I've come across a lot of statements that in such and such place the rules of dream/mythic/fairy tale logic apply instead of scientific logic, but that often just means "throw a lot of weird shit at the players" or awesome but isolated ideas rather than something more, well, logical. So, I'm going to take a crack at this.

Some basic principles of dream logic and how to apply them to RPGs to give them a more fairy tale or mythic feel:

People matter

The universe isn't some vast uncaring void; it is very interested in humans and reacts to them on a fundamental level. This means that the strange things that inhabit the world are generally created by, tied to, or a twisted reflection of humanity.

No aliens

Sword & Planet fiction had a profound impact on the development of D&D, especially in the monsters. A lot of D&D monsters are basically aliens in the same way that Barsoom Martians are, sure they're weird but when it comes right down to it they have the same mundane biology as people do.

Throw that out. To quote a comment from "Beedo" on an old Monsters and Manuals blog post:

QuoteThe moment you decide that goblins hatch from pumpkins blessed on Halloween night by the Goblin King, that Bugbears slip into the world from the Nightmare Realm in order to hide in closets and terrorize people, you put that sense of wonder and mystery back into the myriad monsters out there.

Emotions matter

In a lot of folklore magic doesn't come from wizards who know the right techniques, it comes from people wanting something so badly that reality contorts around their desires. D&D already does this with the undead a lot but it gets a bit samey ("this dude died really pissed off so now he wants to kill people!"). Have the passion of artist imbue their art with magic in ways the artist never foresaw, have critters be vulnerable to certain human emotions and have many magical features tie back to human drama somehow.

Magic isn't an exception to the natural order, the natural order is magical

The general assumption in a lot of D&D worlds is that everything works the same as in our world with the exception of the stuff that magical critters and wizards do. Generally the way to turn up the dial on the magic level of a campaign is to put in more wizards and magical critters which can make a fantasy world pretty cluttered after a while.

For this sort of exercise it's probably better to make stuff like goats more interesting. This sort of thing is often overlooked in setting design.

Words matter

It's been done to death but I still love the idea of magic and faerie always obeying the letter of the law and people trying to rules lawyer around them. One setting element that I've loved using is lots of the weirdness in the world being a result of people trying to find loopholes in Welsh-style geases.

Same goes with fantastic creates, they react as much to the right words as they do to a sword to the belly.

The lands of faerie aren't on the map

I've been coming around to the idea of having a relatively mundane world as a baseline and then lots of weirdness leaking in from the other side. That means that you can't lock down truly wondrous places on a map but that the next time you get lost in the forest you can stumble across rituals in the temple that was eroded to dust centuries ago or see the city that rises up out of the lake every new moon.

Then you have to follow the rules about eating the local food, not stepping off the path or making sure that you always follow the white bird. If you go a second time the path will still be there but it'll lead through different lands.

Symbolic connections matter

Magical thinking is all about things that are symbolically connected being actually connected. For example plants that look like a certain body part are good at treating the conditions that afflict that body part. One example of this that I liked was in the Conan d20 RPG a lot of spells have a range of "magic link" that requires you to have a lock of hair etc. etc. of the target.

Give spells personality

Vancian magic is a great resource management mechanic but a lot of D&D magic could use a bit more personality. Have your memorized spell be a chained demon that takes the form of a snake that wraps around your neck until you cast the spell or a jeweled amulet. Or have magical power take the form of your character being possessed by a spirit that gives them strange knowledge and subtle power until they cast off the spirit by casting a single spell of great power.

Any things I'm getting wrong or missing? Any good reading material? Reading over this I'm realizing that a lot of these are still pretty vague. I really want to nail these down to content that's more practically gameable rather than broad generalities. Have to work more on this.

Excellent post! This is fortuitously timed. I was planning on using many of these ideas in the campaign setting I am working on for 5e. I particularly appreciate the idea that monsters have simply become aliens for most intents and purposes. There really is little about them that is fantastic in most settings, rather they are simply mundane parts of that world.

My current thinking is that all monsters and demi humans originate either from the feywild or the shadowfell. They enter the material plane only through magic or areas of bleed through. I was thinking as well that there was a cyclical nature to this, with times of both waxing and waning influence of these two mirror planes with the waxing periods leading to great upheavals and ages of legend.

Having read the OP and being impressed by it, I'm going to pop in my copy of Miyazaki's Spirited Away to see how closely this maps. I think it will be pretty close.

The OP gets it, IMO.

