Fantasm Spiders and the Dream Walker

Session Summary: 10/22/2023

Ahhhh, creatures of the DREAMLANDS walk openly in Lepidstadt! With the boundary between the waking world and the Dreamlands worn thin by weeks of ritual activity across the city's pentagram-shaped circuit, the heroes found themselves confronting entities that should by all rights have been confined to the sleeping realm. Fantasm Spiders: creatures that spun webs not of silk but of nightmare-stuff, connecting dreaming minds to their own hungers and feeding on the distress that resulted. They were fast, their movements carrying the discontinuous quality of dream-logic rather than physical physics, appearing where they should not be and absent from where they had just been.

The battle against the spiders required the heroes to adjust their perceptions, to fight with dream-sight rather than purely physical awareness, tracking the creatures through both realms simultaneously. This was exhausting in ways that a purely physical battle was not, the mental effort of maintaining dual-perspective vision while also managing the immediate requirements of staying alive. But they had been building toward this capability for weeks, and the skills they had developed in the process of investigating Lepidstadt's corruption proved exactly applicable here.

A Dream Walker then appeared: a being that had stepped fully from the sleeping world into the waking one, maintaining solid form through sheer accumulated dream-energy. It was the most sophisticated Dreamlands entity they had yet encountered in the physical world, and it fought with a complexity that reflected its hybrid nature, switching between tactics that worked on physical opponents and tactics that worked on dreaming minds with unsettling fluency.

They destroyed all of them and stood for a moment in the aftermath, catching their breath in a street where passersby who had seen nothing of the battle stepped around puddles of dissipating dream-energy with the oblivious serenity of the fortunately unaware. The heroes reached their fifth level of power, a recognition of the accumulated experience that these months of investigation had provided. They were not the same people who had walked into Poiana that first October afternoon, and the difference between who they had been and who they were now was written in every choice they had made since and every horror they had survived!