So, I'm going to take the snippet of lore we got, and make an update of the Nightmare Lands, keeping as much from the original box set that does not give me a migraine (*cough* Abber perception-reality *cough*), along with some modernizations, with the goal of making it a more habitable domain - ie, you can play a variety of characters from there - and also the general outlined template. I'm trying to come up with dreamweaving rules later, but I'm at a point where I feel that I can show the fluff.
Intro:
VIEW CONTENT:
The Nightmare Lands
Domain of Fearsome Dreams and Strange Mysticism
Darklord: Caroline Dinwiddy/The Nightmare Court
Genres: Psychological horror, cosmic horror, and dark fantasy.
Hallmarks: Nightmares, reoccurring dreams, mutable reality, changing landscape, endless dreamworlds, domination of the subconscious
Mist Talismans: Copy of Dr. Illhousen's notes, dreamcatcher made from the guts of a living phobia, a preserved dreamweaver spider corpse
To enter into the Nightmare Lands is to leave sane reality behind. This is not the same as a chaotic reality; the lack of any coherent order, while it could certainly be horrifying, would also be wondrous in equal amounts, due to random chance. No, the logic of the Terrain Between, as the physical half of the domain is called, is as strict as the contours of thought; while infinite variations are possible, each has some link to the dreams that produced them, every bit riddled with meaning. The issue is that there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dreamers, and the most powerful mind - or minds, considering that her mind has fractured into independent egos - is that of the darklord, who wishes nothing more than all other minds she has captured to suffer to provide a balm for her own guilt. To the waking inhabitant, the Nightmare Lands are a place where even daily survival is an adventure and test of will. To the dreamers caught in the Orbs of Nod, they're infinitely worse, a torture chamber where the Nightmare Court preside over the breakage of sanity with tools forged from their own doubts, fears, and self-loathing.
And yet, life exists here, and not just the idle creations of megalomanical parasite godlings. Much, of course, is monstrous, stray creations of thought interacting with the wild magic of the Well of Onerios at the center of the City of Nod that serves as the domain's ever-shifting capital. But there is Humanoid life too. Some of it was even born here, in the form of the Abber, a nomadic culture of mystics and hunter-gatherers that has managed to make the Wilds of Everchange that border the city their home. While they seem primitive to those native to other domains, in truth they are as advanced as a realm where numbers do not always work the way they should allows them to be; in fact, they have an advanced knowledge of psychology leaps and bounds ahead of even the most advanced alienist of Dementlieu or Borca - they have to have it, given how much of their realm is born of the imaginings of Humanoids, and so to understand the malfunctions of the mind is a survival skill in the Terrain Between, and their medicine people have learned a great deal of magical lore relating to both the mind and illusions from observing their home. Others, known collectively as the Alienated in a dark pun nobody remembers who first made, are recipients of the ultimate punishment the Nightmare Court has for spoiling their crop of dreams - to be stolen from their native domains and be forced to live on the blasted and bleak shores of the domain, along with their children, and their children's children. Yet they have survived, having formed something of a city-state around the stolen mental hospital of the great alienist Gregorian Illhousen, and while they are not quite what other domains would regard as sane, to see the world as a great dream is simply rational here.
At the core of the domain, however, a different, much darker asylum waits. Caroline Dinwiddy, an amoral and cruel psionist who opened a sham clinic to have an endless supply of test subjects, sleeps fitfully in the only clean cell, feeding on the nightmares around her to remain asleep and never confront the truth of what she is as she tries to subconsciously regain her might. From her mind, the memories of the patients she betrayed and her co-conspirators' remnant psyches, twisted by her rationalizations and out of control power, spill forth in the form of the Nightmare Court, mighty fiends who each embody a different type of traumatic memory she once sought to utilize in her quest for power and utter understanding of the mind. Once, she repressed these memories from a portion of her mind, in the belief that only a perfectly pure soul could achieve the ascension into a being of pure thought and sanity she once sought. Now, having been rejected by her own best self, they are her defenses and feeding maws, greedily sucking away psionic energy to build a new ego, one that will be both one with all others and one in and of itself.
Noteworthy Facts:
Those familiar with (and consciously aware of) the Nightmare Lands know the following facts:
* The Nightmare Lands is both a descriptor of the dreamworlds contained within the Orbs of Nod, a vast set of semi-technological alien devices that transform a person's dreams into physical pocket planes, and a large, roughly circular island upon which the Orbs are placed. The island is often called the Terrain Between to distinguish it from the dreamworlds, since it is between physical matter and dreamstuff.
* The Terrain Between is never fully stable; it is a place of highly wild magic that is shaped by thought spillover from the Orbs. While four ring-shaped"regions" remain in the same place (from outwards in, the rocky coastline known as the Waking Coastline, the grassy and stormy Outlands where the Orbs are contained, the protean Wilds of Everchange, and the menacing City of Nod at the center), and when present major landmarks like the freshwater lake Langiour do not move, everything is possible. The Wilds in particular are notorious for this - while they revert to a deciduous forest when the thought spillover clears, a fifty-acre across area can become a grassland, a volcano, a jungle, an enormous tower, and a giant fleshy monster merged with the ground over the course of a fortnight. This magic can even produce sentient beings, though they usually dissolve when the moment passes - only especially strong wills, in particular those who have developed more of an identity due to interacting with other sentients, last longer due to being more aware of themselves.
* The Nightmare Lands are ruled over by the Nightmare Court, powerful fiendish(?) monsters who seek to use the traumatic memories of the prisoners of the Orbs of Nod to create terrifying and exhausting nightmares that aggravate the mental problems of dreamers, to feed on the psionic energy released by people in states of extreme emotion, especially those produced by irrational thought. Most of them have a preference; the Ghost Dancer targets guilt and remorse, Hypnos inferiority, Morpheus alienation and shame over one's identity, Mullonga phobias and anxiety, and Python paranoia and fear of betrayal. They are ruled over by the Nightmare Man, a terrifying figure who often commandeers the Orbs of individuals whose trauma produces especially vivid dreams in order to create artworks of them.
* There are two broad sentient communities not aligned with the Nightmare Court, as opposed to their fiendish servants and those dreamborn they supply the psionic energy needed to exist in return for service. The Abber nomads are a group of tribal cultures that live primarily in the Outlands, venturing into the Wilds of Everchange, to gather the abundant resources that their mutation often provides, and the Alienated, communities of people abducted from other domains by the Nightmare Court when too many people discovered their existence. The Abber live in semi-nomadic camps that frequently move to avoid harassment by the Court's forces, and the largest settlement of Alienated is built in and around the Illhousen Clinic for the Mentally Distressed, a formerly Nova Vassan cutting-edge psychiatric hospital that was torn out of that domain and deposited on the Waking Coastline.
* One can use knowledge of dream symbolism to shape the changes that the thought spillage produces. This is necessary for the Abber peoples to survive, and their medicine people are masters of it. They often craft magic items from the abundant magical energy, especially dreamcatchers that ward away the Court's lesser servants.
VIEW CONTENT:
Nightmare Lands Characters
There are three major sources of characters from the Nightmare Lands; First-generation Alienated who remember being stolen from their homes and deposited in the alien Terrain Between, the children and descendants of other Alienated and Abber cultures who have never known anything but the ever-shifting island, and the rare sentient dreamborn Humanoids who have stabilized their existence without becoming a minion of the Court and assimilate into the other two populations. Needless to say, it's an eclectic mix, and it leads to a blase, open attitude towards the vast majority of ancestries; if it is obviously self-aware and it does not inherently hurt others as a product of its existence, it is a stranger, and thus, a person (it may take a while for many, especially Abber, to be sure a stranger is not a trick of the Nightmare Court, and they know that people can still be evil or hostile, but once they trust someone is real, they try to give that person the time of day and hospitality). Virtually any ancestry can be found among Alienated and dreamborn, and it's only slightly less diverse for Abber, many tribes of whom have a long history of accepting dreamborn into their tribes and intermarrying - the "base" demographics are primarily humans, elves, and gnomes, with a large minority of half-elves. Alienated use the naming of their original domains, while Abber tend to use names inspired by Native American (in particular Objibwe and Haudenosaunee, aka Iroquois) and Mongolian conventions, though they often use literal translations for ease of strangers when engaging in diplomacy (the medicine woman Kawisenhawe may use She Who Holds The Ice when negotiating trade with an Alienated settlement, for example). When creating characters, consider asking the following questions.
How has the Nightmare Court menaced you? Nowhere in the Terrain Between is truly safe from its rulers, as sleeping puts you in their crop fields, and the waking world is ravaged and mutated by their hungers and experiments. Have your dreams been caught in an Orb of Nod? Have you been forced to move or adapt when a dreamborn monster attacked or psionic anomaly occurred in your home? Which member of the Nightmare Court do you most dread?
What is your relationship to dreamweaving? Abber medicine people are adept dreamwalkers and mental healers, with a regular duty to free their peers from the Orbs when the Court turns on them due to slim pickings from other dreamers, and many Alienated are not lacking in that department. Can you trigger a lucid dream or share another's dream? Have you learned how to shape the energy released from dreams in your homeland to make life easier, and can you do it reliably? How has the wild magic of your home influenced you in particular? (It's not uncommon for people from the Nightmare Lands to have Dark Gifts - the Abber view them as blessings from mischievous but well-intentioned trickster spirits, because as unpredictable as they are, they are often a much-needed edge over the multitude of monsters and environmental dangers).
