Dreams on "Star Trek: TOS" and "Ponyfinder" · 5:33pm Mar 6th, 2018
I'm back, batches. (Let your cookies come. They will all fall before me.) And boy do I have a doozie for you today.
So recently I've been marathoning Star Trek: the Original Series. I've also been playing in a campaign of Ponyfinder (ponified Dungeons & Dragons) for almost two years now. I've been meaning to do a blog post on that, in fact, but I've never gotten around to it. Anyway, both those things came to a head last night in another extended and detailed dream sequence.
First of all, some background: in the Ponyfinder setting, the Chrysalis-equivalent is Kara, goddess of shapeshifters and liars. She's a very interesting character, especially in our campaign (maybe I should do that post after all...). Once a year, her followers hold a festival, wherein one person can volunteer to sacrifice their body, allowing Kara to channel herself through it for 24 hours, and killing the host in the process. This is the only way she can personally visit the mortal world, and the only way most people will ever hold an actual conversation with her.
So on to my dream: I was Captain Kirk (of course), but aside from Scotty, there were no other Star Trek Characters. It was formatted (mostly) like a TOS episode, dramatic pauses for commercial breaks and all. Aside from us, there was at least one real-life roommate (though I don't think it was any one specifically... more like a nameless conglomeration. They all sort of blend together after the first 15 or so 
), and I think a couple priestesses of Kara (at least one, definitely). Here's the story as cohesively as I can piece it together:
On Kara's holiday (whose name I can never remember), which myself, Scotty, and the roommate were visiting, the roommate somehow ended up being the sacrifice to summon/channel Kara. I, being Kirk, saw this at the last second and tried to jump in and save him. Something odd happened to the ceremony, which ended up with the roommate dead but me channeling Kara, somehow. The next thing I knew, I was waking up a day later, with no memory of Kara's visit.
Being Kirk, I couldn't just leave it at that. Since this world followed D&D rules, I learned that the local people (Kara's) claimed to have methods to bring a dead person back to life. After some smaller second-act adventures and B-stories involving Scotty's totally unrequited overtures to the priestess and me completely neglecting to take care of the dog that some friend had given to me as a gift (which has NOTHING to do with my real life, let me assure you---in the dream, I mostly kept the dog in a suitcase and only remembered to feed it once a week or so), I found I had to appeal to Kara to get my friend back. This time, I would be the willing sacrifice. (Being Kirk.)
We finally convinced the priestess to hold a special, private summoning ceremony outside the normal festival time. We met with her at a mountain shrine to Kara, where this actual, wonderful, word-for-word exchange occurred:
Priestess:"James Kirk, you have volunteered of your own free will to play host to our lady, Kara, for the third time."
Me: "Third time?"
P.: "Yes. Your body was used as a vessel twice before. You were made to forget the events that led to the second summoning."
Me: "But I thought... it could only be done once? That being a sacrifice for Kara meant... sacrificing... your life?"
P.: "My dear Captain Kirk, whoever told you that nonsense?"
My actual thought, as I made my Kirk slightly-off-camera reaction face, to a whimsical flute riff: "Well, this'll be one to tell Reddit."
I woke up (in the dream, that is) after Kara's short visit, during which Scotty and the priestess presented my request on my behalf. I woke to find the roommate alive again. We descended the mountain to the followers' village, where Scotty made one more offering to show his affection for the priestess: for whatever reason, a forked stick carved roughly into a toy handgun, somehow capable of actually launching a whittled wooden dart. She rebuffed him hard, and for the life of me, I can't remember what she said to him. I do know that it was actually witty and memorable, and actually dialogue I could have but my dreaming mind apparently decided it had better things to remember. Like the dog, which was part of the epilogue scene:
[Me, the dog, and the roommate lounging around a basement living room (not one I've actually lived in, I don't think), and Scotty hovering around me like I was sitting in the captain's chair on the bridge of the Enterprise.]
Me: "There's one thing I don't get, Scotty."
Scotty: "And what's that, sir?"
Me: "If the summoning ceremony isn't actually meant to kill the sacrifice, then why did [roommate] die?"