I have villains in my setting who rule over certain areas, and in them the rules of dream logic apply. Each one has a slightly different theme (An isolation nightmare, a humiliation nightmare, etc.) but what you outline here fits. I especially resonate with the "symbolic connections matter" bit.

The OP sounds a lot like my old article, "Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems"

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html

Short form is that it is about getting past these assumptions:

1. Magic is a known system and thus non-mysterious
2. Magic is a force separate from Nature
3. Magic happens as spells from deliberate users
4. Magic obeys conservation of (magical) energy
5. Magic works regardless of morality, ethics, or other intangibles

Having people, emotions, words, and symbolic connections matter is similar to my #5. And both cite that as magic being a part of nature.

Giving spells personality is fine as far as it goes, but I'd emphasize more that magic is more than just spells or enchantment.

Quote from: Arkansan;786647Excellent post! This is fortuitously timed. I was planning on using many of these ideas in the campaign setting I am working on for 5e. I particularly appreciate the idea that monsters have simply become aliens for most intents and purposes. There really is little about them that is fantastic in most settings, rather they are simply mundane parts of that world.

My current thinking is that all monsters and demi humans originate either from the feywild or the shadowfell. They enter the material plane only through magic or areas of bleed through. I was thinking as well that there was a cyclical nature to this, with times of both waxing and waning influence of these two mirror planes with the waxing periods leading to great upheavals and ages of legend.

Yeah I'm thinking of having critters generally either enter from the Ethereal (which would be a bit Feywild-ish) or be created as a result of human actions, no aliens.

Got to herd the kids now but will post some more replies when I have the chance.

One more idea:

Horror is about the dissolution of the natural order

 "I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?
-The White People by Machen, one of Lovecraft's favorite stories

A lot of the horrors and monsters out there represent not so much threats to the human body as threats to order and stability. Think about the dragons in St. George vs. the dragon paintings, they're the size of St. Bernards at the biggest. What's so scary about that? Well dragons are poisonous and they corrupt the land. Am thinking of having those kind of small dragons but with poison that's as twisted as the color in the Color Out of Space.

Quote from: Daztur;786688Yeah I'm thinking of having critters generally either enter from the Ethereal (which would be a bit Feywild-ish) or be created as a result of human actions, no aliens.

Got to herd the kids now but will post some more replies when I have the chance.

One more idea:

Horror is about the dissolution of the natural order

 "I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?
-The White People by Machen, one of Lovecraft's favorite stories

A lot of the horrors and monsters out there represent not so much threats to the human body as threats to order and stability. Think about the dragons in St. George vs. the dragon paintings, they're the size of St. Bernards at the biggest. What's so scary about that? Well dragons are poisonous and they corrupt the land. Am thinking of having those kind of small dragons but with poison that's as twisted as the color in the Color Out of Space.

Hadn't looked at the horror aspect of it that way. I suppose I should think on horror a bit more because it seems as though it is tied to fantasy in a fundamental way.

As to the role of the feywild and shadowfell in my game, I think I may rename them because those specific terms seem to have some baggage. I wasn't aware of their use as specific setting elements in published campaign settings. I just liked the concept, which is mentioned briefly in the PHB.

Please do add more though, this thread has been very thought provoking for me.

A lot of folklore went into High Valor, there is a reason "Valor" is your combat dice pool. The ability to make a difference isn't your sword, but your willingness to step up and fight for what you believe in, and Will powers magic and skills.

RPG fantasy tends to be based strongly in Tolkien-meets-Howard, with a physics that is more  20th century modernism than faerie-tale. The Western Enlightenment scientific mindset applied to magic. It works well, but it's good to try different things. With my Yggsburgh campaign I tried to do a Realm of Man/Order vs Realm of Faerie/Chaos thing, but overall it stayed pretty Gygaxian - more Keep on the Borderlands than House on the Borderland.

Quote from: jhkim;786665The OP sounds a lot like my old article, "Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems"

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html

You wrote that! It's been one of my favorite articles on the subject since I first ran across it. It's been important in forming my preferences for how magic is represented in RPGs.

Quote3. Magic happens as spells from deliberate users

I've been reading the Arabian Nights stories lately and that's one that keeps poping up. Non-Magic User type characters just seem to bestow magical qualities on objects at will... it usually seems to stem from the being beautiful, royalty, spiritual devotees... something, but NOT trained wizards/warlocks/sorcerers... and often no real surprise by the folks receiving/viewing it.
Magic stuff just kind of shows up... often in a way that fits the narrative needs... which seems difficult to reconcile with non-narrative RPGs... but still worth of note that it's not mechanistic and 'scientific' in how it operates.

