Field Guides #2 - Reflecting Eden
26 December 2023
Contents
Intro
At the edge of sleep: dreams. At the edge of dreams: Eden.
The Reflecting Eden Spa & Resort rides parasitic on the Bastion coastline. From an expensive seaside perch it reaches with tendrils of metal and glass to the endless horizon. For too long (it sighs) for too long our pleasure houses and bath halls have focused solely on the flesh, and in this our delight is limited. Think of that other you, whose skin you wear at night, walking unloved in illusory halls. Your deeper half thanks you, says the receipt, and it's true: Eden caters to both the dreamer and the dreamed.
Can our dreaming selves feel love? Kindness? Comfort? Science says maybe, adverts say yes. Come, walk stone hallways lined with water still as glass. Cocoon yourself in wool, drift away under moonlit moss. Your body's in safe hands and your mind is free to wander. When one eye closes, they say, another opens.
Checking In
Go see Darcy in Reception and she'll hook you up with the basics: a silk robe, a sleeping mask, and your nail. No payment needed: the resort is free, as it should be. After that, the grounds are yours. Soak in the salty air, let perfumes tempt you down endless hallways real or imagined, wander the labyrinth until your eyes shut tight and your dreamself rises to do it all again. How does it all work, you ask? Look to the west: the sun's always setting in Eden.
The Nail
Special: when a player installs a nail, they name one sensation: a sight, sound, smell, etc. This sensation influences the dreamscape while they sleep.
This little ray of sunset is your key to the dreamscape. It drives into the dominant palm and offers an indispensible function:
- While awake, tap twice to sedate yourself and instantly fall asleep.
- While dreaming, tap twice to wake up.
Such a simple device is the soil on which Eden was grown. Most folks are going to have theirs installed by Darcy with a contraption resembling a staple gun. It glows red hot at first, then quickly cools into the steel grey of its namesake.
Each one is scarred with unique burns from their making, so they function as an ID when needed. Guests are forbidden from tampering with, removing, or replacing their nail. Remember, if you've heard rumors of nails recording data on one's dreams: no, you haven't.
The Dreamscape
The dreaming world is reality's vestigial twin. It can't exist without our worldly thoughts, but it yearns to be so much more. In most places it's ephemeral, forgotten on waking, a creation built to die.
Eden isn't most places. Anchored by the sun and shaped by our collective unconscious, the local dreamscape holds a mostly coherent mirror to the waking world. In the resort proper you'll get the usual effects - shifting clocks, sinuous architecture, unhinged otherworlds out the window - but everything'll generally be hotel-shaped. Everything you're holding comes with you, but if you want to shape the world or imagine anything new, you'll have to do that in a private room. The dream isn't yours alone to change.
The real shit, the words too big for reality's page, is gonna be shut tight behind dreamlocked doors. The weirdest you'll get outside of that is some influence bleeding through from nearby sleepers.
How does damage work in the dream?
When in doubt, use CHA.
Per the rules, CHA hitting zero makes you catatonic, and that's good enough for government work. Make CHA your default dreamworld consequence over STR and you'll be doing just fine.
What's influencing the dream here?
Every person sleeping in Eden affects the dreamscape in some way. When enough people with similar thoughts doze together, strange things can happen.
| d6 | Influence | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fear | Fog in the halls. CHA saves always fail. |
| 2 | Teeth | Air feels brittle. Taking CHA damage makes a limb fall off. |
| 3 | Mirrors | Hazy duplicates crowd the world. All attacks are impaired. |
| 4 | Tinnitus | Silence you can hear. No verbal communication allowed. |
| 5 | Yearning | Hush, little hearts. NPCs are too wistful to be of any use. |
| 6 | Public Speaking | Everyone's in their underwear. Armor has no effect. |
Where Do You Sleep?
Anywhere you like! There's a hammock in every garden and a couch on every corner, but local custom offers this: wrap yourself in robe and blanket, walk until a particular view lights your mind ablaze with wonder, and tap your nail to dream on the spot. Eden feeds on this practice - vast windows highlight the sea while skylights let stars seep in from above. Strange sculpture works with dizzying incense to overwhelm the senses. You never have to wander far to find new delights.
One small consequence: longer hallways are often littered with sleeping bodies. The guards do their best to clear a path, but nobody can be everywhere at once.
