violence, but the townspeople are benevolent, even kindly; 
after all, they're victims. Many of them worship termites, 
actually worshipping Pazuzu. 

Many children die young, because they are spirits that have 
made a pact to return to the spirit world as soon as they 
can. One of these children befriends the PCs, and then dies 
a few days later. The next day, his spirit approaches the 
PCs and show them "the road under the road," which leads 
more fully into the dream world. 

At a nightmare market, the PCs find Nakemi, and the 
assassins find everyone. A shootout ensues, with the pcs and 
the hitmen trying to kill each other, the hitmen trying to 
kill Nakemi while the pcs try to protect him, and strange 
African dreamthings scramble for safety or to stop everyone. 

Nakemi is convinced that Samara Nyeme's dream is reality, is 
what has happened to Africa. If the PCs convince him 
otherwise, they can bring him out of the dream, and he will 
recommence his lifelong crusade to unify Africa. 

Shortly after, Chesed will return to Metropolis. 

--- Dreams and nightmares --- 

-- Dream Madonna --

by Jean-Loup Sabatier 

A teenage girl pc becomes pregnant, even though she?s still 
a virgin. Eight weeks ago, when the child was conceived, she 
had a dream. The dream took place in a beautiful country; 
there was a beautiful man there, who made love with her 
passionately. The dream lasted a long, long time, and even 
when the dream turned into a sadistic nightmare, she 
couldn?t make herself wake from it. 

Since that time, she has visited this dream realm 
frequently. 

Her parents punish her, thinking she?s been careless and 
promiscuous. They force her to have an abortion-but in the 
dream, her baby continues to grow. In the waking world, she 
is no longer pregnant, but in her dreams, the baby grows and 
grows, until she gives birth to a little boy. As soon as she 
falls asleep, she is with her son, in a strange place. From 
time to time the baby?s father comes to visit. 

Now the dream baby is a strange little boy with strange 
powers. 

-- The Red King's Dream -- 

(ideas adapted from Mike Nystul's "Whispering Vault" and 
C.J. Carella's "GURPS Voodoo: The Shadow War") 

Anacalypses are the beings who dream our reality, but not by 
their own choice: they also labor to break free of the 
Demiurge's prison. Once, these strange and enormously 
powerful creatures were content, living somewhere beyond 
Metropolis, and dreaming of nothing. They dreamed Nothing: 
an unending, changeless void, and this existence--and its 
dream--made them happy. But the Demiurge had need of their 
strong dreams; once Nataraja's dance had shaped our world 
from the substance of Malkuth's living body, it was the 
dreams of the Anacalypses that would hold it in place, that 
would allow the Illusion to bend and stretch as we pushed 
against it. So these bizarre gods sleep on, and their sleep 
is everything. It is said that Anacalypses are the offspring 
of She Who Waits Below, scions of a spontaneous generation, 
and that there are 343 of them, whose archaic slumbering 
surrounds us with narrative. In the Dreamworlds, the 
Anacalypses appear as titanic eyes that have been sewn shut, 
whose hundreds of tentacles have been nailed or pinned of 
bolted or chained to monolithic crags that float like 
icebergs through the Interstices. Those who wander into an 
Anacalypse's dreams wander into the "real" world, as if 
they'd passed through a gate; they are fully capable of 
applying their skills from Art of Dreaming, although it 
might be a bad idea--if an Anacalypse's dream were to become 
lucid, it might wake up. We call it "Awakening," when a 
human being escapes from the mundane dreams that the 
Demiurge has inflicted on humans and Anacalypses both; but 
there is no way to predict what will happen when an 
Anacalypse wakes and realizes how the blissful nihilism of 
its sleep has been derailed, simply in order to imprison 
humanity forever. Some Anacalypses, still unable to dream of 
Emptiness as they would choose, go mad and enter the 
Illusion, wreaking destruction; the lictors are quick to see 
these renegades exterminated. The cleverer ones, however, 
enter the Illusion subtly, slowly amassing power, money, and 
followers, because they know they will never be free to 
dream until the Illusion has been destroyed. When the 
Illusion has begun to fray in an area, that's usually a sure 
sign that an Anacalypse is growing wakeful--if it hasn't 
simply awoken already. The only other thing that has been 
known to bring an Anacalypse to consciousness is a rare and 
powerful spell in the Lore of Dreams; it's said that only 
the Demiurge and the dream prince Hammad al' Sufi know this 
spell. This might be why many creatures of power seek 
alliance with al' Sufi, including the Devourers, Messiah, 
Ialdabaoth, Muawijhe, Malkuth, Tiphareth, and Thuwathu and 
Minyindagarr. 

