The SUE Files: One Day We'll Even Have Rules

I fear we may have put the cart slightly before the horse, given the sort of logistical issues we're running into. It might help to define the basic in-universe mechanics of worldbuilding so that we know what kind of inheritances between worlds we're looking at. Here's what I'm thinking:


Most people who tell stories do so in broad strokes; in, for example,a dashing swordfight scene, no one cares that some guy three rows back in the astonished crowd of onlookers stubbed his toe yesterday. Indeed, for all practical purposes, he has no toes insofar as the story cares. In most stories, this isn't a problem, but in every RPG I've ever been in, at some point the players will wander into some part of the story that no one ever anticipated them seeing, at which point the DM ad-libs through a combination of logic, tropes, and random guessing.


World-dreaming is like that, except all the players are doing that from the moment they become self-aware and there are potentially trillions of them. Thus, the simulation: taking the dreamer's cognitive bias and feeding random numbers into it until a world falls out. Then we have gaps to deal with, chief among them people's ignorance concerning the operation of their own sentience. It might as well throw the resultant exceptions upward, drawing from whatever made the dreamer's own world...and by the time the recursion terminates, everything's pulling from the same basic template. A template that, self-evidently, contains the capacity to start the whole thing all over again, wishing its own little infinity into existence. There's a nice sense of unity there, one that I think reflects a lot of “alien” species in fiction: weird as they might get, they're still broadly describable in comprehensible terms, and therefore it's still broadly possible to understand them. This will be critical for most parties, in all probability.


Given that, I don't think it's too unreasonable to say that a great many capabilities are all stuffed into the same template, then deactivated as needed in each iteration; it's considerably more efficient than hoping that whoever's dreaming of sapient sound waves has any idea of how to build their instincts at a molecular-equivalent level. More importantly, it means dreamjackers almost literally jailbreak their brains to do things they were never intended to do, but had the capacity to do anyway, which helps explain some of the operational uniformity of such a diverse organization.


This has a number of implications. The big one concerns creating: it leaves our old idea of omniscience with usable loopholes. Firstly, even if a world's creator can see anything, they can't possibly process everything at once. There is only so much data one mind can process at once. Secondly, their perceptions are still subject to their various cognitive inadequacies, which means our PCs can hide by making sense, among other things, or at least not standing out. This, in combination with how much most people focus on specific stories in their larger world, implies certain things about dreamjacker operational doctrine we'll get into later.


The little one concerns our PCs and how we make them. I'd like to make the entry process as wide open as possible, thus the assumption that everybody already knows, on some level, how to do this. I'd also like some constraints on the process of becoming one: ideally it should be irreversible but not repeatable. That way the PCs don't have a Get Out of Adventure Free card; I don't like to be this cynical, but I'd like to be able to put NPC dreamjackers in horrible situations without having to explain why they didn't just run away. There's also some associated physical gaps; with all that in mind, here's my thought:

Every dreamjacker starts with someone who wants to leave everything. It may not be a reasoned decision; it might with equal ease be founded in anger, terror, or curiosity. The only really salient points are the totality of the character's confidence in however they're leaving and their lack of information concerning their destination. Maybe they built themselves and extra-universal transportalizer; maybe they researched Mage's Ultimate Escape. Maybe they ran blindfolded through a maze for a really long time. Maybe they stepped through a mystical portal at the end of all the planes. Heck, maybe they got really scared of the monsters under the bed, shut their eyes, and wished real hard. The point is, we're dealing with the kind of mind that insists they're going and only knows they're going Out hard enough that the whole world acknowledges their momentum.


Now, what happens to their body is rather dependent on their home physics; their mind, on the other hand, that little standard sapient template suddenly doing extremely nonstandard things, is flung through all the cosmoses. Wherever it lands, though, it's demonstrably not “real”; matter doesn't work the way it remembers, its senses are horribly off, et cetera. So it insists things make sense, which switches on a bunch of heretofore unused engrams and starts translating sense data and instantiating a body. It insists that said body is real, therefore it can interact with local matter, though it's really closer to a memory forcibly injected into a larger thought; likewise, it insists it can sense, and so it finds or builds senses to parse the incoming data in comprehensible ways. That's really the key to this entire process: complete and utter disregard for apparently immutable truths.