Quote from: jhkim;786665The OP sounds a lot like my old article, "Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems"

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html

Short form is that it is about getting past these assumptions:

1. Magic is a known system and thus non-mysterious
2. Magic is a force separate from Nature
3. Magic happens as spells from deliberate users
4. Magic obeys conservation of (magical) energy
5. Magic works regardless of morality, ethics, or other intangibles

Having people, emotions, words, and symbolic connections matter is similar to my #5. And both cite that as magic being a part of nature.

Giving spells personality is fine as far as it goes, but I'd emphasize more that magic is more than just spells or enchantment.

Really enjoyed that article a great deal. Am brainstorming about how to take the excellent advice you give an implement it in concrete ways in D&D.

Quote from: Arkansan;786693Hadn't looked at the horror aspect of it that way. I suppose I should think on horror a bit more because it seems as though it is tied to fantasy in a fundamental way.

As to the role of the feywild and shadowfell in my game, I think I may rename them because those specific terms seem to have some baggage. I wasn't aware of their use as specific setting elements in published campaign settings. I just liked the concept, which is mentioned briefly in the PHB.

Please do add more though, this thread has been very thought provoking for me.

Well there's a lot of different kinds of horror. The kind of horror I'd use for a more fairy tale style game would be the kind of horror that assumes that the baseline world and its institutions are basically benign and horror comes in the forms of insidious threats from the outside. Think Rosemary's Baby. This is completely the opposite of, say, Lovecraftian horror that posits that it is the fundamental nature of things itself that is horrific.

Quote from: jhkim;786665The OP sounds a lot like my old article, "Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems"

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html

Short form is that it is about getting past these assumptions:

1. Magic is a known system and thus non-mysterious
2. Magic is a force separate from Nature
3. Magic happens as spells from deliberate users
4. Magic obeys conservation of (magical) energy
5. Magic works regardless of morality, ethics, or other intangibles

Having people, emotions, words, and symbolic connections matter is similar to my #5. And both cite that as magic being a part of nature.

Giving spells personality is fine as far as it goes, but I'd emphasize more that magic is more than just spells or enchantment.

That's good, that's good indeed. I think the magical systems tend to be quite "scientific" in RPGs as opposed to the actual literature (though even that somewhat changed, with the advent of realistic/dark fantasy, which I admit I am a huge fan of), because of playable wizards. If the magic - users are just NPCs, you can get away with much more secretive and odd magic.

Let me wrack my brain and see what I can add.

Myths, Fairy tales, fairy tale reception and modern artificial fairy tales (of the early German Romanticism mostly) where a main focus of mine when I still tried to get a B.a. But then, I was a horrible "scientist" (yes, German academics actually call humanities a science) where humanities are concerned and mostly for a inability to concisely write down my analysis.

So this entire post might be an exercise in futility. Still, I feel compelled to try though, so here goes nothing.


Heavy Symbolism: Mythology and Fairy Tales and many modern Tales emulating them are layered with thick symbolism. This is quite tricky to do in gaming. One pitfall is to get into the sort of intellectual and more often pseudo-intellectual wankery of White Wolf storygames (I actually liked some of those games, but they spend to much time on "exploring the Themes" better spend on making a good game). Another problem is that the symbolism heavily relies on the history and cultures our real world. Later works wildly mix christian, ancient roman and greek mythology and local folklore in their symbolism. Why the fuck would a fantasy world have these foundations? The players might understand the presence of a talking burning thornbush, but the PCs have no base with biblical symbols.

My solution would be to develop a symbolism of its own for a game world, let the players learn it slowly and keep it light. Fairy tales and artificial fairy tales can have a multitude of heavy symbols in a short sentence. If you try this in gaming, you become obtuse and risk railroading to preserve your themes and idea. That is cool in a movie or book, where the entire point is to follow the authors idea and you can reread or rewatch until you "get it". But we are not writing a book or shooting a movie.

For example, you could establish eels as a symbol of sexual perversion. Once established, when ever the players note eels or eel like stuff is a around, the players now, there's something messed up going on without you needing to spell it out. Just describing a NPC as slick might show he is a deviant.

This whole approach is of course, pretty much faux-symbolism. You don't get the heavy weave of multiple dimensions of ambiguous interpretations of a well crafted romantic tale, but then, that's not what most of us play the game for anyway.

