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....

To pledge yourself to a Sovereign, you must sacrifice a level, losing all relevant experience and abilities. You can always enact another ritual to gain more of Their attention, but you'll need to burn another level, which must be higher than the previous sacrifice. Once the pledge is made, it can never be revoked. Attempting to pledge yourself to more than one Sovereign is a great way to simultaneously shatter your mind into a million tiny pieces and melt into a puddle of radioactive goo.

You gain one new way to channel Them per level you sacrifice. Roll 1d10 on the Sovereign's table each time; if you roll a power you already have, you can choose either the one above or below it on the table.
 
Humankind is too weak to channel even the merest sliver of a Sovereign's might without being permanently changed. Whenever you roll doubles on a d100 roll after making your pledge, gain a point of Weird (the measure of how intensely someone's connection to mundane reality has been warped, which is slowly accumulated by all starsailors). Should you manage to roll triples, gain 1d5. You no longer suffer the ill effects of Weird, as one untouched by a Sovereign would, but new effects will begin to manifest.
There are the Fisher-King, the Woman on the Screen, and all the rest, of course, but we haven't the time to discuss them all right now. Let's start with the Khatun-in-Dreams.

She was the Khatun-in-Symbols once, and both the faintest and the most powerful of them all. Whenever one thing gestured to another, when concepts were conflated- that is when she was present, and where her power was consolidated. But when she began to encroach on the others' domains- to embody what was rightfully theirs- they grew to hate her, and in a secretly-planned ambush, they attacked the basic foundations of thought and metaphor so thoroughly that the Khatun was lobotomized.

(Ever read a poem that employed the literary device known as illinor? How about pallixum, valishness, memetosomatic irony? No, you haven't, because you will never be able to conceptualize them. These forms of symbolic thought were destroyed by the treachery of the Sovereigns. Do not forgive them.)

Now, she has domain only in dreams. She stakes her Empire of Repose in the Dreamlands, the collective unconsciousness of every particle in the universe, and fancies herself a kind ruler. In truth, she is still an optimist. Falling into dreams may not have been her own choice, but in the Dreamlands, she has reasoned, one can be truly free of the bounds of reality. She loves her dreamers, and she loves freeing them of the shackles of toil, hardship, pain, conscious thought, and life.

To pledge yourself to her, just fall asleep thinking about the Empire of Repose. Simple as that. If you really mean it, you'll dream of her palace of sky-blue tiles and iron spires, and this will be the first of your visits to the Dreamlands. It would, of course, be dreadfully impolite to mention that every subject in her domain shares her torment- their skulls are cracked, and their brains drip from the backs of their heads. And so shall it happen to you.

1d10 Blessings of the Khatun-in-Dreams

1. As an action, force anyone to make an Insight roll or fall asleep for 1d10 minutes.

2. As an action, infect somebody's mind with nightmares; if you meet them again after they have slept, they will fail any Insight saves.

3. As an action, dissipate somebody's nightmares; they gain 1 Weird, and all of their Insight rolls are made with advantage until they next sleep.

4. During a full night's sleep, your dreams are sweet and peaceful, and you recover 1 Hit.

5. During a full night's sleep, retrieve an item from your dreams to be found at your bedside in the waking world; it must be something you've seen before, and cannot be larger than your sleeping quarters or cost more than your current amount of spendable Scratch. If it is a unique item, the one you get is a perfect copy.

6. During a full night's sleep, you can explore the dreamworld of anyone you've every met. You can learn one everyday fact about them, one of their major secrets (but it will be revealed only in symbols and dream-logic), or leave a subconscious suggestion behind to subtly influence them in their waking life.

7. During a full night's sleep, you may ask one question and have it answered in the form of an allegorical dream.

8. During a full night's sleep, pass an Insight roll to dream of acquiring a new untrained skill, which you retain in the waking world.

9. After a full night's sleep, invoke dream logic in the waking world to critically succeed on any one roll; you must get another full night's sleep so do so again.

10. Before falling asleep, you may pre-determine a set of simpe menial tasks and carry them out while sleepwalking, still getting the benefits of your rest.

You can't use multiple powers during one night's sleep.

Weird Effects

2. You can always fall asleep instantly, whenever you want, under any conditions. You always dream when you sleep.

3. You can choose to visit the Dreamlands as filtered by your own subconscious while you sleep, and although you will only be allowed in the very outermost circles of Her glorious court, you can seek out other dreamers visiting the Empire of Repose and talk to them there.

5. You are always a bit drowsy. You yawn all the time, and fail Agility saves in situations where you have been taken by surprise. 

7. Your drowsiness, the faraway look in your eyes, and your likely propensity for describing your dream-visions are advanced enough to mark you as the Khatun's own, to anyone who can recognize the signs.

11. You don't have a choice anymore. You cannot dream of anything but the Empire of Repose. If there's someone there you've been trying to avoid, you're going to need to be very clever about it, now.

13. The next time you fall asleep, you will never wake up again. Sleepwalking is still possible. When your body in this world dies, your consciousness will exist forever in dreams, lost to the Khatun and her court.

Of course, this is just Locheil's Hubris system with a coat of eldritch paint. The Seven Sovereigns will appear- if you are unlucky or unwise- in Starsailor, my upcoming game that uses an unholy fusion of Mothership and GLOG mechanics to model New Weird retrofuture 60's counterculture acid-fantasy Golden Age of Sail spacefaring adventures. All art in this post is by Moebius.