Dreamchaser: Sister Swan

Yesterday we played Dreamchaser (as I mentioned in the chargen post I did last week). Here's our Dream!

Three players, plus me as Guide. The players came up with some pretty cool ideas for a Dream, but the one we landed on was "turn my sister back into a swan." The players came up with their characters, and it pretty quickly became clear that they were a coven of witches and that the swan-woman, Evelyn, was one of them.

• Ruth, the wise old woman. Ruth is the oldest witch in the coven and is an expert on Augury. Her Milestone is "assume my true form." She's Evelyn's sister.
• Catherine, the witch-in-training is one of the younger members and is bookish and earnest. Her Milestone is "find the swan-sister's egg."
• Arden, the loyal friend is also a younger witch, and was trained by Evelyn. She goes with her gut first and last. Her Milestone is "find the right spell."

We decided the order of Milestones made most sense going in the reverse order that I listed them above, so we started with "find the right spell." The witches are preparing to cast, but conditions aren't right - Ruth says no-go, so everything stops. They're on the shores of Glass Lake, but clouds are rolling in. Catherine goes inside to check the library, but the book she needs is missing. She asks Hortense, the librarian, but Hortense's eyes are shining a weird yellow and she's standing there slack-jawed. Catherine rings the alarm bell.

Outside, Ruth casts runes and realizes that something is interfering with the spell. One of her runes drops into the lake and she asks Arden to dive down and get it. Arden does, and is underwater when the weird cloud-blast hits, striking all of the other witches slack-jawed and yellow-eyed too. Arden resurfaces, unharmed, and the two of them hearing the bell ringing.

The race into the library and find Catherine there. She recognizes this spell as inherently non-harmful, but tends to be a precursor to an attack. The three of them cast a protective circle, and none too soon, as four beings appear from the door in a cloud of black smoke. They have no visible faces, wear black robes, and speak in a strange backwards tongue. One of them says something to Hortense, and she leads him(?) back into the forbidden section. 

Arden throws a spell at the other three, but this breaks the circle, and the fight is joined. The witches employ their magic and other skills to defeat the strange beings, and Arden manages to retrieve the book that they were going for before Catherine casts a summoning spell (since these things work backwards, you summon to banish). They now have the spell in question, and they can cast to find out how to transform Evelyn back into a swan. They realize they need her egg, which leads into the next Milestone. 

The egg, Ruth reveals, isn't an egg that Evelyn laid but the shards of the egg from which she hatched. They get in Ruth's canoe and travel to the Swamplands, where the swan-folk live. They follow the river into a close tunnel of mangrove trees, where Ruth sees eyes from the dark and tries to speak with the creatures therein. She learns that these creatures intend to eat them, and the fight is again joined. 

The creatures - ape-like things called berbalangs - drop down to bite at them. Arden tries to cast a blinding spell, but it goes horrible awry and winds up blinding all three of them (Arden winds up with the Blind Tag, so hers is sticking around). Ruth is able to cast a spell causing a high-pitched noise that upsets the berbalangs, and Catherine amplifies it to drive them away. They revive Arden but are unable to restore her sight, and they head out of the forest into a lake with a single island. 

The island sports one immense tree, and swan nests all around, some of which are very old. An immense catfish surfaces behind them, and Catherine asks him for help. He tells them that since Evelyn is still alive, some fragment of her shell must remain here. He says that he doesn't know which nest is Evelyn's (she's not a fish, after all), but does warn them that if they touch any shell that isn't hers, they will kill the swan to which it belongs.

They start looking - carefully! - around the nests. Ruth uses her magic to narrow it down, and Arden tries to help Evelyn remember (her memory of this place is spotty at best), but she trips and falls, crushing an eggshell. From out in the swamp, they hear the song of a dying swan. Arden weeps in grief, defeated (again), and the leaves on the tree above them turn into a thousand raptors, which flap about and divebomb them. 

Ruth squawks and tries to drive off the birds, but all that happens is that she attracts something bigger and reveals herself to be a transformed bird like her sister. The bigger thing - which Evelyn calls the Hunter - is a huge raptor that flies toward them. Just in the nick of time, they find Evelyn's nest, and she picks up her shell. The raptors return to the tree and the Hunter flies off, but they still need to find out how to break the spell that prevents Evelyn from becoming a swan. (And complete the final Milestone!)

The catfish agrees to take them to where the oldest bird in the swamp is, since maybe that bird remembers Evelyn and Ruth - they left the Swamplands 600 years ago. They find the birds of the swamp clustered around the body of a swan, the one that Arden inadvertently killed. A fishing bird takes them to task, but Ruth pleads their case, and the particulars of the case are revealed. Evelyn's mother transformed her into a human to leave the Swamplands in order to settle a debt. Ruth was transformed into a human to accompany her, and Ruth reveals that she has always been able to change back and forth between her human form and that of a great blue heron. Evelyn, though, says that she has always preferred to be what she is and not complicate things, and now she wants to fly again and return to the Swamplands. She was sent out to the human world to come back with wisdom. Has she?

Catherine argues that she has, since she can teach magic and witchcraft. But there's a hitch; Evelyn and Ruth share a curse, and Evelyn cannot return unless Ruth does. Ruth hates to give up her position in the coven, but she finally agrees, taking her true form, whereupon Evelyn also takes hers, and the two sisters fly back to the borders to the human world with Catherine and Arden.

Character Creation: Dreamchaser

Trying desperately to stay ahead of my "one character a week" schedule and doing OK so far.

