Inspirations for Greentown: Legend Fantasy Roleplaying

I've taken up my pen again to begin writing two books to follow up from The Blood Path, my Legend orcish adventure which approaches completion as I speak.

The common setting for these books is Greentown and the local region. There is a map of Greentown already available in the preview - however, I am going to put it here as well.

And then I thought that I could look for pictures of old urban sprawls, something to remind me of the decaying splendour of a town like Greentown. So I cast about for some pictures of urban street views, and came up with these ...

Real back streets from real, modern cities can often provide inspirations for fantasy settings better than any original fantasy art. After all, once you've drawn one mock Tudoresque mansion you've drawn them all; but there is a vast variety of back streets from a vast array of cities, some of which could date back centuries, and all of which have their own unique character.

I just hope that Greentown will prove to be as memorable, and as loved, a place as any setting for your Legend fantasy roleplaying games, for just this reason.

Temple Dream from 2010 12 19

This is one of my favourite dreams - the Temple Dream from 2010 12 19.

I have a Temple in my dream. An altar, a Chaosphere suspended over it, plain floors, walls and ceiling. The top of the walls has a long grille completely surrounding the Temple: behind this grille is a long observation gallery for Acolytes, accessible via stairs to the first floor outside the main Temple building. Just behind the altar is a shelf where I place my tools - wand, athame, pentacle, chalice and so on. One of the tools is a long Chaos staff topped with a small Chaosphere.

My dream began with word that a student from some nearby White Light Christian community had been brought to the Temple, and had been laid out before the altar, bound, gagged and hooded. Out of curiosity I went down to the Temple where, indeed, the woman was lying at the foot of the altar exactly where the Acolytes said she was. She was dressed in some kind of white blouse and trousers; she was barefoot.

I knelt and removed her hood. She had shoulder length straight blonde hair, blue eyes and this look of absolute fear and hostility. I greeted her, welcomed her to the Temple and watched her begin to struggle against her bonds.

It turned out that she had been caught by the security patrols casing the Temple, possibly out of curiosity - certainly without official sanction from her people. She froze when I brought forth my little focus, Blacklight - a wand tipped with obsidian (I always use obsidian in workings, because for some reason I have the ability to handle it). I brought it up to her eyes, and Blacklight did its trick, sending her into a trance state.

I can do this naturally. Hypnotising people is so easy. So easy.

Next, I told her body to relax, and told her conscious mind to go to a safe, warm place where it would feel warm and safe and comfortable. That left her unconscious mind in charge, and I summoned it to the front.

"Unconscious, say hello." I've done this, too. Often, a healthy unconscious is as curious as I am and as willing to talk to someone who seems to want to listen to its needs.

I gave the unconscious a couple of helpful suggestions - when I tap her on the shoulder her conscious and unconscious minds swap places, her conscious goes to the safe, warm place and I talk directly to her unconscious mind again - and a couple of other suggestions which I thought would come in handy. Then I made one final suggestion.

"When I tap you on the shoulder, you will awake. Your bonds will have been loosed by your struggles. You will be free, and there will be absolutely nobody else in the Temple, so you can do as you will.'

After loosening her bonds, I tapped her on the shoulder and stepped back. The girl awoke, untied herself and got up. She looked around, seeing right through me as if I wasn't there. She glanced about her one last time.

Then a sly look came over her face. I watched as she began to remove her clothes, climbed onto the altar, took the staff, kissed the Chaosphere at the tip and, well. Don't know what happened next, because the damned alarm woke me.

But by the look on her face, she seemed really into it for a White Lighter. I'd not placed any suggestions in her on how to behave - this was her, pure and simple.

I had her. I'd had her from the moment she'd allowed herself to be caught. She'd probably made a lot of noise just to draw the attention of my remarkably inattentive Acolytes.

I love my Temple dreams.

Related to this dream:-

Cult Leader

Join Me!

Ministry

Lousy Dream - from 2012 09 27

I had one lousy dream this morning (the day after my brother's birthday in 2012).

I was working in some commercial establishment, in the kitchens. Outside the kitchens, in the main body of the building, the general public was dining. I was employed as some sort of sanitation staff or general gofer or something.

The kitchen staff were all clustered around the freezers, which one of them had opened. There was food inside the freezers - some member of staff had left a plate of food on top of the other food in both the freezers, it turned out.

For some reason, one of the kitchen staff, a young woman, was forking great mouthfuls of food from one of the plates into her mouth, and one of the staff had handed me a plate with what looked like a corned beef casserole and spuds, carrots, some peas. I had a fork, and just gently squashed one of the corned beef chunks.

