Welcome to the website for DreamLands!
An anachronistic modern fantasy LARP game set in the chaotic and mysterious world of the Dream.
Rules Documents
Here are the rules documents for the DreamLands. Please bear in mind that the rules documents are still being finished and so details may be changed. Anything significant that is altered will be noted in the changelog channel of our Discord.
Full Rules
(out of date)
Crafting Recipes
(out of date)
Magic Rites, Spells & Performances
(out of date)
Rules Quick Reference
Below are quick reference documents. These contain summarised or truncated versions of the info above.
Core Rules
Character Quickstart
(out of date)
Skill List
Weaponry & Calls
Setting Info
Below are rules documents that cover specific parts of the game. This info is all in the Full Rules document above but are split up here for convenience.
Magic Primer
(out of date)
Crafting Rules
(out of date)
Healing & Repairing
(out of date)
Deep Dreaming Rituals
(out of date)
Archetypes
(out of date)
The World of the Dream
The DreamLands is a larp in which player characters come to life inside their dreams. Literally - they wake up when their player character's source body sleeps in some other world, and as a manifestation of a dreamer they get checked into The Last Resort, a friendly facility that is an anchor point inside a giant dream, drawing dreamers to it.
Not all of the DreamLands is so pleasant and stable. There are dangers: gaps in space and time to be explored; anachronistic artefacts of different dimensions to be learned from; echos of the past, nightmares, and other mysterious forces seek to disrupt the peace and destroy the dreamers. Even the Resort itself might have some secrets.
What are DreamLands? And why are all its denizens so certain that the dreamers' 'real world' is ending?
Wonders and Secrets
The DreamLands is a strange world with many oddities and myriad curiosities.
The history of the land is lost to even those who dwell here and within the fogs of time lie great secrets, treasures and dangers. Dreamers seem to have a knack for uncovering these things, almost as if clues to the answers emerge from the very ground.
Those with the Rosetta Stone skill are given the tools to decipher a strange ancient language that is found across this realm of dreams. Some are also able to use an Interfacing skill to interact with strange ancient devices. Whether these ancient things were ever truly understood is now yet another thing waiting to be explored in the DreamLands.
Of course, some things in the DreamLands are known. It is well understood that the nodes of dreamstuff that form in wild places can be harvested to be converted into some the DreamLand's many strange and varied resources, typically sought after by Crafters and practitioners of the Alchemical arts.
Aspects
When Dreamers find themselves at the Last Resort their dream forms will invariably take on the properties of one of the Aspects. These are categories of form that the Denizens of the DreamLands all take on, shaped by their personalities and view of themselves.
One curious quirk of Aspects is that they are malleable and often will change. It is rare to find a long-lived denizen that has not changed their Aspect at least once. People, after all, do change.
The idealistic Augiri literally glow and heal people instantly by sacrificing their Essence.
The Creative Knakosi sport masks and have additional Crafting skills.
The frivolous Cascadae flow in the wind and can teleport short distances by burning an Essence.
The Argumentative Reboris always look big and can keep fighting even with injured limbs.
The metilculous Gelics have words upon them and gain extra Knowledge when in the dream.
The determined Vauro posess impressive horns and have an extra Body Hit.
The Last Resort
No one knows how the Resort came to be, nor how long it has been in existence. It teleports around the DreamLands, seemingly at random, hosting Dreamers when they come to stay. Wherever it lands, it is seen as an omen both good and bad - for Dreamers bring fortune and misfortune at their whim.
It is staffed by powerful Denizens who seem protective of Dreamers, and keen to nurture Dreamers and assist them in achieving their goals.
The form of the Last Resort changes entirely ever so often, though subtle differences can be seen each appearance, as it has been known to shift and merge with its surroundings. Its logo, however, is eternal - appearing even in ancient texts unchanged.
The Resort acts as a base for Dreamers and is in many ways a safe home for them within the Dream. It has a number of amenities for the guests and you can typically expect the following within it.
- The Front Desk The front desk welcomes all Dreamers and sorts out the Admin for the resort. Dreamers can go here for their important documents, caching in Forage Tokens and any other general help or questions.
- The Crafting Base This is where Crafters can create items and develop new ones. It contains a set of props for each of the 15 crafts and is where the Crafting referee will be based.
- The Entertainment Suite This is the home of the Magic referee and will contain information on the various magic schools in the DreamLands as well as a pre-made Alchemy set up.
- The Market The Market stocks all kinds of items and is open for the Dreamers when needed. It will sell Basic resources for a set price and will buy any resources from Dreamers. Any rarer resources sold to the market will be put up for sale. The Shop keeper will also offer some additional services for money.
- The Bar The Bar is connected to the Market and operates as a meeting place for Dreamers and the staff. Players can store their drinks at the bar and have it served to them at the bar in a sort of cloakroom system. Also the barman will sell rumours to those who ask.
- The Dream Door This is the entrance to the Resort and the DreamLands. It is where most Dreamers (excepting Cascadae) will appear when first entering the DreamLands. It is also a route for Dreamers to temporarily leave the Dream. Players may use the door at any time to go OC, putting their finger in the air and walking to the Out of Character area.
