Monday, June 28, 2021

Seven Plot Hooks involving the Khatun-in-Dreams and the Dreamlands


1. A bunch of radical beat poets who worship the Khatun want to rediscover one of the Lost Forms of Abstract Thought. The players' crew is hired to escort the sheltered, rich bohemians across the seediest space stations in this sector in search of a psychoactive drug intense enough to help them rediscover the forbidden poetic technique.

2. After a mixup in the universe's collective unconscious, the crew wakes up in the Dreamlands in a blimp powered by gaseous hope, taking the place of a newly-recruited gang of revolutionary sky-pirates planning to bomb the Khatun's palace and free her dreamers to imagine their own dreams instead.

3. Cultists of the King in Yellow, who orchestrated the attack on the Khatun-in-Symbols out of jealousy all those aeons ago, have started a war of aesthetics that's sweeping the planet's music scene. The King in Yellow cultists favor traditional forms and exquisite craftsmanship, and the Dreamer cultists champion DIY aesthetics, surrealism, and free-association. It's all coming to a head at the upcoming planet-wide Battle of the Bands, and if the crew doesn't intervene, it'll boil over into a riot to make Altamont seem tame. Maybe they could start their own band to win the contest instead...?

4. Every member of the crew has seen the same face in their dreams for three nights straight. A man with bushy eyebrows, rambling an advertisement for some new brand of soda- and reclining on the Khatun's own throne (which is actually the abstract idea of a throne, and also a cloud)! Has the power balance in the Empire of Repose shifted? Has the Khatun accepted a sponsorship deal with this huckster? And will anyone in the crew get a good night's sleep until they figure it out?

5. When the crew stops at one of their hometowns for a quick resupply, they find every single person there has recently fallen into a coma- and that the longer they spend there, the more they start to feel oddly drowsy. Can they break the local Khatunic cult's spell before the entire town wastes away?

6. The macguffin that the crew so deperately needed got disintigrated or something. They're no cultists, but they've got drugs that'll send them straight into a Dreamland haze. They'll have to brave the ever-shifting landscape to find the macguffin and bring it to the waking world. It's lost in the depths of a dream-dungeon, which just so happens to be the GM's favorite fantasy dungeon that they wouldn't get to use in Starsailor otherwise.

7. A scientist's bold new theory- that the Dreamlands are the 'real world' and this world is the one that isn't real- has led to a diplomatic/scientific expedition into the heart of the Khatun's palace to recover the crystal ball she uses to scry her lands... only thing is, she doesn't accept non-worshippers into her courts. Time for a dream-heist!

The Seven Sovereigns and the Khatun-in-Dreams

There are those who are older and more essential to the nature of reality than humankind. We call Them the Seven Sovereigns, and They are embodied in concepts, cognitohazards, and the soft voice in your head that makes very bad decisions seem reasonable. They intrigue against each other endlessly via the bursting of supernovas and the revision of the laws of physics, and They hate the Holy Primes, for binding even Them. 

The Seven Sovereigns will never understand you, in much the same way that you will never understand the microdramas unfolding among the bacteria in your gut. Humankind exists on a scale so inferior to Theirs that we are nearly beneath Their concern, even as we are scattered and tormented by the aftershocks of Their cosmic maneuvering. If you completely abandon common sense and sacrifice all you have gained in recognition of Their superiority, you may gain even the merest iota of one of Their titanic awarenesses, and inevitably you will be crushed like a gnat in the great engines of Their workings. But until then, how glorious Their attention will be....

[GLOG/Buckets of Blood Class] Archdrude

It's been a while since I posted about Buckets of Blood; I've been quietly working on the boring parts of writing the game and some ...