Sea dreams are made of fish, whom am I to disagree.
The Game: Lucid: Sea of Dreams
The Publisher: The Games Gardener
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one
Games where you romp through dreams are nothing new, going all the way back to Shattered Dreams (to my knowledge, that was the first one). Shattered Dreams suffers from being way too 90s, but there are some more modern examples: WILD, Dreampunk, that game that Kai wrote for Game Chef the one year. Lucid seems a pretty simple game. System wise, you just roll d10s, and I think difficulty is assigned via target number? Except...the book says that a difficulty of 4-5 is "challenging." Um, no it ain't. Your odds are actually pretty good of rolling a 4 or better on a d10 (they're 60%, in fact), and if you're rolling three dice your chances of getting an 8 or better are about 82%, I think, because we ran those numbers for NWoD (I may be a little off, but the point is the odds are good). So why is difficulty 8 listed as "Absurdly Difficult?" As always, of course, I'd have to run it to know for sure.
The book itself is pretty well-written, though. There's not much setting, but there's enough - there are emotion-centered dream thingies that perpetuate and feed on particular feelings, there are places in the dreamscapes that you can go (and a crocodile-headed bartender named Lyle-Lyle). Writing about dreams and getting the tone of "weird and nonsensical but not totally rando" is hard, but I think this game pulls it off OK. And, I think it would a lot easier to pick up and play than the games I linked above (especially Shattered Dreams, holy shit).
So let's make a Dreamer! I'm asked a few questions to start with:
How did you go Lucid? It's like going rabid, I guess. No, seriously, I think my character was an addict. Let's say he was in a bad car accident and fucked up his legs pretty badly, and got hooked on painkillers while in rehab for those injuries. He kicked his addiction and one of the tools he used was lucid dreaming. Let's name him Adrian Soap.
What are your goals? They're specifically asking about motivations for traveling the Sea of Dreams, here. I think in Adrian's case, it's for novelty and creative fulfillment. Adrian-in-Dreams can fly (or how about just run), solve problems that require heroics or profundity. That's...maybe not intoxicating, but definitely diverting.
Who are you in the Waking World? Adrian was an IT professional who kind of fell into his job. He got t-boned by a drunk driver and now "guy who got t-boned" has sort of become who he is, and he rather hates that. At least when people find out he's a recovering addict, that's something he can own.
Now I get to pick an Avatar. An Avatar in the Sea of Dreams can be anything, which is a little daunting. I don't see Adrian's as being too abstract, given how he came to Lucid Dream, so let's say his Avatar is a living statue. His apartment window faced a park, and there was a bronze statue of...somebody, some general or other, he thinks. He used to stare at it while falling asleep and used it as a touchstone for centering himself while dreaming, so it's kind of what he looks like in Dreams unless he changes it. He still has his own features, though, not the statue's.
Attributes! There's 3, I get 9 points, I can't go over 5 in any one of them. I think Resistance and Influence are going to be higher than Intuition. Let's put 1 into Intuition and 4 each into the other ones? Wait, do I get a free one to start? No, doesn't look like it. OK, let's go Intuition 2, Resistance 3, Influence 4.
I get three Items, but they don't have to be literal items, they can be memories or sensations or whatever. In Adrian's case, I think he's got "the smell of rain", "a bottle of pills", and "pain."
I start with 5 Lucidity, and that's it, kids! The sheet has slots for Fears, Hopes, and Beliefs, though, are those meant to be anything in particular? I think it's just meant to be places to flesh out the character, because those terms aren't mentioned in any game context in the text.
OK, sure. We'll say Adrian fears hospitals and medical stuff. He's more afraid of getting addicted again, but he also knows that some pain is too intense for just gritting your teeth and powering through. He hopes to find something as fulfilling in the Waking World as the Sea of Dreams, because asking people "did you turn it off and on again" ain't doing it for him. And he believes that people don't choose to be addicts and folks who say it's a moral failing as judgmental assholes. Also that The Great Escape is the greatest movie ever made.
That'll do it!
