Fever Dreams

Fever Dreams is a GM-driven tabletop roleplaying game for 2-3 players, presented in a 40 page zine with beautiful hand-drawn art. It was funded on Kickstarter as part of Zine Quest 3 and is now available for purchase here. The soundtrack is available separately at https://curtisfalkingham.bandcamp.com/releases. Physical copies are available for purchase at https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TallinRiverPrints.

The world is haunted. Humanity’s collective consciousness has broken, and through the cracks come Calamities: bizarre, otherworldly entities which infest anywhere that people live and twist their lives. They might be dreams made manifest, or nightmares; they are united by little except their unreality, and the infectious way they warp the world around them.

But if they can be understood, they can be confronted. Lucid Dreamers employed by the crumbling remains of the government are trained to make use of the latest cutting edge innovations in Parapsychology, a science developed to make sense of the strangeness that now threatens to overwhelm the world.

This research has produced a ritual called Spirit Therapy, a procedure which can banish a Calamity by sacrificing whatever will fulfil the unsolved human needs which brought it into being. The price may be steep; part of the cost must always be paid from your own humanity.

You will investigate the circumstances that lead to a Calamity’s generation, explore the unearthly locations they twist around themselves like cocoons and invoke your brightest human values to reach into the suffering at the heart of a haunting and undo it.

Fever Dreams is designed to be played in a single session lasting a few hours to a whole evening. The zine includes rules, setting information and a bestiary of 10 Calamities for you to build scenarios around. While it could be adapted for use in a detective RPG system like Gumshoe, as a stand-alone game Fever Dreams uses a simple resolution system based on d6 rolls. The outcome of a roll may be influenced by invoking your character’s Aspects, or personality traits. You may decide to succeed when your roll has failed in exchange for gaining Fever counters, which escalate the intensity of the threat facing the players as they accumulate.