Background: These days, you can’t wait to get to sleep. Your waking life has been rough lately, and a night of facing nightmares you can stab and explode is actually a huge relief.
Like many Hecatite dreamers, you did very poorly on your Orthotropic Exams - the testing that, when passed, gives you adult status and career path. Unlike most Hecatites, Dreamers or no, after failing to prove your adulthood you didn’t go back to the Orthostroma, the “cram school” that would help you grow into your approved mode. You took one of the few other legal options - you joined the Diaphoron of the Conditioned.
In Hecatite society, a legal but not officially condoned belief, practice, or lifestyle is isolated from other ‘correct’ paths of life in a Diaphoron, an isolated community. The Conditioned, who adapt their behaviors rather than their bodies to better perform desired tasks, are known to be useful in combat and interspecies diplomacy, so their strangeness is… tolerated. Usually.
A little less so, lately. More and more Conditioned Hecatites are cracking under the stress of social disapproval and abandoning the Diaphoron - and the alien Conditioned who live within the community are reporting ever-greater problems with meeting the bureaucratic hurdles and guidelines Hecatite society throws up against those they disapprove of.
To you, that sounds like a nightmare at work. Speaking to alien spacefarers, they don’t seem to report this kind of trouble elsewhere, so it’s something local to Aratta. Every night, as soon as you can, you’ve been seeking out any Oracles you can to try to find this nightmare, to learn more about it, but so far they’ve just looked grim and troubled and been unable to point at anything more specific than the vague Human and Gorgon nightmares that have been popping up. But that isn’t right - this is bad Hecatite behavior, and it affects everyone, so it should either be Hecatite or universal.
You’ve been wondering lately if you should try to join the Conductors - nobody shatters more nightmares - but you’ve been wondering if, religiously speaking, it’s allowed. Conditioned aren’t supposed to deliberately augment themselves with outside assistance, but to find disciplines that unlock inner strength, and really, you just can’t tell whether this counts or not. But even if you don’t become one of them, at the very least you can take help wherever you can get it.
Goals: -Search everywhere you can for new, powerful nightmares, especially xenophobic ones. Take any help you can get. -Look for spiritual practices or disciplines that can give you inner strength -Try and figure out whether you ought to become a Conductor, or if you have to decline for religious reasons
Allies: You look up to Oracles and Conductors, of course. Any other Conditioned. Anyone from Aratta Skyhook. Anybody else who will believe you that there’s a new threat somewhere out there that no one’s found yet.
Mod Expectations: -Two threads per week of at least four comments in length where you’re hunting for nightmares in some way -One thread per week of at least four comments in length where you’re engaged in Conditioned spiritual practices or asking spiritual or theological questions
Weekly Reporting: Any progress toward your goals. Any time you ask an Oracle about your quest (let the Oracle’s player know to contact the mods for the results of any oracular knowledge).
Skill: Kinesic Diagnosis. Whenever you fight someone, you learn at least one profound, true thing about their state of mind. This does not work if they are motionless during the fight, if you neither see nor touch them during the fight, or if either of you are treating the fight as practice. Things you can choose to learn include if they are being honest with you, whether they are generally friendly or hostile towards you, what their underlying emotional state is, what they presently want or fear. A fight which goes on an especially long time or which is especially intense or dangerous, may reveal multiple profound truths, at the discretion of the player (if the opponent is a player character) or mod (if the opponent is an NPC). This ability works on non-sentient beings, including nightmares, but the insights into a limited mind may be less profound. The only way to counter this ability is by keeping all physical motion unobserved, or, IF they are aware you possess this ability, by any skill which grants complete conscious control of body language. This insight is not magical or psychic and is not subject to magic resistance or psychic protection. The skill does not necessarily require the opponent to be consciously aware of the answer to your question for you to extract it.
HECATITE DREAMER - RAIDOU
Like many Hecatite dreamers, you did very poorly on your Orthotropic Exams - the testing that, when passed, gives you adult status and career path. Unlike most Hecatites, Dreamers or no, after failing to prove your adulthood you didn’t go back to the Orthostroma, the “cram school” that would help you grow into your approved mode. You took one of the few other legal options - you joined the Diaphoron of the Conditioned.
In Hecatite society, a legal but not officially condoned belief, practice, or lifestyle is isolated from other ‘correct’ paths of life in a Diaphoron, an isolated community. The Conditioned, who adapt their behaviors rather than their bodies to better perform desired tasks, are known to be useful in combat and interspecies diplomacy, so their strangeness is… tolerated. Usually.
A little less so, lately. More and more Conditioned Hecatites are cracking under the stress of social disapproval and abandoning the Diaphoron - and the alien Conditioned who live within the community are reporting ever-greater problems with meeting the bureaucratic hurdles and guidelines Hecatite society throws up against those they disapprove of.
To you, that sounds like a nightmare at work. Speaking to alien spacefarers, they don’t seem to report this kind of trouble elsewhere, so it’s something local to Aratta. Every night, as soon as you can, you’ve been seeking out any Oracles you can to try to find this nightmare, to learn more about it, but so far they’ve just looked grim and troubled and been unable to point at anything more specific than the vague Human and Gorgon nightmares that have been popping up. But that isn’t right - this is bad Hecatite behavior, and it affects everyone, so it should either be Hecatite or universal.
You’ve been wondering lately if you should try to join the Conductors - nobody shatters more nightmares - but you’ve been wondering if, religiously speaking, it’s allowed. Conditioned aren’t supposed to deliberately augment themselves with outside assistance, but to find disciplines that unlock inner strength, and really, you just can’t tell whether this counts or not. But even if you don’t become one of them, at the very least you can take help wherever you can get it.
Goals:
-Search everywhere you can for new, powerful nightmares, especially xenophobic ones. Take any help you can get.
-Look for spiritual practices or disciplines that can give you inner strength
-Try and figure out whether you ought to become a Conductor, or if you have to decline for religious reasons
Allies: You look up to Oracles and Conductors, of course. Any other Conditioned. Anyone from Aratta Skyhook. Anybody else who will believe you that there’s a new threat somewhere out there that no one’s found yet.
Mod Expectations:
-Two threads per week of at least four comments in length where you’re hunting for nightmares in some way
-One thread per week of at least four comments in length where you’re engaged in Conditioned spiritual practices or asking spiritual or theological questions
Weekly Reporting: Any progress toward your goals. Any time you ask an Oracle about your quest (let the Oracle’s player know to contact the mods for the results of any oracular knowledge).
Skill: Kinesic Diagnosis. Whenever you fight someone, you learn at least one profound, true thing about their state of mind. This does not work if they are motionless during the fight, if you neither see nor touch them during the fight, or if either of you are treating the fight as practice. Things you can choose to learn include if they are being honest with you, whether they are generally friendly or hostile towards you, what their underlying emotional state is, what they presently want or fear. A fight which goes on an especially long time or which is especially intense or dangerous, may reveal multiple profound truths, at the discretion of the player (if the opponent is a player character) or mod (if the opponent is an NPC). This ability works on non-sentient beings, including nightmares, but the insights into a limited mind may be less profound. The only way to counter this ability is by keeping all physical motion unobserved, or, IF they are aware you possess this ability, by any skill which grants complete conscious control of body language. This insight is not magical or psychic and is not subject to magic resistance or psychic protection. The skill does not necessarily require the opponent to be consciously aware of the answer to your question for you to extract it.