Horror in a Sleep Disorder Research Clinic

According to Don't Rest Your Head, you enter a parallel world that is twisted as fuck.

That's simple. The Dreamlands.

The thing is, it's not really horror in itself, the horror comes from evil dreamers using people's dreams to their own ends. As is the Dreamlands are a Fantasy world mixing themes of Conan and the Mythos. It borders on all those deep dark places humans will never return from the same. But in itself it's pretty idyllic and full of artsy psyonic magic. There are vast power differences between random encounters, so to say, and characters traipsing around the Dreamlands unwary may well be swallowed hole by a plant or led down the garden path to their demise by some will-o'-the-wisp.

So what does that mean for the clinic? Usually patients stay one night at such a place to have their sleep patterns recorded for analysis by doctors in a separate appointment. They might come back a few times, but it's not a treatment or a sustained in house diagnosis. There might be one or two resident patients with exotic conditions who sleep there every night. But most will be there for one night of sleeping hooked up to countless monitoring devices, maybe return once or twice, but that's it.

So whatever happens has to happen fast. It could be a change that only manifests later, like former patients walking off rooftops or into traffic days or weeks after their night in the clinic. Or it might be a cult spreading among former patients who all became initiated in the clinic.

So there must be one dreamer who is either mad or malicious, who has some control over Dreamlands access and over the people he brings into the Dreamlands to whatever ends, and who manages to remain unnoticed. It could be a resident patient, or a doctor, maybe even a nurse or technician who simply uses the clinic without having anything to do with the actual diagnostics and research going on.

It could also be a drug. Something given too patients, possibly even with good intention, that projects their mind somewhere bad while they sleep. And they wake up changed.

One's own tragic insomniac fate.

Don't Rest Your Head!

It's a perfectly normal anachronistic Mad City full of nightmares.

The clinic is actually researching the effects of sleep withdrawal. Patients are kept awake at all hours via the effects of drugs, timed electric shocks, orderly harassment, ect.

You can be awake for up to three days straight before you start hallucinating. What happens after a few weeks? I know the real answer is you die from exhaustion but you could make it so the mind starts behaving as if it were dreaming, warping reality, making nightmares "real", what have you

Insylum.

Broken mechanics but a sweet! setup.

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7001919/Insylum.pdf

You are a patient. You don't remember why. Making you remember is part of why you're here.

Days are spent in group or individual sessions of therapy. At night, when the orderlies are less watchful, a door opens to another world...

This picture is pretty good.

This game always sounded interesting but I never got around to playing it. I like the incorporation of the King in Yellow.

Anyone got that creepypasta about the soviet no-sleep experiment?
That wasn't terrible.
Something like that, where someone from an agency of some kind is funding spooky shit based on sleep disorders for ambiguous purposes

Don't bring up the Dorminian incursion!

Technically, you can start hallucinating any time you go to sleep by tricking your body it's sleep-time while staying awake

Yes but the idea that after you are awake for a certain amount of time you're virtually guaranteed to start seeing weird shit is spookier.

People who got worthless degrees.

Australian delicacy.

So, you're saying that we can literally force ourselves into daydreaming?

More like sleep paralysis lite

Things that are just close enough to normal that your can't prove they are really there, but are freaky and paranoia inducing. Everything creepy that happens should be something that, after the fact, you can't prove really happened and no one will believe you.

This doesn't mean you are not in danger. None of the staff will believe that you saw a guy get eaten by a monster. Of course not. Look, he's right here. He might not be talking anymore, and he can't sleep, and he keeps giving you this look like you and he are sharing a private joke, but he isn't dead. Right?

Or how about that other guy you saw get dragged away, kicking and screaming? It looks like he ran away during the night. It happens sometimes, people decide to check themselves out.

Not specifically sleep disorder but Ravenloft can inspire you (especially the domain of Dominia I think owned by Dr. Dominiani which basically a distant asylum). Search for Domains of Dread online.

>Clinic staff-member suddenly falls into a comatose state in the middle of explaining something to the player-characters, remaining standing while his head slumps forward. None of the other staff notice even if directly pointed out, and some even have one-sided conversations with the sleeping staff-member. Upon awakening, he will act as if he was active and talking during his period of inactivity, leaving a chunk of information absent from the player-characters' knowledge.