How much do you know about "normal" reality? While on an intellectual level everyone in the Nightmare Lands is aware that their domain does not function like other domains (as dreamwalkers can enter the Orbs of people in other domains and new Alienated bring news of the world outside the Terrain Between), but there's a difference between knowing for a fact and actually experiencing it. What do you do to check if reality isn't altering itself? What sort of precautions and rituals do you undergo that are rational in your home but seem strange or unsettling to foreigners? Do you regard a world without rampant wild magic as refreshingly stable, uncannily dead, or something else?
There are three major sources of characters from the Nightmare Lands; First-generation Alienated who remember being stolen from their homes and deposited in the alien Terrain Between, the children and descendants of other Alienated and Abber cultures who have never known anything but the ever-shifting island, and the rare sentient dreamborn Humanoids who have stabilized their existence without becoming a minion of the Court and assimilate into the other two populations. Needless to say, it's an eclectic mix, and it leads to a blase, open attitude towards the vast majority of ancestries; if it is obviously self-aware and it does not inherently hurt others as a product of its existence, it is a stranger, and thus, a person (it may take a while for many, especially Abber, to be sure a stranger is not a trick of the Nightmare Court, and they know that people can still be evil or hostile, but once they trust someone is real, they try to give that person the time of day and hospitality). Virtually any ancestry can be found among Alienated and dreamborn, and it's only slightly less diverse for Abber, many tribes of whom have a long history of accepting dreamborn into their tribes and intermarrying - the "base" demographics are primarily humans, elves, and gnomes, with a large minority of half-elves. Alienated use the naming of their original domains, while Abber tend to use names inspired by Native American (in particular Objibwe and Haudenosaunee, aka Iroquois) and Mongolian conventions, though they often use literal translations for ease of strangers when engaging in diplomacy (the medicine woman Kawisenhawe may use She Who Holds The Ice when negotiating trade with an Alienated settlement, for example). When creating characters, consider asking the following questions.
How has the Nightmare Court menaced you? Nowhere in the Terrain Between is truly safe from its rulers, as sleeping puts you in their crop fields, and the waking world is ravaged and mutated by their hungers and experiments. Have your dreams been caught in an Orb of Nod? Have you been forced to move or adapt when a dreamborn monster attacked or psionic anomaly occurred in your home? Which member of the Nightmare Court do you most dread?
What is your relationship to dreamweaving? Abber medicine people are adept dreamwalkers and mental healers, with a regular duty to free their peers from the Orbs when the Court turns on them due to slim pickings from other dreamers, and many Alienated are not lacking in that department. Can you trigger a lucid dream or share another's dream? Have you learned how to shape the energy released from dreams in your homeland to make life easier, and can you do it reliably? How has the wild magic of your home influenced you in particular? (It's not uncommon for people from the Nightmare Lands to have Dark Gifts - the Abber view them as blessings from mischievous but well-intentioned trickster spirits, because as unpredictable as they are, they are often a much-needed edge over the multitude of monsters and environmental dangers).
How much do you know about "normal" reality? While on an intellectual level everyone in the Nightmare Lands is aware that their domain does not function like other domains (as dreamwalkers can enter the Orbs of people in other domains and new Alienated bring news of the world outside the Terrain Between), but there's a difference between knowing for a fact and actually experiencing it. What do you do to check if reality isn't altering itself? What sort of precautions and rituals do you undergo that are rational in your home but seem strange or unsettling to foreigners? Do you regard a world without rampant wild magic as refreshingly stable, uncannily dead, or something else?
VIEW CONTENT:
Settlements and Sites
While geography is more of a loose suggestion in the Terrain Between, and irrelevant in the majority of dreamscapes, there are some general regions to be aware of, and there are certain locations that, while they wander, at least remain consistent.
The Edge of Waking
While the borders of the domain trail off into the Mist, the actual Terrain Between is a bit smaller than them, taking the form of a large landmass on a choppy, unpredictable sea, rumored to be inhabited by nautical undead, sahuagin, and wereotters. The beach of the island, the Edge of Waking, is far more calm than its waters - in fact, about two nautical miles away from the beach, the waters become eerily placid and still - but it is hardly inviting, being extremely rocky and largely empty of all but the hardiest flora and with the dominant animal life being crustaceans and resting seabirds. Here is also the most stable grounds of the Nightmare Lands, with the worse changes being the relative distances many locations are from each other, and so most Alienated dwell here in ramshackle towns built from their stolen homes. Which is just as well, as when the Nightmare Court steals a location from other domains, they are deposited here, confused and frightened, prey for the more amphibious sea monsters and more adventurous creations of the Court.
Gregorian Illhousen Clinic for the Mentally Distressed/the Insomnia Sanctuary
The most successful Alienated enclave by an order of magnitude inhabits this unfortunate medical hospital, stolen from the domain of Nova Vassa when its titular director proved too effective at treating (and thus, rescuing) the Nightmare Court's victims, and developed a far too accurate assessment of them and their practices to be allowed to spread - with the help of a jealous colleague, the Court sucked Gregorian, his peers, his patients, and his institution through a ritual dreamscape to the southern part of the Edge of Waking. The original Dr. Illhousen is long gone (thanks to natural causes, to the eternal fury of the Court), but his daughter Enkhtuya (a half-elven druid) remains, seeking to merge the traditional techniques of her Abber mother and the pioneering alienism of her father to improve both. It gets its other name from a final, spiteful curse from the Court that was not very well thought-out; no one can sleep within its cells, which to people whose dreamscapes are caught in an Orb of Nod, means sanctuary from the Court for as long as they dare to stay awake, giving Illhousen and her students time to prepare for the inevitable confrontation with the overseer of the patients' torments.
The Outlands
Sometimes known as the Ring of Dreams, for this is generally where the Orbs of Nod are stored when a member of the Nightmare Court claims a dreamscape, the Outlands are technically more verdant than the Edge, but this is not a particularly high bar to clear; the ground is grassy, but the health and occasionally species of the grass changes in frequent waves, as the stray magic and psionic energy not soaked up by the Wilds of Everchange and the City of Nod affect them in unpredictable waves. It grows enough to sustain life, however - hardy life that does not mind its food randomly swinging between feast and famine, admittedly, and it's difficult to grow beyond a small size - to say nothing that this is where the Nightmare Court starts their patrols of monsters, looking for potential threats to the crop of the Orbs, each one a glass and stone construction of varying size, covered in arcane designs to keep the dark storm of psionic thought restrained. It is, however, livable; this is where the various tribes of the Abber civilization dwell when not embarking on quests into the Wilds of Everchange for its abundance of resources and the powerful magic items that form there. While they generally do not free the minds of non-Abber from the Orbs due to fear of reprisal, they are more than happy to advise others who venture to meet them how to do so - it is the one request that servants of the Nightmare Court almost never make, and the ones who do generally are not willing servants. The vast majority of lore the Alienated know of the Nightmare Lands comes from the Abber, who have been here, learning, since the domain first formed. Those who think them dumb brutes or idealized primitives closer to the Earth are sorely mistaken, however, and in the presence of Abber victimized by Alienated who think themselves kings in waiting of the "savages" they find, it is often their last mistake; the Abber are among the most mystically aware people in Ravenloft, with some their medicine men including the most skilled (non-darklord) mages in the Land of Mists (including, to many literate people's shock, some wizards; while the Abber do not have a fully realized written language, wall paintings, carving, and tattoos serve well-enough as spellbooks), and to be honest, they regard the land as something of a hostile rival, seeing as how it belongs to the Court. They are also aware of other domains, having met Alienated and observed the (admittedly twisted) memories of their homes through the Orbs; a few more technically inclined Abber hunters have backups for their traditional bows in the form of guns scavenged from Alienated and scenes of violence in the Orbs.
Wilds of Everchange
Mistakenly referred to as the Forest of Everchange in Gregorian Illhousen's notes due to the closest form they take to a default, the Wilds of Everchange are a vast, organic irrigated network used to funnel the extracted psionic energy of the Orbs of Nod into the Well of Onerios through arcane and strange means - and the center of the domain's wild magic. They are not efficiently insulated conductors in the slightest, and both the leak of thoughts and magic cause constant metamorphoses; what is a tree today may be a mountain tomorrow, a plateau becomes a village of strange people who have no idea they are not quite real, a pool an entrance to an underground temple complex that worships some dreamed-of dark god. It is never unlivable; shaped as it is by Humanoid dream, it obeys the rule that every environment must be something a dreamer can exist in, and in the waking world, the "dreamers" are living people. But no other rule applies; the Wilds are frequently affected by psionically warped zones of anomalous reality, not impossible elsewhere in the Terrain Between but far more common here than even the City of Nod. Within, time may move five times slower than the outside, and water starts fires on dry wood, or a song may call forth monsters to attack everyone wearing red. Even worse, it is the domain of Morpheus, who finds its protean nature far more to his liking than the relative "civilization" of the City of Nod, and he will happily speed its transformations if it seems a little too stable or to flummox intruders. And there is no shortage of intruders; the constant metamorphosis gives it an endlessly renewing bounty, more than enough to feed an entire Abber camp for weeks after a lucky day of foraging and hunting, and the same beliefs of the dreamers who feed it cause strange magical items that are decorated in the same designs as the Orbs to be spontaneously made or materialize from some netherworld (even the Court isn't sure) in the most warped and dangerous areas - treasures commiserate with the dangers. It is a sign of great bravery, stupidity, or both for Abber to launch expeditions into the Wilds to gather artifacts and food to help the village or trade with Alienated, trusting in their waking skill or ability to dreamweave the rampant magic into something more livable to guide them - but no one with anything resembling sanity takes the so called Hunt of Dreams lightly, and few return unscathed - if at all.
