Recovered: Restless Dreamer
A GLoG class for the cursed class challenge.
Now you’ve done it. Maybe you pricked your finger on a magic spinning wheel. Took a bite of an enchantress’ apple. Stole a perfume from the wrong alchemist. Desecrated a fairy ring. Whatever it was, you’re gonna be comatose for a while, so you might as well make the best of it.
The Sleeping Beauty by Arthur Rackham.
This is a cursed class. Once you have a template in Restless Dreamer you can’t gain templates in anything else until you wake up.
- Asleep, Beautiful, Well-Rested
- Somnambulant
- Sandman’s Touch
- Manifestations
Asleep
You’re asleep. You cannot move on your own and must be carried everywhere. You are still aware of your surroundings, but only what they dream themselves to be: you see the ruins on the hill as a glorious stately palace and the mayor’s cat as a fearsome panther. The thief in the night is a smooth constellation of shadow and the paladin literally radiates sunlight. You can speak softly and coherently or loudly and incoherently.
Beautiful
Fortunately, you are a graceful sleeper. Whenever you gain a template in Restless Dreamer, add one to your Charisma. You are non-threatening to animals, if obviously vulnerable, and people will do things to help you or your companions when asked that they might not otherwise.
Well-Rested
If the curse is broken, you resume your normal sleep schedule. You can only use your Restless Dreamer templates while sleeping, but while awake, bonuses to Charisma from Beauty become bonuses to Constitution. (Such beauty could only last as an idea of a person, not a real person.)
Somnambulant
With great effort, you can move under your own power and take actions no sleeper could normally undertake—cast spells,1 swing swords, sing songs, etc. Each round you are up and about you must make a Charisma save to avoid drifting off to dream again, and take a -1 penalty to this save for each preceding round you’ve been moving.
Sandman’s Touch
Your stillness and calm are contagious. You can cast human and beast into a deep sleep at the touch of your hand whenever you so choose. The only limit to this ability is what you can reach.
Manifestations
You can call creatures of the dreaming to aid you in the waking world. They range from clever dormice to crawling vines to rolling nightmare machines. Each day you can call dream creatures with total HP equal to the total number of templates you have, and they have morale as retainers. They return to the dreams of others when they are needed (usually within the next 24 hours).
Methods of Waking
- True love’s kiss.
- Find the little fairy that did this and wring their little fairy neck.
- Dream a world so real it replaces the one you’re asleep in.
- Really a lot more ammonium salts than advisable.
- Ride it out—you don’t seem to be aging, so you might as well find out what the future is like.
- Get yourself kicked out of the dreaming.
- Bargain away your ability to sleep.
- Have your corporeal form brought to the dreaming to take your place.
Notes
I was told it’s easy to write GLoG classes and this did go fast. I haven’t played the GLoG proper yet, so please let me know if I missed something obvious.
There are many other entries in this challenge. These are the ones I am currently aware of:
- Curses (Words for Yellow)
- Nanoweapon Poisoned (Archon’s Court)
- Skablin (ふかひれスープ)
- The Ogre (Of Slugs and Silver)
- Holding Out for a Hero (A Blasted, Cratered Land)
- The Oath Cursed (Anxious Mimic)
- Mirror-Struck (Princesses & Pioneers)
- The Doppelgänger (Parasites and Paradoxes)
- The Abattoir God (Bugbear Slug)
- Wizzard Bidness (Meandering Banter)
- Curse of the Undying (Nuclear Haruspex)
- The Fading Curse (Whimsical Mountain)
This post was first shared on August 3, 2019. In the comments, Ancalgon_TB suggests that this could make a good NPC or villain who doesn’t want to wake up and will try to prevent that.
How do you rest to regain spells when you’re always asleep? Easy: you fall asleep in your dreams. Just be sure you don’t only dream you fell asleep in your dreams, and be careful not to learn the spell that your spell dreams it is, which might be something else entirely…↩︎