OUROBOROS RETROGRADE - Jaunt info

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Ouroboros Retrograde
A timey-wimey return to Questing Country
January 15-February 24

Questing Country is a dreamspace shared by the young people of many species. In Questing Country, lucid dreamers are empowered by magic and guided by spirit companions to fight their own nightmares, slay the collective nightmares of their people, change the world by learning how to be heroes in waking and dreaming worlds, and literally change the dreams of all people for the better. The landscape of Questing Country changes, but the place is real - anyone who dreams of Questing Country vanishes from their bed, and wakes up with the wounds, marks, or treasures they earned there. Only young and innocent people are hopeful and naive enough to believe one person really can change the world - and so, they’re the only people who ever have the chance to change it.

But there’s more to Questing Country than the Champions it anoints and their dangerous lives and uncertain fates. The nightmares have their own magic. The Fire Mushrooms range out from the place called Nuclear Winter. Hordes of Men in Black come from Conspiracy Country. If they’re not stopped here, they gain power in the dreams of the Known Worlds… and those are only a few of the more obvious ones.

Sometimes, though, the untapped powers of Questing Country find other shapes, as well. The most famous are Valences - collective wishes that can be sought and achieved so that one young dreamer can make their hope into reality - but there are others. A year after the last Valence was achieved, the constant Aspect of Questing Country that allows clear communication between Spirit Companions and Dreamers has passed into retrograde, which happens every so often, rendering messages unclear. More unusually, the constant Aspect of Questing Country that accounts for linear time is also in retrograde, causing those boundaries we take for granted between past and future to grow hazy, bridging times of crisis, and allowing the Powers of the past and the Wisdom of the future to collaborate on their dreams.

-Several centuries in the past, the Champions that fight the nightmares caused by the Diabolin Empire, who are themselves seen as Waking Nightmares more monster than being - these brave, outmatched Champions seeking to free the elves and the Hecatites from slavery - are dealing with something terrifying to them beyond even the Diabolin or the mystery of an Ouroboros Retrograde: the Rise of the Adversaries. These Champions and Oracles know that a Champion who gives in to despair becomes a Pillar, but they have never heard of a Dreamer who fights on their own behalf and defies the wisdom of Spirit Companions, and they may not trust corrupt futures in which these threatening new Adversaries are common. Surely, this is a future to be averted.

-In the first year after an unexpected Double Valence, in addition to both Communication and Time being out of their usual alignments, the Dreamers know to expect the return of the Travelers - a people pulled from their worlds by mysterious dream-beings like and unlike their companions, but infinitely more powerful. The Oracles noticed when so many Champions vanished after the Valence was achieved, discovered why, and predicted the Travelers’ return.

-And a generation later, in the first year of the Starquakes, the Dreaming people have been troubled by the vast and powerful dreams of alien minds. Portions of Questing Country have vanished in dreams of light and fire, or of cold and aurora and static, the march of mountains, storms of dust, seas of lava - and yet none of them harmful, simply overwhelming. But harmful or not, the Quests of Champions are interrupted when whole dream-continents vanish, and their ability to shape the Known Worlds is disrupted. Worse, their faith in that ability may be shaken; if a generation of Champions learns and believes that they are helpless to defy larger forces, it may become the truth - permanently...

As the three timelines temporarily converge, can the generations of the past and future make sense of each other’s dreams, worldviews, and agendas, and rediscover the power, wisdom, agency, and resistance to change the Known Worlds?

We can only hope.

The Known Worlds | Species | Dream Forms | Roles | Changing Roles | Timelines & Summaries | Bonds & Bonded Groups | Casting Call/Plot Role Announcements | Glossary | Skills | Calendar | Who’s the What of Which | Player Resources | Questions/FAQ | Plotting

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THE KNOWN WORLDS (NEW INFO)

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Earth - the human homeworld, and the only one they’ve known in the Adversary and Double Valence generations. By the Starquake generation, humans have set up colonies on Mars and a handful of Jupiter’s moons, and occasionally make other forays out into interstellar space.

