Nightmares and Dreamscapes

I thought, with it being Halloween week, I'd write about a movie that I've always thought was the biggest influence on my writing for the WILD RPG. No, not Inception, though that's the one that really got me writing the game itself...

No, I thought I'd write about a scary movie that completely opened my eyes to dreams as a game device - Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The UK Movie Poster, which was also the cover of the VHS I bought back in the 80s (I still have that somewhere)...

The only problem is, I started to look into Elm St... It was a long, long time ago, and I noticed that it came out the same year as another movie that was a huge influence on me as well... Dreamscape.

And now I can't remember which one I saw first.

So I'll credit them both with being the biggest influences on WILD.

There's a good chance I saw Dreamscape first as I was a massive Indiana Jones fan (Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first VHS tape I bought as it was one of the first VHS movies to come out at a retail level immediately - and I ended up buying Temple of Doom as a new Rental VHS which cost a fortune... saving, paying for it in advance instalments at my local video rental store... yes, I was that big an Indy nerd). Anyway, I was a big fan of Indiana Jones, and there was this movie coming out that had Kate Capshaw in it - the underrated Willie Scott from Temple of Doom. You could tell someone in the movie's marketing thought "you know, that actor from Indiana Jones is in this movie, let's market it like one of those films..."

Jump on that Indiana Jones bandwagon why don't you?
The amazing Drew Struzan again. I miss movie posters like this...

Original UK VHS Cover

Dreamscape is far from being an Indiana Jones movie. Dennis Quaid plays Alex Gardner, a psychic who is brought into a research project to project himself into the dreams of others to try to help them overcome night terrors. He stumbles upon a plot by Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer), a government agent using his psychic agents to implant dreams of nuclear terror into the mind of the President, and aiming to assassinate him in his dreams. Gardner sets out to stop the plot, save the President, and aid the nuclear peace process.

Sure the special effects have dated a bit, but the plot's great. It was a revelation at the time for me, and I found the idea of going into other people's dreams fascinating.

If you haven't seen it, I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Then, a matter of months later, the TV channels in the UK started running ads for A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The ads were really creepy, and had a lot of the iconic imagery that you expect from Elm St now - Johnny Depp getting swallowed by the bed, Amanda Wyss spinning around in the air, Freddy walking through the cell bars... I was very intrigued. I managed to rent the VHS the day it was released. I have a weird memory of watching it around at one of the game group's house, Milo's I think.

I was mesmerised. Genuinely scary, but when the line between dreaming and reality blurred - when Nancy falls asleep in class but class continues as a weird dreamscape... And the concept of grabbing something in the dream and waking, pulling it into the waking world... I loved it.

I mentioned before on this blog that I attempted to run A Nightmare on Elm Street as a Call of Cthulhu game for my unsuspecting players, but I don't know if it worked. I seem to remember it not going so well, once characters started dying...

Thirty-plus years later, and I'm still fascinated by dreams, and, along with Inception, these movies continue to be an inspiration for my game writing.

WILD Dev Diary 2 - Current Structures and Past Inspirations

Last blog post I explained that I had a notebook filled with every note, inspiration and working-out I had since I started writing WILD, my RPG of dreamshare technology.

Seeing as the builders next door are using pneumatic drills to dig up concrete, my concentration for actually working on WILD is a bit fried, so I thought I'd continue my look at the old notes and see what I'd put.

My next couple of pages are a list of films, TV series and books that I considered inspiration for WILD. You'd probably recognise a lot of them as ones I mention frequently on this blog.

Inception, Suckerpunch, The Matrix, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, Dreamscape, Sleepwalkers (TV Series), Assassin's Creed, Cell, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mulholland Drive, Ink, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The City of Lost Children, eXistenZ, Life on Mars, Parasomnia, The Bridge (Banks), Awake (TV Series), Fringe, Lost, Vanilla Sky/Open Your Eyes, Paperhouse, Escape Into Night, Twin Peaks, House of Sleep...

I haven't gone back and added to this list in a while, and there have been a few I should add. Must do that.

On the next page, I have a list that just says - "To Look At:"

Under that, is "Dream Journals" - something I've done a bit of research into, especially considering the idea of solo gameplay in the WILD universe that involves journaling.
"Lucid Dreaming" - well, that kinda goes without saying, but this was early in the notes.
"False Awakenings" - done so many times in horror movies... "That was a horrible dream, ah, jump scare!"
"Eckankar" - a modern religion whose followers believe that the soul can leave the body and travel to other planes of reality.
"Interobjects" - the dream phenomena of encountering an object that is the merging of two objects but it's incomplete.
"Pre-lucid dreaming" - near lucid dreaming.
"Veridical Dreams" - prophetical dreams, or dreams that contain real events that the dreamer is unaware of.

After that is the page from the photo at the top. The Stages of Sleep (NonREM or NREM) through to REM.

I drew this weird doodle of what I thought the dreamrealms would look like, but it's nonsense. Just the doodles of an idle mind.

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That's enough of that for this entry I think. Don't want you getting bored.

CURRENT STATE OF PLAY

I mentioned before that I had a restructure of how the game works, and the game system itself, and I thought I was pretty happy with the way it was working out. I kinda came to a grinding halt actually writing it, trying to get it down on paper. I'd got the basics of it down, and I thought the best way to describe it was to give an example of the system in action.

The Matrix, obviously not WILD... 

So I had a basic example of a hacker trying to get information out of a computer before the guards arrived, and started writing how the "roll" works - I put "roll" in quotes as it's actually a pretty simple card draw looking at some tarot cards.

Then I thought - why make up the results just to show what happens? Why not actually draw cards and type it up? Win or lose, it explains everything.

