Creating Backstories for the Nightmare Court

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Leliel
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Creating Backstories for the Nightmare Court

Post by Leliel »

Anyhoo, I'm planning on a Changeling: the Lost crossover (basically, the players are changelings who start dreaming themselves into Ravenloft, where their Astral forms are outsiders, reality wrinkle and all. I plan on them being sort of like Sapphire and Steel from the Ravenloft perspective).

More to the point, I plan on being the main antagonists being the Nightmare Court. Changelings are natural dreamweavers too, and I plan to make the Nightmare Man a changeling himself. Thing is, I want them to have more of a motive than eating. In fact, I noticed that their dominant motive is Lawful Evil.

So, instead, I made them stand-ins for the Outer Church, from the Invisibles. Their ultimate desire as a group is to terrify all sentient life into abandoning free thought and individual desires. They're also a "court" in the sense of being a judiciary-a surreal kangaroo court where it is assumed that accusation is proof of guilt and the ultimate goal is to provide examples rather than pursue justice.

Since I thought this idea was cool and doesn't fit the current Quoth the Raven theme, I thought I could post my revised versions here too.

To start off, let's overview the Ghost Dancer! Also my pean to my irritation with "pretty lady = nicest member"; I made her to be the most petty and self-centered on purpose, as well as into the theme of irony and self-blindness.
VIEW CONTENT:
Leonia Gerhard, the Ghost Dancer

Quote: <twirls silently, as all onlookers see flashes of all those they have hurt in her movements>

Description: The Nightmare Courtier of Guilt, and more formally the Presiding Clamiant of the Oneiric Collegium, the Ghost Dancer is the undead personification of the reason recusal exists as a concept. Anything she feeds upon is, in Leonia's view of things, directly linked to the circumstances behind her own death, and thus while she is often considered the most "merciful" of her peers, in truth she is probably the cruelest; it just so happens there are one-in-a-million cases where she is convinced the dream seed she is focusing on is truly contrite, and thus she moves on-however, the Ghost Dancer's definition of "contrite" usually involves her victims being so broken down that suicide often seems like too kind a fate to subject themselves to. She is just as mean-spirited and misanthropic as all the other co-darklords, it's just that people see the beautiful ballerina and assume that her heart matches her face. In fact, it's probably better for her social ambitions her death robbed her of the ability to speak-otherwise it would be not be particularly difficult for others to pick up that she is, to not put too fine a point on is, a vain primadonna who thinks the world owes her all the favors she desires.

Leonia Gerhard's story begins in Dementlieu. The daughter of Darkonian emigrants (or more accurately, a Darknonian mother and a Borcan father whose memories had promptly returned to him but remained mum to prevent the irate eye of the Kargat falling on him), Leonia was always a figure of attention for her pale skin and platinum blonde hair. Combined with a natural sense of poise that led itself well to her later profession of one of the Academe de Ledgermain's bards, with a unique grasp of their magic-even before she lost her voice, she was no singer, but she learned how to substitute the vocal component of song for her natural reflexes as a ballerina. Of course, even as a child, the character flaw that would later come to define her life, her inferiority complex, was ever-present. Leonia always had a sense of never being quite good enough for anyone-as a child, it was her distinct paleness and status as first-generation immigrant's daughter, as an adolescent her peers being more interested in "manly" pursuits of arcana and mathematics, as an adult student of the Academe her inability to sing her spells "properly" and being disrespected for her gender. Unfortunately for the world, Leonia learned that the best way to get around her insecurities was to manipulate others; she became a master of playing to emotion and chauvinism, using her meek appearance and demeanor to master the art of the fake cry and how to best inspire pity she could manipulate and direct. Part of the reason this worked so well is that Leonia honestly believed a great deal of her "woe is me" act; to her, she was simply asking for help in a way that sold herself as the unlucky creature she was...which would not be so bad, if she didn't regard all others seeking sympathy as rivals who didn't know how good they had it. More than one person never got the help they needed simply because Leonia was hogging all the attention, and deliberately so to deny her imagined enemies "underserved" compassion.