The City of Nod
It is perhaps fitting that the Nightmare Lands, the eternal frontier of terrifying wonders, has the most savage and hellish part as the closest thing to conventional urban civilization there is. The City, named for the Orbs, is the capital and heart of the Terrain Between, and it is a dark one indeed - for it is the home and testing grounds of the Nightmare Court, where the mind-eating fiends plot new terrors and set their thought-born monsters against each other to examine their capabilities and for idle sport. From afar, looking out from its plateau and seen from everywhere on the island, the City looks like a bastion of stability and order (albeit dark and menacing), but that is an illusion; the city's alleys and streets change according to both their own alien logic and the whim of the Court, with the melange of styles recognizable as Humanoid being ruined shells, and the only new buildings being strange, impossible structures of glass and stone that seem almost organic. Here and there, the inhabited ruin is broken up by the grotesque and macabre art instillations of the Nightmare Man, sculpture and free-standing portrait both, treated as holy sites by the Courts' servants for their brief existence. The only unchanging places are the domains of the Court, if only for their convenience, with the Ghost Dancer eternally performing for her audience of corpses, Python cavorting with his serpentine assistants, and Morpheus' telepathic mind casting its gaze from his white stone tower, unmarred by window or door. Even that has an exception, as Mullonga's Bleak District moves through the city, assimilating other building into its rotted and menacing tenements and temples to fearsome beasts until she desires for it to move on, hunting those courageous, idiotic souls who would dare intrude on fear's capital. There is no rest here, no reprieve - there is only horror, and the hoard of psychic energy stolen from the rulers' victims. The only way the truly wise end up here is if they are taken, or the need for the Well at the center is truly desperate.
Well of Onerios
At the very heart of the City of Nod, and thus, the heart of the Nightmare Lands, lies a dome of perfect black marble. Within this marble lies two things. The first, and the most legendary by far, is the Well - the reservoir for the Court's collected psionic energy, a maelstorm of thought and magic capable of warping reality and to answer any question. It is also the way by which the Court finds its victims - the well is far deeper into the Mists than the actual bedrock of the domain itself, and spreads tributaries - roots, really - throughout the space between not just the domains, but the Region of Dreams in the Ethereal Plane of all worlds, even touching dreamers outside of Ravenloft. When especially vivid nightmares occur, this "Web of Dreams" trembles like silk threads, drawing the attention of the Court. If the dream they find seems viable for their techniques of mental torture, they draw it forth from the Well, forging a new Orb of Nod from it to trap the dreamer's mind in an endlessly repeating nightmare, to be ravaged for ever more psionic energy to fill the Well to drain for their dark purposes. And yet, the Abber regard it as sacred, a callback to the first dream from which the dreamscape that became all worlds in the multiverse - for the Well bucks against the Court, forming portals into its Web within the very dreamscapes the Orbs contain, whereupon a skilled dreamwalker can go anywhere in the universe (though the Dark Powers naturally prevent transit out of Ravenloft until they are already letting the dreamwalker go), and provide the prisoners of the Orbs the capacity to overcome their overseers - a dreamer who solves the root cause of their nightmare, within the dream or out of it, with help or without, is no longer a prisoner of the Court, their Orb shattering and releasing a flood of positive psionic energy that supplies the non-dream plant life of the domain with needed nutrients and providing for life the Court does not control.
Dinwiddy Holistic Treatment Center for the Insane
The other thing the dome contains is a squat, run-down building, almost insultingly mundane contrasting with the dark city outside, let alone the cauldron of psionic power it overlooks. The most obscure lore gathered by the Abber speaks of it - very quietly, lest the Nightmare Court overhear. They say it is a place that embodies the First Dreamer's own doubts in Their own imaginings, the belief that it did not make sense, becoming this echo of the utterly mundane - and horrific, for those few who have entered realize that it is a truly barbaric excuse for a mental hospital, having things that even Nova Vassans, obsessed with seeming sane and respectable, dispensed with as cruel long before Gregorian Illhousen ever entered medical school. But it is a banal horror, compared to the surreal nightmare outside, a place of all too mundane medical horrors - and quackery, as those who have read the books on "orthomolecular balance" and "orgonic radiation" can attest. They are almost right - it is not the testament to the First Dreamer's own moments of irrationality and internal failures, but of the First Nightmare Courtier - their mother and collective true self, dreaming in the cleanest cell that has been welded shut. This, not the Nightmare Man's Grieving Cathedral, is the palace of the ultimate ruler of the Terrain Between and all those dreamscapes they have conquered, for it is Caroline Dinwiddy's sham clinic and front for her attempt at transcendence. Now, it is her sanctuary from the monsters she does not want to admit to herself are born from her, the archons to her warped demiurge of nightmares, eternally dreaming of a world where she was successful and is now, through her proxy, god-queen of all thought - even as she whispers her orders to the Nightmare Court to gather ever more energy to get her transcendence right this time.
While geography is more of a loose suggestion in the Terrain Between, and irrelevant in the majority of dreamscapes, there are some general regions to be aware of, and there are certain locations that, while they wander, at least remain consistent.
The Edge of Waking
While the borders of the domain trail off into the Mist, the actual Terrain Between is a bit smaller than them, taking the form of a large landmass on a choppy, unpredictable sea, rumored to be inhabited by nautical undead, sahuagin, and wereotters. The beach of the island, the Edge of Waking, is far more calm than its waters - in fact, about two nautical miles away from the beach, the waters become eerily placid and still - but it is hardly inviting, being extremely rocky and largely empty of all but the hardiest flora and with the dominant animal life being crustaceans and resting seabirds. Here is also the most stable grounds of the Nightmare Lands, with the worse changes being the relative distances many locations are from each other, and so most Alienated dwell here in ramshackle towns built from their stolen homes. Which is just as well, as when the Nightmare Court steals a location from other domains, they are deposited here, confused and frightened, prey for the more amphibious sea monsters and more adventurous creations of the Court.
Gregorian Illhousen Clinic for the Mentally Distressed/the Insomnia Sanctuary
The most successful Alienated enclave by an order of magnitude inhabits this unfortunate medical hospital, stolen from the domain of Nova Vassa when its titular director proved too effective at treating (and thus, rescuing) the Nightmare Court's victims, and developed a far too accurate assessment of them and their practices to be allowed to spread - with the help of a jealous colleague, the Court sucked Gregorian, his peers, his patients, and his institution through a ritual dreamscape to the southern part of the Edge of Waking. The original Dr. Illhousen is long gone (thanks to natural causes, to the eternal fury of the Court), but his daughter Enkhtuya (a half-elven druid) remains, seeking to merge the traditional techniques of her Abber mother and the pioneering alienism of her father to improve both. It gets its other name from a final, spiteful curse from the Court that was not very well thought-out; no one can sleep within its cells, which to people whose dreamscapes are caught in an Orb of Nod, means sanctuary from the Court for as long as they dare to stay awake, giving Illhousen and her students time to prepare for the inevitable confrontation with the overseer of the patients' torments.
The Outlands
Sometimes known as the Ring of Dreams, for this is generally where the Orbs of Nod are stored when a member of the Nightmare Court claims a dreamscape, the Outlands are technically more verdant than the Edge, but this is not a particularly high bar to clear; the ground is grassy, but the health and occasionally species of the grass changes in frequent waves, as the stray magic and psionic energy not soaked up by the Wilds of Everchange and the City of Nod affect them in unpredictable waves. It grows enough to sustain life, however - hardy life that does not mind its food randomly swinging between feast and famine, admittedly, and it's difficult to grow beyond a small size - to say nothing that this is where the Nightmare Court starts their patrols of monsters, looking for potential threats to the crop of the Orbs, each one a glass and stone construction of varying size, covered in arcane designs to keep the dark storm of psionic thought restrained. It is, however, livable; this is where the various tribes of the Abber civilization dwell when not embarking on quests into the Wilds of Everchange for its abundance of resources and the powerful magic items that form there. While they generally do not free the minds of non-Abber from the Orbs due to fear of reprisal, they are more than happy to advise others who venture to meet them how to do so - it is the one request that servants of the Nightmare Court almost never make, and the ones who do generally are not willing servants. The vast majority of lore the Alienated know of the Nightmare Lands comes from the Abber, who have been here, learning, since the domain first formed. Those who think them dumb brutes or idealized primitives closer to the Earth are sorely mistaken, however, and in the presence of Abber victimized by Alienated who think themselves kings in waiting of the "savages" they find, it is often their last mistake; the Abber are among the most mystically aware people in Ravenloft, with some their medicine men including the most skilled (non-darklord) mages in the Land of Mists (including, to many literate people's shock, some wizards; while the Abber do not have a fully realized written language, wall paintings, carving, and tattoos serve well-enough as spellbooks), and to be honest, they regard the land as something of a hostile rival, seeing as how it belongs to the Court. They are also aware of other domains, having met Alienated and observed the (admittedly twisted) memories of their homes through the Orbs; a few more technically inclined Abber hunters have backups for their traditional bows in the form of guns scavenged from Alienated and scenes of violence in the Orbs.