>A deranged man in a hospital-gown wanders through the main hall early one morning, claiming to have died in his sleep. The staff calmly reassure that he is in fact alive and not a ghost, and gently guide him back to his bed and give him a glass of water whilst telling the player-characters that they intend to contact someone more knowledgeable in mental-health issues to take over the matter. That night, if the players find the deranged patient's room and look inside, they come across a familiar looking corpse in bed, long-dried stains of blood covering his mouth and gown...

>The next time one of the player-characters sleep, they find themselves having a mundane or even cliche dream. When they feel the sensation of waking up however, the other people in the dream begin panicking and grabbing at the dreaming character, begging them not to wake up or they'll all die

>When the players first arrive, an intern drops a canister of a sleep-inducing gas, rupturing the valve and causing a small leak. The tank is quickly patched up in short enough time that nobody is affected (save for the intern, who collapses face-first into a potted fern), but the player-characters catch a whiff of a very distinct smell. When they visit the clinic-director later on, they notice that exact same smell permeating every inch of his office.

>THE WHOLE CAMPAIGN WAS A DREAM HAHA WHAT A TWIST FOOLED YOU ALL wait where are you guys going

Motherfucking bump.

Russian Sleep Experiment

Don't Rest Your Head has a setting exactly for this stuff.

I have the answer to this:
youtube.com/watch?v=MEwbfnCpKA4

Wat

The Russians are crazy enough to conduct this experiment in real life.

Not op, what's don't rest your head?

Bump

that was great, up until the point where they started talking
an excellent example of how not to finish a creepypasta

Save it from the brink.

Have them do Perception checks and when they pass they see something scurry away

There is nothing there

People calling the characters names while there's no one around but that's it that's as far as it goes

Grievous injury or death caused by accidents from negligence or lapses in concentration. Make the players think that something is trying to kill them off, one by one.

In reality all it was was that some poor, dumb fuck just had to go and ignore all the warnings and operate some heavy machinery.

>The heavy machinery is part of the underlying mechanisms of reality, not supposed to be accessible to sane and normal people.

Having been to one, they are basically an office building with several bedrooms with a lot of monitoring equipment and a technician watching all the bedrooms.

A rat stands up on its hind legs and says beware.

He watches, even in your dreams.

Please tell us more?
Did you feel claustrophobic in any way?

Fuck off

Succubi and incubi obviously

Can we talk about how incredibly lazy sprinkles on buttered white bread is for a dessert? I think that's the true horror here.

That's my culture you're insulting there, mate.

Small hallways, glitchy monitors, constant humming tone that is just loud enough to let you know it's there, abrupt encounters with unhinged people screaming about their dreams. If you could see it in a horror survival RPG, try to flesh it out for a pen and paper game. Wanna REALLY fuck with your players? Secretly play infrasound that is known to cause feelings of dread and paranoia

Play a constant sound between 7 and 19 Hz for this to be effective

Is this the brown note noise?

If you can call that culture

Fuck off, this is great stuff.
The pcs smell fairy bread but can't find its delicious source.

More elaboration?

Damn son, this is fucking great.

Now that's just sad

>people in the dream begin panicking and grabbing at the dreaming character, begging them not to wake up or they'll all die
Spoopy

Have you seen Before I Wake?

Its party food for 8 year olds.

That's like the stupidest thing i've seen. Why not add some fucking vanilla sugar and cinnamon into beaten eggs and soak bread in it then cook it? No wonder you were exiled into deathland

You mean the most glorious thing.

Shut up cunt

Because it's a quick and easy party food for kids. not dessert for a meal.

>Not teaching your kids about proper food
>Feeding them shit

Is the whole thing translated this way? Because if so I must read it.

Yep

Link me good sir, please.

Huh, turns out "Me Stepmum's Too Fuckin' Hot, Mate" turns up the right one. What a time to be alive.

contaminated with fetish porn
let it die

Fetish porn can be fitting for a horror setting

Kindly fuck right off.

You wish to discuss the finer points of australian cuisine then?

Or how about discussing the op?

>bread and sprinkles is bad

>fried bread in circles with sprinkles and icing is fine

Phew boy, Americans.

Anyone ever read Lucidstuck here ?
It's pretty good

I don't follow...

>fried bread in circles with sprinkles and icing is fine
What?

Course it is.

