You are a person in the world, living a life like anyone's life. You eat. You sleep. You stare at screens. You have friends, and family, or maybe you don't. You go to work, or school, or whatever.
But at night, as you sleep, you will rise towards glory.
You are a scholar of hidden lore, a practitioner of occult arts. You have learned to dream as the wise dream: to travel in the supernal places, the realms-beyond-the-mundane, where the symbols that define reality are made manifest. You know how to consort with otherworldly powers and confront otherworldly perils.
And now you are about to make the Ascent. It is the truest test for any dreaming-magus, the hardest road that you can walk. It is the tower that humans built to reach Heaven, before they were cast down for their hubris -- and the palace of the gods, spiraling upwards into the Empyrean -- and the great mountain in the desert, with the pilgrimage-road winding along its steep sides -- and a thousand other things besides.
If you do not falter, if you pass all the trials, if you reach the top of the Ascent, then you will find the thing that makes it all worthwhile. The ultimate power. The most fundamental secret. The treasure beyond price.
(You are not prepared, and you understand that you are not prepared. You do not know what awaits you along the way. You certainly do not understand what you will find at the end. But it will all be worth it, if you succeed. For your purposes. For any purposes. It has to be.)
You are a person in the world. But at night, as you sleep, you will climb. You have your reasons.
What are they? Your Aspiration is the grand purpose that fuels your occult obsession and has driven you to undertake the Ascent.
[][ASPIRATION] Ambition
You wish to acquire power in order to achieve something: become wealthy, become famous, destroy an enemy, attain a position, be the very best like no one ever was, create something believed impossible, or something else in that vein.
[][ASPIRATION] Mysticism
You wish to acquire supernal knowledge in order to understand one of the great truths of existence: what is the dreaming-realm, what is the true nature of the divine, what happened at the beginning of all things, what will happen at the end, what lies beyond death, or something else in that vein.
[][ASPIRATION] Adventure
You wish to experience the hidden wonders of the dreaming-realm, purely for the sake of the experience: discover what lies beyond the farthest horizon, see the colors beyond the rainbow, taste fruit that grew in no earthly soil, know the passions and pleasures possible beyond the world, or something else in that vein.
[][ASPIRATION] Connection
You may climb alone, but your connections shape your dreams even as they shape your life. You wish to do something for or with someone else who occupies a position of importance in your life: find a fellow occultist who was lost in dreams, prove to your teachers that you are worthy of their tutelage, claim the power that will let you save your dearest friend, make your beloved's dreams come true, or something else in that vein.
And how came you here, initiate of the hidden world? Whence did you learn your lore?
[][LORE] From a mentor
Perhaps a traditional master and apprentice relationship; perhaps an older family member; perhaps some other person you know. Someone more experienced than you who has been teaching and guiding you, for whatever reason they might have for doing such a thing.
[][LORE] From a cabal
You are part of a circle of rough peers who have been investigating the occult together. You have learned with them and grown with them; you have laughed with them and feuded with them. But there are steps that must be taken by oneself.
[][LORE] From books
You are wholly self-taught. You found fragments of the truth written down: perhaps in ancient books, perhaps in dreamy theosophy, perhaps in tiny forums on the Internet. For whatever reason, you were willing to piece them together and try them out, and you found that they worked.
[][LORE] From nobody at all
You are a naturally gifted dreamer who has found your way into the dreaming realms entirely accidentally and sought out the Ascent, not knowing what it is, or where you are, or anything of what you must do. (This background will make the Ascent more challenging.)
With the exception of the last option, these are all mechanically identical: your lore background purely influences your character's history and relationships, guiding what sort of character you are and what sort of story is being told. The only change in "From nobody at all" is that your character will not have any of the IC knowledge or the other backgrounds do, meaning that you will OOC have to figure out many elements of the mechanics as you go.
Hi, SV. I am taking a second stab at QMing, now that my life has quieted down; this time, something smaller-scale.
I Walk In Dreams is an adaptation to the questing format of a game written by one of my close friends. While I am going to expand it and add my own takes on things beyond simply directly running it as a quest, the concept is his and, with permission, I will be using his prose in various places (such as the intro to this very post), so credit where it is due. I'm being coy about the details because the original game is a nest of spoilers for the quest, but following the ending of the quest, I will provide a link so you can check out the original, if you've a mind to.
Important notes:
- Voting is by task and not by plan! When a vote is by plan, I will specify. Approval-vote all the options you like!
- More information about the quest format will come once I know whether or not you've decided to go in blind, but I'll tell you that it involves alternating days in the mundane world and nights spent dreaming, that it is diceless, but that it does have mechanics and is not a purely narrative quest. There are multiple ways to win and multiple ways to lose. The primary action of the quest will be at night, where you encounter the places and beings of the dreaming-realm and make decisions about how to interact with them.
- While Cultist Simulator is an easily-recognizable influence, I Walk In Dreams is different in important ways. Fundamentally, this is a mystical and extremely personal journey, with focus on the strange things of the world and the changes you undergo as a result of your encounters. Even with a Connection Aspiration and a cabal background, your Ascent is your own.
- I expect character creation to last for three votes total -- this one and two more -- and then the first day of the quest will begin. Choices are starting very general and will become more specific in the next two.
Sweet dreams.
