Questing Country: The Basics

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1. Questing Country is a collective unconscious space common to many species, some of them spacefaring.

2. Spirit Companions, the cute, small-animal natives of Questing Country, empower a few teenage Dreamers of all worlds to beat nightmares with the power of hope to become Champions. This helps keep adults of all worlds from giving in to their fears and despairs. Chosen Dreamers have several different possible Roles, but everyone was a Champion once. Adult Dreamers stick around sometimes in the form of Oracles. Every Role has a unique relationship to their Spirit Companion.

3. Every dreamer starts as a Champion and becomes an Oracle when they realize they can’t change everything or win every fight.

4. Some Dreamers rebel, becoming Adversaries or Dark Oracles. Some lose Hope, becoming Pillars. Very recently, some Dreamers have become Harbingers or Conductors - Roles nobody fully understands. But they’re all on the same side, fighting nightmares. They might sometimes have conflicts which lead to fights and rifts between groups of Dreamers, but these are better understood as teen rivalries and drama than war. Dreamers are on the same side of their big, defining conflict against nightmares.

5. The last Jaunt that visited Questing Country involved an event in which Dreamers from the Past, Present, and Future visited Questing Country. The Past was represented by the Rise of the Adversaries Era, the Present by the Double Valence Era (the Era of the FIRST Questing Country Jaunt we ran), and the Future by the Starquake Era. You don’t need to know anything about these eras that isn’t in this summary. This Jaunt is in the Starquake Era, three months after the Jaunt ended, but visitors from other Eras, while rare, are still present and playable due to a lingering gateway between times, the Opaline Bore.

6. The Starquakes that have been turning parts of Questing Country into Transformed Lands, and have turned some Dreamers into Harbingers, are the result of the dreams of infant Starmovers, a very alien/liminal species, and once the Starmovers, Harbingers and Dreamers began to understand one another, the Starquakes lessened greatly in frequency and intensity.

7. During the time-crossover, when the Travelers appeared, Investigators were recognized and welcomed by Dreamers, whose Oracles had learned a little about how Travelers’ lives worked. They offered, in some cases, to help them break free of the Arcana - but after the Arcana destabilized dreaming by mining the “backstage” structures beneath Questing Country to steal time travel magic, the Dreamers became warier. While they still have sympathy for Travelers, and would like to help them, they recognize the Arcana as hostile and dangerous forces which put the very plane they exist in, and so their entire mission, at risk. Since the end of the Jaunt, some Dreamers have tried to find ways that they could travel to Liminal Space and help the Travelers - but most, especially the Oracles and Spirit Companions, do not want the Travelers to come back.

8. Since the Starquakes dropped off in frequency, almost no new Harbingers have been transformed. Instead, Dreamers have begun transforming into Conductors - a Role which gives them almost-uniform appearance, a confidence boost, a weapon that can pin nightmares, and a psychic link, like a Bond but moreso, to all other Conductors. Conductors are ridiculously effective against nightmares, and seem to be immune to the negative emotions that sap Champions’ powers.