Pocket Dreamworlds

Fifty-seven years I dreamed
Fifty-seven years in the Idean Cave
Fifty-seven years in the Labyrinth of Sleep
Each year a corridor
Each corridor a dream
Each dream a tattoo
I am no slave
Yet all dreamers are slaves!

We are children stacking rubble
In the temples of our ancestors
Believing we fashioned the stones ourselves
Blind to the handprints of the Cyclopes.
Who came before? Who shall come after?
Who is here now?

—Epimenides of Knossos, “Dreams of Asterion,” 536 BCE

Introduction

White Leviathan offers alternate versions to Chaosium’s history of the Kingsport Cult, the fundamental nature of Dagon, and the origins of the Deep Ones. The scenario takes modest liberties with additional Mythos material as well, particularly touching upon the earth’s Dreamlands and its relationship to the Elder Things. This section expands the background of these elements, which do not shape the core plot of White Leviathan but may come into focus depending on the actions of certain player characters, especially Joseph Coffin and Montgomery Lowell. See “Player Character Secrets and Development” for details.

Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Milieu

Keepers unfamiliar with H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands milieu need not panic—everything you need to know is contained in this scenario. Put as simply as possible, the Dreamlands are a fantasy world created and sustained by sentient dreamers, a bizarre realm populated by mysterious races and magical beings. Time flows differently in the Dreamlands, where entire years may pass in the course of a single earthly night. Some real-world locations have Dreamland analogues, while other settings remain purely mythological. In terms of technology, the Dreamlands lag behind the earth by several centuries. There are no guns, steam engines, or printing presses in the Dreamlands.

The Dreaming Skill
Passage into the Dreamlands is controlled by the Dreaming skill. Normally equal to a character’s Power, this is not the case in White Leviathan, where only one player character begins with the ability to Dream: Mr. Joseph Coffin. (Montgomery Lowell may acquire the skill at the Galápagos Islands.) The Dreaming skill may be used in several ways. It allows a character to willingly enter and exit the Dreamlands, it reflects a traveler’s understanding of the strange physics (and metaphysics) of the Dreamlands, and it may be used to create, alter, or destroy objects within the Dreamlands. At the Keeper’s discretion, it may also be used to control the flow of time, or even allow limited teleportation.

Dream Avatars
Dreamers enter the Dreamlands in the form of an avatar, usually an idealized version of the Dreamer. While this avatar appears physical, it’s separate from the Dreamer’s actual body, which remains in the waking world. An avatar has all the Dreamer’s characteristics and skills, and may suffer damage. If his avatar is killed in the Dreamlands, the Dreamer wakes violently, suffers a –1D10 Sanity loss, and has his Dreaming skill reduced to zero. This usually means he can never enter the Dreamlands again; but the Keeper is free to make exceptions, especially for Joseph Coffin, who’s descended from a family of powerful Dreamers. In Lovecraftian fiction and the Call of Cthulhu rules, certain earthly locations permit a person to physically enter the Dreamlands. The only place in White Leviathan where this is possible is the Strange High House In the Mist, but the player characters depart Kingsport long before this becomes relevant.

Delving Deeper
The Keeper is encouraged to read H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist,” “The White Ship,” and “The Silver Key,” all of which shaped White Leviathan’s Dreamlands encounters. The first two stories involve Kingsport, and the third was the inspiration for Rebecca Carter Elton, the keeper of North Point Light. For a deeper dive, the Keeper may read Lovecraft’s novella, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Also recommended are Lovecraft’s stories “The Cats of Ulthar,” “Celephaïs,” and “Polaris,” and Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean cycle, particularly the stories “Ubbo-Sathla” and “The Seven Geases.” The best resource for Dreamlands gameplay is Chaosium’s Dreamlands: Roleplaying Beyond the Wall of Sleep. This book is not required to play White Leviathan, but may provide a Keeper with additional ideas for managing or expanding the campaign’s Dreamlands encounters.

Origin of the Dreamlands

Without exception all sentient races possess a collective consciousness. With most races such as human beings, this connection exists on a deep level that remains hidden from common life; a collective unconscious or “racial memory” manifesting as intuition, snatches of precognition, or shared images in dreams. Some races, like the Elder Things, have learned to harness the power of their networked intellects; while others, such as the Great Race of Yith, have submerged individuality into a common pool or hive mind. Furthermore, each racial collective is dimly connected to a universal collective. If every individual is a star and each race a galaxy, the cosmic consciousness is the dark matter binding the universe together, connecting all sentient minds for good or ill.