And something emerged from inside it. A very small white worm, wriggling as it lay in the gravy.

Some others emerged, writhing about on the plate. Beside me, the young girl began retching and bolted for the staff toilets, clutching her mouth. But the worst part was that, when I looked through the windows of the kitchen, I saw two old people staring in at us, their faces pressed against the glass. They had seen everything.

And one of them was already on her mobile phone.

Last thing, I found myself on the main floor, just as the word reached the customers that there was something in the food. The last I saw before waking was the mass panic starting as customers began getting up to rush for the toilets, or or the door - presumably to hospital to get their stomachs pumped or something.

More Vampires?

After the last dream, I never imagined I'd have a dream where I was a vampire. But apparently, I did.

No, not the gay Goth Nosferatu from the last dream - I was me, as a bloodsucker. My face felt the same as it normally does - there were apparently no mirrors to check, not that that would have done any good - and apparently, I was in a different city to the last dream. More modern. I swear it was a modern Italian city of some sort, possibly Milan or Naples. At least the architecture was Italianate, and moreover it was gorgeous.

I was wandering in the streets, surrounded by tourists and locals, and then I met up with other vampires in the middle of the street. I had the distinct impression that I'd called the gathering, and that they had come from their domains to see me in mine. Almost as if I were Prince ... or a pretender conspiring to usurp the Prince's throne.

What I was supposed to do then was anybody's guess, because the alarm went off.

What Kind Of Dream Was This?

I was wandering the streets of Ancient Rome, in broad daylight, surrounded by crowds of Romans of all classes. Alongside me was a travelling companion: a very gay bald vampire, a real Nosferatu, with a narrow face, a sallow complexion, his two fangs in the middle of his mouth where his two inner incisors should be, and dressed in a black toga.

I remember distinctly that the vampire was definitely gay - he told me so himself - and that, for some reason, he owed me his unlife, because he'd been threatened with being buried with an acorn planted beneath his coffin, so that it would grow up into an oak and slowly pierce his chest as it grew through him, in effect staking him in excruciating agony for four hundred years.

John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) - Final Scene (clip)

Okay, check the mouths of the characters. Whose mouth is expelling vapour, and whose mouth is not? Do you think one of them might, just might, have been infected? And who, pray tell, do you think that infected one might be?

As for why this clip is here, instead of To Scape The Serpent's Tongue - since I first saw the movie, scenes from this movie have haunted my nightmares. Ditto, scenes from Aliens and, lately,  The Fellowship of The Ring, but particularly this movie.

Cult Leader - 2011 10 02

I'd like to describe a dream I'd recently had.

I found myself in a street at night full of people - young men and women. At a glance, I could compel them to do my bidding. So I made young women chase after young men, and gay men and lesbians find appropriate romance.

Then I had another idea. Summoning every couple I'd entranced to my side, surrounding myself with young, sexually-aroused couples, I commanded them to follow me. I knew of a place nearby where they could indulge their carnal passions freely.

I seem to have a lot of abandoned buildings, mostly hotels, in my dreams. This one had a vestibule, a lobby with a reception desk, and a room with a massive oval jacuzzi which, against all probability, still had running water and electricity, and a transparent dome overhead the same shape as the jacuzzi below.

I led the six couples into the jacuzzi room, past a little kitchen off to one side of the corridor, and told the couples to disrobe and enter the pool.

Then, before I could disrobe, I heard someone at the glass double doors of the front entrance, knocking, asking to come in. It was Mum and Dad, with one of Mum's brothers and his wife (Aunt-in-law?).

I ushered them into the kitchen area, and asked them to settle down and pour themselves a cuppa while I went into the back room to explain to the guests that they might have to leave. I hadn't taken two steps into the jacuzzi room when I realised that Mum and the in-law had followed me.

And they were standing right behind me when they caught the sight of six couples, in the jacuzzi, all stark naked, standing up "in the presence of the Master," as one of the young men said.

Related to this dream:-

Join Me!

The Temple

Ministry
Crossposted from Hypnotic Erotic.

Hypnosis In A Dream

I was out in town, in an older part of town with narrow, red brick streets, cobbled roads and terraced housing. This was a residential area with a small store, and I'd just finished shopping in that store - I came out with a joint of meat wrapped in old-fashioned wax paper, carried in a bag - when I noticed a woman looking at me from her living room window, from just behind a red curtain with a floral pattern. The window, too, was old - a wooden frame painted red, the same colour as the door, lintel and doorstep.

