James Maliszewski
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Dream-Quest: The Mutable Dreamer?
🕑 Added 2025-10-14 04:00:07 +0000 UTC
Lately, I’ve been pondering an intriguing — and probably difficult to implement — idea for Dream-Quest. I’m not yet sure if it’s good or even workable, but it’s been rattling around in my head long enough that I feel compelled to explore it a little.
The idea is this: what if each player character — the Dreamer — doesn’t have a fixed class when visiting the Dreamlands? What if, instead, the Dreamer’s form and abilities shift with each journey? One night he might dream himself as a knight or ship captain, another as a poet-seer, shadow, or priest of the Great Ones. The Dreamer remains the same individual across these journeys — the same consciousness — but the Dreamlands, being mutable and treacherously symbolic, grant him new masks and tools each time he passes beyond the Wall of Sleep.
Experience points, in this conception, belong not to any particular class but to the Dreamer as a whole. What the Dreamer learns or achieves in one dream would carry forward in some fashion, but how that experience manifests on a given visit would depend on what role he assumes. A Dreamer who repeatedly takes the same form might grow increasingly adept in it, while one who embraces the fluidity of the Dreamlands might forever change, gaining breadth but never depth.
I don’t yet know if this is a sound foundation for play. It could easily become confusing or make progress feel hazy and insubstantial. Yet that very quality also feels profoundly dreamlike. As I've discussed before, identity in dreams is slippery, mutable, and often symbolic. You are yourself, but also someone else; you act with the memories of both. A system that captures even a fraction of that strange, shifting continuity would be doing something few roleplaying games ever attempt.
There’s also an appealing thematic tension here — between stability and transformation. The Dreamer could cling to a single identity as an anchor in the shifting Dreamlands or surrender to the current and let the Dream shape him anew each time. Either path says something about how one engages with the Dream: mastery through repetition or wisdom through change.
On a broader level, this might serve as a metaphor for the way dreamers grow — spiritually, psychologically, or even cosmically — through their journeys. To visit the Dreamlands again and again is to become many people and perhaps, in time, to reconcile them all into a greater self. Mechanically, this could introduce an air of unpredictability to the game, underscoring the idea that the Dreamlands are not a realm of fixed laws but of mutable meaning, where even one’s own shape is subject to the tides of imagination.
Whether this notion would ever work in play is an open question. It may remain only an evocative idea rather than a practical mechanic. Still, I keep returning to the image of the Dreamer who wears many selves, whose true progress belongs not to any one form but to the soul that dreams them all.
Comments
Wes
Love the idea. As you described it, I was thinking more along the lines of the character inhabits an unknown body/class in the dream state. So part of the intrigue would be figuring out those strengths/weaknesses/capabilities, and then how to accomplish their goals in that new form. And the role playing challenges of how the character would react/adapt to those new parameters. I just finished reading The Way of Kings and was thinking of Dalinar's 'storm dreams', where he had no idea who he was inhabiting, but had to interact with someone and the environment while trying to figure that out.
Sasha Bilton
I love this idea and I think there are some mechanics to support it from creating multiple characters and inhabiting them randomly (and now I have an idea for a Great Race Of Youth RPG 😃) to just tracking XP and using standard template stat characters to inhabit. You could make this an optional rule, as I think having a Dreamer class is also cool.
