⭗ REDIRECTIONS XXV⭗

 

⭗ TALES FROM THE UTTER WEST #5 ⭗

⭗ THE MARK OF THE DREAMER ⭗

“You’re quite adept at fantiscience and the powers of the Long Ago builders,” Kvelak said, eyeing the Blue Oracle carefully. “Your skin, the color– it’s a mark, isn’t it? But not one I’ve seen before. It’s not like the mark of the corruption that I’ve seen on some in these lands. It’s not the Blue God’s sign. It’s something different. It’s something older.”

“It is the Mark of the Dreamer,” the Blue Oracle responded, looking up to meet Kvelak’s eyes. “It is the Ka overtaking the Ba and Ha. It is the blending into void, into the space between suns and the space between stars where all dreams exist as one, bleeding through to shape all that we perceive.”

"All Praise to the Blue God," Coda-2 said, ignoring the wary glare Kvelak leveled at her and at her other two bodies.

"Let us speak more of your Mark, Oracle," Lleva urged, ever curious.

⭗ THE BLUE MARK OF DREAMS ⭗

As the corruption marks the dreamer, the divisions between time, space, dimension and dreams start to fade and disappear. Where others see sharply defined borders, the dreamer sees connections and wider contexts instead. It takes more and more balance to keep from appearing insane or to keep from babbling incoherently about all of the invisible (yet very real) things the dreamer sees. Each spell cast widens the dreamer’s perception just a sliver more, and it quickly becomes apparent that eventually the dreamer will see everything everywhere all at once. Whether the dreamer can learn to keep their mouth shut about it is what always remains to be seen.

In addition to this blurring which happens in the mind, the defined lines of the body start to blur too, especially when the tissues are suffused with magic during the casting of a spell. The Ha changes to become a mirror of the Ka and the Ba is subsumed in a sea of dreams and possibilities. All those marked with The Blue Mark of Dreams first begin to exhibit subtle physical changes. Sometimes this manifests in a changing of the color of the skin to blue, translucent pale or void. Sometimes it manifests in other changes, a change to a different sex or to a sexless being altogether. It never happens all at once, but it does come in stages and waves, and sometimes the dreamer can drift back and forth between their old Ha and the Ha they are transitioning into as they fall deeper and deeper into the dreams. Some dreamers become completely unrecognizable after a while, their Ha permanently changed. In this state, it is not that they cannot dream themselves back to their old Ha, it is that they simply choose not to. They have found their own balance, as strange as that balance may look to those not bearing the Blue Mark of Dreams.

Some of the spells that come to those who do (or will come to) bear the mark are as follows:

⭗ READ DREAMS ⭗

See Through The Unseen

Power: 1 - Range: Touch - Target: An individual - Duration: 1hr

The gentle touch of a hand upon the forehead brings visions of the world within the sleeper’s mind. The theatrical play of dreams within a sleeper is laid bare before the Marked Dreamer.

Overcharge: A dream can be summoned and recalled from a sleeper’s mind even after that sleeper has woken. Be warned, the dream will fray and fall apart more and more within the mind of the sleeper with every moment of waking time that passes.

⭗ SHAPE DREAMS ⭗

To Lead The Sleeper’s Mind-Theater

Power: 2 - Range: Touch - Target: An individual - Duration: 1hr

For some, it is not enough simply to watch and understand. Sometimes a master of dreams feels the need to spin their own weft through the threads of all that is. Close your eyes and visualize the dreams you wish to impress upon the sleeper’s mind. These dreams can be anything, as long as they are tame enough to pass as the sleeper’s own dreams. Anything more tame, and you risk waking the sleeper.

Overcharge: The dreams are no longer tame. The sleeper is trapped in the dream. Overcharge multiple times to make the shaped dreams stronger and stronger, but be advised– If the sleeper dies in their dream, they die in the physical world as well. Use with caution, unless seeking to torment a sleeper to the point of death (a poor use of this power.)

Dangerous: It is possible, by shaping the dreams of another, to bleed into those dreams and be shaped by them in turn.

⭗ MANIFEST DREAMS ⭗

Funnel The Follies And Fears Into Finitescence

Power: 3 - Range: Touch - Target: An individual - Duration: 1hr

The Marked Dreamer becomes a conduit for creation, with the sleeper’s dreams being the catalyzing agent. The instructions are simple: look within the sleeper’s dreams, fasten onto something they are seeing or experiencing in their dream, then pull it out of that space and make it manifest. If an object is focused on, it will be no larger than what the Marked Dreamer can fit in their hand. If a situation or an outcome is focused on, it must be something that has a likelihood of happening anyway. Overcharge for more spectacular results.

