• 26 Dec, 2025 *

Reader, I must warn you. Today, I’ll have to tell you some of my dreams.

The thing is, I joined the Secret Sancticorn 2025 on the RPG Cauldron, where you randomly receive an assignment by another participant. In German, we call it "Blogwichteln". A big thank you is due to Errant who got the whole thing going.

My assignment, coming from greenmirror, is about dreams in OSR adventures. Let’s read it:

Adventures in dreams, or any other locations that adhere dream logic, can be difficult to adapt into dungeon games. Such places are fluid and offer players the potential to shape their environment in ways that are antithetical to "old-school" gaming. How do you resolve this potential? What makes such a scenario well-done? What are the tools and procedures you use to bring such a place alive?

I love this topic, I’m eager to dive straight in. The problem is, I don’t think that, as a GM, I’ve really tapped into the potential of dreams. I’ve run a Call of Cthulhu mini-campaign partly set in the dreamlands, but that was about it.

I do see the potential, though, and I will use this post to collect ideas for dreams and dream elements in games.

Ask about dreams

My first instinct is the same as with any specific topic. I’m not much of a procedures guy, I play rules-lite, "worlds not rules". If I want a certain theme in my game, I will ask the characters about it.

In daily conversation, I usually prefer others to keep their dreams to themselves. Thus the disclaimer above. Not so in a game. I’m convinced asking questions is the most useful GMing technique, hands down.

Campfire scenes often involve questions addressed to a PC standing guard. "What do you do to while away the time?" is a staple. Asking about dreams could be a nice reversal. Next time we have a campfire scene, I’ll ask a sleeping PC what they dream of, especially after all the bloodshed of the previous adventuring day. "That pirate you stabbed, does her face haunt you in your dream?"

Also, here’s a GM challenge: Roll on the encounter table, present that encounter as a dream when the group makes camp.

Some dreams enforce rules

Tapping into others’ imagination is good, but I also should use my own. So let’s bring my dreams into the game. (Needless to say, they’re the only dreams I have reliable access to.)

Frankly, some of my dreams are quite a bit more akin to an OSR game than I would like. For example, there’s this dream where I am standing in front of a door, rummaging through my belongings, but can’t find the key. That’s really a nightmare about inventory management, I’d say.

Another recurring dream of mine is being late for work, or alternatively sitting at my desk, behind schedule, desperately trying to get some task done. Strict time records must be kept!

If I can derive a lesson from this, it must be that dreams are not naturally the opposite of game rules. This gives me confidence that, to a degree, we’ll be able to apply game rules in a way that feels dreamlike. How exactly? Not sure yet, but my instinct is to make it scary, and not to overdo it. Not more than magic, anyway. Magic is already a dreamlike twisting of reality – and thus, of game rules. Which is why it has its own ruleset.

Perhaps it sounds a bit like I’m rejecting the premise, but well, I think all fantasy worlds were originally dream worlds. H. P. Lovecraft famously called his fantasy world the Dreamlands. This dream connection may have gotten obscured when Poul Anderson (in an essay called "On Thud and Blunder") demanded believable fantasy environments in fiction, based on historic facts, and Gary Gygax went all in on Naturalism with AD&D.

I don’t mean this a criticism of Gygax or Anderson. Especially in a game, a degree of coherence is certainly desirable. As a player, you want to know what you can achieve and what is out of reach. So I’ll put this down as a reminder not to overdo the strangeness with dream characters and items and places. Instead, embrace the fantastical.

One type of item I’d want in my game is one that interacts with dreams. Like the Mask of Dreams, an arcanum. If you wear it while dreaming, you will find one item that you saw in your dream in your clenched fist when you wake up. It might be a gem, but beware of sharp blades.

Constraints of space

Can a dungeon or wilderness be a dream location? I don’t think they’re ideal. My dreams are rarely mappable. There are no corridors. The locations are ambiguous and hazy. I feel my dream imagination provides specifics only as needed. As a GM describing a dream world, I try to do the same.

I do have dreams where I step though my door, here in Bavaria, and suddenly I’m in Japan. In other cases there isn’t even a door, the landscape just changes. In other dreams, I’m flying through the clouds. Such dreamlike means of transportation could well ruin your carefully prepared hexcrawl.