Wilds of Everchange
Mistakenly referred to as the Forest of Everchange in Gregorian Illhousen's notes due to the closest form they take to a default, the Wilds of Everchange are a vast, organic irrigated network used to funnel the extracted psionic energy of the Orbs of Nod into the Well of Onerios through arcane and strange means - and the center of the domain's wild magic. They are not efficiently insulated conductors in the slightest, and both the leak of thoughts and magic cause constant metamorphoses; what is a tree today may be a mountain tomorrow, a plateau becomes a village of strange people who have no idea they are not quite real, a pool an entrance to an underground temple complex that worships some dreamed-of dark god. It is never unlivable; shaped as it is by Humanoid dream, it obeys the rule that every environment must be something a dreamer can exist in, and in the waking world, the "dreamers" are living people. But no other rule applies; the Wilds are frequently affected by psionically warped zones of anomalous reality, not impossible elsewhere in the Terrain Between but far more common here than even the City of Nod. Within, time may move five times slower than the outside, and water starts fires on dry wood, or a song may call forth monsters to attack everyone wearing red. Even worse, it is the domain of Morpheus, who finds its protean nature far more to his liking than the relative "civilization" of the City of Nod, and he will happily speed its transformations if it seems a little too stable or to flummox intruders. And there is no shortage of intruders; the constant metamorphosis gives it an endlessly renewing bounty, more than enough to feed an entire Abber camp for weeks after a lucky day of foraging and hunting, and the same beliefs of the dreamers who feed it cause strange magical items that are decorated in the same designs as the Orbs to be spontaneously made or materialize from some netherworld (even the Court isn't sure) in the most warped and dangerous areas - treasures commiserate with the dangers. It is a sign of great bravery, stupidity, or both for Abber to launch expeditions into the Wilds to gather artifacts and food to help the village or trade with Alienated, trusting in their waking skill or ability to dreamweave the rampant magic into something more livable to guide them - but no one with anything resembling sanity takes the so called Hunt of Dreams lightly, and few return unscathed - if at all.
The City of Nod
It is perhaps fitting that the Nightmare Lands, the eternal frontier of terrifying wonders, has the most savage and hellish part as the closest thing to conventional urban civilization there is. The City, named for the Orbs, is the capital and heart of the Terrain Between, and it is a dark one indeed - for it is the home and testing grounds of the Nightmare Court, where the mind-eating fiends plot new terrors and set their thought-born monsters against each other to examine their capabilities and for idle sport. From afar, looking out from its plateau and seen from everywhere on the island, the City looks like a bastion of stability and order (albeit dark and menacing), but that is an illusion; the city's alleys and streets change according to both their own alien logic and the whim of the Court, with the melange of styles recognizable as Humanoid being ruined shells, and the only new buildings being strange, impossible structures of glass and stone that seem almost organic. Here and there, the inhabited ruin is broken up by the grotesque and macabre art instillations of the Nightmare Man, sculpture and free-standing portrait both, treated as holy sites by the Courts' servants for their brief existence. The only unchanging places are the domains of the Court, if only for their convenience, with the Ghost Dancer eternally performing for her audience of corpses, Python cavorting with his serpentine assistants, and Morpheus' telepathic mind casting its gaze from his white stone tower, unmarred by window or door. Even that has an exception, as Mullonga's Bleak District moves through the city, assimilating other building into its rotted and menacing tenements and temples to fearsome beasts until she desires for it to move on, hunting those courageous, idiotic souls who would dare intrude on fear's capital. There is no rest here, no reprieve - there is only horror, and the hoard of psychic energy stolen from the rulers' victims. The only way the truly wise end up here is if they are taken, or the need for the Well at the center is truly desperate.
Well of Onerios
At the very heart of the City of Nod, and thus, the heart of the Nightmare Lands, lies a dome of perfect black marble. Within this marble lies two things. The first, and the most legendary by far, is the Well - the reservoir for the Court's collected psionic energy, a maelstorm of thought and magic capable of warping reality and to answer any question. It is also the way by which the Court finds its victims - the well is far deeper into the Mists than the actual bedrock of the domain itself, and spreads tributaries - roots, really - throughout the space between not just the domains, but the Region of Dreams in the Ethereal Plane of all worlds, even touching dreamers outside of Ravenloft. When especially vivid nightmares occur, this "Web of Dreams" trembles like silk threads, drawing the attention of the Court. If the dream they find seems viable for their techniques of mental torture, they draw it forth from the Well, forging a new Orb of Nod from it to trap the dreamer's mind in an endlessly repeating nightmare, to be ravaged for ever more psionic energy to fill the Well to drain for their dark purposes. And yet, the Abber regard it as sacred, a callback to the first dream from which the dreamscape that became all worlds in the multiverse - for the Well bucks against the Court, forming portals into its Web within the very dreamscapes the Orbs contain, whereupon a skilled dreamwalker can go anywhere in the universe (though the Dark Powers naturally prevent transit out of Ravenloft until they are already letting the dreamwalker go), and provide the prisoners of the Orbs the capacity to overcome their overseers - a dreamer who solves the root cause of their nightmare, within the dream or out of it, with help or without, is no longer a prisoner of the Court, their Orb shattering and releasing a flood of positive psionic energy that supplies the non-dream plant life of the domain with needed nutrients and providing for life the Court does not control.
Dinwiddy Holistic Treatment Center for the Insane
The other thing the dome contains is a squat, run-down building, almost insultingly mundane contrasting with the dark city outside, let alone the cauldron of psionic power it overlooks. The most obscure lore gathered by the Abber speaks of it - very quietly, lest the Nightmare Court overhear. They say it is a place that embodies the First Dreamer's own doubts in Their own imaginings, the belief that it did not make sense, becoming this echo of the utterly mundane - and horrific, for those few who have entered realize that it is a truly barbaric excuse for a mental hospital, having things that even Nova Vassans, obsessed with seeming sane and respectable, dispensed with as cruel long before Gregorian Illhousen ever entered medical school. But it is a banal horror, compared to the surreal nightmare outside, a place of all too mundane medical horrors - and quackery, as those who have read the books on "orthomolecular balance" and "orgonic radiation" can attest. They are almost right - it is not the testament to the First Dreamer's own moments of irrationality and internal failures, but of the First Nightmare Courtier - their mother and collective true self, dreaming in the cleanest cell that has been welded shut. This, not the Nightmare Man's Grieving Cathedral, is the palace of the ultimate ruler of the Terrain Between and all those dreamscapes they have conquered, for it is Caroline Dinwiddy's sham clinic and front for her attempt at transcendence. Now, it is her sanctuary from the monsters she does not want to admit to herself are born from her, the archons to her warped demiurge of nightmares, eternally dreaming of a world where she was successful and is now, through her proxy, god-queen of all thought - even as she whispers her orders to the Nightmare Court to gather ever more energy to get her transcendence right this time.
VIEW CONTENT:
Caroline Dinwiddy
One of the most powerful psychics to have ever been born on her world, and possibly one of the most powerful human ones in the multiverse, Caroline lived, for all intents and purposes, a charmed life in childhood - psychics were known and accepted on her homeworld, and she had about as normal a childhood as possible with someone who could pick up stray thoughts. In time, she was tutored by the Ulmist Inquisition, and quickly became an important Templar-General in their ranks - perhaps a bit too quickly. The sheer ease at which she had picked up psionic techniques, combined with her own meteoric rise, lead to a bit of an ego problem. It did not help that, to be frank, Caroline did not actually feel she chose this route for herself; she really wanted to be an artist, and to translate the wonderful images she saw in the dreams of others into physical mediums, but felt too pressured by her family and friends, not wanting to disappoint them. On some level, the ease at which she took to the Ulmist creed, reshaping the seeds of evil within the minds she detected, was due to the frustrated sculptor within her, making minds possess the beauty she was never allowed time to bring into reality.
In time, however, exposure to the darkest minds in the cosmos gradually nurtured a dark and growing cynicism within her. She started to view the sapient mind as a collection of potential flaws and regrets, with truly Good people only being that way due to raw luck of circumstances anything else. She believed in free will, of course - she had seen the mind was too unpredictable to be completely attributable to nature or nurture, or at least the factors were so obscure that if true choice was an illusion, it was a seamless one - but she increasingly found it was a minor-at-best contributor to whatever it was that made sapients good or evil. Systemic issues, family circumstances, history, culture... all seemed far more important than the ability to decide whether or not to do wicked things. There arose in her a sort of craving to be set against only those who were truly evil without explanation or understandable reasoning - too often, she found that at the core of, say, an orc warlord's brain lied a legitimate fear of starving and being remembered as a failure, a plague-spreading cultist driven by deep envy of the healthy who ignored her, and a selfless faith in the god who at least eased her pain and symptoms.