Eden's Places
A few islands in the sea of infinity.
Dreamlocked Doors
Not all of Eden's features, strictly speaking, exist.
What would you do if you could shape image into being with just a thought? The first thing Eden's pioneers did was live their wildest fantasies; the second was monetize the same. Whether it's an otherworldly installation, an idea that's too big for your budget, or just a private space to shape as your own, Eden is full of rooms that exist solely within the dreamscape, enclosed behind dreamlocked doors.
Most folks can tell you this much:
- Dreamlocked doors are identified by pastel sunlight fighting through the cracks.
- They can only be opened while in the dreamscape.
- Some can be used as shortcuts across the facility, but you'll still need to get your body to the other side. Don't wake up in transit.
What's behind this door?
| d6 | World | Strange Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Abandoned school. Halls full of mannequins. | Mannequins are a virus - you touch one, you become one. Waking up cures it. Their creator lurks nearby. |
| 2 | Flooded, raining city. Endless neon signs fade into the depths. | Water saps CHA (1d6/round) when touching bare skin. |
| 3 | Marble grave in a solemn wheat field. The stars are distant fireflies. | Carving a name on the grave bans that person from Eden's dreamscape, but upsets the fireflies (detachment, Blinding Flash 1d8 CHA blast). |
| 4 | Technicolor prison cell. A thousand locks wrap around a lumpy cocoon. | Wrapping an object in chain and locking it to the cocoon adds it to your real world inventory. |
| 5 | Small island in a vast ocean. Stone coffin lies in the sand. | Any physical change done to someone in the coffin also affects them in the real world. |
| 6 | Ravaged, ruined garden. Cinders burn with melancholy. | Lone angel (Armor 2, flaming sword 1d10 CHA) meditates in the wreckage. It'll aid anyone it deems worthy of worship. |
The Sunset Engine
Special: while the Sunset Engine is active,
- All dreams in range are lucid.
- All dreams in range are shared.
Eden's crown jewel. Holy anchor, sacred moneymaker, the Sunset Engine shines eternal on the distant horizon. Her pastel light exhibits a dual property: it exists in both the physical and dream realms. With a wealthy benefactor, a shitload of Underground tech, and good old Bastiard ingenuity, the boys in the lab have harnessed this otherworldly power.
The good news: It works! The Engine keeps Eden's dreamscape mostly consistent. Sunspots can be shaved off to form nails. More complex extractions allow the guards to walk the oneiric border between real and dream.
The bad: this shit is dangerously unstable. All that influence has to go somewhere, and the sun sucks it all up like a black hole. She's one panic attack away from going nuclear in two worlds at once.
How does Eden protect its fragile child? Band-aids, mostly. The access tunnels are blockaded with alternating dreamlocked/real-locked doors, so only someone who can walk both worlds is getting through. Volunteers lay sleeping at the Engine's base, brains pumped full of happy thoughts to keep the dreamscape stable. It's enough. Barely.
Ennui Horizons
Special: The following effects apply to characters in the Horizon's waters.
- Swimming causes CHA damage. Start at 1d4/round, increase # die as they go further out.
- If a player's CHA hits zero while swimming, they become a layabout and are removed from play.
Ennui Horizons is Eden's most controversial feature.
Paint this on your mental map: a calm inlet, ringed by beachside greenhouses. For color, add the sun out west in all her glory, drawing reds and purples across the radiant canvas.
Now for the spice: bodies. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. All floating, all asleep, all with a look of pure bliss on their soft faces. The air hums electric. Mostly they're concentrated towards the shoreline, so densely packed you can walk on them. Things thin significantly further out. Turns out this stretch of ocean gets bombarded by the sun's energy. Swimming here brings your body to the exact midpoint between real and dream, and it's a one way trip. When you sleep here, you sleep forever.
There were only a few at first. Then came the rumors: Transcendence! Enlightenment! See something beautiful as you fade away! It's all bullshit, but it gets butts in seats, and new swimmers join the party every day. The staff hates these layabouts - they clog up the view and attract annoying next-of-kin. But they're too risky to recover, so here they sit, islands of bodies, smiling serene in the current.
And the chaser: soaking up the sun has imbued each body with some aspect of the dreamscape. Could be useful back on shore... if you can get one out of the water.
