I’m excited to announce that I’m doing some new online Dreamland playtests on the Dreamland Discord!! I hope to run games fairly regularly, at least 3x a month, until the summer. At the moment I’m planning a special series of games. Here is the current schedule, as written in the image (NOTE: People who have expressed interest on the Dreamland Discord are listed here by their Discord names):
February 3, 7PM PST – Ultraviolet Grasslands (1 INTERESTED: Sheenath)
February 11, 7PM PST – Hot Springs Island (3 INTERESTED: biggerKrissy, Sheenath, vesper)
February 19, 7PM PST – Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier (2 INTERESTED: biggerKrissy, vesper)
March 7, 10AM PST (GMT folks take note!) – Gackling Moon (4 INTERESTED: Sheenath,TriffidEM, Arbiter, draconic_dropbear)
March 10, 7PM PST – Lorn Song of the Bachelor (1 INTERESTED: Arbor Day)
March 18, 10AM PST (GMT folks take note!) – Romance of the Perilous Land (4 INTERESTED: Arbor Day, Sheenath, Arbiter, draconic_dropbear)
March 26, 7PM PST – Through Ultan’s Door
Yes, that’s right — all these playtests will use other people’s TTRPG adventures & settings! That’s Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands, Jacob Hurst’s Hot Springs Island, Gus L’s Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier, Patrick Stuart’s Gackling Moon, Zedeck Siew’s Lorn Song of the Bachelor, Scott Malthouse’s Romance of the Perilous Land, and Ben Laurence’s Through Ultan’s Door.
Why am I running Dreamland games in other people’s settings rather than in the wonderful original TBA settings created by (NAME REDACTED) for Dreamland RPG? Well, all of these are games and creators I admire (and have worked with, in the case of Jacob Hurst and Patrick Stuart), and I have been wanting to play them for awhile. Also, I want to test the Dreamland system to see how it works with fantasy settings and adventures not created for it. Dreamland RPG has an implied setting, but Dreamland itself is vast — infinitely vast — so I’ve tried to imply that many kinds of not-specifically-Dreamlands fantasy worlds could exist within it. (What is and isn’t Dreamlandy is more a question of vibes than hard rules… the game’s subtitle is “Fairytale Portal Fantasy Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” but it could just as easily by “Surreal Portal Fantasy,” or “Mystic Portal Fantasy,” or “Psychedelic Portal Fantasy.”
A few of these games, like Hot Springs Island and Gackling Moon, are already explicitly rules-neutral, but for the others there will be the challenge of porting OSE- or OSR-type rules to the very different Dreamland rules system. But I wouldn’t be trying it if I didn’t think it would work, and would be an interesting experiment. I recommend all these games and I look forward to porting them to Dreamland. I’ll certainly be writing about the results, and if this series goes well, I have future adventures in mind (spoiler: I’d love to run Emily Allen’s “Gardens of Ynn”, for sure….).
Feel free to share your adventure suggestions and thoughts here. And these date are set in stone, so please sign up to try a game! I’ll share the link again — sign up now in the Dreamland Discord!!