Nah, it was shit.

Stop farming for ideas and finally run a fucking game.

You'll only shit yourself if you have some severe hallucinations, and even then you'd have to sneak some acid into the players food

How was it shit?

Have this guy as one of the staff
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant

He oversaw something called "the sleep room", where he kept patients in chemically-induced sleep for months at a time, while treating them with electroshock therapy for depression. His reasoning was that people dislike electroshock treatments because they hurt, so by inducing sleep between sessions, he hoped they would fail to form memories of the treatments and so have better outcomes. In reality, his patients often ended up dead, with serious amnesia, or totally insane.

Just a bland question with no effort put in from the op.

It is a slight upgrade from a single line of greentext, but not by much. It lost points for putting up a off topic bait picture.

Obligatory.

>as i read this thread before bed nose deep in a CPAP
thanks for the sweet dreams OP.

When did your joy and life leave you?

The day I got a teaching certificate.

Yeah... It's his job.

So the beds are like a hotel bed, with cheap sheets but the furniture is nice. There's a TV to watch, but I just listen to podcasts when I do it.

The wires are pasted all over your body (including legs) with this gritty glue stuff. There are a few that are on the little sticky pads directly like you see in sci-fi movies - the ones where the wires snap on but he pad remains when you yank them off. There is a belt to monitor breathing and it also straps the wires close to you so you can move at night.

Then here are a dozen or so sensors all over your head using that glue stuff, and all the wires are gathered above your head and plugged in. You have to sleep on your back at like 9pm, and your wake up call is 5am. If you have to take a piss you have to call out for the tech to come help unhook you so you can shuffle to the bathroom.

Generally it's not as bad as I first thought, but sleeping is rough. With a C-PAP it actually helped, but some people have trouble with those too. The last one I had was a follow up with less than half he wires and shit, only the initial visit was really crazy with all the monitoring.

lurk moar newfag

Don't Rest Your Head is a FATE based RPG that is about insomniacs that enter an alternate reality called the Mad City.

It is hard to describe really. Nightmares are real, there are citizens, most are murderous, being awakened your characters aren't normal either and might be able to manipulate things in their favor, but it will never be for long.

It is like playing in Freddy Krugers world and it has a good mix of literal definitions. Paper Boys for example, are your stereotypical newspaper boys, but they are made out of newspaper, tend to be murderous (like most nightmares), bleed ink, and when they write a story for their paper it tends to come true, even if they have to make it happen and it almost always comes true no matter what.

A Paper Boy crucified to a wall by large staples screaming 'HELP WANTED!' is a good set-up to an adventure that will always end badly.

Fucking dumbass.

>Don't Rest Your Head is a FATE based RPG
Absolutely not. It has nothing to do with Fate.

It was made by the same people and was designed by one of the same designers, it heavily narrative based, is frequently lumped in with other FATE products, and has a kind of FATE point mechanic with hope and despair coins and such.

I can see why people would list it as such, especially given the character creation aspect being as open as it is and the overall feel.

But yeah, it is its own thing. It does feel very FATE like though.

The adhesive could be good for a challenge. Imagine being stuck in a huge blob of the stuff that slowly shifts to cover you completely.

Not at all. The game dynamic is entirely different.

There are some things it has in common with Fate, primarily the fact that some people just can't wrap their head around it. And it isn't just tribalism, I've had players earnestly try and fail.

But where Fate has aspects that are used by the players to invent details about their character in the story, DRYH has the 5 questions which are used by the GM to set up each scene specifically for one character.

DRYH is a sequence of quick events which follow a very concise framing. The dice tell the GM what happens, the GM just fleshes it out with story. But the story trajectory is in the mechanics.

Fate works the other way around, putting everyone in every scene with as many ideas as possible.

Fate points are a narrative device. Coins of hope and despair are a currency that manages dominating pools and character decay.

Trust me, I have played both and they have nothing in common, mechanically.

Sounds like a terrible way to simulate sleeping conditions and study sleep disorders.

Do you have a better approach?

Everyone gets surveilled by their Apple Watch 24/7 and if they get sick the cloud alerts their insurance who can then mandate a procedure for the patient.

Happiness is mandatory.

Dreamlands is great. And well set-up for gaming, too, since Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand man is basically an ideal campaign book.

>Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand man
What's that?