It was one of these, an entitled and ruthless god-king born of a hidden desert empire of inbred, imperialistic psionists that she discovered the knowledge that would provide the catalyst of her transformation from a cynical but dedicated Inquisitor into a greedy, mind-eating deceiver, and from there a broken goddess. The king planned to use the secret technology and dark wonders protected by a secret order of scholars to transform himself into what would be essentially an entity of pure thought, able to insert himself into the thoughts of his world's entire Humanoid population, and from there, become its ruler by inserting love for him and his kingdom above all else. This was derailed long before he even attained enough materials to begin the plan, but from how he had begun expansion and the order's own lore, it was disturbingly, tantalizingly possible. Quietly, Caroline began to wonder if the project couldn't be done on a cosmic scale - not just for the population of a single world, but to insert a single thought - that one's circumstances were not all they were - into every sapient mind in the universe. After she quietly stole some of the items the god-king desired for his ascension herself - in particular, a hive of eusocial spiders able to spin pocket worlds around vividly dreaming minds, and a great glass and stone orb used by an unknown civilization for creating artificial worlds - her plan gradually became more and more ambitious. Why stop at inserting thoughts, when one could remove them as well? So, so much evil was born from ultimately simplistic, base desires - if sapience simply thought of itself less, that it was not inherently good because its opinion was its own, so much of the motive for continuing evil would go away.
But to accomplish anything resembling that, one needed a massive amount of psychic and magical energy, and a vast network to reach everywhere in the Deep Ethereal, where all dreams lie. Hence, her own two innovations on the material she stole; a collector for the mental energy she harvested, and a farm to harvest the energy released by those in extreme emotional states.
Nobody questioned why, as she was nearing the age of retirement, that the admired Templar-General would put her considerable resources and efforts to creating a mental hospital; she had certainly seen enough mental malfunction in her day, creating a place where it could be managed (and, to the more myopic and selfish, locked away from respectable society) seemed entirely logical. Nor did the new staff question why she only chose Ulmists she trusted as doctors, instead of actual alienists. She chose her unwitting conspirators in her plan too well - people disgusted with the mentally ill and wished them sealed away and hidden, not truly treated. And certainly no client questioned it being a place for "alternative psychiatry"; after all, the great Inquisitor Caroline Dinwiddy believed in them, there must be something, so surely her techniques learned from the Abber people looked down on by all more developed cultures were well-considered.. In truth, she very much did not respect, or believe in, a single method she hawked; it was always a cover for her cabal's true purpose, to send their patients into ever-heightened emotional states to serve as both testing ground for new psionic techniques and to harvest the energy released from the most easily provoked emotions - fear and sorrow. The Dinwiddy Asylum was nothing of the sort, but the core of a vast network to reap nightmares from across the planes, and a laboratory for the refinement of techniques to grow them. There were Abber techniques among the pure woo, mind, learned from a "civilized" member of their society - in reality, a medicine woman banished from her tribe for her willingness to harvest the dreams of her peers for arcane materials, the one non-Ulmist member.
Even as the Asylum became a private hell, its queen remained pure, however - the great evolution of the multiverse would require a perfectly pure and good thought to be modeled on, and Caroline chose herself as the crucible of this new god-mind. To that end, she isolated the parts of her brain fully aware of the (to her) necessary sacrifices she was making, creating a persona that would become a kind, just and perfect arbiter of all minds, while the rest of her brain was compartmentalized in her dreams, protecting her idealism from being corrupted by her scheming - the Anima. In time, more and more of her understanding of the horrors she performed were dumped in her subconscious, gradually merging with her own repressed desires to form a new mind entirely - a drifting, id-driven ego resembling a truly horrific version of the artists she had admired in her youth, a cloaked man with skeletal hands who was obsessed with indulging the creative and hedonistic passions of her youth by possessing the bodies of others to make images from the nightmares she harvested. Because this intellect - her Animus, as she called it - shared the memories of joy and satisfaction he (the mind did not share her gender identity for reasons neither care enough to speculate on) he had from an act of creation with her, she indulged his appetites, simply directing him to make his art as disturbing and intrusive as possible to inspire more nightmares across the cosmos, increasing the yield for the newly dug Well of Oneiros.
Eventually, the Well was filled, and she dropped the mystical shroud she was using to hide the forming Well from the world as a necessity for Dinwiddy's best self to becoming one with all thought. Instantly, the Ulmist Inquisition and Abber tribespeople reporting increasingly terrible nightmares of a dark man with a cloak of spiders realized what she had done, and what she was planning, but any attempt to stop her was delayed - the psychic maelstrom within the Well provided far more than fuel, conjuring an army of nightmare-born beasts to protect it, as her agents among her fellows sabotaged any attempt for a response. To make a long story short, the delay worked - as the final module of the first Orb of Nod, the one meant to serve as a chrysalis for the Anima to transform from mere mental construct into god-mind, the Inquisitor-Templar fertilized it with her brightest self to the cheers of her secret cabal, eyes already bright with joy of beholding the dream of a perfect multiverse - her dream.
By all means, the Orb worked perfectly; if the Anima had not truly been made to be kind and just, what her mother-self truly thought was her best qualities, all the planes might be ruled by a cosmic, psychic god-empress. But as the Anima separated from Caroline, and truly looked upon her maker and her conspirators for the first time - and the dark Animus that was her father-self - she screamed in horror and fled into the Well from the horrid, twisted thoughts that surrounded her, a scream that utterly destroyed the mental barriers that psychics rely on to retain their selfhood. The cabal and the staff won over to the Templar-General's side was killed instantly from the shock, everything they were flowing into Dinwiddy's mind as fog erupted from the Well, covering the Asylum utterly and all inside - including the forces of the federation of five Abber tribes who were still trapped in its grounds. When it cleared, where there was once a city, there was a shifting ruin - and a great island rich in the awful wonders of rampant magic, which the patients, staff and the Abber soon fled into, away from the already echoing, alien city. And in time, the Animus remembered what part of the gestalt mind that existed in the comatose wreck of Caroline Dinwiddy were him, and which parts were the more important members of her cabal, rebuilding himself and sculpting new egos out of the wreck of the cabal's memories and Dinwiddy's own darkest desires and anxieties. From there, the Nightmare Court ventured out into their fearful kingdom, already plotting how they would try to ascend again - properly.
Roleplaying
While what is left of the original Caroline Dinwiddy isn't truly aware of herself - she is an urge and a voice giving orders to the Nightmare Court in their back of their minds, her dreaming mind orchestrating plan after plan to reconstruct herself and tame the resentful Well of Oneiros, given consciousness by the Anima. But players may encounter echoes of her at various points of her life when the Court focuses her enough to serve as a way to force the rest into coordination. No matter what form she takes, she has bright red hair and the same personality, though what is most prominent depends on her life stage - the Child is the embodiment of her Ideal, the Crusader her Bond, the General her Trait, and the Professor her Flaw (not coincidentally, these are her youth, early career as an Inquisitor, her later and jaded career, and after she came up with her idea, respectively). In all forms, she uses similar statistics to an Ulmist inquisitor (what type varies on manifestation), though hypothetically if she awoke she could be similar to a star spawn emissary, with her acid attacks instead doing radiant damage, with appropriate refluffing.
Personality Trait: "I do what I must to ensure utopia and the end of injustice for all of the cosmos. Anyone in my way is ignorant and can be won over, an enemy to be crushed mercilessly, or incidental and to be monitored until they become a threat."
Ideal: "I know what is best for the multiverse, even if I am personally too jaded to be a good ruler - I am perfect for selecting and shaping whoever is, though."
Bond: "The Nightmare Court disgusts me, but they are what is left of my friends and creative impulse. I will guide them and their targets into good action, with brutality if necessary."
Flaw: "I do not think of myself as the hard woman who makes hard decisions - I know I am, and it fills me with pride to look upon my darker actions, knowing they are steps to utopia. Those who would disagree with them are fooling themselves."
The Nightmare Court
There is something of a lie in the Court. Namely, that they are an organization, and not the extensions of a fundamentally broken and mutated mind, born from the decayed remnants of others so deeply intwined with Caroline's own desires and id they are more the dissociative identities of one person than truly separate individuals. On the other hand, that person is less of a single mind now and more of a sea of various urges and wants, so their egos are separate enough to recognize which member of the Dinwiddy Cabal contributed the most to their current existence. While they all believe in the ultimate goal of ascension, this time supplying themselves as a new pantheon given how Anima proved she could not be trusted (in their myopic view), they are ultimately creatures of the id and are frequently distracted with harvesting nightmares for the sake of gorging themselves on the excess psionic energy rather than any greater plan; it is because of this that their ability to influence dreamers, and thus, blunt the impact of their dreamshaping, is not as advanced or wide-reaching as it could be. While each member has a referenced stat, keep in mind that they are even more willing and able to cheat than most darklords; these are simply their general forms, if given time to prepare at all they will shape more terrifying battle forms around themselves.