There are rules: Usually, this is heavily integrated with the above mentioned symbolism. But we want to emulate the feeling of dream logic, without actually telling a fairy tale to our players. For this purpose separating the element of rules from the other elements is extremely useful.

Myths and fairy tales always have rules, rules as inevitable as gravity. They are just completely different from our natural rules. This is one of easiest elements to use and adapt and it sends a strong message. You can see that in modern adaptions of fairy tales with even the most tenuous relation to real fairy tales. When the girl in the Labyrinth says it's a piece of cake, things get harder for her, don't feed a Mogwai after Midnight or get it wet. If you encounter something significant in Planescape, you know because it comes in threes, you encounter two of something, you know to wait for the other (meaning third) shoe to drop.

So, you want that dream logic feel, establish a few strong rules that seem utterly alien to our world and stick to them. That should get across the massage that this is not our world.


Fairy Tales start out ordinary. Go and read a bunch of fairy tales and well done fairy tale emulations. They tend not to start in the court of the Fey Queen, but James the farmer going about his business. Things look normal at first and the main character usually has the same assumptions and expectations as the reader, before being drawn into weird shit. This is actually very important for the dream logic. If you start out with a dragon spitting out a pearl from with hatches the protagonist, the audience goes "Uhu, this is made up stuff."

By following something that starts ordinary and then segueing into the fantastic, with the protagonist never questioning it, you follow dream structure. The events pull you along and you progresses from ordinary to utterly fantastic without getting so jarring that you are thrown off from following. See, for example Lovecraft, who starts with the familiar and slowly reveals how it is all a terrible illusion and draws a lot of his power from this technique.

This is my favorite element to use in D&D. More often than not, players expect D&D to be medieval fantasy Europe. There's elves and mages and monsters, but otherwise it is kind of middle ages.

So let the players enter the game with those expectations and start out pandering to them, then slowly draw them into the weird elements until they don't question that they need to rub a living crystal turtle with a napkin made from spiders to float to the sky castle. The unquestioning protagonist and ideally receptionist/player is a vital element of dream logic, the point where it really emulates dreams. You really should know that this can't be real, but you sleepwalk through it anyway, because that is just how it works now.


TLDR: Proper dreamlogic is a matter of stories and disruptive to gaming, but individual elements can be used to give give a game the proper feel.

I think the first post is a fine summary; there's probably little to add except elaboration or clarification.

A couple of traditional rules for visitors to the Underworld or Faerie:
1. Partake of none of its food or drink.
2. Always be courteous.

These can obviously present difficulties in combination, but the natives know the rules as well and are also bound to observe customs that prevent traps from being too easily set.

Oaths can be very effective tools, since Higher Powers or Deeper Laws can punish oath-breakers even if nobody else knows of the offense.

A geas is a personal taboo the violation of which leads at least a step toward a doom. It  can be extremely arbitrary.

Vows - basically oaths to accomplish such and such a quest - can also be powerful magic.

Character is often the real treasure heroes acquire in myth and legend, the essence of which other things are signs. The hero's journey, if successful, allows the solution of problems - for the community as well as the individual - back in the mundane world.

The Grail Question: What does this mean? That is the thing foremost in ancient and medieval minds. What moderns think of as the real world is a shadow of the real world; all things are symbols.

Therefore, although there may be a few real enigmas, for the most part there are underlying patterns, mysteries that can be solved. Things do not happen without cause, or for causes that take no account of people and concepts such as justice.

Quote from: Daztur;786688Yeah I'm thinking of having critters generally either enter from the Ethereal (which would be a bit Feywild-ish) or be created as a result of human actions, no aliens.

Got to herd the kids now but will post some more replies when I have the chance.

One more idea:

Horror is about the dissolution of the natural order

 "I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?
-The White People by Machen, one of Lovecraft's favorite stories

A lot of the horrors and monsters out there represent not so much threats to the human body as threats to order and stability. Think about the dragons in St. George vs. the dragon paintings, they're the size of St. Bernards at the biggest. What's so scary about that? Well dragons are poisonous and they corrupt the land. Am thinking of having those kind of small dragons but with poison that's as twisted as the color in the Color Out of Space.

Yes, horror is not mere terror; it is a sense of profound wrongness. It goes beyond scaring or grossing out to creeping out.

Things H.P. Lovecraft used to impart that are sometimes not so effective with latter-day readers. That's just one example of how the affect of horror can depend on the formative background of the subjects.