Oblivion Circle

One peaceful night the investigator goes to sleep normally in her own bed. Hearing a noise in the night, the investigator wakes to find the world outside her bedroom totally changed. Odd, many-legged chairs and tables and weirdly organic trinkets now furnish her home. Other residents sleep soundly but if awakened, see nothing wrong. They seem well disposed toward the investigator, yet their speech sounds ominously strange; for instance, they swear by the names of unknown gods.

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The night world outside the investigator’s house has also changed. She sees dreamily twisted houses, new bends in once-familiar roads, and inexplicable advertisements. (“Play Canton-Prefecture Super Lotto and win up to three years of life!”) Newspapers bear enigmatic headlines such as “Kaiser denies cranching out of control.” The victim detects no single obvious branch from her previous reality.

Fellow investigators, too, have changed and now pursue surreally distorted goals. Where the victim might remember a journalist ally as a zealous seeker of truth, the changed reporter now just as zealously casts horoscopes of target politicians, divining their future misdeeds. Though friendly toward the victim, changed investigators recognize nothing wrong with the world, instead believing the victim herself mad.

The victim may explore this nightmare world until dawn. Then she awakens in her bed, with the world outside back to normal. Yet she holds physical evidence that proves her “dream” actually happened, and an unbroken circle of white dust surrounds her bed.

Possibilities

1 An enemy sorcerer has magically transported the investigator into a carefully prepared section of the Dreamlands. Eavesdropping on the victim’s movements, the magician hopes to learn the whereabouts of incriminating evidence or a vital object the investigator owns. After the sorcerer learns the desired information, he dissolves the enchantment, returning the victim to the waking world.

2 In a previous adventure, the investigator offended a Cthulhoid cult. Cultists have projected her into a nightmare world of their communal imagining. They forge the physical evidence to make the illusion convincing. Though the spell cannot work in daylight, the cult intends to torment the investigator nightly until she goes mad.

3 The investigator has gone mad and created a submerged, split personality. This personality creates the nightly dream vision, a projection of the world she would prefer to live in. The mad investigator hallucinates the “physical evidence” and dust circle. Because some sane part of her still dwells on current investigations, the subconscious intuitions revealed in her nightmares may prompt genuine real-world leads.

© Allen Varney