What effect is on this layabout?
| d8 | Distance | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Near | Colors are more vivid nearby. |
| 2 | Near | Repeats everything you say with a 30 second delay. |
| 3 | Near | Constant low-level static electricity. |
| 4 | Near | Plays funky music when you rub its belly. |
| 5 | Mid | Sleeping next to it causes you to take on its appearance. |
| 6 | Mid | Floats two inches above nearest surface like a hoverboard. |
| 7 | Far | Endlessly weeps water, seaweed, fish. |
| 8 | Very Far | Hold its hand and speak a person's name to swap places with them, no matter the distance. |
Other Installations
| d6 | Feature |
|---|---|
| 1 | Bedroom choked with palm trees. There's no roof, and the sky's full of stars. |
| 2 | Poolside bar. Liquor sold in the real gets you drunk in the dream, and vice versa. |
| 3 | Someone set up a pillow fort labyrinth. People have been living there for weeks. |
| 4 | Dreamlocked hallway connecting two real spaces, filled with disco lights. Voices jeer if you go through without dancing. |
| 5 | Concert hall packed with snoring bodies in the real and a massive rager in the dream. |
| 6 | Medical wing. Nobody's here. Nobody's here. |
Eden's People
They're real, more or less.
Darcy, Receptionist
Day after day Darcy sits flanked by obnoxious smiling art and stabs nails into palms. Poke, poke, poke, yes sir, yes ma'am. Nobody pays her any mind - they're here for dreams. She's only got one fear, but it's a doozy: she thinks if she stays still and quiet long enough she'll burn her image into the wall and disappear.
She copes by treating dead air like a curse to be broken. Darcy runs her mouth from dusk to dawn, chat chat chatting the hours away. Off the clock she feverishly brews psychedelics to sell under the table, hoping against hope for repeat customers so she never has to hush up. Turns out she's an okay receptionist but a great cook: her products activate the 90% of our brains that are mostly mush, granting special effects while dreaming.
What's Darcy peddling?
| d4 | Appearance | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Candied feather | Flight while dreaming, sluggishness / slurred words in the real. |
| 2 | Mirrored pill | Change appearance at will while dreaming, look pale and sickly in the real. |
| 3 | Splitting amoeba | Create a clone while dreaming, grow an extra finger in the real. |
| 4 | Gummy fist | Armor 3 while dreaming. HP 0 in the real (too overconfident). |
Border Walkers
Armor 1 | STR 12 | DEX 10 | CHA 7 | Liminal Beatstick 1d8 STR/CHA (hurts both at once)
Paid to guard the facility but not to be happy, The Border Walkers live like unlucky hallucinations. Shivering under sunlit halos, their bodies exist simultaneously in both the real and the dream. The experience is, put lightly, fucking awful. Their eyes overflow with ephemera; colors unknown spill from their fingertips. Most don't last a week. These poor freaks shine bright and burn out fast.
Their miseries are endless. Their services are few, and costly:
- They can carry your sleeping body through dreamlocked doors.
- They can bring items between the real and dream worlds.
- They can create a private dreamlocked space and give you control over the inside.
The halos that make it all happen? Very fragile, and hard to replace. One more burden on their anxious backs.
The Owner
More rumor than human, the shadow of Eden's founder looms heavy over the sea. Who funds a free resort? And why? The Owner answers only with silence, leaving gossip to fill the blanks. These days the story garners more interest than the person - it's easier to worship a blank canvas. The most consistent thing you'll hear is this: they never leave the dream. As for the rest, nobody's digging deeper while the wine still flows and the checks still cash.
Whispers and hearsay about the Owner
| d6 | Rumor |
|---|---|
| 1 | The Sunset Engine traps their child in its core. |
| 2 | They have two nails. The second takes them even deeper into the dreamscape. |
| 3 | You can influence them to appear by getting enough folks to think about them while falling asleep. |
| 4 | They record people's dreams using nails and sell the data to the living stars. |
| 5 | They were the first layabout, smiling body buried under the rest. |
| 6 | They were born a dream. Eden is their desperate attempt to walk the real world. |
Local Dreamers
| d6 | Dreamer |
|---|---|
| 1 | Bigby, accountant. Totally lost. Kicks people to wake them up and ask basic directions. |
| 2 | Gabriel, statue. Someone stuck a nail in it as a laugh. Turns out statues can dream. |
| 3 | Shasta, peon. Worships the Worm Moon. Wants a private room to dream it into being. |
| 4 | Belinda, grandmother. Shriveled and warm. Dreams to relive childhood memories. |
| 5 | Freakwick, alien. Escaped dreamlocked containment. Ageless, eternal, asks too many questions. |
| 6 | Bathos and Pathos, twins. Separate in the real, one person in the dream. |
Eden's Problems
Not even heaven is perfect.