Portals are a way to integrate dreamlike proximity in a game without sacrificing game logic. To enforce the dream theme, such a portal could lead into a dream realm and only from there back into the "reality" of your fantasy world. An obvious example for such a portal would be paintings you can step into in Pickman’s Student, an early adventure for Call of Cthulhu by Keith Herber.

Moving through the waking world while you think you’re only dreaming is another possibility: Your characters fall asleep in a castle chamber. That night, they all experience the same disturbing dream. In the morning, they find themselves somewhere else entirely. If that sounds a little heavy-handed, play out the dream and let their decisions determine where they wake up. Thus, they must figure out how dream and waking world are interconnected.

The concept of dream space also is a fun one: I might have a dungeon room that looks big, but after just one PC enters, tell them it is now completely cramped. No others can get in, just one at a time. And of course there is some trap ... On the opposite end, there might be a small crawlspace that is actually much larger than it looks.

Some dreams resist gamification

Ocasionally, I dream of getting shot. No rolling initiative. Just some horrible situation, and then game over. Which once more tells me dreams can be scary. Though this kind of instant death is not what you want in a game.

I might still introduce such a sequence as a cut scene. Maybe the party is getting ready for a boss fight, discussing strategy and tactics. When someone describes drawing a weapon, I ask the character: "As you do it, you remember you saw this creature before. He was in your dream last night, and in that dream, you didn’t have time to draw before he killed you. Why was that? What held you back?"

After their answer, we come back to the fight, though the mood may have changed a little.

I’d even like to do a whole mini campaign interspersed with dream cutscenes. A hexcrawl should be ideal, as the group will be making camp every night. The dreams will then reflect the PC’s activities. If they went hunting during the day, they’ll dream of being hunted, etc.

Monsters as nightmare creatures

Dreams can be scary. Dreams about fighting will certainly be scary, quite the opposite of "combat as sport". More "combat as war", which is an often proclaimed goal of the OSR anyway.

To make combat in games scary, the obvious angle is to come up with a scary opponent, a thing from a nightmare. I’m convinced most traditional monsters, like kobolds and goblins, were originally nightmare creatures anyway. They just don’t have that effect on us anymore because we’re so used to them. To circumvent this, I see two options:

1. Revive the scariness and dreamlikeness of a monster though description. In the words of Jason Cordova, "never say the monster’s name". Describe it as a scary creature, a dream creature. Emphasize one trait that’s not usually associated with this particular monster.
2. Create new, interesting monsters. A great example of this is in Through Ultan’s Door by Ben Laurence. I’ve only read the first installment, which has giggling white swine with baby’s heads and limbs. By the way, Laurence calls his setting the "dreamlands".

Distorted realities

How would I go about if I wanted to write dreamlike monsters myself? I think before I can answer that, I need to take a closer look at how dreams work.

In one recent dream I met a friend from my schooldays, who had somehow acquired a certain personality trait. On waking up, I could remember when and where I had really came across this trait, this kind of behaviour. I had seen it on another person.

Thus, I could make out which two elements my dream imagination had combined into one. But the point is, they were not just combined like Lego bricks, but fused together. My school friend suddenly did behave that way, at least in the dream there could be no doubting, it was "real" and it was scary.

That is what I’d strive for when designing nightmare monsters. Take two disparate elements and really weld them together.

As a first step, I have the idea of combining a lion and a snake for a new monster. I could say it’s like a snakeperson with a golden mane. My players would see the elements, nod, and then focus on the required tactics.

To make it scary and dreamlike, I will have to find some point of fusion, something to weld my elements together. How about politics? This monster could be a cold-blooded ruler, holding court in the desert, imperious, always ready to pounce on you if you show a weakness. And of course the PCs would have to travel through this creature’s realm, asking permission.

Not quite a giggling white swine with a babyface yet, but much better than the original idea.

Call of Cthulhu’s Dreamlands supplement has a rule that allows dreamer to change the dream world, "permanently" creating all kinds of objects, from a dagger to a palace. Sadly, I’ve never managed to dream up a new city, but I do notice that I have some authorial stance in my dreams.