That was not the act that imprisoned her beyond the Veil of Sleep, though. That involved, as with too many things in the advanced Core, a relationship. While she never could get her own act, she was made partner, rather than assistant, to the great magician (and natural sorcerer) Roch Vandame. Having been inspired by her own frustrations of being a woman, and linking them to being treated as a dirty secret his whole life due to his arcane abilities, Roch saw a kindred spirit in the mystic dancer, and furthermore could see in her a unique gimmick that would propel both of them out of the rest of the Academe's shadow. While initially just intending to use him as a springboard for her own career, in time Leonie came to care for him as a person, and gradually this care for the kind man who was always patient with her rants turned to attraction.

There was a problem though-Roch already had several passionate letters with someone else, a Sascha Ahlstrom. From the content of their long and involved letters, Leonia realized the two were deeply in love, but something about Sascha made it impossible to pursue a relationship. Never a dumb woman, Leonia realized her rival was a native Patterna speaker, in other words a Vistana who regularly visited Port-a-Lucine. Realizing that a magician being in love and probably having taken the virginity of a Vistana would be a scandal Sascha would not want to put on Roch if their love was genuine, or would be so heartless that Roch would see that being involved with one of the wandering folk was a mistake.

Eventually the day came, with Leonia hiding nearby with a specialized "image catcher" she had on loan from the Academe on hand, that the ship-bound caravan came into Port-a-Lucine, with an obviously nervous Roch on the dock. The colorful ship docked, at from there emerged a stunning Vistana beauty...who winked at Roch before distracting the dockhands while Roch snuck aboard. Curious, an invisible Leonia followed to spot her partner in a chaste but loving embrace with the ship's male quartermaster.

The revelation that Roch not only was in love with someone else, but that the very nature of his affections meant he was incapable of returning her own (as far as she was concerned) finally caused Leonia's jealousy to boil over. All of her life, she had suffered, and now she was in love with a man who could never even notice how much she struggled for him? This would not stand. Slowly, a plan to destroy the man who had "led her on" and to catapult her own career in the musk of scandal presented itself to her. Snagging a few compromising positions of her partner and his lover, Leonia snuck off into the night-and to her magician's cabinet, where she kept a complex device meant to deliberately induce temporary scars for part of her "fake death" act. Quietly pressing a pair of "handmarks" into her neck, and dressing herself up as a victim of assault, she "fled" to the front door of the Academe' local coordinator with a new sob story about how "those brutes" had treated the poor, innocent ballerina who threatened to expose their decadence and shame.

While Roch pleaded his innocence, the tides of two types of bigotry sealed his fate before it even came to trial, and he was beheaded in record time. In the wake of the scandal the Council of Brilliance proceeded to justify a "decency" measure against the Vistani that had "corrupted" its son, all with Leonia's urgings. The ship itself was burned and the crew hunted down in a frenzy of prejudiced violence, all while Leonie watched from her theater's roof with dark satisfaction.

Suddenly, she saw a figure sneak into the theater, one in distinct Vistani garb. Furious at the intrusion into her sanctum, she descended to turn the invader in for the bounty, only to encounter Sascha, eyes red from crying and narrowed in rage, sitting in the front row-along with the corpses of his crewmates, all poised as if to watch her perform.

"Why are you so surprised?" he said in Patterna, which Leonia suddenly realized she understood. "You desired a solo act, did you not?"

Suddenly, the fake wounds that the ballerina magician had used to frame her partner appeared on her body-but they were very real now. Struggling to breathe, she fell to the floor.

"And a solo act you shall have. You shall even have an eternal audience, entertaining those trapped between worlds as they await their rewards. And you shall entertain them forever, until the day you understand, in truth, what you hung on us falsely."

