I often write boxed text for new in-game events and locations. I find it easier to think through the sights, smells, and other sensations during GM prep and write them out, rather than improv’ing when I’m trying to write a game. Here’s one such moment.
On a successful Perception check, the rest of the party wakes up to a rustling sound from one of their companions:
You awaken to the sounds of sharp, continuing tossing and turning nearby. One of your friends seems to be having a fitful night. It’s not particularly bad, but it doesn’t stop. As you watch them, you notice sweat beading up on their face.
They are mildly feverish to the touch. Detect Magic will reveal a Conjuration aura around the dreamer’s head. It doesn’t seem to be emanating from them or anything else, it’s just… there.
The dream has the following mechanical implications:
- A DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check reveals they are stable.
- A DC 12 Intelligence (Arcana) check suggests they are receiving a dream. If used with Detect Magic, this reveals it might be something seeping in from another plane.
- The dreamer must make a DC 10 Constitution save or take one level of Exhaustion.
- Nothing the party does will break them out of this.
Later, the dreamer receives this description:
You awaken, trying to remember what it is you dreamed. Oddly, your mind has not stepped in to fill in the gaps and create a smooth narrative of the dream; you can remember only raw flashes of vibrant color, muddled together at the edges, moving in a strange, halting motion. It is like different watercolor pigments leaking between areas of moisture, faint and pastel in one place, dark and heavy the next, bleeding between each other in ways seemingly out of the artist’s control.
You run through it again, one more time to piece together a pattern in the noise, consciously doing the work that your subconscious keeps from your view. A face–dark and angular like your own–swirls in the hazy blotches of color.
“Did you do this? Are you the reason…?” the words reveal themselves out of chaotic noise echoing in your hearing, your mind zeroing in on the precise high and low frequencies to pay attention to, and which ones should drift into the background. And then cut off mid-question as whatever is causing this experience unravels.
The next night, the same thing happens. The dreamer is more fitful. This requires a Constitution save of DC 14 rather than 10 to avoid Exhaustion.
You awaken, but you do not awaken. You are dreaming, and this time your mind has adapted to whatever seems to be happening.
At the lowest points in your life, you felt your goddess was there, guiding you onwards, directing your steps, haunting the way you make sense of the world, of other people, of right and wrong and hope and despair. She shaped who you became to the extent you could not be unhaunted without losing an important part of yourself.
But your goddess was never an actual sense of presence, a person who talked back, a force that acted upon the world. She was the sense that one day justice would triumph over cruelty, that love would triumph over power and control, that all things would be made right. You knew she was real because you could not bear to live in a universe where she was not.
And yet.
A real elf woman stands before you, and you know with every fiber of your being this is your goddess, in the flesh.
Well, not exactly an elf. More elf-ish. Your people have always depicted her in their own image, but here she is different. Her face is more angular, her frame more lithe, her ears longer and more pointed, her stature slightly but noticeably shorter. She looks… not dissimilar from the fey you met before.