The Dreaming

[Cram]

Hi guys! I've been working on a game which you cats might be interested in. It's an ambitious project called The Dreaming. We're not done developing it yet, but I wanted to hear what you guys think.

social networking site: (not much to see here yet)
rulebook for the live game:

The Dreaming is a combination of LARP, ARG, and social networking site. It's a persistent 24/7 game which you can play no matter where you are. The game's setting is based (very) loosely on Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.

The game takes place in the Dreaming, the mythological realm where we go when we sleep. You'll play the role of a Dream, a character who lives in the Dreaming. You can post to the social networking site as your character, but there is also a live component to the game. Whenever you'd like to go "in-game", you put on an arm band or game badge. Voila! You are in the Dreaming, a world which looks almost exactly like our own. All the non-players you see everywhere are just "wakes" - regular people who are in the midst of a dream. They don't even know they're asleep!

Using the game's social networking site, you can locate other Dreaming players and find out where/when they meet up. If there are none in your area, there are a few "Single Player Dreamwalks", adventures you can go on without needing a party. Many of these involve putting up posters for the game or advertising for new players in your area. This marketing activity also has meaning within the game's mythology.

If you can get a party together, you can print out a Dream Walk script from the website and then embark on the adventure. During the Dream Walk [module], some people in your party will become monsters or other NPCs you encounter during the adventure.

Dreamscaping Rituals allow you to give places in your neighborhood a special in-game meaning. The bar you hang out at can become a Feast Hall, the park you and your friends spar in can become an Arena. The owner of the territory gets special powers they can use to buff people that hang out there. Players can try to seize territory from each other and otherwise put the kibosh on each other's plans.

In order for an action to impact the game world, it has to be "Archived" - this means that somebody has to post pictures, video, or a blog entry about the event to the game's website. So by playing the game, players provide content which serves as a sort of commercial for the game. Dream Walks can affect overarching plotlines - for example, there are 50 refugees on the plane of faerie. If you and your friends go on the "rescue the fae" module, you can recover two of them. If you instead go on the "close the portal" module, you seal off two fae from being rescued. The scoreboard is kept on a wiki. In this way, you can cooperate or compete with people who you'll never game with locally.

The game uses a fairly simple boffer-combat engine to resolve combat. Your character has a class, which suggests his or her role in combat, and a race, which suggests his or her role in the Dreaming society. Foam weapons and spell packets will be used to beat the snot out of each other. The owner of a territory may designate whether or not combat can take place in that territory - so though you can turn a restaurant into a game location, it doesn't necessarily mean that people will be spelling each other down there.

Ultimately, I want to throw open the doors for players to write Dream Walks. Players will be able to vote on the coolest modules and plotlines, hopefully creating a self-sustaining plot generating engine. We shall see!

So that's the Dreaming in a really brief nutshell.



-What do you think?
-Is it something you'd play?
-Do you have any ideas for how to recruit players?

[Cram]

Alpha Test Announced!
Date: 3/19 - 4/3
Location: in your town

http://dreamings.ning.com/profiles/blogs/alpha-test