The woman was mature, with short red hair and green eyes. I remember looking squarely at those eyes, and catching her attention. I didn't know if she wanted someone to talk to, or even for anyone to notice that she was there at all - but I went over to her door and knocked on it.

When she answered, I asked her if there was a reason for looking at me. She led me into her room and sat down. I took out my wand - a ritual tool which is essentially a big obsidian - and gently pointed the tip of it at her Ajna chakra, bringing it up to her forehead to establish the "animal magnetism" connection that Franz Mesmer described.

Hard to describe "animal magnetism." It's a different feeling from hypnosis. It's a feeling more like a physical attraction, compelling movement towards the source - in this case, between the woman and the tip of the crystal wand.

As I brought the wand up to her Ajna chakra, the spot right between her eyes above the bridge of her nose, the wand did its thing. The woman's eyelids fluttered closed. I touched the tip of the wand to her forehead, gently brushing her skin, and she sighed and sank back into the chair, her body relaxing and growing flaccid as she sank deeply into a trance.

I asked her what she wanted. Her unconscious responded with moans and gasps. I asked her how long it had been since she'd experienced intimacy. She replied "A long time." I asked her if she wanted intimacy now, and she hissed "Yesssss" through her teeth, her body arching.

Damned alarm. Lousy timing.

Crossposted to Hypnotic Erotic.

Dream Fragment 3: The Garden of Obsidian Statues

I seem to dream myself into the Legend Fantasy Roleplaying game a lot this day and age. Something about the game - maybe the compactness of the books, or the simplicty and openness of the rules, just lends itself to using the imagination. In my case, I even dream myself into the game.

Some of the previous dreams have included the inspiration behind The Blood Path and this dream sequence, along with my recent dream The Seer Princess and my dream of a book of wine-dark red. And then there was this third and final dream fragment.

I was apparently in the sumptuous courtyard of one Lady Jorana, a noble lady of some ill repute. She was said to be a practitioner of strange sorcery, and that she had once used it to transform herself into the woman she is today, having been born in every respect a man.

Outside, in the garden of this villa, were a number of strangely-posed obsidian statues, every statue different, their surfaces as smooth and dark as the day they'd been carved. Not a single bird landed on any of these statues; not an insect or spider crawled on their surfaces.

I was with a party of adventurers, just exploring the courtyard at the Lady Jorana's request. There was a lavishly ornate fountain in the centre of the courtyard, and the sound of the trickling waters was like sweet music to my thirsty colleagues. However, I warned them not to drink any of the water. Not even to touch it. Not one drop. I had no idea why, but no way was I going to go anywhere near that fountain for any reason.

The Lady Jorana arrived, her servant bearing golden goblets filled with water, because by now the adventurers were all very thirsty; they'd been travelling long, and the roads had been hot and dusty, kind of like the setting of my Sullup Lurth stories (I'll tell you about them some time ...). She herself wore a flowing, patterned silk cloak covering her face and body; apparently it was some sort of enchantment designed to damp down her natural beauty, which was unearthly beyond human reckoning (part of me was thinking "In game terms, she has a CHA of 22 ..."). As she spoke, she dropped the cloak and stood, her unearthly beauty revealed before everyone. I saw her as Morticia Addams, say, aged 19 when her charms were at their most fiery, a single woman - only this one was, in this case, not looking for a Gomez - presumably because she already knew what it had been like to be Gomez.

Despite my warnings, my fellow adventurers could not resist the lure of the drinks. Some of them downed the water in the goblets, then rushed to the fountain, all reason and caution abandoned, to quench their thirst in the waters there. Bad move on their part: the waters in the goblets were drawn from the fountain, which was enchanted to turn the imbiber into an obsidian statue.

I just watched, helpless, as the adventuring party turned into black, glassy statues, one by one, their eyes reflecting the horror as they realised what was happening. And Lady Jorana smiled, because she now had three fresh new obsidian statues to add to her garden.

Dream Fragment 2: Hot Stoves

There was once a time when my brother, with whom I did not get along that well in life sadly, presented himself to me as my Shadow; a dark figure haunting my nightmares.

Well, that was until I told my Shadow, flat out, that it was no longer to appear in that form in my dreams. "Come as anyone you like, be as menacing as you like, but if you put on the appearance of my brother in my dreams again, I will hurt you. I will be your Shadow." My words.

Since then, my brother has come to me in my dreams as more of a brother to me - the brother I wish I'd had while he was still alive. Someone I could talk to, without him starting an argument all the damned time.

I was at home. I presume I'd managed to get back from Connection Station. It was night outside, and the house was not the usual place I have in my dreams - my usual home in dreams looks more like the old house I grew up in; I never dream of my current lodgings.

