Campaign Pitch: Stranger Dreams

Here is the fourth potential game for 2017. Stranger Dreams ties up some loose ends, satisfies my desire for psychic action, and attacks Hunter: the Vigil from a different direction.

Stranger Dreams

Elevator Pitch: Stranger Things meets the Nightmare on Elm Street's Dream Warriors as small town inhabitants discover that their weak psychic powers make them the only ones who can stop the nightmares devouring their community.

Life just got turned upside down.

It started with the dreams. Nightmares of monsters haunting your town. Spiders infesting the flesh of your friends. A horrible grinding emerging from government facility in the nearby woods.

Then came the powers. One of you could shift things with their mind. Another sees auras...and worse. But the guy who glimpseS the future has it the worst.

Something terrible has come to your community and you are the only ones who realize it. Your powers don’t make you superheroes. But maybe these gifts are enough to stop it from devouring everyone and everything you love

Theme: The burden of power. The characters have been given gifts but also a responsibility. They can stop the horrors haunting their town but only at risk to themselves and they have no one they can turn to except each other.

Mood: Night Terrors. Mere mortals would be helpless, paralyzed, against these monsters. The powers you have been cursed with allow you to act. But is it the nervous decisive action that can save this town or the slow futile motion of being trapped in a dream?

System: Chronicles of Darkness with material from Second Sight and Hunter the Vigil. Some adjustments will be made to the Supernatural merits to fit my vision of the costs and power level of psychic abilities.

Practically I want to change the in-game cost from Willpower to levels of automatic Bashing damage. Characters can choose to upgrade the damage (to Lethal or Aggravated) in exchange for creating much more powerful effects.

Character Creation: Normal starting characters but each character will get 3 extra Merit dots to be spent on supernatural abilities as part of their “psychic template”.

While Stranger Things is clearly a source of inspiration, this game owes more to the original source material, especially the stories by Stephen King.

This game would also allow me to conclude the storyline of the Mother of Nightmares, a variant Azlu whose tale runs from my first Mage: the Awakening game to my Hunter: the Vigil game Corrupted Transmission to a convention one shot Plague of Spiders.