The Dreamed Folk
I have decided to create a blog to collect my thoughts and maybe organize them into something GLOGable or at least provide inspiration to that end. I have always enjoyed that system and the broader OSR community so I’m excited to contribute to it if I can. Anyway here is a taxonomy of weird guys from a project of mine. Some of it references my specific setting but I have tried to speak broadly such that any parts seen as good can be stolen without much trouble. This is largely an attempt to create a general sphere of supernatural existence from which behaviors and abilities can be derived while retaining a broadly cohesive theme. This is my usual method to creating monsters and I hope it helps someone somehow.
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In the days when civilization was young, it was ruled by Titans. Immense godly figures glutted on the numinous flesh and blood of the deities which came before, grown from mere men into things which many say were never meant to be. In time, as their fare dwindled, they turned upon each other, and made the World into Perdition on earth, until Heaven arrived and smote them down, smearing their souls across the land and breaking their bodies such that they could no longer rise. To this day, they remain so, dead yet dreaming, their faces in the stars and clouds and their fury in the storms and waves.
This is not about them.
It is about what rose from the ruin of their minds.
Just as the fertile loam of the earth may bear crops and nourish beasts, so too did the slain-yet-dreaming Titans nourish a new kind of life. Just as worldly creatures arose from nothing, wriggling from earth and water to grow into all the things of Creation, so too did things arise from the remnants of the once-gods. Born within the souls of these existences, yet not of them. Mold and grubs arising from their corpses, and as alien to man as those same scavenging broods.
It is said that they were madder than they were now in those early days, if that can be believed. They had not defined themselves, not found a means to continue. They erupted from nothing and wreaked chaos before vanishing, like wildfires or lightning strikes. It was only the cunning and patient and lucky that survived and learned, and beget more of themselves.
As creatures of the mind, it was the effluvia of the mind which fed them. They grew adept at teasing it out of others, and doing so could stray from the rotting wombs of their progenitors to spread across the World.
The Oneirian lot are blessed with glamour. By styling their forms in one way or another, they elicit potent emotional reactions from those who encounter them. By augmenting this with the arrangement (often sorcerous) of ideal scenarios for these emotions to blossom, to seem natural, they prolong the emissions of the spirit which they favor, and thus grow satisfied. And grow strong, as well. The more passions an Oneiric being harvests, the greater the strength of their spirit.
Her life trajectory is about to be irreversibly altered.
They often favor the forms of mortals, though warped and made unreal. They often have pointed or finned ears, tails, wings, or horns, or a combination, or other features. Some are achingly fair, others seem as part of the land they stand upon as they are people, fading into it. Others are garishly contorted, caricatures of people. Some are horrific monuments to fear and disgust. Though they can lead on and misdirect, they cannot change their nature. Some wear nothing, or leaves, or fine raiments, or shadows, or beams of light. One can predict what a dream feeds upon by the emotions its body elicits. What do you feel when you look upon one? The answer is, you feel what it hungers for the most. Of course, the clever, disciplined, aware, or abnormal may circumvent this, but this itself may be dangerous. If one fails to coax its meal from a mortal mind, its measures grow more desperate, like a drunkard shaking a flagon for its last drops. Or a beast shattering bone to get at the marrow.
Often, they do not mean to maim, traumatize, or kill. But they still do so.
Most of the time, these encounters are subtle and fleeting. Most Oneirians are clever and lookshy. Tiny flitting things or creatures skulking about under root and bush. Or perched on the windowsill, or lurking in the attic. A good broom can rush them off, and little offerings and ceremonies can keep them from causing overmuch mischief.
But these are not the kind spoken of in myth and song. Their greater kin, in the spaces man dare not settle but must traverse or work within, who lurk to ensnare such mortal souls, those are the ones which are rightly feared and venerated.