This can end badly in a lot of ways. The temptation to misuse it is going to be vast; in many ways, they are omnipotent. Even if they don't go full-on tyrant, seemingly benign uses can cause serious problems. Just sculpting fire in fun ways or whatever isn't necessarily morally wrong by anyone's standards, but it's still going to shatter Immersion if overdone. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some may never figure it out and just wane in shock and confusion until there's nothing left. In between we could have Superman-style vigilantism, rigorous exploration of their new understanding of reality, just blending in and lying low...who knows. A potential dreamjacker's second career is probably as interesting as the first one.


At this point, triage happens. The first third, the ones who are being cruel or tyrannical or so uncontrollably destructive that there's no hope of reigning them in, get dreamjacker teams sent after them. The last third, the incurably confused ones, are definitionally beyond help – or, more immediately pertinently, beyond recruitment. The triage step, from a game design perspective, is more there for NPC creation than as a restriction to PC personality. Most people don't want to play characters so crazy they can never meaningfully interact with other people or so unsuited for this that no power in the cosmos can help them learn how to breathe. The first is there so we can make SUEs later. The second is there so we have some numerical flexibility.


Anyway, the middle third of the triage gets enough positive Agency attention to be pinged for recruitment. In dreamjacker parlance, this is “waking up”; it happens through a nightmare, all the more remarkable for being the first dream the candidate has had since freeing themselves from their host world. Specifics differ, but the events depicted do not: it shows the rise and fall of one Mary Sue. From her start simply slaying anyone who gainsaid her to her eventual casual rending of worlds and minds asunder, she assimilates all she sees, twisting the unique parts to amuse her and reprocessing the shattered remains of the rest into yes-persons. She overwrites minds on the most basic, fundamental level to remove their capacity for dissent or even unhappiness, likewise almost casually ripping apart everything she sees to better suit her whims. The world is her museum, the interesting exhibits fixed and pinned down and sealed behind glass while the rest is turned into muted, sterile, identical support structure for further conquests. Eventually something snaps, and everything she did and everything she knew was dissected and destroyed by an inconceivable array of impossible horrors until nothing remains of a thousand worlds but empty non-space – in a particularly eerie twist, the candidate's home and loved ones are typically superimposed on suitable parts of the rapidly decaying reality. Then those thousand become a million, then ten million, and so on until the candidate screams themselves awake. All the while, embedded didactic keys trigger awareness of their ability to do everything they see. They wake up fully capable of Suedom and fully aware of the consequences. They know about Immersion, they know what happens when it breaks, they're aware of the existence of the Agency in broad terms and they know what it is to be a dreamjacker. Presently an existing cell comes by with a job offer.


The key reason for a candidate to accept is one of agency, I think. They've certainly been batted around by fate enough to want some control. Eventually, someone like Mary is going to arise, and if not stopped they will eventually break things until everything around them is torn apart, including in all probability the candidate's home. Perhaps they will make the difference that day; perhaps not. But either way, better to do something about it – and they know well how big a something they can do – than be blindsided by it and let all that potential dissipate away. Then, too, for the rest of their life, whatever they do, they need to fight to wake up every day convinced the world they see is real. They can convince themselves that the world is a wonderfully plastic infinity where a very tiny group of concerned people can literally hold the cosmoses together against an endless array of insane, tyrannical megalomaniacs, or they can convince themselves that the world is an immutable place over which they have almost no direct control.


Some refuse to help, of course. Knowing what happens when they overuse their abilities, I'd bet the sensible ones are going to use them only when they perceive a dire need, and even then not to meddle noncausally in someone's head. Operationally they might be more like consultants, if anything; the Agency is necessarily too paranoid to forget about them completely, but just as there's no reason to restrict their freedom unless they start going wrong, there's also no reason to ignore whatever information they might be willing to provide.


The rest...the rest, after all that, are our dreamjackers. They possess the following traits:

1. The will to leave home in a big and extremely dangerous way.
2. The adaptability to find a way to exist reasonably well where they land.
3. The basic sanity to be able to interact with other people nondestructively.
4. The desire to prevent the end of all the worlds.