An Anacalypse whose power has grown in the Illusion is known 
as a Devourer. Devourers always appear huge and monstrous; 
they have no pleasant facade to present to the world. Some 
sprawl out for miles in corridors beneath the cities, a 
contiguous lake of black ichor rising in places to shape 
hideously-imitated human faces; some appear as moving masses 
of insect parts, whose clicking susurrus buzzes out words; 
while still others resemble tremendous human beings, whose 
disproportionate bodies cannot stand, and can barely move of 
their own volition--entire ecosystems of four-foot-long 
maggots can live in these insensate forms, while the 
Devourers care nothing for their burdensome flesh. The 
Devourers live under cities, where the Illusion is weakest; 
after all, this is where they woke, the place they dreamed 
for thousands of years, however unwillingly. Some occultists 
believe there is a Devourer beneath every major city. This 
may or may not be true, but there are definitely Devourers 
beneath Harlem and the Bronx, southeast Washington D.C., 
L.A.'s Watts, Bangkok, Amsterdam, and Kreuzberg in Berlin. 
The Devourers' purpose is to destroy the Illusion utterly, 
so they can return to dreaming their zero dream. In order to 
accomplish this, they influence the emotional state of the 
city they occupy, driving its inhabitants to ever more 
desperate and violent acts, which thereby lower their Mental 
Balance. While Anacalypses do not control minds, their very 
existence causes an intensification of emotion--so a 
discussion might turn into an argument, an argument into a 
fistfight, a fistfight into murder. Devourers tend to have 
many followers: human cults, creatures from the Underground, 
borderliners, seraphim, nosferatu, and even the occasional 
lictor have been known to serve the Devourers. It is not 
known whether these monolithic creatures act in collusion 
with each other. 

-- Subterranean Dreams -- 

They perform complicated rituals designed to bring them 
closer to She Who Waits Below. The cults are formed 
spontaneously by people who have received dreams or visions 
from She Who Wait Below. Their rituals vary widely, from 
esoteric groups who simply meditate, to aggressive groups 
with bloody sacrificial rites. The nature of the visions and 
dreams received will contribute to the form of the cultic 
groups. 

No one has ever returned from the Inner Labyrinth, so there 
is no person who can tell what this deity looks like. But 
she reveals herself in the dreams of all who dwell long in 
the Underworld. In dreams, she may have various forms-a 
shining eye, a formless cloud of chaos, or a swollen female 
body resting in darkness. These dreams are often about 
wandering through endless corridors, feeling tempted and 
drawn by something that is frightening but also wonderful. 
In rare cases, dreamers have been physically drawn into the 
Inner Labyrinth by dreams sent by Her. 

Those who meet her in dreams are drawn to her and feel an 
urge to go ddeper into the Labyrinth, to join with her and 
be dissolved in Achlys. All who have dreamt of She Who Waits 
Below for any considerable period of time will be gripped by 
a desire to cease to exist. 

-- Escapees -- 

Flitting in and out of our awareness, we almost sometimes 
see them: a silence we can almost hear. Escapees from dreams 
move alongside us, rarer than moonshade. Some find one 
individual and haunt her, until her sanity is torn by 
attending two worlds at once. Other dreams skitter through 
our homes, endlessly re-enacting whatever trauma birthed 
them. All have their own agenda, but some are more active 
than others. 