From behind him a familiar corpse rose, walking over to her. Leonia could not even scream as Roch strangled her in truth.

Storytelling Hints: Anyone who gives the Ghost Dancer a voice, via telepathy or temporary unclenching of her vocal chords, will quickly learn to regret it; Leonia is one of the world's great whiners, an endless tide of maudlin complaints and bemoaning of her past that would not be half as irritating if she ever acknowledged the pain of others. But no-to Leonia Gerhard, the only person who has troubles that matters is Leonia Gerhard, and absolutely none of them are her fault, just ask her. She even rephrases her need to pray on dreams as her being an innocent victim in all of this; she needs some way to rest despite the fact that Sascha's curse means she can never stop dancing, she just needs to park herself in a normal dreaming mind to catch her ghostly breath and focus enough to even stand up. Naturally, she never brings up the fact that she could just hypothetically surf good dreams instead of inflict endless repeating scenes of guilt, but if bought up she has an excuse there too-she needs to understand guilt and shame to free herself (which is technically true, but of course she would have to feel those emotions herself to stop her endless dance, something she can never seem to quite manage-her self-pity gets in the way).

As with all the Nightmare Court, Leonia believes the Nightmare Man is correct that free will must be severely curtailed and monitored for the good of the world. Unlike the others, her motive has nothing to do with her past, not directly. Rather, she has convinced herself that all guilt and shame is deserved, as it is the only way for victims of circumstance like her to get ahead in the world; best for everyone to stay within the rules of good behavior and success, and then people like her don't need to fear any sort of oppression. Really, it's a way for her to avoid admitting the truth that Sascha had a point to herself; if everyone feels guilty for good reasons, then by shaming them she is not really manufacturing anything for her own benefit.
I am The Archangel of Night.
I am the Guardian of Shadow
I am the Vindicator of the Unknown
I am..Leliel.
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Re: Creating Backstories for the Nightmare Court

Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Interesting. I always liked the idea of the Ghost Dancer being the ghost of Hazlik's archenemy--he wound up in the Nightmare Lands when he first arrived, I like the idea that he was not a DL yet, but she became one just as he killed her, and she pulled him in.
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Re: Creating Backstories for the Nightmare Court

Post by Leliel »

DeepShadow of FoS wrote:Interesting. I always liked the idea of the Ghost Dancer being the ghost of Hazlik's archenemy--he wound up in the Nightmare Lands when he first arrived, I like the idea that he was not a DL yet, but she became one just as he killed her, and she pulled him in.
Interesting, and I will have to save that idea.

No Court member right now, but I do have my version of Dream Spawn.
VIEW CONTENT:
Dream Spawn

The dominant "species" of the Nightmare Lands, Dream Spawn are also a quiet warning against those who would let the Court run amuck; while it is believed by Dr. Illhousen that they are the cast of any given dream between roles, any changeling knows the human mind is more than capable of conjuring its own actors. They are, in fact, what remains of the original populace of the Terrain Between that, unlike the ancestors of the Abber, were not able to adapt to the madness with their identity intact. They have since degenerated into entities that, while technically perfectly adapted to their chaotic, amorphous environment, do not exist in a state anyone sane would call "living."

In their true forms, the majority of dream spawn are "morphs"-pale, gray humanoids with few features apart from the suggestion of a face and mouth. They usually are not in this form, however-morphs, as the name suggests, they change to fit the environs the Nightmare Lands have currently been warped into. There is no particular limit on their shapeshifting- the same morph can be a merchant, a wolf, and a walking tree, all in the same hour if Morpheus is feeling restless. They are not masters of this ability, though-their minds change to fit their forms, always aware they are not quite real but unable to comprehend what that might mean. Their general personalities remain intact, however-gray morphs are meek and subservient, while shadow morphs are insightful bullies. Gray morphs do not have much of a personality beyond that, apart from occasionally admitting that they despise being an underclass. Shadow morphs are those who stood up for themselves...to become part of the oppressors, gaining permission to assume powerful, monstrous forms (the Nightmare Man ruthlessly culls morphs who show too much compassion, as he rightly feels they might object to the abuse of dreamers).

