Tames Nightmares

Description

Dreams are a blessing for most living creatures. Weary travellers gladly slide into their bedrolls, ready to forget the waking world for a just a bit, plunging into the comfort of their dreams. They all yearn for a couple of precious moments spent with the ghostly fragments of pleasant memories long past.

However, this is not the case for you. You go to sleep out of necessity. You know what’s waiting for you there, in your mind’s subconscious. Whether you’re being chased through a forest, where the trees are made of black glass, blood seeping down their jagged branches, or torn apart by corpse abominations, stitched together from the body parts of a dozen men, your dreams have always been nightmarish pits of despair and pain.

You’ve tried everything you could to make the nightmares stop. You ran, you avoided them, you hid from the monsters of your subconscious, but sooner or later they always seemed to find you.

In the end you realized it’s time to stop running. You decided to face your inner demons and embrace them. Absorb them. Use them to your advantage. Now they’re an inseperable part of you. Nightmares still haunt your non-waking moments and you still wake up, drowned in your own sweat. But now you’re prepared. You go to sleep with the decisiveness, with which a warrior strides into battle, ready to face them head on. Ready to absorb them… and unleash them upon your enemies.

Details

Connection:

One of the PC’s has experienced the twisted abominations of your nightmares firsthand, as you pulled him into your dreams. Therefore all tasks to resist the effect of your nightmares are reduced by 2 steps.

Additional Equipment:

You have an oddity, a small fist-sized empty box. Everything you put in the box before you go to sleep will transfer over with you in the nightmare. If the items inside are exhausted in the dream, they are gone in the real world as well.

Esotery Effects:

Nightmare Esoteries: If you perform esoteries they take on the form of the horrors inhabiting your dreams. Your Stasis esotery might look like tentacles sprouting from the ground, holding the person in place. Your Onslaught might look like an ethereal screaming face. Your Blackout might cause the sensation of agonizing screams in the darkness.

Minor Effect Suggestions:

You instill emotions of dread and unease in someone. The target’s next task is modified 2 difficulties to its detriment, as they’re overcoming the negative emotions.

Major Effect Suggestions:

The essence of your nightmares infuses your body and dark energies extend in a swirling fashion around you. All hostile targets within immediate range waste their action trying to overcome your horrors for the next round.

Tier 1:

Mental Penetration: Your nightmares can break apart a target’s mental defenses. You are trained with all esoteries/tricks/moves which influence/assault the minds of your targets.

Resilient Psyche: No mental attack could ever match the horrors you’ve experienced in your own dreams. You are trained in Intellect defense.

Inability (The Night belongs to Them): Every time you go to sleep, you enter a battlefield, much more horrific than anything you can encounter in the waking world. You can not spend recovery rolls while you’re asleep. (You do however get all recovery rolls after a night’s rest, just like normal.)

Tier 2:

Infest Mind (3+ Intellect points): You infest a single target’s mind with one of your nightmares. All the target’s tasks are modified one difficulty to its detriment. This lasts for one minute. In addition, the PC can choose whether to apply effort towards lowering the task difficulty or infecting multiple targets (for each level of effort an additional target may be chosen). This ability has short range. Action.

Tier 3:

Wave of Fear (4 Intellect points): You unleash your twisted dreams in a form of an energy wave, radiating from you, causing madness and fear in all targets (including other players) within short range (Player Characters must make an Intellect defense roll against it every round while it is active). Creatures affected are terrified and run as far away from you as possible. You can maintain this ability by paying the ability cost plus applying a level of effort per target. If you cannot spend the Intellect points to maintain all afflicted targets, the effect wears off.

Applying the ability is an action, maintaining it an Enabler.

Tier 4:

Advanced Infest Mind: You are a master of infesting people’s minds with your nightmares. Your Infest Mind ability receives optional effects (you can use 1 optional effect per level of effort spent). You can not apply multiple effects on the same creature (though they can be spread out among multiple targets):

• Target takes 2 Intellect damage (ignores Armor) for 3 turns, as it struggles to keep its mind intact from the horror’s destructive invasion.
• Target’s vision is distorted and it will use its next action to attack the closest living creature next to it, be it friend or foe, thinking it’s the source of the mental assault.
• Target is too busy fighting off the nightmare in his/her head. He/She takes an additional 1 difficulty level detriment to all perception tasks.

Nightmare Feast: You have learned how to absorb the nightmares of people sleeping around you, providing your comrades with a calm and pleasant slumber. All PC’s spending a night in short range of you gain a +2 to their first recovery roll the next day.

Tier 5:

Dream Cage (6 Intellect points): You can plunge a single living, thinking creature in short range into your subconscious for 1 minute, where it will battle for its life against the hellish beings, inhabiting your mind. The creature’s body falls on the ground, still functioning, but without a mind to control it. Any damage done to it will cancel the effect. During this time, all tasks you perform are modified one difficulty to your detriment, as you try and keep the victim from escaping your dream world.

Advanced Mental Penetration: You are specialized with all esoteries/tricks/moves which influence/assault a target’s mind.

Tier 6:

Manifest Nightmare (7+ Intellect points): You have tamed your nightmares up to a point, where you can manifest them in the real waking world (how the nightmares look like, depends on the PC).Action. You can either:

• Summon a horrific level 6 abomination from your dreams somewhere within short range of you. As a level 6 creature, it has a target number of 18, 20 health and it deals 6 damage (further modifications/upgrades can be discussed between the GM and PC). The creature is uncontrollable and it will attack the closest target in range with the intention of ripping it apart. However you can try controlling it by succeeding on a level 6 Intellect task, after which ordering it around will be a free action. Banishing the creature is also a level 6 task and each failure reduces the difficulty by one step.
• Summon a landscape from one of your nightmares, spanning a 100-foot cube (centered around the PC) for 10 minutes. Details about how it looks and acts depend on the PC and GM. The landscape is likely filled with death traps, acid pools, living trees, which try to dismember the closest targets etc. The landscape does not differentiate hostile and friendly targets. It will try and destroy any living creature in range. For every level of effort spent, the landscape’s radius will increase by 50 feet. Cancelling it is a level 7 task.

Advanced Wave Of Fear: You master the control over your nightmares. You can choose to exclude Player Characters from the effect of Wave of Fear.