Dan Paddock used to dream of a meaty skeleton on a crucifix, 
wearing a smiley-face mask. A voice from behind the smile 
would pose impossible, obscene riddles--"How many you's can 
Hades juggle?" "What do you get when you mix your boyhood 
home with a leper's asshole?" Behind the mask, the voice 
only laughed. One night, working with a therapist, Paddock 
tried to confront the dream creature; he pulled away its 
mask, and found nothing behind it, nothing at all. But when 
Paddock awoke, he held in his hand a yellow, plastic mask 
smiling a frozen smile up his way. Ever since then, the 
crucified dream riddler has followed Paddock, taunting him 
with bizarre questions that seem almost meaningful. The 
dream is wearying of Paddock now, and will probably find 
fresh pastures soon, and another human. 

In Italy, a plague victim's nightmare broke loose. What a 
woman--tall, absurdly fit, with a shaved head, with an 
endemic terror of germs and human contact. If someone 
touches her, she'll react violently, and to clear eyes 
she'll appear as a pustulent living cadaver. 

Dr. Mo-Mo, a vulture-headed thought-surgeon with a broken 
neck, kidnaps people indiscriminately, performing thought 
surgery on them. He might suddenly alter their ideology, or 
give them the transplanted memories he stole from his last 
patient. Most often, he surgically extracts the memory of 
his operating table, and the scalpels he uses aren't 
physical--so his victims usually return home disoriented, 
having lost time, but can't even guess at what may have 
happened. 

-- Dream Creatures -- 

ICHTHYRIANS The ichthyrians are born in Vortex and only 
exist in the world of dreams. They have twenty spiderlike 
legs and long, jointed bodies covered with thick shells. The 
head has two red eyes and a large jaw full of sharp black 
teeth. Ichthyrians hunt dreamers. They create a link between 
dream and reality so that their victims are devoured in 
reality as well as in dreams. They can move unhindered into 
and out of people's dreams. The dream princes have tamed 
ichthyrians, and use them as watchdogs. 

AGL 2d10 (11) EGO 1 STR 1d10 (5) PER 2d10 (11) CON 2d10 (11) 

Terror throw: 0 Height: 100 cm Weight: 20 kg Senses: can 
track a dreamer through several dream worlds Movement: 5 
m/combat round Actions: 2 Initiative bonus: none Damage 
capacity: 4 scratches = 1 light wound 3 light wounds = 1 
serious wound 3 serious wounds = 1 fatal wound Endurance: 90 
Natural armor: 2 Attack modes: Bite 15 (scr 1-7, lw 8-13, sw 
14-22, fw 23+) Home: Vortex, the dream worlds Number 
encountered: 10+1d10 

ILKUZAHN The Ilkuzahn are a group of beings that are a 
threat to the waking world from the dream world. They enter 
a dreaming mind and use it to manifest in the waking world, 
coming out only when the victim sleeps. Similar to the thing 
under the bed or the closet monster, the Ilkuzahn are 
nightmare beings brought into reality. 

Why they come to this world is unknown. They come to kill, 
terrify, and wreak havoc, as near as anyone can tell. Their 
passage into this world is marked by a floor-hugging mist 
that runs through the dream to their exit, similar in 
principle to the silver cord that connects the subtle body 
to the waking body. The mist has no effect or power other 
than the basic significance that the Ilkuzahn are there. 
Even if discovered, the Ilkuzahn will not harm or allow the 
harming of their host. 

The Ilkuzahn come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Their 
true form is hideous, but they can take on the guises of 
humans temporarily. 

KAIES The Kaies are unlike any beings mentioned so far. 
Unlike the Vacyge of the Likaer, the Kaies don't attempt to 
terrify or tempt the dreamer; their goal is much simpler. 
They eat memories and leave the dreamer a blank and 
dreamless husk. 