Some shadow morphs go a step farther, gaining access to the Dreamtime Abber shamans summon their spirit guides from. The exposure to this primal source of knowledge and spiritual power unlocks their capacity for strong emotion-and it drives them quite mad. Or perhaps they become sane, and they are unable to deal with individuality. Those who maintain cohesion and have a strong enough will to deal with the shifting of their form become even more vicious versions of their shadow morph selves, not only enjoying the mental torture of dreamers but devising new and ever more personalized ones. These "dream demons", the ennui, are initiated into vassalage of the Nightmare Court and made petty tyrants of fear and trauma, the supreme overlords of the morphs and the generals in the Court's war on free thought. Ironically, the ennui all despise each other-the Court sets them against each other for their own amusement and egos. Every ennui's success is a mortal threat to his peers-a failed ennui is nothing more than raw material for the Nightmare Man to make into his personality-less personal agents, and they all know it.
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Re: Creating Backstories for the Nightmare Court

Post by Leliel »

So. My life did not go as planned.

Still, I finally got my mitts on the full preview, and wow, my idea for the Nightmare Man makes even more sense now, so I am making him now.

This probably isn't my best work, but I'm putting this out there to rethink later-I like the core idea too much of the ur-rationalist whose core power is over the mad.
VIEW CONTENT:
Esme Chaput, The Nightmare Man

Quote: A world of beauty? Ha. There is nothing but horror here. Nothing but nightmares-I'm just honest about it.

Description: Ah, the Nightmare Man. Lord of the Lands Between. Courtier of the Deepest Fear. High Justice of the Oneric Collegium. Phobetor. The Emperor of All Trauma. There are few darklords closer to the True Fae in existence, with him being all but a god over his personal domain, limited only in his imagination.

The Dark Powers did that quite deliberately. After all, there are few things he wishes to be less than his old Keepers.

In truth, the Nightmare Man-Esme Chaput, to use his real name-is actually a changeling. Not a golem made by the Arak, but one of the rag-tag tribe of escaped fae slaves known on his native Terra as the Lost; a human stolen away by cruel Fae lords and made into a part-Fae servant himself. Before then, he was a tailor who dreamed of being a painter in pre-Revolutionary France, the growing Enlightenment enthralling him with the potential of beauty. In fact, his current status as a Lost is due to an ill-advised deal he made for real talent as an artist, more than enough to be patroned by a noble, only to discover that as a man of common birth, he was never allowed near the aristocracy, losing the bet that he would be forever famous and enduring a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the Man With the Ergot Smile. He eventually escaped when he used his talents as a Wizened craftsmen to paint himself a door out of the Man's domain, but in a way he never left; by the end of it he was not only without sanity (a universal condition among changelings, admittedly-one needs a certain flexibility of mind to comprehend the mad logic of the True Fae enough to get out), but broken-by the time he escaped, his own artistic spirit was now a source of pain, the very concept of beauty reminding him too acutely of his term in an eldritch hell. Even as he climbed the ranks of the Autumn Court of Fear, researching what his former masters dreaded and using it to protect the world from them, he never truly left behind the fact his own love of beauty betrayed him, utterly. Or that he never forgot the simple joy he had in his Fae-gifted talents. Especially when he wove dreams, portrait and play both.

He was not the first Bridge-Burner, but he was one of the first Seasonal Monarchs to embrace that vile creed of protecting the world from the Keepers by removing anything that made life worth living from it.