Sometimes, within a dream, I tell myself that what just happened is crap. Next thing I know, the narrative twists, the element is changed, or gone, or I wake up. Yes, the latter is what happens most often. I can usually terminate my own dream and wake up.

Furthermore, I usually know all along that I’m "just dreaming". It’s meta, but scary nevertheless.

I could see this as the premise for a campaign framework, even a complete Dream RPG in the NSR tradition. The goal in each scenario would be to collect some resource, not gold, but ... dream flowers perhaps? softly glowing starfish drifting through the air? Whatever they are, they act like XP.

Each session, the PCs can keep going as long as they want, unless they die (which makes them wake up: no permanent damage, but lose all dream flowers), or wake up voluntarily (adventure over, keep flowers).

Within such a framework, I guess I could play lots of one-shots, or repeatedly visit some megadungeon. If I use published materials, I’d best make it more dreamlike using other thoughts from this post.

Humor and Laughter

Even though many dreams are scary, I sometimes experience happy dreams, where I’m flapping my arms a little, soaring above the clouds. However, I don’t think I ever laughed outright in a dream.

Laughter and jokes shared among a group are, for me, one of the principal joys of RPGs. This is why I’d refrain from playing in a dream world only. In a dream adventure, I’d always want to have these moments of waking up, I’d want to have some relaxation from the heavy dream atmosphere.

Many of my dreams are funny at least in retrospect. This week, I dreamt that I was the boss of a company I had founded, currently looking for new headquarters. Nothing could be further from my real situation, and thinking back makes me smile, even it wasn’t funny while it lasted.

What it does show is that dreams can cast us in roles far from our actual life. This could happen to the PCs, too. They might dream of being the guard at the gate, of being the queen who has to deal with numerous supplicants every day, or even being a skeleton in the crypt.

Interview with a Lich Lord

To finish off this blog entry, I’d like to sketch out a dream scenario, using some of the considerations above.

Let’s do a dungeon with a lich. I will try to combine two disparate elements in that character. My general idea is to make him an undead wizard and at the same time an employer looking for personnel.

The encounter with him will be at the centre of my adventure, so let’s start with that. My hope is that everything else will follow naturally.

My first instinct is to have him ask the PCs straightaway about their qualifications, but then I remember there’s not much humour in dreams. I must avoid making him laughing stock. Rather, it should be a scary encounter. For that, I’ll have to somehow fuse the two elements, undead wizard and employer.

Maybe he thinks the PCs are dead already. Why would he do so? This dungeon must be situated somewhere on the way to the Realm of the Dead, Hades, whatever they call it. An ideal place for a lazy lich on the lookout for workforce. I should give it a name. The PCs must know from the get-go that they’re in a dream realm, so I might have some NPC call this place "the last dream labyrinth before eternity".

When they meet the Lich Lord, he’ll offer a seat, asking polite questions. Did they find the way easily? Then, to ramp up the tension: What was it that killed them? – Only slowly should they realize that he wants to hire them. "I’m sure the work here would very much agree with you. Also, consider what other prospects you have! Not too many, I daresay."

I like it! Of course, even if this is the finale I’ll strive for, I’ll not enforce it. It may not happen quite as planned, they could start firing arrows and fireballs even while he’s talking, but that’s okay. In that case, the realization what he wanted of them will come later.

My work is now cut out for me. Everything in this dungeon will have features of an underworld realm, on the way to Hades, but I can also think of the rooms as offices to give me some inspiration. The group will meet some of the staff on their way. I’ll have design, production, sales, marketing, and, uh, human resources ... whatever that means in this context.

I’ll remember to make transitions between rooms dreamlike. At least some of them. No listening on doors, you take a step towards the exit, you’re already there, on a rock in the midst of a field of lava.

Finally, I’ll want a hook. I can’t but think of Orpheus and Eurydice as the classic underworld tale. Yes, that is my hook: the PCs are on a mission to bring someone back from the dead, either out of love or for money. "Maybe there’s hope yet! A soothsayer told me they haven’t gone further than the place they call the last dream labyrinth before eternity."

And whenever the group rests, I’ll be asking the PCs questions. "What job were you in before you started adventuring? What did you like about it? What’s the job of your dreams?"

#adventure #english #osr #storytelling