Within a dream, the Kaies bring up memories from the 
victim's mind. Then, one by one, they begin to disassemble, 
destroy, and consume the memory. A Kaie's dream becomes easy 
to recognize because of the stark reality of the memories. 
It is unknown whether or not they work together. 

The Kaies remain cerfully hidden within Constructs as the 
dream breaks apart. When moving from memory to memory or 
wandering the Interstices, the Kaies appear as insubstantial 
mists with indistinct yet disturbing features. Like the 
Vacyge, their true form inspires terror. 

THE LIKAER The Likaer enter a mind and tempt the victim. It 
begins simply, with dreams of long-term goals fulfilled, but 
goes far beyond that. Soon they begin to dream of insane 
passions and unnatural acts of self-gratification. Then the 
Likaer laugh as their carefully staged temptations begin to 
carry over into the real world. 

As with all the nightmares, little is known about the 
Likaer. They are believed to feed off of the raw emotions 
that result from their actions. Furthermore, they are the 
most difficult to drive out of a mind, for their dreams are 
considered pleasant by the dreaming mind. Dream constructs 
actively work to oppose dreamwalkers fighting a Likaer. 
Additionally, the Likaer are believed to be solitary, unlike 
the Vacyge. 

The Likaer appear as beautiful and desirable members of the 
gender the victim finds attractive. Normally they wear 
little or no clothing in this guise. Their true form is very 
different. They are tall, thin humanoids with grotesque 
grins and strange coloring. The Likaer are not as physically 
terrifying as the Vacyge, but they are inhumanly 
manipulative and their grins are unnerving to even the 
steeliest of nerves. 

PSYPHAGI Psyphagi (singular psyphagus) do not originate in 
the dream worlds. They are creatures that have been trapped 
there after losing their physical bodies. Now they are 
attempting to return to the waking wolrd by possessing the 
bodies of dreamers. They attack the sleeper in her dream, 
defeat and capture her dreamed self. Then they take over her 
body. As long as the dreamer is alive and imprisoned in the 
dream world, her body will live and be possessed by the 
psyphagus. 

In dreams, a psyphagus looks like a human with totally black 
and hairless skin. Its eyes are alos completely black, 
without pupils, and the hands have black claws. In the 
waking world it is unable to maintain a physical form of its 
own. It cannot exit the dream worlds through a portal--if it 
does, it loses all form. 

Psyphagi dwell in their own dream worlds, where they keep 
dreamers in some form of prison--anything from a locked room 
to a dungeon to a chain fastened in a rock. When a psypahgus 
has managed to capture a dreamer, no ego throw is necessary 
to possess her. If the dreamed self is set free, it can 
expel the psyphagus and regain possession of its body. This 
is done with an ego throw. If the effect is higher than the 
psyphagus' effect, the owner gets her body back. 

Like all creatures who lack bodies, psyphagi have an 
insatiable hunger for physical experiences. They can wear a 
human body out in a few months. When the body dies, the 
psyphagus returns to the world of dreams. 

AGL 3d10 (16) EGO 2d10 (11) STR 3d10 (16) CHA 1d10 (5) CON 
3d10 (16) PER 2d10 (1) COM 1d10 (5) EDU 1d10 (5) 

Terror throw: none Height: 180 cm Weight: 80 kg Senses: Can 
see the subtle bodies of humans from several dreamworlds 
away. Otherwise, as human. Movement: 8 m/combat round 
Actions: 3 Initiative bonus: +4 Damage bonus: +3 Damage 
capacity: 5 scratches = 1 light wound 4 light wounds = 1 
serious wound 3 serious wounds = 1 fatal wound Endurance: 
110 Natural armor: none Skills: Art of Dreaming 75, 
Automatic weapons 16, Handgun 16, Sneak 16, Impact weapons 
16, Sword 16, Unarmed combat 16, hide 16, Language--3 human 
Attack modes: according to weapon, Claws 16 (scr 1-8, lw 
9-15, sw 16-25, fw 26+) Home: the dream worlds 

THE VACYGE A force known as the Vacyge wars to drive 
humankind mad one by one. They enter a dream in groups and 
twist the victims' dreams into horrible perversions of 
reality to batter down their sanity. 

