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.