To encounter the dreamed folk in force is to be swept into a narrative of their design which does not abide by any logic or progression as the stories of humans do, but sweeps from one emotional peak to another, dragging its hapless players along. One may turn to a fellow journeyer to feel, truly, that they have met their true love, and for the other to feel the same. Another may make a sworn enemy of someone else, or be drawn to play the antagonist to the budding romance. The rival may win, perhaps, and the anguish of the lover enjoyed as surely as the finest wine. No catharsis or climax matters to the Oneiric, only that the effluvia of the mind be milked for as long as it is able. They are dreams, after all, and dreams need not make sense. Some may be wholly pleasant for all involved by a quirk of chance and the inclinations of the dreams, while others are wholly nightmarish, and may very well end in true death.
And when, if, they withdraw their glamours and leave, satisfied, the emotions they brought with them vanish. All that is left is ruin, horror, shame. Or not. Perhaps the love of the couple was true, held back only by mutual failure to speak on it. Perhaps a great self-knowledge was obtained. Perhaps truths came to light which mattered even after the feelings were gone. The aftermath of an encounter can never be wholly predicted, but rarely does it leave its participants unchanged.
I quite like this style but wish there were more non-european works in it, or rather I wish I could find them if they exist. The dreamlike quality of the art is exactly what I am going for for the Oneiric aesthetic but it is intended as more universal than specifically euro-coded. They can be anywhere.
How, then, are such things to be managed? The first, simplest method is to avoid them. Where the dreamers dwell, do not go. It circumvents the issue entire, but is not wholly avoidable. They may move, encroach. They may play at being tied to a place, only to suddenly spring upon a land thought safe. Reliance on this alone works often, but not always.
Secondly, one may placate them before entering their domain, or do so to keep them out of yours. They are pleased by performance, if it is done well. Plays, operas, songs, and poetry are in a way the domain of these beings, for by emotion elicited through the artist’s hand nourishes them all the same, if the artist can truly sway the audience to feel what is desired. It also signals to them a spirit of cooperation; a promise of further meals. They may thus be inclined to let the next set of passers-by go unmolested, or refrain from entering a place sealed by a particular sign.
Thirdly, one may rely on clear wits and a knowledge of the self, without evasion or placation. If one recognizes an unfamiliar feeling creeping up on them, and suspects glamour to be involved, they may act contrary to their emotions and recognize signs that a scenario is contrived to produce them. Of course, few possess such theory of mind. The average person of the World is ignorant to the sciences and unfamiliar with the nuances of psychology. It may be you are the only sane individual in a tableau of victims enacting the urges instilled in them. In that case, one can either find allies, or seek to wait it out. In truth, the best option is to play along, allowing yourself to feel the glamour and allow it to move you, while resisting actions that may have lasting consequences. Patiently endure until your captors grow tired, and then move on. There are some who are exceptionally skilled at this, so smoothly integrating into the scenes created by the Oneiric while retaining their own will, that they may walk right up to the creatures and speak to them, treat with them for knowledge, ask if they may be of service, or simply slay them outright.
And then there is faith. Priests, saints, and the otherwise particularly devout are creatures of Heaven’s Gospel, and that serves to gird them against other intrusions into their mind and spirit. While all else falls to madness, a student of the Great Faiths will retain their wits.
If one wishes to be an ally of the Oneiric world, one need merely participate in the formation of their scenes. Direct a caravan into a particular valley, scratch out the wards on a particular village. Leave the door open and unlocked. Or perhaps, if you are interesting in a way they enjoy, you may become a permanent companion. Should a human manage this, they will be altered, for humans are ever the most mutable of beings. A human in such a pact will assuredly become a changeling, taking on the features of their patron and becoming a potent producer of their favored feelings. One who serves a wrathful dream of who savors the feeling of slaughter shall becoming a banditrous knight, all bristle-hair and long-toothed, hunched upon a changeling-hound as a mount and clad in sorcerous plate, leading a wild hunt of brutish vagabonds. One bound to a fair and regal Oneirian becomes a dignified and beautiful personage, consumed by the loveliness of their master and driven to serve their whim. To be bound to the will of a morose, bitter dream is to become a glum, cynical thing, toiling away in the dark or ruminating on better days.