A couple of draws, and our hero had failed to get the information - three guards burst into the room and she was trapped. Another draw, and she'd kicked one through the office door, smashing the glass, and punched another in the face. Another draw, and she'd managed to knock the second guard out, but the third guard got a shot off, and she was injured from the hit. A third draw, and while she managed to dive to get the memory stick as the guard continued to fire at her, he clipped her in the shoulder and she crumpled to the floor. She was alive, but captured. The memory stick hidden for now...

The "rolls" were super quick, the whole scene resolved in a matter of minutes with action playing out in a smooth flow.

Excellent.

I'm happy with the way the game system works, I just need to try to structure the rules so they are (a) interesting, and (b) easy to refer to - though the rules are so simple you'll remember it pretty quickly.

Right, I guess I should get back to it.

Until next time.

Keep dreaming.

WILD Dev Diary 1

Synchronicity has a knack of sneaking up on you and before you realise it, the universe has given you multiple signs that all point to the same thing.

First of all, I'm back to working on WILD. I'd had a bit of a break from it while I did some commissioned work on Doctor Who, but now I'm back to getting my head into the dreamrealms. Returning to it when I've had a break from it, I started to see ways to fix it, make it work better, and that involved tweaking the game system rather dramatically.

Second bit of synchronicity came from reading a handful of articles and listening to a couple of cool podcasts about game design and publishing. Most of them included a comment about keeping people interested in what you were working on by publishing a regular "Development Diary", so your potential audience and players could see how the game was progressing, the thoughts behind your design decisions and so on. And while I've been posting the odd update here and there about how WILD was progressing, these articles and podcasts lead me to think I wasn't doing it regularly enough.

And then, the third bit of synchronicity came on Sunday. It rained. I mean, it RAINED. It looked like the fight scene at the end of The Matrix Revolutions. It was hard to actually see through the rain. And, being the fool I am, was walking home from the dayjob in it. No raincoat, no umbrella. Just my suit jacket. And a hat... By the time I got home, my clothes were plastered to me. I hung my jacket up, and it dripped so much water I had to put newspaper under it. Two days later, and it was still wet, and will need a clean.

Inside that jacket, in the inside pocket, was my notebook. An A6 Moleskine-a-like made by popular stationery chain Rymans. This notebook as not left my side in many years. It is where I started formulating the ideas for WILD, making notes of how the game would work, how dreams work, key ideas of dream research, psychology, and inspiration from all sources.

It's like a backup of my brain - all the many ideas that I need to write down so I don't forget, they're all in there. And after the downpour - after my complete drenching - it was a little damp.

Luckily, it was just the black cover that was wet, and the pages were untouched. Lucky.

This reminded me of something I'd planned on doing for many moons - writing up some of my ideas and thoughts as a Developer Diary, so not only you could see how my brain got from "Wow, I should make a tabletop RPG of dreamshare technology" to where I am now, but also so I have a backup of what I've scribbled down, and can remind myself of ideas I noted down many years ago that I may have forgotten all about.

And so begins my Dev Diary posts. Hopefully, this will be fairly regular - and it'll get me writing and thinking more and more about WILD.

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 Let's make a start, and look at the first page in the Dev Diary! This is really going back a bit. I have a distinct memory of coming out of the cinema after watching Inception and my head was full of ideas of dream sharing and why there wasn't a game that did that.

I was reminded of the game I ran in my late teens that was based on A Nightmare on Elm St, and how obsessed I was with the third movie - Dream Warriors - and how the characters all appeared in one dream to tackle the evil. And how I loved Dreamscape, and The Matrix, and how I really wanted to write a cool game that captured that feeling.

So I bought this notebook and started jotting down some ideas - each idea has a little box next to it to categorise it so I could keep track of which ones were [Game System] or [Setting], and so on.

A lot of these notes were made sitting in the library, opposite my dayjob, when I'm desperate to escape from the mundane work on my lunch hour and just think about what I'd rather be doing.

That first spread (and the pages that follow) are me randomly writing down ideas that I needed to remember:

[Game System] Do dreams have a number of points for their stability? The more fantastic the elements in the dream, the more likely the dreamer will realise it is a dream and it will collapse, but is this just for people who are untrained and unaware that they are asleep? What about people who have gone in fully aware?

[Note] How much of a dream is remembered upon waking? Some seem to be lost instantly, while others can always be recalled.

[Why?] Why are dreams being explored? Is there a Collective Unconscious? Maybe not so much Sandman-esque dream-realms, but maybe more like Tron - where multiple dreamers, using the technology, have formed distinctive locations through repeated visits. 

[Note] Without the machines can you enter someone nearby's dream maybe through will, etc.? Maybe part of the plot would have to be getting the device onto a target without alarms. (Dreamscape)

[Note] Powerful enough dreamers bringing objects out of the dream realms into reality. (Elm St, Paprika)

[Note] Doing it without a device, only through meditation. Drugs don't work, produce impure results.

[Game System] Maybe a dream has a number of Story Points? As the players use points to manipulate the dream to their own ends, they are used until the dream collapses. A dream within a dream uses a portion of this as well. Architect can increase and replenish a little, trying to hold the dream together until mission end. 

[Note] Actives need to be classified to be different from Projections - the "scenery" characters who are a figment of the dreamer's mind. Do these Projections act hostile against intruder Actives or is that too derivative? (Inception)

[Game System] Injury and death in the dream, does it result in waking or continuing injury into the real world, or both? A threshold for injury? When hit or injured a character needs to make a roll to resist waking... lighter injuries are ignored, but more severe injuries are carried over into the real world. Fatal injuries have a chance of waking - or dying in the dream like the folklore says.

[Scenes] Start in the middle of the action, never describe going to a location. Keep players on their toes.

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That's the first few pages. More next time, which hopefully will be less segmented!