Looking at this list, one might feel it's too restrictive; I can certainly see where, for example, 3 might give people pause. If it helps, think of them as guidelines. The Agency certainly can't afford to waste people who need a bit or a lot of help to adapt, and they're as willing to make allowances as the DM is.


It is also an exclusively mental list, because I don't want to stop people from playing whatever they want physically. Yes, in a complicated and pedantic way, someone who's robot, for example, is actually only a thought imaging itself a robotic body, but if you tap them they clank. The point is to not get hung up on how, exactly, character A exists in setting 1, or ability Ж works under such-and-so physics, while not handwaving any of that away entirely. If there is a giant atomic-powered robot striding through a high fantasy kingdom firing off laser beams, so be it. If an alchemist then sprinkles philosopher's stone on that robot and turns its armor into gold, also fine. The fact that the two kinds of physics can't coexist doesn't matter unless someone makes a big deal out of it, and that is literally what Immersion is for.


With that done, there are some loose ends to tie up. A lot of them concern what happens when a dreamer stops; if we have to compress millennia of history into a single lifetime, let alone a single night, we're going to need time travel. Also, if we want dreamers hopping out of the world, the tree's going to get even more convoluted than it already is; we can certainly do things like loops in a limited way, but random cross-connections, truly random ones, get really tiresome to map.


As a solution to all of this, I refer back to the above explanation of how new worlds come up. Take the dreamer out of the equation once it's been running for a while, and maybe the simulation just idles; it refers to random people around the dreamer when it runs into a particularly knotty problem, they have a slightly freaky dream, and the world keeps on going. Maybe it polls the inhabitants every once in a while. The world drifts slightly over the ages, to be sure; its responses when invaded shift gradually as more and more mindsets are added to its history. But it keeps going until someone stops it.


That feels like a neat solution to a lot of our problems to me. Please feel free to tell me if it isn't.

The SUE Files: Doing Things Right

This is one of the reasons I wanted to build this thing in full view of everybody: not only do my readers generally have excellent ideas, they're also good at pointing out when I've failed to excise my personal biases from my work. Like here, where I kind of assumed everyone's as sullenly misotheist as I am and probably made some folks uncomfortable. Apologies, and I think I can fix it thematically before we start nailing down mechanics, so well done baeraad.


Admittedly, if I completely excise the keep-the-gods-in-line element, the game gets rather different, but I can at least shove it into a dark corner and mark them as Radicals or something and essentially render it irrelevant. Come to think of it, it's rather cleaner in execution to have us focus on SUE-stomping as opposed to more generic tyrant-stomping; we can parody Authyrs in other ways. We can also solve two problems at once here: it's been pointed out that certain realizations of the dream-within-a-dream topology require impractical amounts of computing power at the non-leaf nodes. So let's set up impractical amounts of computing power; you can skip the next paragraph if you accept me energetically waving my hands.


As a sort of zero option handwave, let's just say all of this is actually occurring in a Tipler oracle of unknown construction and purpose. We have the computronium to make our worlds tree arbitrarily large; we therefore have the nodes to extend it upward higher than the PCs could reasonably want to reach, unless somehow we feel like defining a root, “real” world. I certainly don't. Let's go further and say that, somehow, the people instantiating these worlds are automatically offloading the actual instant-to-instant number-crunching to the simulator itself, which lowers the bar on world-dreaming from “impossibly good at multitasking” to “can semi-accidentally use a level editor” and vastly improves our collective familiarity with our pool of potential creators.


However we define it though, the important thing is this: something else is driving all this, and it's turtles all the way up and down, so to speak. Given that, I'm fairly confident in saying that cases of Blue and Orange Morality are going to be fairly common; hopefully individual GMs are going to have the sense not to put anything in that squicks out their players, then proceed to defend it by saying it's ok in [wherever they are]. I mention this because we're probably going to be operating on the assumption that the PCs are intervening in cases of rampant SUEdom not because they're being horrible, but because they're doing it in someone else's sandbox/dreamscape. Essentially the players are defending people's right to think whatever they want, free from external meddling...by meddling in people's thoughts.