No, this place looked like a bigger complex, with many rooms and a spacious kitchen, done up in an old-world style. There was a massive fireplace, with a fire burning away in the grate; and there, on a grid over the fire, was a pot of some sort, with food cooking. Sean, my brother, was sitting beside the fire on a small stool, watching the flames and waiting for the pot to cook.

And beside him was a much larger stove, on the kind of industrial scale you associate with hotel and restaurant kitchens, roaring away. I have no idea what was cooking inside that stove, but it could feed an army, or a giant.

This was a new place to me, because I asked Sean about the stove, and he told me he'd found it and turned it on to cook something. I was amazed to see it; I had no idea it was even here when I took up ownership of the place. But it looked as if whoever had owned this place had used it to feed a hell of a lot of people at one time, because you could run a catering business from products made in that stove.

And that was the second dream fragment.

Dream Fragment 1: The Connection

I am so used to out-of-town travel that I even dream of it these days, even though I can no longer afford the luxury of being able to go out and see the world in person much, any more.

I dream of attending conventions out of town, and travel in these dreams involves going by train, and a stop at Connection Station.

Connection Station, my name for it, is a railway platform out in the middle of nowhere. There's supposed to be a village nearby, but I have never seen it. The station has a ticket machine, a rude shelter, some street lamps and that's it. Trains from Out Of Town come here, and I connect with those trains at this station.

Some of my convention-going dreams involve me heading along the coast, which in my dreams seems to conflate the North Wales coast and its little resort towns with the larger coastal towns along the North West of England to produce a garish, Vegas-cheap ride through endless seafronts and promenades and vulgar arcades, hotels and funfairs.

Out Of Town itself is a foreign place to me. I don't have a map for the place, naturally, so I have to make my way around. Out Of Town is every place I ever got lost in; and while the hotel where the convention takes place is easy to reach, I've managed to come up with an alternative arrangement.

Apparently, I have a second home in Out Of Town. Big place. Mostly empty, most of the year, unless I'm visiting and attending conventions. This second home used to be part of a hotel / resort complex, and a lot of the outlying areas are abandoned and falling to the steady encroachment of Nature. But the place is mine.

In today's dream, I was actually returning home from a local journey which had taken me away from my dream home town, to one of the outlying areas which kind of feel like the suburbs, and occasionally like the rougher spots on the periphery of the real town where I live. I was on a train coming in to Connection Station, my business having been concluded, and I got out of the train onto the platform of Connection Station. As always, I turned away for a second, and the train was gone as if it had never been - a theme I have noticed with all the public transport in my dreams. The train was gone, and I was alone, free to explore the environs of Connection Station to my heart's content.

I had something like an hour to wait until the train heading for home, and I'd already headed along the northbound track to look at the abandoned station twenty minutes' walk away (I always pass by it in the train journeys in my dreams, and it looks identical to Connection Station in almost every way) so instead, I wandered along in the opposite direction, towards the bottom of the footpath beside the embankment, nearer to the trees.

I had hardly moved away when I realised that there was a train on the platform. I had barely registered its presence before it rumbled past me and headed along the tracks. I thought I had missed the train at first - but for some reason I remembered that an outgoing train always stopped at Connection Station ten minutes after the other train arrived, so that one would have just taken me Out Of Town again, and that was not where I wanted to go.

Instead, I found myself wandering around the almost-empty car park, and found myself looking at a double-decker Arriva bus which was parked there, empty, with no sign of any driver. As if it was waiting for the driver to come along and take its passengers home.

Well, just me, at any rate.

And that was it for that dream.

The Maze

I was in a garden maze, surrounded by tall privet hedges on all sides. Struggling for a way out, I noticed a guide up ahead.

She wore a white shift. She was barefoot. I could not see her face, only the back of her head; she had long, straight, black hair. She kept vanishing behind corners as I approached. However, I had a feeling she knew her way out of the maze and I only needed to follow her.

And then I finally emerged from the maze, and looked upon a flat lawn, with a boundary hedge barely visible through the early morning fog. No sign of my guide anywhere.

Books Of Wine-Dark Red

I often dream of a book, whose cover and lettering are wine-dark red. A book I am frequently drawn to consult, as if it contained deep secrets of sorcery and power.

The book has a tooled leather cover, with some sort of circular design on it. The pages are edged in gold, shiny and heavy to handle. It's unusually warm to the touch, too, as if alive.

I've never been able to read the contents, but the pages look gorgeous. On occasion, the lettering bleeds, and the book itself leaks a gorgeous, deep red fluid.

Not blood. Pomegranate juice.