Very little is known about the Vacyge. No one knows why they 
want to drive people mad. No one knows where they came from 
or how long they have been here. But once they are in a 
mind, the terror they create knows no bounds. 

Normally, they appear as a normal Construct within a dream. 
When they do reveal their presence, they look like living 
shadows. More substantial than a shadow, a Vacyge stands 
taller than a person and a bit more slender, with wild 
"hair," no facial features, glowing red eyes, and long 
claws. Even in true form, the Vacyge can inspire fear. 

The Shroud When the Vacyge enter a dreaming mind, a Shroud 
descends to isolate the mind from the dreamworlds. Because 
dreams are hugely and impossibly varied, the Shroud creates 
its own reality using the victim's mind as a template. Evn 
in your mind the Vacyge are in their own element. 

The Shroud then utilizes the victim's natural fears and the 
Vacyge's terrifying creativity to drive her over the brink 
and into the pits of stark raving madness. 

A dreamer is helpless to the Shroud's effects. A very real 
nightmare, the Shroud is only recognizable to an experienced 
Dreamwalker. Comapred to most nightmares, which are random 
and fragmented, the Shroud holds a much more calculated 
flow. Additionally, they are much more horrifying to behold. 

Firmly embedded within the Shroud, the Vacyge can be 
difficult to find once they are hidden. They normally appear 
as something fitting to the nightmare but can be identified. 
Once they begin to scare a victim in earnest, the Vacyge 
enter the center of the conflict. Otherwise, their shadow 
remains relatively unconcealable. If a Dreamwalker looks 
carefully, a Vacyge shadow can belie their true form. 

-- Nightmares -- 

Most nightmares are the product of a dreamer's unconscious 
mind, her fears and obstacles in daily life taking on a 
visual form. There are other kinds of nightmares, though, 
that don't respond to analysis; free-floating parasites that 
whisper through the world of dreams until they find a 
victim. Some of these nightmares will only visit a sleeper 
once, quickly gorwing bored with her predictable responses, 
while other nightmares seek residence in someone's mind for 
as long as they live. No one knows with any certainty where 
these nightmares came from. Some of them probably escaped 
from a dream, others may have spontaneously generated from 
stray dream matter. Others may have been the deliberate 
creations of powerful dreamers, haphazard experiments to 
test the depth of imaginality; and still others may, at one 
time, have been human. 

These nightmares attach themselves to sleepers; viewed from 
the Interstices, they seem like barnacles stuck to the 
bottom of a sleeper's body. Someone who is consciously 
travelling the dreamworlds can also fall prey to them; upon 
touching the physical form of one of these nightmares, a 
character needs to make an EGO roll or lapse into a waking 
dream of the nightmare's monomaniac vision. 

Buried in Witches A dreamer imagines she is buried alive, in 
a swirl of countless struggling bodies, who all seem somehow 
strange. There is no respite in the shrieking, no 
communication to be had. This nightmare actually collects 
sleepers. It attaches itself to a dreamer, and consumes her 
dreamself over a period of years. Every night her dreamself 
shrinks a little more. Ultimately, the nightmare will take 
her dreamself with him, as another prop with which to 
torment its next victim. 

Living Darkness A darkness that breathes and screams 
psychotically, that lives with its own alien intelligence as 
it presses all around a sleeper. The Living Darkness prefers 
to taste the terror of people who are consciously dreaming, 
so it tries to conceal itself in the path of anyone 
travelling the Interstices. 

The Glass Skin There is glass where your skin was. You can't 
move, or the glass will shatter, and you'll die. Hammad 
al-Sufi sometimes punishes people by sending them this 
nightmare, which grows like fungus in a dry well near him. 
He sends one of his servants to collect the 
petrified-to-glass dreamselves of those who have been a 
particular nuisance to him, and then keeps the thousands of 
glass-encased, fully-aware dreamers on display in one of his 
worlds. 