Faerie - the elves’ homeworld, only ever visited by the Diabolin (the elves rather wish they wouldn’t). In the Adversary generation, abduction and enslavement by the Diabolin is a major threat. Faerie is a wild & beautiful world with abundant multi-hued flora, graceful & bright-colored fauna, and lush temperate & tropical biomes even at the polar regions, with almost no axial tilt to create seasons. The inhabitants are mostly semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers: they have little metalworking, no cities save Diabolin ruins, no agriculture, no writing. What scavenged stellar technology remains is viewed as evil magic.

Khthon - the Gorgon homeworld, on the cold end of what humans would call that solar system’s ‘Goldilocks zone.’ It doesn’t look like much from space, as the surface temperatures combined with Gorgons’ reptilian nature mean their civilization is almost entirely in extensive cave networks below ground, with the exception of spaceports and burial plots. By the Double Valence generation, Gorgons have begun setting up subterranean colonies off-planet, although each world tends to be home to its own religious, cultural, and political movements, completely independent of (and often hostile to) their homeworld. Colonies include Sublune & Hypocaia.

Hecate - the Hecatite homeworld, a peaceful but extremely regimented place. All life on Hecate is silicon-based and crystalline, not carbon-based, and the line between being, creature, plant, and object is fuzzy at best. Highly organized with a central government of their most educated and accomplished elder scientists, Hecatites place great value on intellectual achievement and consider academic prowess a greater indicator of maturity than mere age. The Adversary generation is struggling with Diabolin incursions; the Double Valence and Starquake generations are practiced spacefarers in their own right.

Cadmus - homeworld of the Spartoi, a rocky world with brown, rust-infused oceans, inhospitable badlands full of harsh weather, an unstable magnetic field, and very little ozone, creating a volatile climate and high mutation rates in all its hardy, volatile species. The Spartoi organize themselves in clans, based on either bloodlines or chosen family. Clans, especially those formed by choice, often use similar names (starting with the same letter, for instance, or ending with similar sounds). Family clans are more likely to be stationary, living on hereditary grounds, while chosen clans are more nomadic - unless, of course, they defeat or absorb a family clan and settle on that clan’s hereditary grounds. This is not a fun place to be a pacifist, as most clans can’t fathom why you’d want to, and those that can are isolated and well-hidden for their own safety.

Povodni - a wet world of low, marshy continents with many active springs and wells, and shallow seas full of migratory flora and fauna. The Vodyanoi live in coastal cave systems, using the air-filled sections of their caverns for the kinds of chemical and technical work that are impossible underwater. Most Vodyanoi technology, however, is the result of breeding plants to serve specific purposes, and their air-cavern handicrafts are pre-Industrial. Most Vodyanoi culture is flexible and adaptable; they are natural mimics, inventive, and do not prize continuity or tradition, so their ‘nations’ are all seen as temporary associations, not permanent or rigid institutions. Vodyanoi are not the top of the local food chain - while they are omnivores, they have the reflexes and instincts of prey, not predators, despite hunting small fish.

Throne Of The Overlords - the massive, dark, volcanic Diabolin homeworld was lost almost two centuries before the Double Valence generation, polluted in some way by Diabolin internecine warfare - the Diabolin have a dozen mutually exclusive stories about what happened and how, and believe all of them. In the Adversary generation, the Throne is home to a terrifying interstellar empire, totalitarian, egomaniacal, & brutally militaristic; heat and pressure and darkness mean a slave’s lifetime is measured in single-digit years even if the mad Diabolin do not kill them. Diabolin names for places tend to be titles, not names, like the English might name a house "the Hollyhocks." The Diabolin white dwarf diamond mine is "The Dead Reach."

Junkworlds - radioactive trash heaps used as prison planets by some spacefaring species, and occasionally picked over for scraps by scavengers and less scrupulous sorts of other spacefarers. Gehenna was evacuated and is presumed wiped out by the tachyon storm in the Starquake generation; other junkworlds include Megiddo and Potmos. The offenses that can see one exiled to a junkworld vary depending on species, ranging from political dissidence or scientific malfeasance for the Hecatites to prisoners of war for the Gorgons. Diabolin tend to put their criminals into cryofreeze and retrieve them later; enslaved members of other species can be subjected to this treatment if their owner was as well. Dreamers can access Questing Country from a junkworld, but may occasionally find themselves up against some real doozies of nightmares.