The Ghost Dancer: Leonora Smith was in many ways the idealistic heart of the Dinwiddy Cabal, serving as both counselor and ambassador for the rest, using her civilian job as a theater critic to excuse her frequent traveling to deliver messages to and from both distant members of the larger network and unknowing assistants. She truly believed in the mission for its own sake, which is why her last thought before complete ego dissolution was absolute confusion and a sense of betrayal that the Anima rejected them. The Courtier born of her memories is the representative of Caroline's suppressed regret and imagining of herself if she had chosen to follow her heart, taking the form of a spectral ballerina with bruises on her neck. She generally manifests as a ghost, and favors nightmares of guilt, befitting her nature and what's left of Leonora trying to understand what was part of her that caused the Anima to reject her so violently.
Hypnos: Baron Riccardo d'Augustin was only an artificial psychic, and then most of his powers were based around simple mesmerism rather than mind control. He was still allowed to join the Inquisition, and later the Cabal, as he was also incredibly wealthy and owned a multiplanar manufacturing and shipping business through his family's portal-rich land. To be honest, very few of the Cabal actually liked him, and he was less popular among the Ulmists as a whole - he certainly funded the proper businesses, but everyone could see the barely controlled greed that was at his core, and he mostly (by his own admittance) joined the Cabal because a truly peaceful world would be one that would involve both newly safe trade routes, and a lot of bandits and monsters trying to be accepted into normal society - an endless and highly talented pool of workers to expand his wealth with. The Nightmare Courtier born from his fragmented self embodied Caroline's own frustrations with having to rely upon his resources, and his own ability to talk the polish off armor even before he needed to resort to hypnosis. He appears as a mage eternally sleeping inside a glass coffin, but one eye is always open and alert, and he has the ability to cast suggestion on anyone he contacts telepathically three times per day, feeding on dreams of inadequacy and inferiority. These suggestions last into the waking world, making him one of the primary influencers of people outside the Terrain Between when the Court wishes to do something in the waking world.
Morpheus: The brilliant and amoral gnome Dr. Suzuki Aoi was the Cabal's engineer and head researcher, the one most familiar with the technology the Orbs and Well were based on - some say they were actually a member of the scholars that once guarded it, but Caroline won them over with her charisma and turned them into her accomplice in thieving it. Just as interested in seeing the overall effects of the fully active Anima on the world as they were in safeguarding the multiverse, they always seemed something of an eccentric oddball to the Cabal, and this has translated to their reborn form, a force of chaos and change who both maintains the constant flow of energy to the Well, and ensures that the Terrain Between is never predictable. Use the stats of an incubus/succubus for the very rare occasions they haven't modified their true form (likely brief boredom with inconsistency), and they feed on alienation, especially those produced by loss of personal control, or disgust for elements of the self their victims cannot change.
Mullonga: Nobody except their leader was quite sure why the banished Abber medicine woman Yodagent ever agreed to be part of a Cabal to eradicate exactly the kind of pride and callousness that led to the elf abusing her skill with dreamwalking to steal memories from her people for use in her magic. In truth, the witch was almost as self-righteous as Caroline herself, and found a kinship in the Templar-General's dreams; her theft was always with the motive of believing it was necessary for her people's own good, or the development of magic. While Caroline knew this, she never quite got over her apprehension of the unsettling, dark-humored sorceress, and that fear translated into her form as a Courtier. While Mullonga can be forced into her base form of a green hag through overcoming her dreamweaving, she far prefers forms that, while clearly medicine women, are keyed to her victims' most traumatic memories, as she feeds upon acute fear, especially phobias.
The Nightmare Man: The Animus, the oldest and strongest of the Courtiers, feels the darklords' chains even more acutely than the rest do. Unlike the rest, he was allowed to develop into a fully independent psyche in dreams that were not always nightmares, and so he is most acutely aware of his limitations. While he was always morbid and dark, he did have a genuine appreciation for beauty and uplifting dreams, and the fact that the Web of Dreams only catches dark dreams now prevents him from the simple pleasure of observing happy scenes. Worse, the Dark Powers have given him a combination of perpetual artist's block, and poor fine control over the reality of the Nightmare Lands; he cannot paint, sculpt, or write anything except a straight image or description of the images he sees in dreams, forcing him into betraying what few morals he has to create anything, and his creations never last for more than a fortnight; paint is transmuted to image-destroying blood, stone sculptures rot, and letters on a page get up and walk off, no matter how much he tries to force them to remain the same. He channels his frustrations into the one creation he can pull off, the construction of schemes, and even that is often vexing due to how impulsive his fellow Courtiers are and the unpredictability of both dreamborn and victims. His base form is that of an archmage, usually guarded by various arachnid monsters he creates from the members of the dreamweaver spider hive in his robes, and he feeds on any negative emotion in general - because of this, he prefers to commandeer the dreamscapes of the other Nightmare Court if the breakdown of particularly advanced victims so he can copy particularly bizarre or striking imagery for his hobbies. The fact that this upsets the other Courtiers, who he deeply resents as bad copies of his creator's allies and proofs of his own failures as a crafter, is a distinct bonus for him.
Python: Say what you will about Caroline, she was certainly very charismatic and persuasive - she convinced a celestial to fall. Of course, the coatl Kasakir was already turning rather dark inside, having long lost faith in the virtue of Humanoids as a concept, and developed a manipulative, cold side that desired to manipulate others into his own idea of harmony; she just gave him a reason to become the deceiver he was developing into without regrets. The effective head of recruitment for the Dinwiddy Cabal, the remains of the angelic snake's mind crystalized more around his own desires than Caroline's opinions of him, in particular his suppressed guilt. Now his dream persona absolutely no prohibition against lying, and in fact his cunning might be a bit too excessive for his own good, as too often he ends up taking five or six steps to manipulate others into his own plots rather than one to accomplish his goal himself. He manifests as a bat-winged coatl with an alignment of lawful evil and the ability to lie, but if he has his way, his victims will not notice him in the dreamscape at all, let alone as an intruder. He feeds on dreams of paranoia and suspicion, and is well-known for his favorite trick, to produce a dream of waking up to find the proof of the betrayal he outlines, gaslighting his victims into taking rough justice for things that never happened. He sometimes pretends to be the Rainbow Serpent, a powerful and benevolent spirit of rain and good dreams in the mythology of some Abber tribes to win over some of them as the Nightmare Court's conspirators and cultists, a fact they are aware of (but of course, some are greedy or desperate enough to fall for it).
Caroline and the Court's Torments:
In a sense, Caroline Dinwiddy is a sleeping psychic goddess - more than that, she is a pantheon, the chaos of her mind having crystalized into at least six other darklords (other members of the Nightmare Court at left to the DM's prerogative). This does not reduce her, or their, torment in the slightest, because they are all fully aware of their raw power - and their utter helplessness to overcome their greatest miseries with it.
* Caroline and all of her pieces are fully aware of the nature as a demiplane as a prison, and the Web extends outside of it. However, they can only enter the dreamscapes caught inside the Orbs of Nod, meaning all they know of the multiverse outside is a warped mirror reflecting its worst aspects, in full knowledge it is not completely true, forcing them to understand how limited they truly are.
* The Nightmare Court has incredible ability to influence the actions of those in the Orbs through use of their nightmares pressuring them, but even Hypnos' suggestions can not completely control their actions, and they may always escape.
* While all of the Courtiers still believe in the plan to curate all thought, they are so wrapped up in Caroline's id that the only one with the capacity to delay gratification for any longer than a couple nights is the Nightmare Man, making it so they have to rely on waking cultists and more sentient dreamborn to actually keep them on track, further confirming their ultimate limitations.
* The Anima did not completely disappear; she became one with the Well of Oneiros, and while it is not truly intelligent, it has an awareness that despises the Nightmare Court and seeks to undermine them - it does not plan, but it whispers instructions and lore into the minds of Abber and Alienated would-be dreamwalkers, and ensures that they always find the Terrain Between livable. In addition, it whispers subconscious information into those around the Court's prisoners in other domains, giving potential enemies a chance to realize that they are real entities no matter how much information they suppress.
* Caroline Dinwiddy herself is comatose, hiding in a dream where she succeeded, and the multiverse has been remade in her image, but her own mind keeps detecting flaws in the fantasy and leaves her partly aware it is all a fake world. Repairing her mind until she is conscious will require mending a mind that is unlike any other in the Multiverse, more akin to an illithid elder brain with human emotions than a human psychic; the core mind, the one that would allow the Nightmare Court to focus and truly restart the Cabal's plan, is not only sealed in her own useless body, but what direction she does give is confused and warped by not being able to truly observe the waking world.
One of the most powerful psychics to have ever been born on her world, and possibly one of the most powerful human ones in the multiverse, Caroline lived, for all intents and purposes, a charmed life in childhood - psychics were known and accepted on her homeworld, and she had about as normal a childhood as possible with someone who could pick up stray thoughts. In time, she was tutored by the Ulmist Inquisition, and quickly became an important Templar-General in their ranks - perhaps a bit too quickly. The sheer ease at which she had picked up psionic techniques, combined with her own meteoric rise, lead to a bit of an ego problem. It did not help that, to be frank, Caroline did not actually feel she chose this route for herself; she really wanted to be an artist, and to translate the wonderful images she saw in the dreams of others into physical mediums, but felt too pressured by her family and friends, not wanting to disappoint them. On some level, the ease at which she took to the Ulmist creed, reshaping the seeds of evil within the minds she detected, was due to the frustrated sculptor within her, making minds possess the beauty she was never allowed time to bring into reality.