Outlines
HP 3 | STR 5 | DEX 5 | CHA 13 | Vertigo Stare 1d8 CHA
Critical Damage: target can't sleep for a week.
- When your sleeping body dies while you're in the dream, this is what's left.
- Exact copies at first, but lose coherence over time like an instrument going out of tune. Can snap at any time for any reason.
- Only capable of saying a single phrase: can you imagine such joy?
Omens: static buzz; rhythmic tapping on useless nails; can you imagine such joy?
Ceptors
Armor 1 | HP 9 | STR 6 | DEX 13 | CHA 10 | Paralytic Needle 1d6 DEX
- Insomniac rebels against the tyrant Owner. Known for their bright red scarves.
- Stalk and paralyze targets while they sleep, then brainwash them to negatively influence the dream.
- Anyone they inject has a red noose form around their neck in the dreamscape.
Omens: trailing footsteps; a flash of red cloth; nail-less palms.
Solar Flares
- Sun-born fragmented thoughts. Appear in parts of reality where the dreamscape is less stable.
- Take the shape of everyday objects, never congruent with the rest of the space.
- Explode when touched, harming both the real and dreamworld nearby.
Omens: unfitting decor; a slight glow, like stars in fog; warm, gentle humming.
Encounters (Reality)
| d6 | Encounter |
|---|---|
| 1 | Three border walkers trying to safely detonate a solar flare. |
| 2 | Single ceptor, needle deep in a sleeper's neck. |
| 3 | Someone brought a layabout inside. It makes people nearby trip when you pull its hair. |
| 4 | Hallway overrun with solar flares. One person sits in the middle of it all, too scared to move. |
| 5 | So many people are asleep here that passage is completely blocked. |
| 6 | Four ceptors, blending in with the crowd, waiting for you to sleep before they pounce. |
Encounters (Dreamscape)
| d6 | Encounter |
|---|---|
| 1 | Lone outline, drawn to the living like a lizard to heat. |
| 2 | Confused gaggle of folks trying to help a man with a red noose sprouting on his neck. |
| 3 | Couple of horrible teens (15 DEX, shitty knife 1d4 CHA) trying to tap people's nails and wake them up. |
| 4 | See-through lilies sprout on every surface. They erupt with spores (1d10 CHA) if anyone is rude nearby. |
| 5 | Twelve outlines acting out a domestic picnic. The static hum is so loud it shakes your teeth. They beckon you to join. |
| 6 | Escaped chimera pair (Armor 2, HP 6, 15 CHA, threefold bite 1d8 * 3) running amok, desperate to return to their dreamlocked nest. |
Hooks
| d6 | Hook |
|---|---|
| 1 | Grieving widow wants a layabout recovered from the far, far end of Ennui Horizons. |
| 2 | Undercover ceptor is paying a high price for stolen border walker halos. |
| 3 | Rival resorts want to shut it all down, and are hiring anyone to infiltrate and destroy the Sunset Engine. |
| 4 | Rumors of dreamlocked treasure in an abandoned wing filled with the oldest, least coherent outlines. |
| 5 | Darcy's cooking again. She wants weird ingredients only found in guarded dreamscape gardens. |
| 6 | Someone found the real source of solar flares: a dreamlocked factory filled with strange mechanical elves. Go shut it down! |
Inspirations and Touchstones
Music: New age, vaporwave, utopian virtual
The Anodyne series by Analgesic Productions
What's behind this door worlds 1 and 2 ripped straight from the Hypnagogia series. World 3 inspired by Lilith Zone's Day/Night Town.
Outlines inspired by The Outer Wilds.
Freakwick inspired by Qfwfq from Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics.
Images generated by Microsoft's AI art tool through bing.