There are Dreaming Kingdoms, it is said. Places where the Oneirian hold utmost power. Where all lives, all dramas, all horrors, all pleasures, are performed for the sake of their hungry audience. Where the mortals who dwell there have no sense of continuity or cause and effect, merely drifting from one scene to the next, lost in an ever-present now. Where every villain is only so because the script demands, where every victim is made so in the name of slaking a thirst, where every hero is only so because there must be someone to sup on that glory.
It is also said that those who aid them well are taken there, as a reward. They live the lives of storybook protagonists, the world around them bending to accommodate their fantasies. And so long as they never again leave the boundaries of that place, it will be true. And so long as no outsiders, warded and wary, stumble in to muck it up.
If you are to ward yourself against the Oneiric and do battle, iron and steel shall suffice. The most Worldly of metals, they cut the threads of dream far more terribly than they would a Worldly beast (and that they do well enough), sundering even a mighty dream-lord like cloth or paper. They know this and most shall not fight head-on, instead directing their changelings to protect them, or use lesser kin who have lesser glamours and a greater hold upon the World. While iron may bite them harshly it shall not end them outright. If an Oneirian lord approaches you with the intent to do battle then consider running; it is utterly confident it can kill you without once being touched.
There are five broad spheres of Oneiric influence, termed Courts. There is generally recognized the Fair Court, which seeks love, happiness, lust, and general pleasure, with beautiful and charming bodies evoking the innocence of children or the flowering of wholesome adulthood; the Mad Court, which hungers for anxiety, frantic action, unease, paranoia, derangement, their bodies oft long and sinewy, frantic and grabsome with rolling eyes and caricature faces; the Dolorous Court, which covets grief, nostalgia, bitterness, regret, and the grim satisfaction of the cynic, bodied as withered or leathery or wrinkled mortals, often broad and squat or hunched and heavy; the Wrathful Court, which sparks fury, hot-headedness, indignation, vengeance, muscular and bristle-haired, with tusk and claw; and the Loathsome Court, which harvests disgust, sadism, resentment, envy, and hatred of both the other and the self, sickly and ill-formed, stooped or elongated or twisted, the visuals of the monster under the bed or the thing in the dark alley.
Puck by Richard Dadd
These should be seen less as discrete polities or even defined species as much as fuzzily-defined spheres of influence that meld into each other, dictated by the emotions favored by a given court. Those of a similar court will often cooperate, and compete with other courts for the right to entangle themselves with mortals. An Oneirian which seeks peace and love can hardly share a scene with one that desires wanton slaughter, after all. There can, however, arise cooperation in a broader sort of sense. That same wrathful Oneirian may arrange a scene of bloodshed, and when it is spent it shall yield to the seeker of peace and forgiveness, to soothe the hearts of the victims.
It must be remembered that the Oneirians have no commitments to the values associated with the emotions they uphold. The kind and beloved dream-queen is kind and beloved because it desires the emotions felt by mortals towards the kind and loving. If a tragedy would heighten those emotions, it would allow another of its kind to make it so, or allow another third party, not even a dream, to act. This is another way of handling the Oneiric, in fact. If one can prove the inhumanity of a dream to its supplicants, should there be any kind of long-term relationship, they may abandon it, and with its supply of nourishment dried up it is forced to flee.
To add, these are not definitions used by common folk, but by scholars and pedants. For most, the Oneiric are either dreams (benign or potentially harmful but not usually so) or nightmares (Oneirians which leave lasting trauma or simply kill their victims), and even then typically noted by individual or small group. A local villager would not see the monster lurking in the abandoned hillside cave as a member of the Loathsome Court with a lesser inclination towards the Wrathful, but as a named figure, a local spirit who incites and perpetuates blood feuds, with a history behind it. There might be a festival of some kind which emulates such grudges, providing a trickle of vented hate to keep it placated. Or maybe it has recently orchestrated a great slaughter, and the tearful remnants of the afflicted families demand that it now be slain.
