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2017 01 29 - DreamLess PDF
2017 01 29 - DreamLess PDF
Setting-in-a-Box
v 0.1
> a Setting Seed that tells you what this game is about
> a starter World Deck with a few canon places and people and
things, to be used both as specific official materials and as
guideline examples to create your own canon-like elements
Things 27
White Collar 27
Bloody Eye 27
Lasers 27
Hoover Pads 27
Food Tokens 28
Foundation.Net 28
Muad’dib 28
Scars 28
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Crunchy Bit - Setting Seed
Far in the future there was war, there was treachery, and
something desperate was attempted to end it all, but it failed
catastrophically and as a result reality crumbled, turning
into something deranged we now call Deliria.
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Crunchy Bit - World Pitch
With the Seed in mind you can now discuss about some finer
details: are you a team of Jemnost operatives or a cast of
individual agents? Are you living in the same Bastion? In
which “sea” of Deliria is it located? Is there open conflict
with neighbouring bastions, or is the situation (apparently)
calm?
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Crunchy Bit - Creating a Jemner
Members of the Jemnost elite represent less than 10% of the
overall population, and you are one of them!
Factions Shortlist:
- Great Board - common people with great training
- Spìti tou Kenos - acrobatic philosopher/warriors
- Sem’ya Razum - tribal mind readers
- Ordo - scientists and technocrats
- Haus der Spiralen - survivors touched by Deliria
EXAMPLE
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Aspect - Great Board
You might not have special powers, hyper conditioning or
access to esotic technology, but you have an uncommonly high
level of training and more comrades than all the other
Factions put together.
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Aspect - Spìti tou Kenos
Many children are sent to the House of the Void in hopes that
they will become jemners and elevate their family status. You
are one of the very few survivors, you are a Kenon.
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Aspect - Sem'ya Razum
You are a Razer, born with the gift of telepathy, marked with
a tattoo on your forehead that glows when you use your powers.
You were introduced into the Sem’ya as soon as your ability
manifested and now your family is a small Clan, a group of
like-minded and compatible people which in turn are part of a
wider tribe. You might be a solo operative Svet (light), a
supervising Zanosh (shard), a clan leading Zerkal (mirror) or
even one of the tribe guides, a local Glaza (eye). Your
training encompasses three disciplines:
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Aspect - Haus der Spiralen
You are a Schlaflös. Somehow Deliria touched your mind but
left it sane and untainted. And yet you have changed: your
sleep has gone away and a beast now dwells in your soul. This
is why the Haus stepped in offering help, guidance and a
chance of being part of its community. The Haus is a very
loose and informal organization made up of local groups called
Spiralen; within them a distinguished person is a Spule
(coil), an elected leader is a Herz (heart) while someone with
high level diplomatic and cross-Bastion tasks is an Ader
(vein).
Being a Schlaflös you have a few special rules about how your
unique power works, and how your chronic insomnia affects you.
What follows are all features and details included in the
basic Haus der Spiralen aspect.
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Crunchy Bit - Tier and Exhaustion
You have an unnatural beast (Tier) sleeping within you; at
character creation define a theme (Herkunft) in one or two
words (insects, shadows, tiger, red ice, etc).
You can, at any time, add one or more radical body alterations
that offer practical functionality: huge muscles give
strength, wings allow flight, scales offer protection, claws
can rip things apart, etc. Each one generates 1 Exhaustion
when it manifests. They must also comply with your Herkunft.
When you try to put the Tier back to sleep roll one die: if
you score more than your Exhaustion/3 (round down) you
succeed, otherwise you Crash. Also, you are unable to sleep
naturally and if unconsciousness is forced on you in any way,
you Crash.
You can spend 1 Fate to resist crashing, but every subsequent
time the cost will increase cumulatively by +1.
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The Tier is an NPC guided by three core impulses:
- to feast upon the one person your PC cares about most
- to indulge in its (your) darkest desires
- to establish itself as the absolute predator of the area
Example
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Crunchy Bit - Manifestation Mastery
Gain 1 Exhaustion : for one scene you can manifest a single
cosmetic or radical alteration without awakening the Tier.