I mean, "desperately" is perhaps an exaggeration, but whatevs. On we go!

The Game: Dreamchaser: A Game of Destiny
The Publisher: Imagining Games
Degree of Familiarity: None apart from reading it. The author has explained it to me a bunch of times, and I can never figure out how to pitch it. That's not a condemnation; the game is beautiful and well-reviewed, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Books Required: Just the one.

So, in essence, Dreamchaser is a system-light, generic RPG in which you decide what you want to do, what the steps are to doing so, and then tell the story. So its schtick, I guess, is the focus on the "dream", but it's not like the game actually takes place within a dream or anything (unless you want it to). It's so wide-open that I find myself needing something to grab onto while I'm reading it, and I would really have liked an example of play (there are a bunch on the site, but nothing text-based that goes start to finish, not that I can see).

But I'm pretty smart, so I'm sure I can figure it out. The first part of the game is "Dream Mapping," in which we (the hypothetical "we" of the group) figure out a dream to follow and then the characters who are taking part in that dream.

The book gives us a whole bunch of example dreams:

Figuring out the dream says a lot about the setting, though a lot of it would be implicit. I also think it's interesting that a lot of the dreams up there seem pretty individual - like, what would a game look like in which the collective dream is "get the girl?" Likewise, "release the hounds" is typically something one says when ones is driving intruders away, but if it's the goal of a whole game, man, what the hell are these hounds? (That sounds pretty dope, actually.)

I think for my dream, I'm gonna pick "Ask the moon for a favor." That sounds like a really lovely idea.

So now that I have a dream, I get to imagine my Role. I'm meant to explain this Role in a couple of words (basically a High Concept Aspect, if we were playing Fate). I think I want to play a dying guide, someone who's on the journey to ask the moon for a favor but doesn't expect that it'll end well for him.

And as I'm doing this and listening to my iTunes on shuffle, this song came up:

There's only one verse:

Voy a navegar
Al puerto de alma
Cruzando el mar
Hasta qua llegar

("I going to sail to the port of the soul, crossing the sea until I arrive," if my Spanish is right.)

If that ain't goddamn perfect.

Next step is to make up Milestones. These are things that have to happen in the story - stemming from my character or happening to my character - before we can achieve our dream. The players involved pick a number of Milestones based on how long we want the game to be; for a one-shot, we'd pick one each. Let's assume we were playing a short campaign (3-6 sessions), so I'll pick two.

I want my character to be able to lead the party through danger, I think. I picture my character as an Aragorn kind of person; pretty damn capable on his own merits, but vulnerable, especially if he's looking after others. I can get more specific with Milestones, though, if I want, but I think my phrasing here ("lead the party through danger") is fine. I think I'll add the word "safely", actually.

For my second Milestone, I'll say "accept my fate and die." It sounds morbid, but it doesn't have to be. As Amigo the Devil tells us, there's only one kind of people in this world - people who die.

Now I describe my guide with 3 tags. These are just very brief descriptors or attributes that help flesh him out.

Well, I know I want him to be careworn (I like it better than "weathered" for some reason). I see him as having really sharp senses, so I'll take perceptive. And finally I'll take lorekeeper - he knows the secrets of the world, that's how he can guide you to the moon.

Next I get Strategies. These are effectively skills, but I can define them as I like. I get three, and I can choose their rating (4-7). Hmm. Do they all have to be a different rating? (This is why examples are good!) Hang on (there's an AP on Youtube). Ok, got it. I can have multiple Strategies at a given level, but only two because there are only two slots at each level.

I note, too, that Strategies are supposed to be exactly that - how my character approaches problems. I think my guide prefers to go around problems, missing them entirely, so I'm going to take Stealth as one, and I'll put it at The Best. I think that my guide can fight or use magic or something - ooh, actually, I think banishing magic. I'll put that at Expert. And then finally I think that my guide can talk his way out of problems, so I'll take Riddling as a Strategy, also at Expert.

Next up, I assign 10 points among Soul Skills. There's only two, Imagine and Reason. I'd use Reason when a Strategy directly applies to a situation, and Imagine when it might, but it's a fuckin' stretch. I like that. I see my guide as a pretty direct sort of person, so I'll go 4 in Imagine and 6 in Reason.

Now I get 12 points to split between my three types of Health (Body, Mind, Spirit). Hmm. I think I'll put 2 into Body (he's an old man, and frail), and then 5 and 5 in the others.

Next, three Relationships. Typically I'd use a PC as one of them, but I ain't got none, so I'll just have to make up three NPCs (or I could use two slots and make an Organization, but eh). I'll take Marlon, the Skull, as a Casual Relationship. I can get Spirit Gossip from him. I'll take Death as a Contact; I can get Perspective from him (I want the Pratchett version of Death, here). I can take things or places as Relationships, too, going by the examples, so I'll take the Map of Home as a True Love, and tag it with memories of my wife (ooh, tragic). We made the map together; it was the first one.

And then three iconic items (see, I could have put the Map here, I guess, but it's not clear what the difference is). I want a Patchwork Coat, repaired and restitched over a lot of years. I'll take a Black Knife ("it's not a dagger," he'll say if asked, "it's a knife. Knives are tools. Daggers are weapons."). And I'll take a Glove of Silver (used as part of banishing magic, I think).

Finally, I have to come up with a Name. My dying guide's name is Pallor (it's not his real name, but he doesn't give that out - too many bad memories).

And that'll do it! Just goes to show that left to my own devices I drift toward tragedy and bittersweet.