Of course, that could be part of a broader scheme, enacted by another group of dreams complicit with the murderer, to harvest another crop of the psyche. This is also why many are wary of dealing with dreams, for one is never fully sure when they are fully woken out of it, when the glamorous withdraw and reality reasserts itself. Has the slain beast ended the story, or merely closed the chapter? Will you ever be free? Is the desperation to be done with it all itself feeding into another unseen watcher? How much of all you have done, your legacy, your deeds, how much of that was you, and how much the pulling of hidden puppetry, of the plucking of your heart by another’s hand? How much of it really mattered?
These are the sorts of things which can drive a man mad.
And then they’ll drink of that too.
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Narrative pontification aside, the Oneirian class of entity is meant to pose an unconventional challenge to players; if it gets you to feel the thing it wants you to feel, it wins. If it “loses” the battle but still gets away and produces the emotions it wanted, it wins. It is playing a completely different game than most antagonists who want things like treasure or worldly power or accomplishing an ideological goal. You can leave players entrapped in a web of Oneiric schemes all designed to move them from one emotional tableau to the next, putting them through the psychological wringer until they die or the Courts move on.
Narratively as antagonists, they draw on the fear of a loss of control. Seeing them out in the wild is seeing the physical manifestation of a dream encroaching upon you. You know you’re soon going to lose hold of yourself, feel things that aren’t you, be forced to play roles you don’t want, and that’s if you even know at all, and it isn’t going to creep up on you without knowing in the first place. Maybe sometimes its a magical fairy journey straight out of a disney song where all that’s felt is joy and wild abandon. Maybe it is a horrific nightmare chase that ends in dismemberment. Maybe it starts as a horrific nightmare chase but then the creature is jovially slain by a heroic dream knight which is in cahoots with the nightmare to grant it fear to feed in in exchange for playing the hero and drinking in the gratitude of its “saved” victims. Maybe it is an illogical sequence of random emotional highs and lows as various Court-aligned dreams vie for control of a narrative which serves no logical purpose save to squeeze feelings out of those involved (when there are a lot of them around it is almost certainly this, when the Oneiric are in power especially the pretence of structure can fall away in favor of raw emotion harvesting efficiency).
They can also be depicted in a more neutral and whimsical light as well. A random encounter with some pixie-things playing flutes and fluttering about to grant a brief respite from the hardships of the journey. The travelers may even feel grateful to have encountered them. Or maybe a great dreamed lord eclipses the moon for a few moments and a wave of powerful emotion crashes about the players for a brief instant, and nothing more. A look into the stranger world awaiting them if they stray from the path.
This I imagine can be hard to game out, but I think it can be done in the same way the dreamed folk do it out in the world; setting a scene. Create some emotionally charged random encounter; NPCs afflicted by Glamour. Maybe it seems perfectly reasonable, maybe it is bizarre (bandits and merchants throwing a feast together, the widely known truly-in-love prince and princess going at each other with knives), but the goal of it is to get the people involved feeling what the Oneirian wants them to feel. A minor encounter can inform the players of what they are. Let it get what it wants and leave, and as the NPCs come to their senses they can guess that this was all caused by glamour and it is all really embarrassing, please don’t judge us too harshly, as they slink away or try to right some wrongs (or hire the PCs to do it!). Oneirians are excellent at starting plots, ruining plots, and generally getting up to nonsensical shenanigans.