Like most races, humanity dreams. Throughout history certain humans have possessed the power to access the collective consciousness in their dreams. These travelers have passed beyond the walls of sleep to discover the Dreamlands, a fantastic interzone existing partly in the human imagination and partly in some other, more alien space. Like a stranded tidal pool, the Dreamlands first appears to be an isolated world, a reflection of humanity’s collective unconsciousness. But then the cosmic tide returns, bringing stranger currents from the mother ocean, rushing in and washing out with indifferent abandon, with baleful neutrality: the pulsing beat of Azathoth’s nuclear heart. And we realize we are not alone. We were never alone.

The Dreamlands are where the earth reveals her true age, eons of past civilizations ground to dust by her ancient tectonic mills. Here one finds ghosts, shadows, and echoes; not just of human dead, but beings long faded from the earth; ancient ruins, mountains, and seas dreamed by vanished races. The Dreamlands are where humans come closest to apprehending the mysterious interconnections of cosmic sentience, a world where travelers mingle with talking cats and telepathic trees, where moon-faced mariners trade with electric spiders, and exiled gods mourn forgotten stars.

And the Dreamlands are where human beings are slowly and unwittingly committing genocide upon an ancient race.

The Elder Things

Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!
—H.P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness”

For the most part, the Keeper may adhere to the standard Mythos background for the Elder Things: They traveled to earth over a billion years ago and colonized the planet with their great cities, fighting occasional wars with the Mi-Go and the Star-spawn of Cthulhu. Eventually, their shoggoth slaves revolted, and after the climate changed, they burrowed deeper underground, until most abandoned the planet to younger races. Masters of a technology ostensibly more arcane than scientific, the Elder Things played an important role in shaping primordial life through their unparalleled mastery of genetic engineering. Possessing life spans measured in millions of years, the Elder Things served as Darwinian shepherds, directing terrestrial evolution until the Cataclysm spelled their doom.

The Space of All Colors
In the glory days before their decadence and dissolution, the Elder Race traveled freely between the stars. Through the power of their linked minds, they could bend the very fabric of space-time, temporarily forming warps of hyperspatial connection—the Great White Vortex that allowed them to roam the galaxy.

Like most of their arcane technologies, this power rests in the nature of the Elder Race’s collective consciousness. The Elder Things of any given locality share a substratum of consciousness they call the Space of All Colors. This network links them on a telepathic level; but its power and magnitude is determined by the number of Elder Things in proximity to one another, and the Space of All Colours cannot maintain cohesion across interstellar distances. It requires a minimum of seven Elder Things to generate a Space of All Colors. This is done reflexively, and has an approximate range of three light years. It requires forty-nine linked minds to open the Great White Vortex. Unfortunately, once these Elder Things have made the leap to another star system, the warp snaps shut, severing the colony’s connection to their previous location. A new Space of All Colors immediately springs into being, but this always includes unforeseen variables. Thousands of years are needed for a colony to adjust to the absence of their “lost” peers. (Imagine the Elder Race as an organism composed of multiple nuclear intelligences existing within a shared psychic protoplasm. Interstellar travel is like reproductive fission: a minimum of forty-nine nuclei are required to bud off in a new, self-sustaining protoplasm.)

A warp may be permanently stabilized as a “gate,” but this demands an impressive degree of hyperspatial engineering, and imposes a constant strain on the local Space of All Colors. The large-scale creation of interstellar gates was the high-water mark of Elder civilization, a period known to their descendants as the Galactic Epoch. At one time, earth’s Elder Things had constructed three gates: one in the Yucatán Peninsula, one beneath the mountains of China, and one atop the mountains of Antarctica.

The Undying Epoch
The Elder Race was in decline long before the K’th-thyalei rose to prominence. After the Great Asteroid destroyed the Chicxulub gate, the others fell into disrepair and collapsed. The colony lacked the energy needed to open and sustain a new gate. Stranded on earth, the Elder Things woefully declared the beginning of the Solar Epoch. As described in “Background Part 1—History of Dagon,” the K’th-thyalei that evolved during the Cenozoic Era hunted down and imprisoned many of the remaining Elder Things, stealing their powers and using their bodies as vessels to contain the Green Flame. After their plan failed, the Cataclysm triggered another extinction event, paving the way for human beings. For the Elder Things, the final stage of their civilization had arrived: the Undying Epoch.

