plotting
I've been running a modern fantasy campaign about people who share each other's dreams for roughly the past year and a half. I'm coming up on a termination date, and I've been puzzling over what kind of storyline would be a good one to end on.
Over the past few months, one of the player characters, a boy in middle school, has been trying to share his experience with his best friend, Emily. This began with his telling her about lucid dreaming, and then he went on to find his way into one of her dreams. She was a bit surprised to realize that he was dreaming of himself as a girl, but that's been a motif for this character since the start.
Subsequently he went back, only to find that her house, in her dream, was shrouded in dense fog. This alarmed him, and he called on his fellow dreamers and went in. Finding the fog covering everything, he dreamed up weapons from Ghostbusters and attacked it, setting fire to parts of the house. Emily was asleep in her room, so the party carried her outside and "awakened" her in the dream, which led to her using her newly learned lucid dreaming skill to wake up for real. They put the fog into a containment device and took it into the dreamed up basement of the character's house, where they put it in a larger, more sophisticated containment device.
Since then, he's been feeling a steady impulse to watch Emily and protect her. But at the same time, he's gone to see her in the waking world, but she hasn't wanted to see him. So he's trying to leave her alone and respect her wishes. But he's figured out that the basement of his family's house is symbolically part of him (but he hasn't absorbed the idea that Emily's house is symbolically Emily!). So the fog is imprisoned inside of him and thus can speak to him.
A thing I worked out during the last game is that the fog is actually Emily's capacity to dream nonlucidly, which has now been taken away from her, so that all her dreams are luicid. I've set things up for her to seek psychiatric care to help her with this problem.
Since then, it's struck me, first, that the lucid dreaming is a logical self-protective state; second, that Emily has reason to feel a need for protection, because her friend has come into her dreams without asking her and has set fire to her with high-tech weapons-an invasion and an attack. And just today, it hit me that in fact the whole scenario is a close analog of anxieties about invasion of women's spaces and activities by transgender people (which makes the character's sexual ambivalence all the more relevant). So in a sense this is turning into a horror or dark fantasy campaign, but one where the PCs, or at least one of them, are the threats. I didn't plan any of this out in advance, but I think that's the storyline that needs to be worked out.
Over the past few months, one of the player characters, a boy in middle school, has been trying to share his experience with his best friend, Emily. This began with his telling her about lucid dreaming, and then he went on to find his way into one of her dreams. She was a bit surprised to realize that he was dreaming of himself as a girl, but that's been a motif for this character since the start.
Subsequently he went back, only to find that her house, in her dream, was shrouded in dense fog. This alarmed him, and he called on his fellow dreamers and went in. Finding the fog covering everything, he dreamed up weapons from Ghostbusters and attacked it, setting fire to parts of the house. Emily was asleep in her room, so the party carried her outside and "awakened" her in the dream, which led to her using her newly learned lucid dreaming skill to wake up for real. They put the fog into a containment device and took it into the dreamed up basement of the character's house, where they put it in a larger, more sophisticated containment device.
Since then, he's been feeling a steady impulse to watch Emily and protect her. But at the same time, he's gone to see her in the waking world, but she hasn't wanted to see him. So he's trying to leave her alone and respect her wishes. But he's figured out that the basement of his family's house is symbolically part of him (but he hasn't absorbed the idea that Emily's house is symbolically Emily!). So the fog is imprisoned inside of him and thus can speak to him.
A thing I worked out during the last game is that the fog is actually Emily's capacity to dream nonlucidly, which has now been taken away from her, so that all her dreams are luicid. I've set things up for her to seek psychiatric care to help her with this problem.
Since then, it's struck me, first, that the lucid dreaming is a logical self-protective state; second, that Emily has reason to feel a need for protection, because her friend has come into her dreams without asking her and has set fire to her with high-tech weapons-an invasion and an attack. And just today, it hit me that in fact the whole scenario is a close analog of anxieties about invasion of women's spaces and activities by transgender people (which makes the character's sexual ambivalence all the more relevant). So in a sense this is turning into a horror or dark fantasy campaign, but one where the PCs, or at least one of them, are the threats. I didn't plan any of this out in advance, but I think that's the storyline that needs to be worked out.