Overcharge: Each time the spell is overcharged, the volume of the object manifested doubles in size. For situations and outcomes, the margin of likelihood needed to manifest the change decreases. Overcharge enough times and you might be able to summon a small house or change the minds of a polybody king who is dead set against you.

Dangerous: The current pulls both ways. What flows into the physical world may take an equal ebb of the Marked Dreamer’s mind back into the sleeper’s world.

⭗ WALL OF NIGHTMARES ⭗

Horrors Wrought To Repel

Power: 2 - Range: Whisper - Target: 5 meters square - Duration: 1hr

The Marked Dreamer funnels the fears of a foe into a ferocious fortification of horrors too terrifying to trespass through, (assuming that foe fails their save against this magic.) Otherwise, if they successfully save, the wall of nightmares is disconcerting at best and humorous at worst. If the save is failed spectacularly, the foe flees, frothing with terror. The wall of nightmares affects anyone who the caster wants it to effect, and is invisible to all those the caster wishes to keep safe.

Overcharge: each time the spell is overcharged, the volume of the target increases by seven meters and the visions get more horrifying, giving a save penalty of 1 for each overcharge.

Dangerous: The nightmares are made of soul stuff. They have presence. They are conscious. They can take on physical form and free themselves from being thralls of the caster, wreaking havoc on the world into which they have been released.

⭗ HA-SHAPING ⭗

Molding The Meat To Meaningful

Power: 3 - Range: Touch - Target: An individual - Duration: 1hr

The Marked Dreamer sculpts the physical body so that it reflects the Ba and Ka of an individual. In a way, this is a clearing of the untruths impressed upon the meat by time and trials to reveal the inner dreamself. Marked Dreamers often undertake this process slowly and unconsciously upon themselves over time automatically (and sometimes on others around them) but the skill can also be focused and fastened to an individual to shape them quickly and drastically. People who are ugly inside become hideous outside, while true saints become stunning. Some shaped by this spell are so hollow inside that they disappear entirely, while others cast off a skin of false self to shine as an embodied star wherever they go.

Overcharge: Overcharging the spell makes the changes permanent.

Dangerous: The shaper always risks reshaping themselves.

⭗ OUR PARTY (SO FAR) ⭗

Lleva Vyeldisana, Greenfolk Naturalist and Zoa Conservationist

"Charred-Hand" a perfectly ordinary and unassuming wastelander

The Blue Oracle, Dreamer of Dreams

 

Coda-1, Coda-2 and Coda-3, a bluelander polybody pilgrim, allegedly.

⭗ WHAT ARE REDIRECTIONS? ⭗

My goal with REDIRECTIONS is to add my own contribution to the Psychedelic / Heavy Metal / Ligne Claire art RPG space.  Much in the way that people inspired by Tolkien’s style helped give birth to the modern genre of High Fantasy, the style of Jean “Moebius” Giraud (and others like him) seems to be spawning a sort of genre of its own right now, and I want to expose more people to the wonders of it. I want to share it. I want to be a part of it. Most of all, I want it to grow.

    REDIRECTIONS is a collection of wondrous places and resources presented in story format (as a game in play, specifically traversing the universe of UVG (Ultraviolet Grasslands) but it is also kept more general for your own RPG characters to visit and explore regardless of the system you use. Each place is unique and wholly original, with a bevy of interesting stories, plot hooks and characters to color your experience. The format and many of the specific terms are from UVG. I'm just playing in Luca Rejec's universe. If you like these posts and find them useful, let me know! As of this point, all art in these posts is created as a collaboration with AI. Basically I trained an AI art model on my own sharpie marker drawings, then generated a bunch of pictures and trained a series of other models on them. I generate images with these secondary models, sometimes using the output as it is, and sometimes modifying the images with inpainting and/ or using the secondary models to refine output from DALLE-3. There is, literally, in every image, a little bit of me. Consider these images to be homages to the genre and pretty pictures, but nothing more. I greatly respect the skill of people who work with pen and pencil and have the skill of hand to make things from scratch. This is a series, and each entry is numbered. If you like things like this, please support the true artists whose works are part of the genre, such as the works of Moebius, Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands, Luke Gearing's Acid Death Fantasy and Raw Fury's game SABLE.