In the world of White Leviathan, only sixty-six Elder Things remain on earth, whether languishing in K’th-thyalei prisons, trapped under polar ice, or crushed beneath miles of subterranean rock. Their bodies have degenerated, transformed into rotting prisons for their decaying minds. They long only for release; an escape from this terrible undeath to the liberty of interstellar space. And every Elder Thing is aware the clock is ticking—they are winking out, one by one, barren stars in a vanishing constellation. One their number dwindles to forty-eight, the Great White Vortex slips forever out of reach.

This “Great Release” has been denied for two reasons. First, their degenerate bodies can no longer endure the relativistic energies of the Great White Vortex or the frigid microwave vacuum of the Black Vast Roil. Either mode of travel would spell annihilation. But more importantly, they no longer control the Space of All Colors. Over the last million years, that space has become invaded, colonized, and altered beyond recognition.

On the Shoulders of Giants
Humanity is a young race—younger than even the Deep Ones—and yet, the human Dreamlands are incredibly developed, rich, and complex. This is unique among the cosmos, where most races require eons to develop mature Dreamlands. This suggests the existence of some underlying, pre-existing structure. As the great Dreamer Epimenides wrote, “We are children stacking rubble / in the temples of our ancestors / believing we fashioned the stones ourselves / blind to the handprints of the Cyclopes.” Of course, it was the Elder Things, not the Cyclopes, who built the walls of this temple: the human Dreamlands are founded on the Space of All Colors.

In a very real way it was their own fault. The Elder Race helped engineer life on earth, they pressed their handprints into our genetic clay. It was their plundered technology that catalyzed the rise of mammals and the emergence of human sentience. And when the Elder Race failed, the local Space of All Colors began to mutate, to distort, to adapt to new frequencies of terrestrial life. Perhaps humanity unwittingly colonized the Space of All Colors, perhaps it called to them, requiring new minds for sustenance, or perhaps it was just natural evolution; but over the course of a million years, the Elder Things discovered that their minds had become as damaged as their bodies. They were going deaf and blind. They could no longer sense each other clearly in the darkness; the Space of All Colors had collapsed, one wavelength at a time, fading to a dim human rainbow. Soon they could only see shadows, absences…memories. Where once they conducted great conversations, now they whispered to each other in the Beckettian gloom. And worst of all? Their beloved Space of All Colors hadn’t been violated by the usurper, but had willingly betrothed itself, and was now pregnant with their own extinction. Weakened by disaster and disease, their numbers diminishing, the Elder Things resigned themselves to the horror of the Undying Epoch.

Pocket Dreamworlds

In the world of White Leviathan, certain powerful Dreamers have the ability to create, enter, and sustain “pocket Dreamworlds.” Separated from the main Dreamlands, each pocket Dreamworld has a unique history and follows an independent course of evolution. Some pocket Dreamworlds, like Amon Stockhausen’s Arcadia, are completely individual, and exist only in the consciousness of a single Dreamer. Others, such as the Eden of Abaddon’s Ministry, are communal, and are shared by a specific group of individuals. Although isolated by definition, each pocket Dreamworld has been sheared from the fabric of the Dreamlands, and contains some form of connecting thread known as a “portal.” By nature, these portals are unconsciously concealed; indeed, some pocket-Dreamers aren’t even aware that a larger Dreamland exists! A capable Dreamer may obfuscate an existing portal even further; but portals cannot be sealed, locked, or destroyed. Upon the death of the Dreamer, a pocket Dreamworld is absorbed back into the whole.

There are many reasons why a Dreamer may create, knowingly or unknowingly, a pocket Dreamworld; but every pocket Dreamworld is founded on the imprisoned mind of an individual Elder Thing, pinned to psychic immobility like a butterfly in an insect collection. This invasive act severs the Elder Thing’s connection to the Space of All Colors—even the shadows and whispers are gone. For a being that’s lived millions of years in telepathic communion with its peers, this sudden silence is unbearable, a spiritual crucifixion unprecedented in the history of the Elder Race. Fortunately, the death of the Dreamer releases the “pinioned” Elder Thing; but in the case of communal Dreamers, or worse still, a generational bloodline of Dreamers, an Elder Thing may find itself trapped for centuries. The Elder Things do not understand the reasons or mechanism behind pocket Dreaming, but most Elder Things have suffered pinioning at least once over the past ten thousand years. The experience has already killed three of them—those known to humans as the Empress of the Blazing World, Itzpapalotl, and the Torchwood Enigma.

