An oneiromantic otherspace. 101001101 isn’t the only game in town.

(Thanks to Fred Hicks for writing the Don’t Rest Your Head role-playing game. If you are here on the UA page, that means you probably like surreal, witty horror, so you should give it a look. Also, for what it’s worth, Greg Stolze has contributed to a fiction anthology set in the DRYH universe.)

101001101 would have you believe that oneiromancy doesn’t exist outside of their cabal. This isn’t exactly true. A handful of self-taught adepts have learned how to balance on the thin line between wakefulness and dreaming. It’s not like it’s such an obscure idea – stay awake long enough, and even someone who doesn’t believe in magic can start hallucinating. 101001101 might be the most visible and well-known sleepwalker cabal out there, but a lesser-known group who call themselves “The Awake” are making a name for themselves. The Awake accumulate minor charges in the same way as 101001101, but unlike their better-known counterparts, the Awake only gain significant charges by spending time in an oneiromantic otherspace called the Mad City.

The Awake

The Awake gain one significant charge for every exhaustion penalty they gain by staying awake for an hour in the Mad City. This is the only way for the Awake to gain significant charges.

Days in the Mad City are twenty-six hours long, with a “thirteen o’clock” in both the AM and PM. This means that in theory they can rack up 26 significant charges in a day. None of them ever does this, because they hate the Mad City, and would rather spend as little time there as possible.

The Awake can enter the Mad City for one minor charge, but only when they have an exhaustion impairment of 50% or more. As always, staying awake with a 50% exhaustion impairment requires a body roll (with no penalty) every hour to avoid crashing. And if the Awake falls asleep in the Mad City, they’re stuck there until they can generate another charge…

Passage between the City Slumbering and the Mad City

The ritual for entering the Mad City isn’t very well defined, even among the Awake, who’ve formulated a way get there reliably. At the very least, it’s clear that you can’t get there unless you’re really, really exhausted (50% impairment). Beyond that, nobody knows. The Awake don’t need to use the ritual, they can just use the formula spell “Return to the Mad City” for one minor charge, but they still need to have the exhaustion penalty of 50%.

Without using oneiromancy, nobody knows how to get out at all. The Awake have another formula spell for getting out, which they call “Visit the City Slumbering.” This spell only requires one minor charge, but it cannot be cast during the hour between thirteen o’clock and one. (The Awake believe that our universe doesn’t exist during this hour.)

The City itself

The Mad City is quite unpredictable. One person might find themselves riding a gondola down a canal full of hot coffee, another might be trapped inside a besieged fortress made of crashed aircraft. Generally, however, the city tends towards surreal urban environments.

The city is populated mostly by ordinary-looking people, but they don’t have anything helpful to say, and if you try to touch them, you will discover that they have no physical substance. Finding real food and water is rarely a problem – the bartender might be a hallucination, but the drink he serves you is real enough. Weird nightmares stalk the city too: large attack dogs with oversized sewing needles for heads, or deranged clowns armed with sharp scissors, or whatever. Fortunately, most of these creatures are insubstantial too.

Each time a person falls asleep in the Mad City, they suffer from awful stress-check inducing nightmares. Additionally, everyone is continuously affected by the significant oneiromantic spell “Dream Made Flesh,” which causes a sleeping person’s nightmares to be projected into the minds of anybody nearby, as a vivid hallucination. Finally, if you have 5 fully failed madness gauges, then whenever you’re awake, your nightmares become real, physical things, which only disappear again when you sleep.

If you die in the Mad City, you’re sleeping the Big Sleep. Your soul is trapped here, and can’t pass beyond the veil or become a demon. You just keep on dreaming, and sharing your nightmares with everybody who passes by.

But if you snap in just the right way, there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll figure out the variety of Oneiromancy that’s practiced by the Awake. Lucky you.