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Old 01-22-2019, 05:55 PM   #141
Icelander
 
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Re: So... First Adventure, the PCs Are Dream Projecting to Stop Ragnarök

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
I'm wondering what benefits the druidic drink ought to give?

The ritual to transport them there was cast by Alice, using the energy from the diamonds and the athame as a focuser. But what does 'Nonc' Morel's ritual do?

It was meant to facilitate their immersion in the dream world and allow them to control it, make them more powerful there and protect them from dangers. So... in game terms, what would that mean?

Obviously, they'll all be high as balls. But within the dream reality or whatever apparent reality they visit, what would be cool stat modifications?
I decided that the hallucinogenic mushroom tea gave the PCs Ritual Adept and +5 to Awareness skill, but only within the Dreamlands.

I'm thinking that this does not violate the rule that magic can't make you better at magic, as all it does is allow you to realise that in the dreamscape, everything is metaphorical representations, not plain old reality, and that the rules which make blatant magical effect difficult to impossible in reality do not apply. In other words, there is no spoon.

The Dreamlands are also Normal Mana, instead of the No Mana to Very Low Mana (-10 to -8) that the PCs are used to in the real world. And in Ms. Delvona's Dreamlands, magical effects that rely on frost, ice and draining energy (and possibly Path of Non-Existence) are at +5 and can be attempted even by those who lack Magery (or whose Magery is normally Limited so that they can't cast rituals they don't already know or have in a Grimoire).

A slight drawback with that easy access to certain types of power is that all failures when dealing with such effects are critical failures. Of course, that also holds true with the Nasty Bad Aspected energy contained in the diamonds, but that has stopped precisely zero PCs from making use of them, when they feel the need is dire enough.

For Lucien Lacoste, of course, with his Impulsive, Overconfidence and On the Edge, being momentarily bored was sufficiently dire to dowse up the nearest horribly dangerous spirit, expend a diamond to power a ritual to become a spirit-mauling powerhouse, wrestle the incorporeal Shoggoth into submission, expend a diamond to Bind it and expend the third diamond on a ritual to entrap it in his magical double-headed waraxe, where the shoggoth would give some appropriately awesome bonuses.

Then he mounted his Mi-Go/yeti and rode off again, adjusting the barbaric horns fitted over his cowboy hat.

The verdict of 'Nonc' Morel's player, after effortlessly casting ritual after ritual like a Gandalf who actually does something, was that they ought to stay in the Dreamlands forever, because the real world sucked.

The two other players point out that their theoretically awesome power might not mean much against the true powers of Ms. Delvona's mindscape, which could be as arbitrarily powerful as she could imagine. Or worse, in the case of what had apparently invaded her mind as she botched her ritual and opened herself up to the Lords of the Last Waste.

And while monsters overpowered, critters slain or awesome feats accomplished in the Dreamlands were ultimately of little real significance on Earth, failure while playing around with the energies that Ms. Delvona had been involved with would certainly have repercussions across both worlds. As in, the sort of repercussions prophecies warn against.
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