Buorthi
Among the Denizens of the DreamLands the Buorthi stand out as exceptional. Small flying fairy... things, they are amicable, excitable and almost infuriatingly happy.
Every Buorthi is a skilled sorcerer and they are as capable in most other skillsets as any Denizen.
The Buorthi commonly crop up in the DreamLands and are often happy to help Dreamers.
Keep an eye out for them in the field and make sure to be nice and polite, you won't regret it!
Game Policies
This page details our policies regarding Health and Safety, SafeGuarding and other such necessary content.Please bear in mind that by booking a ticket you have agreed that you have read and agreed to the contents of all of these policies and will be treated as though that is true.We wish to highlight that currently DreamLands is only open for players 18 and over.
Terms & Conditions
Health and Safety
Code of Conduct
&
Safeguarding
Data Retention
Complaints Policy
Sleeping
All events are Camping events with atendees needing to bring their own camping arrangements or organise off-site accomodation.Eating
Events at the Grange have a purchasable Meal Ticket (which can accomodate most dietary needs on request) but are otherwise self-catering.Timings
Events run from 8pm Friday to 2pm Sunday with the game pausing overnight from midnight-10am (but with a 2 hour time-ish period from midnight -2am).Please feel free to contact us with any questions about the event timings or logistics.
Our Design Goals
We have a few things we want specifically to achieve in DreamLands with it's design.
Collaborative systems. We have crafted DreamLands with the intention of it inherently encouraging a level of collaboration rather than a sense of competition. This isn't to say that in-game character friction, rivalries and animosity isn't allowed, but that we have built mechanics like foraging, crafting and other systems to benefit from collaboration and disencentivise hoarding.
Potent Player characters. We wanted to create a system where all characters could have fun powers they could use, rather than the odd few stealing the show. This starts with the Aspect and skill lists offering a number of powerful abilities and calls at creation, but also extends to the availability of resources meaning that things can be made or invented more freely.
Researchable skills. Research is typically tied to crafting and magic and that is no different in the DreamLands, however there is also the option for characters to research their own unique abilities. These will often be inspired by the character's kit/design and/or history in the game. Some examples: A ninja who researches how to teleport a short distance when they dodge; or a healer who researches how to stay conscious until they finish healing even if reduced to 0 hits.
A consistent, mysterious world. The DreamLands is a world cloaked in mystery and as such finding hints, piecing together clues and unravelling the shrouded nature of the world is a key part of the game. We believe that in order to make this really work, a strong foundation of hidden lore is needed and consistency is key. Questions have answers in the DreamLands, things work the way they do for reasons.
Accessible Larping
We are committed to making the DreamLands as accessbile as possible in as many ways as we can. The following are some ways we have already implemented with accessibility in mind.
All parts of the game are accessible on a starting character. We are commited to making sure that different parts of the game are not locked behind XP gates, and that if there is a thing you want to engage with, you will be able to build a starting character that can do it and be useful in it straight away.
Game parts such as Crafting and Magic are designed with no hard limits on how much you can do, intended so that they can be a character's whole game and take up all of an event if wished.
Archetypes are pre-made character build options in the rulebook, intended to help make characters that can engage in different parts of the game for those who aren't into points buying when crafting a character or just want to pick a quick option and get on with the game.
The Dream Door is a permanent feature of the Last Resort which allows players to go Out of Character in camp so that they do not feel pressured to get an escort to sort out-of-game matters.
Game Types for All
As mentioned above there are several non-combat parts of the game that are made to be the entire game if desired, here's some examples of how those manifest within the game.
Crafting. Crafting gives you tokens, which can be used on one-craft at a time but are returned upon the craft's completion. Depending on how many Skill points are invested in crafting you can accrue a lot of Tokens in many different crafts. Some crafting types have shorter crafting times than others (eg. a Brewer tends to work in lots of layered short crafts, wheras a Blacksmith tendd to have longer crafting times, but require less components). Crafting also has a complex possibility space that encourages experimentation and invention with many hidden mechanics for those who wish to investigate such things.
Sorcery. Sorcery is a fairly typical spell slinging system that you may be familiar with. However, instead of working with a limited magic pool you instead have Cast Tokens which you can discard or hand to targets for spells. You can restore all your discarded Cast Tokens by having a conversation for a set period of time. This means that Sorcery is limited in the short term, but that casting small scale spells in a typical engagement isn't going to waste your precious casting resource.
Scouting and exploration DreamLands will have a number of recurring encounters, and small exploration based games that will refresh during events. One is the Foraging nodes, small objects that can be harvested for resources, however each forager can only collect each forage node once, and the forage nodes will change locations during events. This is in addition to Scouting linears each night and discoverable items being fairly common in the DreamLands.
Gallery
Here are some of our favourite images taken by ShadowFlare Photography from our preview event in 2024!If you are in a photo and do not wish to be please contact us on the Discord or email [email protected] to have it removed.