In time, however, exposure to the darkest minds in the cosmos gradually nurtured a dark and growing cynicism within her. She started to view the sapient mind as a collection of potential flaws and regrets, with truly Good people only being that way due to raw luck of circumstances anything else. She believed in free will, of course - she had seen the mind was too unpredictable to be completely attributable to nature or nurture, or at least the factors were so obscure that if true choice was an illusion, it was a seamless one - but she increasingly found it was a minor-at-best contributor to whatever it was that made sapients good or evil. Systemic issues, family circumstances, history, culture... all seemed far more important than the ability to decide whether or not to do wicked things. There arose in her a sort of craving to be set against only those who were truly evil without explanation or understandable reasoning - too often, she found that at the core of, say, an orc warlord's brain lied a legitimate fear of starving and being remembered as a failure, a plague-spreading cultist driven by deep envy of the healthy who ignored her, and a selfless faith in the god who at least eased her pain and symptoms.
It was one of these, an entitled and ruthless god-king born of a hidden desert empire of inbred, imperialistic psionists that she discovered the knowledge that would provide the catalyst of her transformation from a cynical but dedicated Inquisitor into a greedy, mind-eating deceiver, and from there a broken goddess. The king planned to use the secret technology and dark wonders protected by a secret order of scholars to transform himself into what would be essentially an entity of pure thought, able to insert himself into the thoughts of his world's entire Humanoid population, and from there, become its ruler by inserting love for him and his kingdom above all else. This was derailed long before he even attained enough materials to begin the plan, but from how he had begun expansion and the order's own lore, it was disturbingly, tantalizingly possible. Quietly, Caroline began to wonder if the project couldn't be done on a cosmic scale - not just for the population of a single world, but to insert a single thought - that one's circumstances were not all they were - into every sapient mind in the universe. After she quietly stole some of the items the god-king desired for his ascension herself - in particular, a hive of eusocial spiders able to spin pocket worlds around vividly dreaming minds, and a great glass and stone orb used by an unknown civilization for creating artificial worlds - her plan gradually became more and more ambitious. Why stop at inserting thoughts, when one could remove them as well? So, so much evil was born from ultimately simplistic, base desires - if sapience simply thought of itself less, that it was not inherently good because its opinion was its own, so much of the motive for continuing evil would go away.
But to accomplish anything resembling that, one needed a massive amount of psychic and magical energy, and a vast network to reach everywhere in the Deep Ethereal, where all dreams lie. Hence, her own two innovations on the material she stole; a collector for the mental energy she harvested, and a farm to harvest the energy released by those in extreme emotional states.
Nobody questioned why, as she was nearing the age of retirement, that the admired Templar-General would put her considerable resources and efforts to creating a mental hospital; she had certainly seen enough mental malfunction in her day, creating a place where it could be managed (and, to the more myopic and selfish, locked away from respectable society) seemed entirely logical. Nor did the new staff question why she only chose Ulmists she trusted as doctors, instead of actual alienists. She chose her unwitting conspirators in her plan too well - people disgusted with the mentally ill and wished them sealed away and hidden, not truly treated. And certainly no client questioned it being a place for "alternative psychiatry"; after all, the great Inquisitor Caroline Dinwiddy believed in them, there must be something, so surely her techniques learned from the Abber people looked down on by all more developed cultures were well-considered.. In truth, she very much did not respect, or believe in, a single method she hawked; it was always a cover for her cabal's true purpose, to send their patients into ever-heightened emotional states to serve as both testing ground for new psionic techniques and to harvest the energy released from the most easily provoked emotions - fear and sorrow. The Dinwiddy Asylum was nothing of the sort, but the core of a vast network to reap nightmares from across the planes, and a laboratory for the refinement of techniques to grow them. There were Abber techniques among the pure woo, mind, learned from a "civilized" member of their society - in reality, a medicine woman banished from her tribe for her willingness to harvest the dreams of her peers for arcane materials, the one non-Ulmist member.
Even as the Asylum became a private hell, its queen remained pure, however - the great evolution of the multiverse would require a perfectly pure and good thought to be modeled on, and Caroline chose herself as the crucible of this new god-mind. To that end, she isolated the parts of her brain fully aware of the (to her) necessary sacrifices she was making, creating a persona that would become a kind, just and perfect arbiter of all minds, while the rest of her brain was compartmentalized in her dreams, protecting her idealism from being corrupted by her scheming - the Anima. In time, more and more of her understanding of the horrors she performed were dumped in her subconscious, gradually merging with her own repressed desires to form a new mind entirely - a drifting, id-driven ego resembling a truly horrific version of the artists she had admired in her youth, a cloaked man with skeletal hands who was obsessed with indulging the creative and hedonistic passions of her youth by possessing the bodies of others to make images from the nightmares she harvested. Because this intellect - her Animus, as she called it - shared the memories of joy and satisfaction he (the mind did not share her gender identity for reasons neither care enough to speculate on) he had from an act of creation with her, she indulged his appetites, simply directing him to make his art as disturbing and intrusive as possible to inspire more nightmares across the cosmos, increasing the yield for the newly dug Well of Oneiros.
Eventually, the Well was filled, and she dropped the mystical shroud she was using to hide the forming Well from the world as a necessity for Dinwiddy's best self to becoming one with all thought. Instantly, the Ulmist Inquisition and Abber tribespeople reporting increasingly terrible nightmares of a dark man with a cloak of spiders realized what she had done, and what she was planning, but any attempt to stop her was delayed - the psychic maelstrom within the Well provided far more than fuel, conjuring an army of nightmare-born beasts to protect it, as her agents among her fellows sabotaged any attempt for a response. To make a long story short, the delay worked - as the final module of the first Orb of Nod, the one meant to serve as a chrysalis for the Anima to transform from mere mental construct into god-mind, the Inquisitor-Templar fertilized it with her brightest self to the cheers of her secret cabal, eyes already bright with joy of beholding the dream of a perfect multiverse - her dream.
By all means, the Orb worked perfectly; if the Anima had not truly been made to be kind and just, what her mother-self truly thought was her best qualities, all the planes might be ruled by a cosmic, psychic god-empress. But as the Anima separated from Caroline, and truly looked upon her maker and her conspirators for the first time - and the dark Animus that was her father-self - she screamed in horror and fled into the Well from the horrid, twisted thoughts that surrounded her, a scream that utterly destroyed the mental barriers that psychics rely on to retain their selfhood. The cabal and the staff won over to the Templar-General's side was killed instantly from the shock, everything they were flowing into Dinwiddy's mind as fog erupted from the Well, covering the Asylum utterly and all inside - including the forces of the federation of five Abber tribes who were still trapped in its grounds. When it cleared, where there was once a city, there was a shifting ruin - and a great island rich in the awful wonders of rampant magic, which the patients, staff and the Abber soon fled into, away from the already echoing, alien city. And in time, the Animus remembered what part of the gestalt mind that existed in the comatose wreck of Caroline Dinwiddy were him, and which parts were the more important members of her cabal, rebuilding himself and sculpting new egos out of the wreck of the cabal's memories and Dinwiddy's own darkest desires and anxieties. From there, the Nightmare Court ventured out into their fearful kingdom, already plotting how they would try to ascend again - properly.
Roleplaying
While what is left of the original Caroline Dinwiddy isn't truly aware of herself - she is an urge and a voice giving orders to the Nightmare Court in their back of their minds, her dreaming mind orchestrating plan after plan to reconstruct herself and tame the resentful Well of Oneiros, given consciousness by the Anima. But players may encounter echoes of her at various points of her life when the Court focuses her enough to serve as a way to force the rest into coordination. No matter what form she takes, she has bright red hair and the same personality, though what is most prominent depends on her life stage - the Child is the embodiment of her Ideal, the Crusader her Bond, the General her Trait, and the Professor her Flaw (not coincidentally, these are her youth, early career as an Inquisitor, her later and jaded career, and after she came up with her idea, respectively). In all forms, she uses similar statistics to an Ulmist inquisitor (what type varies on manifestation), though hypothetically if she awoke she could be similar to a star spawn emissary, with her acid attacks instead doing radiant damage, with appropriate refluffing.
Personality Trait: "I do what I must to ensure utopia and the end of injustice for all of the cosmos. Anyone in my way is ignorant and can be won over, an enemy to be crushed mercilessly, or incidental and to be monitored until they become a threat."
Ideal: "I know what is best for the multiverse, even if I am personally too jaded to be a good ruler - I am perfect for selecting and shaping whoever is, though."
Bond: "The Nightmare Court disgusts me, but they are what is left of my friends and creative impulse. I will guide them and their targets into good action, with brutality if necessary."
Flaw: "I do not think of myself as the hard woman who makes hard decisions - I know I am, and it fills me with pride to look upon my darker actions, knowing they are steps to utopia. Those who would disagree with them are fooling themselves."
