The dream, overall, is pretty fuzzy in my mind but I do remember the gist of the session that I was running. Here are the main elements:
- The party started in a secluded village with a single road leading out. This road was controlled by a rival family/group who charged a toll.
- Thus encouraged to find other means of travel (I may have given them an explicit goal of establishing alternative routes to the place), the party forded a river the ran beside the village.
- On the other side of the river was some sort of guardhouse or other fortified building. I don’t recall describing it as made of stone but I remember that I mentioned very thick walls and only narrow slits for windows. The party went inside to investigate.
- The building was empty except one PC discovered that beneath the floorboards, there was a hollow spot. Hacking their way through the wood planks, they discovered a shaft leading down into darkness.
- Using their rope, they descended down, past an entire floor that looked like it had been completely filled in, into another, lower level with a dirt floor like a root cellar.
- As they walked around, they disturbed skeletons who rose out of the earth. Combat was joined!
- The party was getting the better of the exchange but the dirt beneath their feet became unstable and they began falling through the now loose soil into some lower darkness.
- I remember thinking, in the dream, that some greater horror was here, now (re)awakened but I did not get around to describing it before my recollections went soft and I lost the dream.
My initial takeaways:
- The settlement setup doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I vaguely have this idea that I pictured the place isolated in a valley of some sort? With one road leading out? I did mention that there was a small dock at the waterfront but that it wasn’t used. I also remember describing a rowboat on the far side of the river that looked like it had been smashed by a rock. Maybe it’s a mining settlement? I did not describe the village at all, in my recollection, other than it was there, that the road was vaguely hostile and expensive, there was an alternate egress, and that I may have tasked the party with establishing an alternate transportation route.
- I think my idea was to push the party to go across the river rather than take the road and have to pay which, as it was my dream and my dream-party, they were amenable and they did.
- The fortified “gatehouse” is interesting in that I didn’t call it a tower and I don’t recall making a point of its construction (wood, stone, etc.) apart from the walls being thick and the windows being narrow. I only remember one of my dream-players recognizing it as some sort of strong point and my dream-self nodding in agreement. What is it guarding-- the river? which side? the village? something from the village? why was it abandoned or emptied?
- I don’t recall where the idea of the undead-infested root cellar came from other than a blurry idea that some great calamity had befallen at least one group of occupiers who were haphazardly interred on that level and then covered up and isolated. I think their demise was related to the thing that was beneath it but I didn’t get far enough to engage in any connections. If this is why the building was abandoned, why clean it up and leave it standing? Why not tear it down, turn it into a memorial (or warning!), rather than leave it for other folk to come by and potentially disturb some terrible foe like the party did?