Example
Example
She might also use such huge and razor-sharp wings to slash
opponents all around her. Or maybe she can throw deadly
crystal feathers at short range.
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Crunchy Bit - Gestalt Deconstruction
Spend 1 Clarity or 1 Fate and fully awaken the Tier : for one
scene you are able to warp reality in a fashion appropriate to
your Herkunft. This only affects scenery and inanimate
free-standing objects within your immediate surroundings.
Doing such thing counts as Creating an Advantage and, if you
do, you also produce Friction. All alterations to reality
vanish at the end of the scene.
Example
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Aspect - Fetish
For some reason sensorial deprivation and physical constraints
relax your exhausted mind. A fetish is any item used for this
purpose: chains and shackles, latex suits, ball gags,
padlocked blindfolds, etc. The funny thing is that in recent
years such look has become fashionable, although fake
(see-through blindfolds, toy manacles, etc).
For each true condition you get to add one more die roll to
your final score when rolling to put the Tier back to sleep.
E x a m p l e
Brigit is wearing a shibari bondage (a complex ropework)
that ties her arms behind her back to her neck, strangling
her if she attempt to move her arms.
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Ordo
This faction is a technocratic caste of academics and
scientists which all abide to one shared set of laws and
social hierarchy but are also split into three independent and
very diverse sub-groups called Legions. Most members are
Cenobites, students and novices not yet allowed to join a
specific Legio. A Legionarius is a veteran agent/scientist
initiated into the ranks of a Legio. Above that are the
Praetorii, leading a whole chapter of Legionarii both in field
action and lab research. A few of them will rise to be
Senatorii, with a seat in the directive council of the whole
faction.
At character creation you have to select an aspect
representing to which Legion you belong:
- Legio Novae Carnis
- Legio Divi Cruoris
- Legio Aeterni Scribere
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Aspect - Novae Carnis
You are an Incarna. You know how to build and maintain
machines and electronics and how to crudely (but effectively)
rig them into a living body. Unfortunately, materials and
parts are hard to come by and you only have limited access to
“the great machines”...
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Aspect - Divi Cruoris
You are a Stilla. You have a deep knowledge of chemistry and
human biology and know how to apply the first to the second in
order to radically alter it. You sport very visible black
veins as a side effect of the mutagenic drugs enhancing your
organism: your body is amped up to the level of an athlete,
and you can push it even further...
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Aspect - Aeterni Scribere
You are a Magister. Your Legion is made of historians and
theorists, and is the only one holding the secret of how
Pillars work. In truth such technology is a relic inherited
from the first desperate days after reality collapsed; you
have no real understanding of Deliria. But constant research
and speculation bore some weird and interesting fruits...
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Crunchy Bit - Reality Friction
In DreamLess the Opposition Clock has a second meter that
advances with Friction points.
When the friction-arm resets, it causes a SOpp effect that you
have to describe as something weird and unnatural. Try to go
for sinister and unnerving rather than blatant and gory.
Aspect - Relics
Items and places can be tainted by Deliria just like people,
becoming dangerous and malicious. Every relic is...
..sinister : what is obviously wrong about it?
..unique : how has common folk named it?
..unnatural : what is its one unnatural property?
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Crunchy Bit - Travelling Through Chaos
Deliria messed up space and time, among other things. Reality
works normally within the Pillar-irradiated confines of
Bastions, but everywhere else:
- the landscape is an a-geographical labyrinth
- electrical devices don’t work
- no long range communications are possible
- flying vehicles just disappear and are never seen again once
they move out of a bastion’s immediate view
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6 = you advance by one step on your path
5 = you reach a different and unexpected location
4 3 2 = you wander somewhere in the current open sea
1 = you are lost in Deliria, roll SOpp & get 1
Opposition
After the roll any PC in the scene can add +1 to the score by
spending one or more points of Clarity or Fate, but this also
causes one SOpp at the beginning of the next scene.