The Nightmare Court
There is something of a lie in the Court. Namely, that they are an organization, and not the extensions of a fundamentally broken and mutated mind, born from the decayed remnants of others so deeply intwined with Caroline's own desires and id they are more the dissociative identities of one person than truly separate individuals. On the other hand, that person is less of a single mind now and more of a sea of various urges and wants, so their egos are separate enough to recognize which member of the Dinwiddy Cabal contributed the most to their current existence. While they all believe in the ultimate goal of ascension, this time supplying themselves as a new pantheon given how Anima proved she could not be trusted (in their myopic view), they are ultimately creatures of the id and are frequently distracted with harvesting nightmares for the sake of gorging themselves on the excess psionic energy rather than any greater plan; it is because of this that their ability to influence dreamers, and thus, blunt the impact of their dreamshaping, is not as advanced or wide-reaching as it could be. While each member has a referenced stat, keep in mind that they are even more willing and able to cheat than most darklords; these are simply their general forms, if given time to prepare at all they will shape more terrifying battle forms around themselves.
The Ghost Dancer: Leonora Smith was in many ways the idealistic heart of the Dinwiddy Cabal, serving as both counselor and ambassador for the rest, using her civilian job as a theater critic to excuse her frequent traveling to deliver messages to and from both distant members of the larger network and unknowing assistants. She truly believed in the mission for its own sake, which is why her last thought before complete ego dissolution was absolute confusion and a sense of betrayal that the Anima rejected them. The Courtier born of her memories is the representative of Caroline's suppressed regret and imagining of herself if she had chosen to follow her heart, taking the form of a spectral ballerina with bruises on her neck. She generally manifests as a ghost, and favors nightmares of guilt, befitting her nature and what's left of Leonora trying to understand what was part of her that caused the Anima to reject her so violently.
Hypnos: Baron Riccardo d'Augustin was only an artificial psychic, and then most of his powers were based around simple mesmerism rather than mind control. He was still allowed to join the Inquisition, and later the Cabal, as he was also incredibly wealthy and owned a multiplanar manufacturing and shipping business through his family's portal-rich land. To be honest, very few of the Cabal actually liked him, and he was less popular among the Ulmists as a whole - he certainly funded the proper businesses, but everyone could see the barely controlled greed that was at his core, and he mostly (by his own admittance) joined the Cabal because a truly peaceful world would be one that would involve both newly safe trade routes, and a lot of bandits and monsters trying to be accepted into normal society - an endless and highly talented pool of workers to expand his wealth with. The Nightmare Courtier born from his fragmented self embodied Caroline's own frustrations with having to rely upon his resources, and his own ability to talk the polish off armor even before he needed to resort to hypnosis. He appears as a mage eternally sleeping inside a glass coffin, but one eye is always open and alert, and he has the ability to cast suggestion on anyone he contacts telepathically three times per day, feeding on dreams of inadequacy and inferiority. These suggestions last into the waking world, making him one of the primary influencers of people outside the Terrain Between when the Court wishes to do something in the waking world.
Morpheus: The brilliant and amoral gnome Dr. Suzuki Aoi was the Cabal's engineer and head researcher, the one most familiar with the technology the Orbs and Well were based on - some say they were actually a member of the scholars that once guarded it, but Caroline won them over with her charisma and turned them into her accomplice in thieving it. Just as interested in seeing the overall effects of the fully active Anima on the world as they were in safeguarding the multiverse, they always seemed something of an eccentric oddball to the Cabal, and this has translated to their reborn form, a force of chaos and change who both maintains the constant flow of energy to the Well, and ensures that the Terrain Between is never predictable. Use the stats of an incubus/succubus for the very rare occasions they haven't modified their true form (likely brief boredom with inconsistency), and they feed on alienation, especially those produced by loss of personal control, or disgust for elements of the self their victims cannot change.
Mullonga: Nobody except their leader was quite sure why the banished Abber medicine woman Yodagent ever agreed to be part of a Cabal to eradicate exactly the kind of pride and callousness that led to the elf abusing her skill with dreamwalking to steal memories from her people for use in her magic. In truth, the witch was almost as self-righteous as Caroline herself, and found a kinship in the Templar-General's dreams; her theft was always with the motive of believing it was necessary for her people's own good, or the development of magic. While Caroline knew this, she never quite got over her apprehension of the unsettling, dark-humored sorceress, and that fear translated into her form as a Courtier. While Mullonga can be forced into her base form of a green hag through overcoming her dreamweaving, she far prefers forms that, while clearly medicine women, are keyed to her victims' most traumatic memories, as she feeds upon acute fear, especially phobias.
The Nightmare Man: The Animus, the oldest and strongest of the Courtiers, feels the darklords' chains even more acutely than the rest do. Unlike the rest, he was allowed to develop into a fully independent psyche in dreams that were not always nightmares, and so he is most acutely aware of his limitations. While he was always morbid and dark, he did have a genuine appreciation for beauty and uplifting dreams, and the fact that the Web of Dreams only catches dark dreams now prevents him from the simple pleasure of observing happy scenes. Worse, the Dark Powers have given him a combination of perpetual artist's block, and poor fine control over the reality of the Nightmare Lands; he cannot paint, sculpt, or write anything except a straight image or description of the images he sees in dreams, forcing him into betraying what few morals he has to create anything, and his creations never last for more than a fortnight; paint is transmuted to image-destroying blood, stone sculptures rot, and letters on a page get up and walk off, no matter how much he tries to force them to remain the same. He channels his frustrations into the one creation he can pull off, the construction of schemes, and even that is often vexing due to how impulsive his fellow Courtiers are and the unpredictability of both dreamborn and victims. His base form is that of an archmage, usually guarded by various arachnid monsters he creates from the members of the dreamweaver spider hive in his robes, and he feeds on any negative emotion in general - because of this, he prefers to commandeer the dreamscapes of the other Nightmare Court if the breakdown of particularly advanced victims so he can copy particularly bizarre or striking imagery for his hobbies. The fact that this upsets the other Courtiers, who he deeply resents as bad copies of his creator's allies and proofs of his own failures as a crafter, is a distinct bonus for him.
Python: Say what you will about Caroline, she was certainly very charismatic and persuasive - she convinced a celestial to fall. Of course, the coatl Kasakir was already turning rather dark inside, having long lost faith in the virtue of Humanoids as a concept, and developed a manipulative, cold side that desired to manipulate others into his own idea of harmony; she just gave him a reason to become the deceiver he was developing into without regrets. The effective head of recruitment for the Dinwiddy Cabal, the remains of the angelic snake's mind crystalized more around his own desires than Caroline's opinions of him, in particular his suppressed guilt. Now his dream persona absolutely no prohibition against lying, and in fact his cunning might be a bit too excessive for his own good, as too often he ends up taking five or six steps to manipulate others into his own plots rather than one to accomplish his goal himself. He manifests as a bat-winged coatl with an alignment of lawful evil and the ability to lie, but if he has his way, his victims will not notice him in the dreamscape at all, let alone as an intruder. He feeds on dreams of paranoia and suspicion, and is well-known for his favorite trick, to produce a dream of waking up to find the proof of the betrayal he outlines, gaslighting his victims into taking rough justice for things that never happened. He sometimes pretends to be the Rainbow Serpent, a powerful and benevolent spirit of rain and good dreams in the mythology of some Abber tribes to win over some of them as the Nightmare Court's conspirators and cultists, a fact they are aware of (but of course, some are greedy or desperate enough to fall for it).
Caroline and the Court's Torments:
In a sense, Caroline Dinwiddy is a sleeping psychic goddess - more than that, she is a pantheon, the chaos of her mind having crystalized into at least six other darklords (other members of the Nightmare Court at left to the DM's prerogative). This does not reduce her, or their, torment in the slightest, because they are all fully aware of their raw power - and their utter helplessness to overcome their greatest miseries with it.
* Caroline and all of her pieces are fully aware of the nature as a demiplane as a prison, and the Web extends outside of it. However, they can only enter the dreamscapes caught inside the Orbs of Nod, meaning all they know of the multiverse outside is a warped mirror reflecting its worst aspects, in full knowledge it is not completely true, forcing them to understand how limited they truly are.
* The Nightmare Court has incredible ability to influence the actions of those in the Orbs through use of their nightmares pressuring them, but even Hypnos' suggestions can not completely control their actions, and they may always escape.
* While all of the Courtiers still believe in the plan to curate all thought, they are so wrapped up in Caroline's id that the only one with the capacity to delay gratification for any longer than a couple nights is the Nightmare Man, making it so they have to rely on waking cultists and more sentient dreamborn to actually keep them on track, further confirming their ultimate limitations.
* The Anima did not completely disappear; she became one with the Well of Oneiros, and while it is not truly intelligent, it has an awareness that despises the Nightmare Court and seeks to undermine them - it does not plan, but it whispers instructions and lore into the minds of Abber and Alienated would-be dreamwalkers, and ensures that they always find the Terrain Between livable. In addition, it whispers subconscious information into those around the Court's prisoners in other domains, giving potential enemies a chance to realize that they are real entities no matter how much information they suppress.
* Caroline Dinwiddy herself is comatose, hiding in a dream where she succeeded, and the multiverse has been remade in her image, but her own mind keeps detecting flaws in the fantasy and leaves her partly aware it is all a fake world. Repairing her mind until she is conscious will require mending a mind that is unlike any other in the Multiverse, more akin to an illithid elder brain with human emotions than a human psychic; the core mind, the one that would allow the Nightmare Court to focus and truly restart the Cabal's plan, is not only sealed in her own useless body, but what direction she does give is confused and warped by not being able to truly observe the waking world.