As has been rightfully pointed out, our heroes and our villains use very similar methods; neither of them are natives to whatever mind they're running around in, and they're both changing things that “should not”, assuming consistent physics, be changed. The fact that we fight for the users doesn't necessarily change that the fighting itself is terribly invasive, and I like the moral ambiguity that brings. It also suggests a rather stealthy modus operandi, as per the original plan; any immune system already in place to prevent this kind of thing will pick up PC agents just as well as the SUEs. Of course, by immune system I mean Lovecraftian horrors.


It's not (quite) as incongruous as it probably sounds; assuming that people's perceptions have drifted over the successive generations of dreamers, the original rectifiers of reality probably aren't something anyone local can parse, for a very large set of values for “local”. At a guess, the PC/SUEs are the only ones whose minds are sufficiently accustomed to accepting unusual things to even perceive them as entities; the unreal geometries and so forth are necessary sacrifices to maintain visual awareness of the locus of points it occupies. At any rate it's not like it clashes with any one thing more than anything else.


Besides, people have been asking after motivations; part of my bias was in conflating an opportunity to do this kind of thing with a mandate to do it. Instead, let's go with something less insufferable: unless stopped, rampant dreamjacking (sorry, but it's the best word I can come up with right now) trips some kind of mental/computational flag and subjects everything connected to the problem to “analysis” in a way that, at this point, is probably destructive. At the very least, the dreamer's now a Cthulhu cultist; more likely some part of the source world is being analyzed, and who knows where that will lead. That, I think, works nicely as a motive: if we don't do it, the alternative is much more destructive and follows unknowable rules concerning when to stop, going up and down and sideways across the tree until it corrects all memetically similar worlds and finds all the distal causes – according to completely alien concepts of causality. Also, because I have to say it: No one expects the Cthuvian Inquisition.


Now, someone might note that, if this keeps happening and we know it keeps happening, only an idiot would try this, and I expect they're right. We do have a surfeit of idiots (“I have plenty of abomination-punching genes!”) and it's certainly a mode of existence that favors hubris, but we also have a nice, clean continuum from functional agents to problems. Like I said, both our heroes and our villains are going where they aren't wanted and doing invasive things unasked – and, as baeraad noted, to remove an omnipotent entity takes some fairly scary levels of power. Somehow, PCs get away with it, over and over, and eventually someone's going to get overly attached to something, or crazy, or dead, and it doesn't have to be that way...


The PCs organization probably has at least some kind of internal subdivision based on what their safety valve is, if you will; if the process of trading everything you've ever experienced for a completely new normal all at once is as traumatic as I expect it is, there's probably a strong impetus to keep agents functional as long as possible. It's related to the question of how a crazy person knows they're crazy. Some of them might do what I originally suggested and confer with the natives concerning the “realism” of their plans; routing the actual execution through people who think natively (ha!) in local terms is also a good way to avoid blatantly blowing one's cover. At a guess, some of the others have a sort of internal tactica/scripture to follow (The Codex Henderson?) and refer back to in cases of dubious sanity or something – or perhaps a democratically elected captain and Articles and all the rest of the trappings of classical buccaneering. Like hats. Probably says something about me that I set out to come up with a loose analogue to VtM clans and end up with rebels, cultists and thought-pirates; hopefully some differently-minded folks out there can come up with alternative methods of organizing the agents into task forces.


