Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

Players will play the part of symbols within a dream, hoping to bargain with and win over parts of the dreamer’s emotional state through a series of visions, quests, surrealities and nightmares. The goal is to effect her final choices once she wakes up in eight hours. Each session can present a mix of different players and different symbols, but the same dreamer.

Introduction

Today, an ordinary person was confronted with extraordinary decisions amidst a confusing swirl of emotions.

Tonight they will have the most incredible dreams, and tomorrow will be the most important day of their life.

This storygame is about that Dreamer and the dreams she had.

…

This game has a somewhat fixed structure, as the GM will ultimately play this for eight hours over several sessions. However, you can run any session with any people you know, even if they haven’t played before.

In fact, the ideal way to play is several ad hoc sessions with small subgroups of your friends, so that stories become a truly communal creation. Just bring these with you:

• notes on the Dreamer’s issues
• the Wish/Nightmare cards from previous games
• blank index cards and pens
• a notebook

Terminology

This game involves a GM and 3-6 players. The same person must be GM for all sessions of the game, but any person may be a player at any time (making this game suitable for pickup play). Play time is variable, but will ultimately add up to 8 hours over several sessions.

The GM will play the Dreamer, a fictional person experiencing some bizarre dreams. The GM should bring a pawn to represent the Dreamer, a notebook to track the various dreams, and several index cards (and pens) to build the various game elements.

Each player brings an Anchor: a physical object of convenient size, not much larger than a CD or paperback, that could have some symbolic or evocative meaning.

Each player will take this anchor and personify it into a Loa, the role each player will take for the duration of hte game.

There will be dreams within dreams; these are separated from each other by panes of Glass. If you break the glass, you break the dream within, and you fall back into the dream outside. At some point, you’ve run out of dreams to run to.

A Committee is convened amongst the Loa in order to create new dreams within old dreams.

There are 6 pairs of Emotions described below; each of these will be tied to an issue at stake in the Dreamer’s waking life. This will manifest as pairs of Wishes and Nightmares within the dream. The Loa will use their power to push the Dreamer towards/away from these Emotions/Wishes/Nightmares.

Symbols come in Chains, and a card containing such a chain is called a Chain Card. The first symbol in a chain is always your Anchor, but throughout the game the Loa can use free association to take a previous element and derive a new one. Players get 3 separate cards on which to write Chains of Symbols (in effect, 3 separate chains). For example, if your Anchor is “broken cd”, a chain may look like this:

Download

• Colorless_Green_Ideas Sleep_Furiously.pdf

Tags: Dev Purkayastha

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Free RPGs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.