S.: "Captain, didn't ya hear? The lady priestess told me what happened: the lad just happened to get in the way of the ceremonial knife! That Kara was awfully understanding, I thought. She said to give you this."
[He hands me an envelope before leaving the "bridge". I open it to discover an actual check (My Hero Academia background, apparently from the roommate's checkbook), written out to me in impressive cursive, from Kara, for $103.95. Reason: "Compensation for inconvenience resulting from incidents at festival."]
Me: "Well. This will make an even better post."
Roommate: "What's that?"
My closing line, before backing-out shot of us laughing and dog barking: "On Reddit: 'Apology check from goddess of lies for killing my best friend.'"
It's a dumb ending, I know, but it's legitimately what my dream gave me right before my alarm woke me up. I think that serendipity kind of makes up for the lameness of it.
This was a strange one, alright. I was simultaneously the character of Kirk, a player of the game this was supposedly happening in, and a viewer of this Star Trek episode. And like always, the whole thing was cinematically shot and paced, accurately to the show's style, and the characters were spot-on too, myself included as Kirk, most of the time.
Oh, and the dog ended up finding a better home.
Umbral Cloak!
I'm GMing a cross-dimensional Ponyfinder campaign, and that holiday was too juicy a hook to pass up; I had the PCs meet incarnated-Kara during the holiday, only to be interrupted by an assassination attempt (seeing as how she was, temporarily, mortal). This drew them into a plot by demons to invade Blevik while Kara was out of commission, and then as 3rd level characters they accidentally ended up killing a marilith. (…Long story involving a stolen Arrow of Slaying and an improbable sequence of crits.)
So I gave them a ton of XP and three Mythic Ranks, had the shooter ascend to actual godhood (since he was about to leave the campaign), and now they're galloping around the multiverse being epic badasses and spreading the good word (and membership pyramid scheme) of the new Church of Sol. Most recently they kicked the butts of two trolls who they encountered after taking a wrong turn while navigating toward a mythic oracle, ended up befriending the trolls, and then more or less on a whim decided to give one of the (still Chaotic Evil) trolls the gift of mythic power. For the moment that means they've got a super meat shield with buckets of HP and fast healing 10, and everyone's pretty much assuming he's going to backstab them at some point and they'll get to kill him for a bucketload of experience points.
Freakin' munchkins.
I assume Ponyfinder is a well-designed and fun system? Anything that lets players roleplay as a non-humanoid sounds intriguing, considering how tired I am of the Tolkienesque stereotyped-humans races (the pretty ones, the bearded ones, the short-and-British ones...). I even homebrewed some kobolds, (MLP-style) changelings, and (class/race) dragons for DnD 5e, though I've never gotten a chance to playtest them.
My only real experiences with RPG's so far are CRPG's and GMing Tails of Equestria for my sisters, but a more heavy-duty MLP-themed system sounds fun if I can find a group.
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Ponyfinder is just a fan supplement for Pathfinder and D&D 5e that adds copyright-friendly reskins of MLP races and setting. It also has a good amount of wholly original content.
But yeah, it made me realize how tired I was of the traditional formula of races. I played two characters before I took over as DM, and both of them were Ponyfinder-original races. One was a nomadic lion. The PF book only has a few details about them and the pride-families they grow up in, so I got to do all the math to figure out how those work (male-female numbers and ratios, natures of relationships and taboos, relative ages, all that fun stuff), all so Amadi could have a working backstory. They also have their own interpretation of the pantheon. Their leonine "Sun King" is actually the evil Daybreaker sun/war goddess.
The other character was a Steelheart, a race of reclusive, near-immortal vine creatures inhabiting metal puppet-bodies, and totally incapable of feeling love. My character, Gizri, was a veteran of two canonical wars. In the first one, she was charmed into infatuation. Her fascination with that experience led her to a disagreement with the Cadance-analogue love goddess, and during the second war Gizri had a hand in the shady massacre of the goddess's people by a band of monsters (which is also a canon event).
Original races are fun. I think it's gotten too easy to ignore this stuff with the vanilla ones, especially in RPGs.