Then again maybe we want the whole Army of Thieves and Whores aspect to it. It kind of reminds me of Shadowrun. To my mind, it's a useful narrative tool for muddying the waters between legitimate activity, legitimate activity complicated by vast stylistic differences, and becoming the very thing they're trying to stop, while also making some nicely sympathetic villains. For example, look at my own folly in lumping SUEs and excessively dictatorial creators together. Sure, meddling in the latter's head is reducing sapient suffering and all...but it's exactly what the PCs are nominally trying to stop. Between moralizing, variably legitimate difficulties in communication, and a high turnover rate from agent to target, we can spend all days putting intrigues together. Or avoid them entirely. It's even possible that avoiding them entirely is the default; it's not like the PCs couldn't just wander around the multiverse and break whatever's fixed (ha) independent of any kind of network. That's less fun, though, than trying to put together some kind of overarching agency out of the kind of people who, approached with the above prospect, are actually on board with it. At a guess, the phrase “Loose Cannon of the Month award” comes up a lot. Especially in worlds with sentient cannons.
Anyway: Much as I want to avoid mandating a particular playstyle, a thought did occur to me for a way to moderate the magic system somewhat, which it needs conceptually. Really, once we have characters who know everything's a mutable dream, all they're really doing is enforcing their will on it; for all intents and purposes everyone's as powerful as they want to be from day one. If you've ever panicked in a dream, you might be aware that they tend to change under pressure; it seems logical to me for the characters to become very good at applying that pressure. They know they can stop breathing, for example, since there's no air anyway. If we take “total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face “ as the source of controlled super-locally-natural phenomena then a mana gauge doesn't make sense. Setting aside that you can be as stubborn as you want to be, you could always just magic the gauge full again. In that vein, I'd suggest not making dreamjacker (working on the name) magic drain any kind of reserve. Instead, it literally strains credulity; insisting the world is something else makes it feel less real.


And really, it has to feel real, even if only on a subconscious level; even if the player characters know intellectually that everything around them is fake, if they see a tiger coming at them they need to jump a bit. I don't see any problem with actually having a game-mechanical gauge for that, calling it Immersion, and saying that magic damages everyone's acceptance of the reality of their surroundings, making it harder and harder to doublethink their way out of becoming snacks for Lovecraftian diagnostic tools. Heck, let's give everyone such a gauge, even if only the PC types know it's a problem to be avoided – and that includes the creator whose poor world is being broken. Seeing weirdness lowers it, creating weirdness lowers it more, breaking Immersion is really not a healthy idea...so how do we refill the reserve?


This is probably the part that people might not like; consider it wide open to suggestions. I'd make it refillable via engrossing activities; just let players define what their characters find so interesting it distracts them from everything else and damps their inner solipsist. Something they can lose themselves in, so nothing else can find them either. Maybe it's martial arts; maybe it's music or coffee or raconteurism or any of a thousand other hobbies people have. Now, insightful readers might notice that if, say, your thing is zero-gee parkour, you're up a creek in low fantasy settings. Too right; so maybe settings have things too. Whatever is interesting, be it floating islands or psychic butterflies or the Basilica of Infinite Camembert, probably helps drag the PCs back from the bring of ennui. This can go one of two ways. Either it's a big, transparently obvious cudgel to force the players to admire the glory of your setting (no), or it's a way to encourage them to go to interesting (read: dangerous) places and do entertaining things. From a functional standpoint I'm probably going to make the basal Immersion return rate high enough to sustain most parties on their own resources and treat local Immersion returns as more of a bonus, but giving crafty PCs more mana for arranging their operations around cool bits of setting might strike a lot of GMs' fancy.


Of course, the entire system rewards players for selecting powers that are subtle in their effects and using them discreetly, perhaps with some thought to local standards of plausibility. It also rewards selective myopia. That might or might not be a bad thing. As for mechanical effects, I'd probably give low Immersion bonuses to power use, as well as a sort of constant reshaping of the area around them. Essentially, just before they bottom out, a character is fantastically powerful and everything seems absolutely perfect. And then they, or someone else, hits zero, breaks, and something incomprehensibly bad gets an error message. Om nom nom.


Okay. This is getting a bit long (three pages!?!) so I thought I'd sum up with what we apparently know so far in the form of an FAQ:

1. What cool stuff will the PCs get to do?
   Hop from world to world fighting nearly omnipotent folks who keep hijacking whole worlds for their own purposes and generally instantiating bad fanfic all over them. We call them SUEs.
   
2. Why do they risk their necks doing it?
   Because if left unchecked, the SUEs rip up local reality until Lovecraftian horrors show up to sort things out – and they tend to continue sorting until everything in the memetic vicinity is a fraying patch of nothingness.
   
3. No, I mean why the PCs specifically?
   
   No one else can go toe-to-toe with them – and anyway, few enough people take to world-hopping that if they refuse, there's no one else.
4. Okay, let's assume they want to. How?
   