Like his contemporaries, Esme once simply desired to remove beautiful things from the world in the belief that this drew the Keepers seeking to have those things. Unlike his contemporaries, he translated this into a full-scale series of political beliefs; to Esme, anything that reeked of the irrational or illogical was a thing of Faerie, and thus a lure to the darker side of human nature, what the True Fae were draw to. As he spiraled further and further into true madness rather than the strange, insightful thought patterns of the fae, even the other Bridge-Burners grew ever more wary of their friend, gradually ostracizing the oneriomancer who was even then called the Nightmare Man for his mastery of using dreams to break down political enemies of the growing French Revolution and rebuild them as fanatical zealots of Liberte, Equalite, and Fraternite. Ironically, as the shadow world drew away in growing horror at the monster the Autumn King was becoming, he grew closer and closer to the Revolution itself-he was a close friend of Maximilien Robespierre, who was aware of his true nature as a fae being but regarded him as having renounced the madness of magic for the Enlightenment and reason. Which is why it deeply pained Esme when he realized his friend has succumbed to the lure of irrationality and he had to start rebuilding Robespierre in the image of the man he used to be. Sadly for him, this fundamental betrayal of his closest friend in the name of his own ideals was more than enough to draw the Mists to him mid-reconstruction; Robespierre's own executioners only pt a merciful finish to the job the man's attempted escape from the horrid visions started.

In the Demiplane, Esme adapted extremely well, becoming known as a great healer of the mind and occasional exorcist in Mordent. In fact, this was because the Realm of Terror agreed with his fanatical devotion to what was sane and rational-the existence of monsters drives people of the demiplane into set, predictable patterns for their own safety, keeping to the light of small and closed minds inherently suspicious of wonder. All well and good, except for the existence of magic-to him, such a chaotic force so easily tapped by the common folk was something truly abhorrent-to him, the magic of this new world reeked of the same mad laws the True Fae spun out of their own minds to enforce their will on the world (conveniently for his peace of mind, his own Contracts were simply exploiting agreements that already existed). Worse was how simple education was enough for wizardly power, warping the supreme power of logic to the service of bringing more madness to the world. Surely, he believed, this could not be anything less than the manifest power of the Keepers? No, the world had to know the true face of that madness.

In his Durance, the Nightmare Man had learned the power of ergotism-and how the hallucinogenic mold made the mind pliable and manipulable. The hallucinations, too, were close enough for dreams for him to manipulate directly without the complexity of exposing himself to the mind's natural defenses. So, it was simple for him to mix in the mold, along with just a pinch of the right dream, into the dough of the pies served at the University of Il Aluk...

As evinced by the outbreak of madness and rumors of magic driving its practitioners mad with secrets man was not meant to know and massacring themselves not being in the history of Core implies, what Esme had not known was that the Dark Powers, already closely watching the radical King after the mental torture of his best friend, had sent an omen to Azalin Rex, a feeling of dark foreboding that drew the Wizard-King to the University seeking a grave danger to his subjects. Immediately, he recognized the astral signature of dream magic in the pies and exposed the mass poisoning before it had begun. Esme barely made it to the city border before the legion of the dead captured him and brought him before the unamused lich. To the people of Darkon, the madman had simply been bloodily and publicly disintegrated, but in truth, Azalin quickly dove into the mind of the dreamweaver, and learned his total and complete history-along with the fact that for all of his hatred of art, Esme had never given up his real impulse to create something beautiful, he just changed mediums from paint to dreams. "A creator who despises creation?" Azalin's telepathic voice echoed in the changeling's head, darkly amused despite himself. "Then let me assist you in removing that temptation!" And with that, Azalin reached into the Nightmare Man's head and carefully applied his power over memory to erase all knowledge he had of artistic theory or skill, and then stripped him of physical form, casting his still-living soul beyond the Veil of Sleep into the realm of dreams he had so loved remaking. And there did the Dark Powers perform their own weaving, forming a land that was neither dream nor country around his mad dedication to sanity.

And then, another domain formed, almost identical-close enough to the Nightmare Man's own that they seemed to be the same land...
I am The Archangel of Night.
I am the Guardian of Shadow
I am the Vindicator of the Unknown
I am..Leliel.
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