You can skip the whole journey by playing a scene where your
PC, while wandering in Deliria, somehow faces alone one of her
deepest fears. When that scene is over create an Aspect to
represent how this experience changed you.
E X A M P L E
Brigit lives in Babele, within the Sea of Mist, and needs
to reach NovaCairo, within the Sea of Dust. Her path would
be: Babele >> open Sea of Mist >> open Sea of Dust >>
NovaCairo
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Crunchy Bit - The State of Things
There are a few Game Aspects that are always present on the
common aspect sheet; write them down first:
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Places
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Sea of Webs Todai
This place is disturbing. A bastion in the Sea of Webs,
There are no day or night, a city of neon, a beacon
only constant blackness. The shining in the middle of a
whole sea is one big vast, endless dark.
pre-Deliria city with no end, Steam vents that run deep
a ruin of brittle concrete underground make electricity
and rusted metal. Here and abundant and, to contrast the
there broken pipes still leak darkness of the open Sea,
water, street lights still everything is illuminated.
glow faintly, some buildings
still hum with activity. Rumors abound: what lays
Things of flesh and metal under the city? how are the
dwell here. And spiders, and steam engines working? what
cobwebs, and silence. Which role do spiders have in all
is the worst thing of all. of this?
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People
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Merchants Settlers
Movers and shakers of Bastion Pardoned criminals sent in
society, they are skilled, Deliria with the suicide task
brave and ambitious. of working to expand a
Part criminals and part Bastion or build a new one.
benefactors, they are normal
people relying on just their The few who survive return to
wits and qualities to defy society as free but strange
both the horrors of Deliria people: heroes that faced
and the security of Bastions Deliria and came back to tell
in order to acquire what the tale, but also rejects
people needs and move it unable to fit back into
where it can be sold. civilian life and prevented
If Titans are heroes, they from joining the Jemnost.
are adventurers, scoundrels,
pirates, entrepreneurs. Whole, but scarred.
Ephemerides Abominations
The World Outside is a place Beasts with human intellect,
populated by shadows, living driven by deranged and
as if the sick nightmare was malicious intents, with the
the normal reality. Not truly instinctive power to distort
people, they are placeholders reality. The final stage of
meant to add solidity and Deliria mind infection.
coherence to the unrealities
of Deliria. Gods. Demons. Inhuman in
Breathing, thinking, feeling, every possible meaning.
yet unaware of the limits of Empowered and yet subjugated
their illusory worlds. Some by their own internal logic
are real people whose mind and rules.
was broken by Deliria, some Each unique. Each the spark
are just such stuff as dreams at the center of a small
are made of. universe.
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World Deck - Things
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Food Tokens Foundation.Net
Civilian life is all about Thanks to the Ordo most
survival: recycled food is bastions have a local area
strictly controlled and network, allowing for the
rationed through a system of comforts of the internet age,
tokens. FTs are thus the albeit in the confined space
official currency within a of a single bastion.
single bastion.
Each bastion has its own Data has thus become a
unique variant of FTs and commodity, stored in old
only accepts it. Exchanging fashioned ways as to be more
foreign FTs for local ones is resilient to the ravages of
strictly regulated and even Deliria, and sold from
discouraged. Fertile ground bastion to bastion:
for a lucrative and vicious documents, programs, news...
black market.
Muad’dib Scars
This desert mouse has somehow Advanced medical skills are
adapted to hunt the small purview of the Jemnost, and
poisonous vermins that plague even then each faction has
bastions within the Sea of its own weird set of specific
Dust, thus becoming a favored knowledge and esoteric rites.
“pet” for those living there.
Civilian doctors make do with
Bastions of different Seas improvised tools, antiquated
seem to have adopted similar techniques and incomplete
solutions that rely on a knowledge. Drugs abound but
variety of semi domesticated are in no way pure or safe.
creatures.
Nonetheless many Jemnost Showy scars and crude
members worry about their prosthetics are a common view
potentially Delirant origin. in any bastion.
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