Encountered by itself, this nightmare is actually pretty 
harmless; it holds you in place for a few hours, and then 
moves on. 

Throatful of Bugs A sleeper starts choking, then begins to 
vomit, only what comes out isn't food, it's insects, 
thousands of them. The nightmare doesn't like to happen to 
the same person twice; it's a juvenile little thing that 
gets a rush out of the look on someone's face when she pukes 
up a few thousand living insects. 

Chicken Rock Three beautiful women with the legs of 
chickens. Two of them murderously attack the third, tearing 
at her skin. If the character tries to intervene, all three 
of them will turn on him. If he doesn't intervene, the 
brutalized third will rise up and promise to hunt him for 
the rest of his days. She won't. This dream is a mysterious 
one; just about every gifted dreamer has had it at some 
point, and no one understands its motives. 

Gluttonous Cobweb A scrawny old woman who moves from dream 
to dream, eating whatever food she can find. While not 
technically a nightmre, the gluttonous cobweb is a strange 
creature that originates in dreams. 

Elemental This nightmare always unrolls in the character's 
home town. A little girl, cute as a button, runs around 
starting fires. Anyone who touches her will feel chilled to 
the bone and let her go. Anything she destroys in dreams 
will burn in the waking world as well. 

-- Dream Wanderers -- 

A particular kind of possession works so that a dreamer 
moves his life force into the dream. He transfers his living 
self to the dream. In the game, this means he loses one 
point of Ego from his waking self every time he enters the 
dream. That point is transferred to the dreamed self. 
Gradually, he becomes more absent and dreamy in real life, 
and stronger in the world of dreams. When the real person's 
Ego has dropped to zero, he becomes a mental vegetable 
within weeks. 

The dreamed self lives on and becomes one of the Dream 
Wanderers who wander into other people's dreams and are able 
to pass effortlessly between different people's dreams and 
our reality. 

Such a transfer can be made intentionally by someone who 
really wants to go into dreams forever. All who have a score 
of 30 or more in the Art of Dreaming can do it. But it is 
more common that the transfer is caused by a curse or 
something else that is not intentional on the part of the 
person himself. 

A dream wanderer has the ability to go between dream worlds, 
much like what a magician can achieve with the spell 
Dreamwalk. Dream wanderers have a sufficiently high score in 
the Art of Dreaming to move unhindered between dreams and 
reality. 

Most dream wanderers are humans, though it is possible for 
other creatures to enter our dreams as well. There are a few 
azghoul dream wanderers. The Purpose and plans of different 
dream wanderers vary strongly. A common trait is that they 
despise the waking reality and regard dreams as a superior 
and more true world. 

Dream wanderers normally look like ordinary people, but they 
can alter their appearance at will according to the rules of 
the dreamed self. They are able to assume non-human form. 
Below follows a description of a typical human dream 
wanderer. 

Armand Mahfouz 

Armand Mahfouz was born in Marseilles in the 1930s and 
founded a gangster organization there, dealing in robberies, 
protection, thefts and prostitution. In 1962 he was 
paralyzed as a result of injuries he got in a gang war. 
Permanently bedridden, Armand learned the art of dreaming. 
He became very skilled, and in 1969 he left our world and 
entered the world of dreams as a Wanderer. He never gave up 
his relation with the criminal world of Marseilles, however. 
Armand is using his powers to build and enhance organized 
crime. He performs daring coups by entering our world from 
the dream. He kidnaps rich people and keeps them prisoner in 
his own dream world. Armand controls a gangster group with 
some 200 members in Marseilles. He is expanding his 
operations to Barcelona. 

Armand is tall, dark of skin, has brown eyes and curly black 
hair. He usually appears in his own form, but can also 
assume the shape of a short white man, and more rarely as a 
large black panther, to frighten his enemies or his own 
goons. He is able to increase three of his abilities 40 
points above the basic score.