James Maliszewski
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The Current State of Dream-Quest (Part II)
🕑 Added 2025-12-11 05:00:07 +0000 UTC
In my last post, I talked about the origins of the Dream-Quest project and how my desire to honor not just the memory of H. P. Lovecraft, but more specifically the peculiar power of his Dreamlands tales, has pulled me in several directions. Those directions, as I’ve discovered, aren’t always compatible with one another. Today, I want to be more concrete by laying out the three distinct versions — “visions” is probably the better word — of Dream-Quest that have been competing for my attention. Doing so should clarify where the project currently stands, why it has developed the way it has, and what I’m actually trying to achieve as it begins to take more definite shape.
The “Add-On” Version
Dream-Quest began life as a single character class, the Dreamer, that I posted to Grognardia during The Shadow over August. It was meant to be a one-off, a small act of creative indulgence that made for a fun post and nothing more. Instead, I found myself unexpectedly delighted with the result. That enthusiasm quickly spilled over into the creation of two more classes, the Moon Prowler and the Dream-Ship Captain.
To my surprise (and no small gratification), these classes were well received. They sparked discussion not only on Grognardia but on my Substack, in emails, and even through messages on the Grognardia Discord server. That feedback mattered, because it confirmed that I wasn’t the only one who felt there was something compelling in trying to distill the Dreamlands into gameable form.
From the start, I designed these classes for Old School Essentials and I kept them intentionally “generic.” By that I mean that, while they were inspired by Lovecraft, they weren’t shackled to his fiction. In theory, a referee could drop them into almost any OSE campaign without invoking the Dreamlands at all. They were no more intrusive than any other home-brewed class. At the time, this felt like a strength. The broader and more neutral the material, the easier it would be to adopt.
Ironically, that very success planted the seed that pushed the project in a very different direction.
The “Self-Contained” Version
Once I saw how much fun I was having — and how interested others seemed to be — I started wondering why I was thinking so small. Why stop at a trio of character classes? Lovecraft’s Dreamlands were brimming with material that begged to be translated, like strange races, uncanny monsters, alien magic, singular artifacts, and landscapes unlike anything in orthodox fantasy.
It was at this point that it dawned on me that what I was really circling around might not be an “add-on” at all, but something much larger — a self-contained setting. Rather than sprinkling Dreamlands flavor into an existing fantasy world, why not invite players to step fully into that otherworld? In this version, the characters would be natives of the Dreamlands themselves with the occasional dreamer from the Waking World as a mysterious outsider.
This approach appealed to me because it promised a kind of fantasy that felt genuinely fresh. It pushed away from the usual “Conan-meets-The Lord of the Rings” stew that dominates so much fantasy role-playing, offering instead a world governed by dream-logic, half-remembered myth, and the strange emotional texture of Lovecraft’s earliest and most personal tales. If the “add-on” version gestured at the Dreamlands, the “self-contained” version tried to live there.
And yet, even that wasn’t quite strange enough.
The “Oneiric” Version
The more I immersed myself in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories, the more I became convinced that they weren’t just exotic fantasy travelogs. They were meditations on dreaming itself, as well as on imagination, creativity, memory, and the inner life. Reducing them to just another fantasy campaign setting, however faithful, began to feel like a kind of betrayal of what made them special in the first place.
That realization gave rise to the third and most ambitious vision of Dream-Quest, the “oneiric” version. In this approach, all of the player characters are people from the Waking World who dream together. Their adventures don’t merely take place in the Dreamlands; they create the Dreamlands. The setting is not a fixed geography to be explored, but a shared, shifting mental landscape shaped by memory, desire, fear, and inspiration.
This was, without question, the version that excited me the most. It felt like it was reaching for something I hadn’t quite seen in other role-playing games, including those inspired by Lovecraft, namely, a form of play that treated dreaming not as a backdrop, but as the engine of the game itself.
It was also, predictably, the version that proved the hardest to wrap my head around.
High-concept ideas are intoxicating. I have pages of them for the oneiric Dream-Quest and some of them genuinely thrill me. The problem is that thrilling ideas are not the same thing as playable rules or procedures. The deeper I went, the more I realized just how much careful thought, testing, revision, and outright failure would be required to make this version work in play. I don’t think the ambition was wrong, but I did, without question, underestimate the sheer labor involved in making something this strange usable and, more importantly, fun.
Where I Am
So that’s where things currently stand. There are three versions of Dream-Quest pulling at me in different ways. The “add-on” version is practical, accessible, and immediately useful. The “self-contained” version is richer, stranger, and more faithful to Lovecraft’s Dreamlands as a setting. The “oneiric” version is the most daring, but also the most treacherous, demanding more design work than I initially imagined.
In my next post, I’m going to talk about where I am right now, specifically which of these visions I’m actually leaning toward, what I’ve learned from wrestling with all three, and what I think the real way forward for Dream-Quest might be.