   My guess is stealth, since the PCs are as much strangers in a strange land as their opponents. One could also employ speed, or in extremis overwhelming firepower, or even lethally persuasive arguments. It probably depends on the exact nature of the foe.
5. And this works how exactly?
   
   I'm going with the assumption that breaking local physics is an act of supreme will; magic is simply rejecting existing reality and substituting their own by being insufferably competent that it will work. Robbing a SUE of that is probably enough to remove the threat.
6. Wait, magic works by wishing?
   
   More like insisting on something really hard. It works in everyone's own dreams; it seemed apropos to make it work here. So flight works by jumping and refusing to land. Don't try it at home.
7. So why not just wish the SUEs away?
   
   A few reasons. In the first place, it's simply unlikely to work; they want to stay more than you want them to go. In the second place, just deleting them is likely to break Immersion for everyone in the area.
8. Immersion? What nonsense is this?
   
   Mechanical representation for how well a given entity is subconsciously accepting the simulation as real. It gets eroded by witnessing/causing things that don't make sense; it gets restored by doing absorbing or interesting things. When it breaks, bad things notice.
9. So sanity is mana now?
   
   Yes, with the caveat that you can be made to spend it just by observing magic things happening where they aren't supposed to. So everyone's sanity is mana, including the dreamer behind the world. If their Immersion breaks, really bad things notice.
10. So, stop arrogant idiots from overusing their magic to break the world so hard it dies, and do this with more magic?
    
    Yep. Also, since it's HERO, everything at all unusual is some kind of magic.
    
    I trust the wider gaps in our concept are apparent to everyone; any ideas to help fill them are desperately welcome. If nothing else, if anyone has an alternative to "dreamjacker", please share it. I don't know if we want to call the PCs some variant on Hendersons, as well, but I suppose it's an option. In specific, though, if I could get opinions on Cthuvian exception handling and casting from/to solipsism, that'd be great.

The SUE Files: Theorycrafting takes A Hundred Skill Checks

Really looking forward to being able to quit flying around the country. For now, though, have some more meta-setting drivel.

I don't think it ever really came across in the SUE Files, but Marty and I are actually agree, to a certain extent, on the dramatic value of unambiguous good and evil: neither of us like it. Marty hamstrung his implementation of moral relativism though his NPCs' utter stubbornness, but done right, I vastly prefer worlds where everyone thinks they're doing good, or at least doing what they must, to worlds with bright shiny pretty paladins duel dark and ugly blackguards for the fate of the world, or some such. PCs tend to act in interesting ways if the option exists to convert or subvert or otherwise adjust their villains away from whatever troublesome thing they're doing, and they're much more aware of the option if it's built in thematically.

Meta-ethical moral relativism, with sufficient self-awareness, also opens something of a design loophole. Ordinarily, building one giant central conflict into a setting is, as most of my readers will know, a bad idea; the players are either irrelevant or they win the world and there's your campaign over. Similarly, endless conflicts usually eliminate only the latter option. Sometimes it's fun to fight for the chance to keep fighting, but it can feel rather grim. Instead, let's make our sides both recognize that it's the conflict, rather than the victory, that matters; there are plenty of ways to lose sight of that and thus become a problem for everyone else, including several that allow a perfectly seamless transitions, so we'll have a nice big stable of redeemable, complicated, nicely varied antagonists. Now we just need a conflict that can hold up to that. Let's run with order vs. chaos, with a shared goal of maximizing freedom for as many people as possible. Now we have people building systems to protect people from each other and people subverting those systems to work around the unintended consequences, each of which ticks the other off but both of which can easily cooperate when faced with either extreme of the continuum.

So with all that in mind, let's look at Marty's original premise again. We're playing in and around the worlds of people's dreams. Now let's generalize that logically into the central idea of the setting: Every dream everywhere actually exists somewhere. So now someone can go find them and mess with them.