There are four incidents of pocket Dreaming in White Leviathan. Abaddon’s Ministry is responsible for Eden, a Dreamlands version of Dunwich founded upon an Elder Thing believed to be an angel. The Kát have constructed the Nangaï, a communal Dreamworld predicated upon a “small octopus god” submerged off the coast of Kith Kohr. By forcibly pinioning an Elder Thing he calls the Orchid, Amon Stockhausen he has managed to create Arcadia. And finally, there’s the House of Coffyn and Apollyon.

Apollyon
The House of Coffyn have been Dreamers since the thirteenth century, refining this power down a bloodline descended from William Coffyn of Devonshire. In 1243, King Henry III appointed Master Coffyn to construct a castle on Lundy Island. During the excavation process, Coffyn discovered the broken body of an Elder Thing. Transported to the island by unknown hands during the Neolithic period, the Thing was badly damaged and half-insane, having already been pinioned by a Welsh magician calling himself Wair, or “Gwydion.” Believing the Thing to be a fallen angel, Coffyn quietly relocated its body to a crypt below the church at Alwington. Within a few years, Coffyn had established a cult surrounding the angel, which he named Apollyon. Unknowingly leaching its power, Coffyn established a pocket Dreamworld on the fringes of Hyperborea. He called his world Fairy Cross, and began Dreaming a “revolving castle” into existence.

Unfortunately for the Master Builder, he could not teach the Dreaming skill to his apprentices, and the Cult of Apollyon gradually died out. Only Coffyn’s children inherited his power, and they passed it to their children. Each generation contributing to the growth of the castle, which soon expanded to an entire city. By the time Coffyn’s great-grandchildren changed the spelling of their family surname, “Fairy Cross” had become “Apollyon,” its namesake now forgotten in a buried crypt. Apollyon reached its peak during the reign of Henry VIII, but by the end of the Elizabethan era, the number of Coffin Dreamers had been whittled down to a single bloodline descended directly from William. In 1642 the pocket Dreamworld traveled to the New World with Tristram Coffin, one of Nantucket’s original settlers.

Tristram Coffin was the last great Coffin Dreamer, and the power steadily waned across the following generations. While the Elder Thing remained pinioned in Alwington, the increased physical distance had a deleterious effect on its human parasites. Tristram’s grandson was Peleg Coffin, a whaling captain who believed his father had bequeathed Apollyon through a tradition of family witchcraft. Peleg could never recall his visits, but his wife Delilah Hussey transcribed her husband’s nocturnal ramblings, believing him to be speaking with fallen angels. Their daughter Mary was the first Coffin to believe the city was nameless. After Peleg was killed overseas, Delilah remarried into the “Black Macy” clan of Nantucket witches, and Mary was raised believing her dreams were visions granted by the Biblical Nephilim. She married Abner Ezekiel Hoag in 1764. Their two sons were Barzillai Coffin and John Coffin.

After the Black Macys relocated to Kingsport, Barzillai joined the Covenant of the Green Flame, while John was reabsorbed into Nantucket’s Quaker community. Barzillai Coffin was completely uninterested in Dreaming, and his son Ezra seemed to inherit that disinterest—until he was given nanga at Kith Kohr. This woke his latent talents, flinging Ezra into the Dreamlands for “years” of his life. Ezra became the first Coffin to discover the portal from Apollyon to the greater Dreamlands. Leaving his ancestral city for the treasures of Celephaïs, Ezra now dwells half in the waking world and half in the Dreamlands; but never in Apollyon. (See Ezra Coffin’s character profile for details.)

Joseph Coffin
Barzillai’s estranged brother was not a Dreamer, but John’s son, Luke Coffin, visited the nameless city until his wife Philomena Folger convinced him it was “a blasphemous place.” Their only child was Joseph Coffin, who was raised with no mention of his strange heritage. Still, the House of Coffyn has not yet fallen into ruin; and Joseph Coffin’s discovery of Apollyon is one of the main subplots of White Leviathan. The question is, what will happen to Mr. Coffin when he realizes Apollyon offers salvation to one race, and doom to another? (See “Player Character Secrets and Development” for details.)

Sources and Notes

The image in the header is William Blake’s The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, from 1803.

White Leviathan > Keeper’s Information
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Author: A. Buell Ruch
Last Modified: 7 October 2021
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
White Leviathan PDF: [TBD]