Happy New Year! A lot has been going on. I’m hoping that 2024 will be a big year for Dreamland, and I have lots of plans to draw artwork for the game and do many other things. In the meantime, please check out the Playtests & Signups page for the latest Dreamland convention games (online and in-person). And if you’re on Discord, sign up for the Dreamland Discord group where we play games approximately twice a month on Thursday nights on Discord & roll20. If this Discord link is outdated when you come to this page, email me at (the Ancient Greek guy who led the Argonauts) at mockman dot ..read more

Revisions and playtests have been going on steadily on the Dreamland Discord and at conventions. After 7 months of feedback, I’m happy to announce updated versions of the Dreamland Quickstart PDF and the sample adventure “The Paradise of the Unchanging”! Please read, download, comment, share & play! Dreamland Quickstart PDF (48p.) – https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cinvdi3c3p7rfu1io3kwf/Dreamland-Super-Quickstart-10-2023.pdf?rlkey=jysezsc162sluzchdoe1p5vtl&dl=0 The Paradise of the Unchanging (29p.) – https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/agqn0axe5udl97d38hrck/Dreamland-The-Paradise-of-the-Uncha ..read more

With huge help from many people, we’ve recorded the first Dreamland RPG actual play video!! I love listening to RPG actual plays while I’m drawing or working, and it was a huge pleasure to actually make one. Many thanks to everyone who was involved. Aaron Vanek edited the video and suggested making it in the first place; Matt Conant handled the OBS software and was involved off-camera with the whole thing; and Vincent Chang, Vesper Remiel and Ronny Elor, the players, were amazing and graciously made themselves available at 8PM on a weekday. This is the first Dreamland video recording, but it i ..read more

(This review was originally posted on goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5228059223 A review copy was kindly provided by the amazing Cody Goodfellow.) Of all the sides of HP Lovecraft’s writing, his fantasy-genre Dreamland stories have been the least imitated, so a new anthology of Dreamland-inspired writings is exciting. Edited by Cody Goodfellow and Joseph S. Pulver, Sr, this anthology veers towards the horrific side of the setting, if “setting” it can be called since these stories refreshingly avoid any Dreamlands “canon” and have few familiar place-names. (And no new place-na ..read more

Summer means conventions and I’m excited to announce some more public Dreamland playtest/demos! I’ll be running Dreamland at GenCon Online, as well as at NecronomiCon PVD (also online for me this year– sadly, I’m unable to attend this year’s con in person). GENCON ONLINE Thursday, August 4, 11AM PST – The Island of Devils – https://www.gencon.com/events/217268 Friday, August 5, 5PM PST – The House of the Gnoles – https://www.gencon.com/events/217269 (Both GenCon games are currently sold out — thanks everybody for signing up!! — but if you’re interested, keep an eye on the website in case of la ..read more

Dreamland is infinite, and one of the things I wanted to do in Dreamland RPG was have a world which doesn’t depend on “canon” or on a small important landmass where everyone lives and everything happens. Almost anything can exist in Dreamland, and the intention is that DMs and players can create different types of places and stories within Dreamland. Dreamland is too big to be fully explored, too big to be saved, too big to be comprehended. That said, the game makes certain assumptions which are worked into the game system: a predominantly Bronze Age or Medieval fantasy setting use of fantasy ..read more

This “example of play” is loosely based on events that happened during a game of the first playtest adventure, “The Paradise of the Unchanging.” Unfortunately the color formatting which differentiated the different Pillar Words from one another was lost when transferring it from MSWord to WordPress, but hopefully the gist still comes across. Ideally I’ll draw this into a comic strip eventually… Princess Zyal, Mulloth the Swineherd, and Ulth the Squire set out on a journey to save the eternal city of Olathöe from an approaching army of abhumans. After acquiring horses and supplies, they stand o ..read more

What says “RPG” more than random tables? The quickest and easiest way to create a Dreamland character is to begin with your three Memories and work your way backward, fleshing your waking self’s character out from there. The suggested method, particularly for new players, is to randomly roll your Memories from one of two tables: 100 Historical Memories and 100 Modern or Near-Modern Memories. First, decide whether your waking self lives in the modern world, or sometime in the past. Dreamland is outside time, so dreamers from the past and present can meet together in the same dreamworld, heedles ..read more

The 1990s brought a huge pop-cultural discovery that has shaped visions of Dreamland ever since: virtual reality. The Matrix, Star Trek: TNG‘s holodeck, cyberpunk RPGs and other media popularized the idea of passing between reality and a persistent imaginary world. Ideas like “what happens if you abandon your real life to live in a fantasy?” or “am I a butterfly dreaming of being human, or a human dreaming of being a butterfly?”, which earlier writers might have explored through the lens of dreams or drug hallucinations, became almost exclusively explored through technology. Science fiction sw ..read more

The great RPG designers/podcasters Kenneth Hite and Robin D. Laws often suggest that, before starting a new campaign, GMs should show players a movie or TV show episode to show them the style they’re going for. So, if you’re starting a Dreamland campaign, what movies should everybody watch? If players don’t want to read a bunch of dusty 100-year-old fantasy stories (or even relatively recent fantasy stories, like Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe), are there movies or TV shows that express the feel of Dreamland? The truth is, there aren’t many, but there are a few. First, addressin ..read more