I think you see where this is going. By some arguments, the universe we all live in is very probably a simulation; that goes double for this setting. Most of us are capable of lucid dreaming some pretty intricate things; with sufficient processing power, one could dream a universe, and suddenly we have a big tree of universes with normal dreams as the leaf nodes; we will temporarily set aside the problem of waking up. Each one sort of speciates as the sophonts within it begin dreaming themselves until we have a weird parody of molecular phylogeny. To further extend the metaphor, if  dreams are accessible we now have an analogue to horizontal gene transfer in the form of the PCs and their fellows hopping around. Now they need a reason to jump, or at least a reason to jump together and do foolish and dangerous things. Enter order and chaos.

See, when you're omnipotent, it's tempting to cheat. To pick what you want to happen, first for impeccable reasons and then for merely good ones and eventually for bad ones. You start confusing people and things, and wanting to force people into predictable, thing-like patterns. You think it will never happen to you, you promise yourself it won't...and then it does, in little ways, and there's no one to hold you accountable, and it's all just so easy.

Now we have a setting with a potentially infinite hierarchy of omnipotent people of all sorts, so the PCs exist because someone needs to hunt down the absolute tyrants who can destroy them with a thought, look them dead in the mind's eye, and say: "I can't be having with that kind of thing."  And live to tell about it. That part's harder.

Still. We have the kinds of gods that want god-fearing people; let's make the PCs sort to create people-fearing gods. Gadflies to the omnipotent, if you will.  At the same time, more cynical readers might have picked up, as I have, that if all dreams are real, everyone in on the secret is under a terrible temptation, those at the bottom of the chain all the more so: dream yourself perfect and go rule the "real" world. We'll call those people the Sues; they're the thing everyone has to guard against becoming, the self-congratulatory little closed ideological loops carving the worlds up and ruining it for everyone.

Now how do the good little nightmares-of-the-gods guard against Suedom? Why, by being real of course; by knowing real people who can slap them upside the head when they're being silly. In short, by not charging forth and solving everyone's problems for them but rather equipping them to solve their own problems, especially those relating to troublesome godlings. If they're honestly happy where they are, they won't change anything, but if they're being hurt they'll work to change that. Having the humility to accept the decisions informed people make is a very good guard against being a tyrannical pissant, and anyway most of the people I know find it more fun to play kingmaker than king. It's also a transparent excuse to put a rather fun mana recovery mechanism into it, but I haven't finished that yet.

There's a nice variety of stories we could assemble here. Sue hunting, sure, but also adjusting the gods one way or the other; it's a constant conflict to keep them from drifting, and sometimes they might need to give a little more guidance or a little more freedom. Of course the fun part comes in the how; how to avoid the all-seeing eyes, how to infiltrate a mind, et cetera. I've got some thoughts on that, but this post has gone on long enough. I'll throw up some potential metaphysics later, just to put some boundary conditions on what is otherwise a rather unbounded set of possible settings.

For one thing, there has to be a way of the world persisting while its creator is not dreaming, or even conscious; I want it to be possible for PCs to affect them externally in lots of ways, so one PC can get the universe drunk while the others are running around inside it and so forth. There should probably also be some intermediary between the people thinking the universe into existence and the ones actually smiting the  sophonts therein; that way we can have pantheons. Something like different deities being personified emotions or philosophical tenets of the world's creator ought to work.

Additionally, there's problems with the commonness of everyone dreaming; we might want some kind of filter on whose dreams are big enough to actually play around inside for extended periods of time, since otherwise we're going to be overwhelmed with places to hide.

Without any admittedly critical explanation of how, I think the takeaway from the above blithering is that we're building this:

1. People's dreams are real somewhere; probably not where they can go meet them, but real enough to be externally affected in intuitive ways.

2. People being people, most of the ones mentally capable of instantiating sapient minds conduct their mindscapes in a way those minds find disagreeable.

3. Occasionally people go bad the other way and just make themselves ludicrously powerful to carve out their own domains inside other dreamscapes. These are called SUEs.

4. The PCs and others like them form a loose organization that works to curb this sort of behavior through empowering a dreamscape's resident sapients and otherwise meddling with the balance of power, generally in ways sufficiently indirect to avoid SUEdom -- or annihilation, which usually means being sneaky.

This whole thing is probably riddled with inconsistencies and vagaries. If you'd like to help point them out, or if you have any other comment, I'd love to hear about it.