Even so, you can still beat them. You can guess what kind of emotions they are going to elicit and plan against that, you can try to infiltrate a scene and get close to them for various results, you can try to find the gaps in their illusions and point out to those wrapped up in their games that this thing doesn’t really care about them (in the case of ones that harvest positive emotion and have cultivated the following of a minor deity or local celebrity). You can just have your cleric or cleric-equivalent run at them screaming with a steel sword, or fortify yourselves with some rare but potent elixir which wards against Glamour (for a time. You best keep track of the passing hours). If you do not care to oust or kill them you can also use them to learn various secrets. While all this emotional stuff is just “eating” to them they can have other hobbies and curiosities and often they know strange things it is also worth knowing for PCs. I imagine a lot of careful wording and checks to be involved to maintain what is effectively a state of lucid dreamed in baseline reality when interacting with them, the alternative being getting swept up in the dream-scene.
For playing an Oneirian as a GM, consider that they view most outward actions as feeding strategies. Everything they do is done with the intent of eliciting an emotion, when they are upon prey. When among themselves, or among mortals who they recognize as their agents and not food, they will be more mercurial and less bound to their role. The mask slips, the smile doesn’t quite reach the eyes, their voice becomes colder and more stilted. The alien psychology that animates it is allowed to be seen. They themselves can still feel things; satisfaction, curiosity, companionship. They have friends, rivals, mates. They can make long-term plots and organize into bands or societies, and they can of course run mortal realms as dens of madness if they are truly prominent. They might have their own codes of honor, with some trying to keep their feeding harmless and even wanting mortals to be safe during it (as much as reasonably possible) while others are happy to run them to their deaths. But at the end of the day they are nearly aliens, their internal schema comparable to our own only in the broadest strokes. We can communicate, but not truly understand. Though the Courts can still apply as a general shorthand for personality and behavior. Even when “off the clock”, an Oneirian’s feelings are filtered through the lens of its role. If a thing of the Loathsome Court has spent its life doing nothing but savaging and degrading mortals, it will likely generally remain a dangerous creature even when not actively feeding. A member of the Fair Court will remain regal and dainty or naive and playful and a Dolorous creature will be grumbling and cynical even when sated. Exceptions to these rules exist as well, but they are the minority, a surprise to spring on those who have gotten too comfortable dealing with the dreamed folk.
Another thing you can do is, if the players fall for a carefully arranged scene and do exactly as the Oneirians wish, then you can then inform them that their actions, retroactively, were the result of the Glamour at play. They felt precisely as the dreams wished them to, did they not? They can choose to view their actions as stemming from their own will, or acknowledge they were in that moment subject to invasive external projections of emotion and "snap out of it" when it is done. Perhaps there can be a roll involved, with failure producing some lasting trauma, or gain a benefit or defect depending on how they process the aftermath and if they roll well about it.
I will also say you could probably drop the Courts entirely as in-universe taxonomic classifications. I mostly use them as a shorthand to better articulate to myself what a particular Oneirian is about and what other Oneirians they may associate with.
For playing a changeling as a player, choose a court to align yourself with and then a sub-court if you wish. For example a Fair and Wrathful patron is almost certainly evoking the archetype of a righteous knight-errant, and its changelings would quest for glorious causes and fair princesses to produce suitable scenes for their master to enjoy. You can’t help but feel flaming passions of both courtly love and righteous fury, they burn too brightly to suppress. You are otherwise a normal person, but your role can overtake you at the worst times if those emotions flare up. How you approach this is up to you. You can treat it as a persona you slip into, cynically arranging or seeking out circumstances that allow you to evoke that aspect of yourself to please your master. Or maybe you chose this out of disgust for your old self, allowing the Oneirian to reshape your soul into your ideal self-image, which you adhere to at all times. It may also directly ask you to do things that will spread its influence or that of the dreamed folk in general. You may obey the letter of these requests or the spirit, with more earnest cooperation earning greater reward.
At some point, you will be given an offer; to be taken to a Dreaming Kingdom to live out your days as a favored pet, or to shed your humanity and become a Dream proper. You can accept it at your leisure, but if they are making this offer, it means you have reached your peak as a mortal changeling. If more power is what you desire, you must leave mortality behind; either through the Dream, or by other means.
But that is a post for another day.
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