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Teeth of Your Dreams
His incarnate will be a building. Its architecture must be perfect, its inhabitants must follow certain specifications. The building needs to be a manifestation of despair in our world, a tenement where all the tenants gradually succumb to a totally dispirited state. Once every tenant has given up hope, the building will work as an incarnation of her enemy, and she will destroy it and him in the process.
She's already been working on this for decades; there is a tenement in Detroit that corresponds, somehow, to Nahemoth's true proportions. To walk through the shadow of this building is to wonder what the purpose of your life could be.... inside, rats roam freely over the tenants, who just don't care. They just don't care that they are hungry, or have open wounds; they can't be bothered to walk across the room to defacate, so they just sprawl in heaps of their own excrement, while bacteria infect their sores. It's almost perfect.
Only one thing is preventing it from being Nahemoth's incarnation: Don Fornshell, one of the tenants, has gone into a stupefied waking-dream, where he roams innocently through a beautiful, silly, Oz-like fantasy world.... This fantasy world actually exists; if it didn't, she'd just wait for him to succumb; but as it is this man is an inhabitant of two worlds. This dream-world is over fifty years old. It was created by a child who was a gifted dreamer and an inmate at Theriesenstadt, the childrens' concentration camp. Its creator is still alive, writing childrens' books, and living in solitude. Malkuth needs to destroy this dream-realm to complete her assassination of Nahemoth.
So the Archon sends dream creatures to destroy this dreamland, to turn it into a bleak, despairing place as well. Entering the dream, they are shaped by the psyche of the original dreamer into his original nightmare: Nazis. Giant, fire-breathing Nazis. They run rampant over a land of fuzzy bunnies and talking rainbows.
The PCs--who have never met outside of dreams--all used to daydream about this fantasy realm, when they were children. They all thought it was the product of their own imaginations. Now, years later, a PC wakes up in the middle of the night, realizing she is in the bed she used to sleep in, when she was a child. She notices: she really is a child, the child she used to be. Okay, this must be a dream. She has this intuition--no, this knowledge, really--that there's a secret passage in her closet. She opens the closet door, pushes out the back wall, descends a stone staircase that spirals down to a stream, where a rowboat is waiting for her, piloted by a very dapper walrus in a tuxedo, who sings operatic arias. The boat takes her to the fantasy land she inhabited as a child.
All her old fantasy playmates are there, as well as all the PCs (as children), but they're worried. Something from another world is coming to destroy the land. All the children who used to dream of this place have been called here to save the world from the monster. What monster? The six, heavily armed, giant nightmare Nazis who breathe fire. But they are just children.
When they wake, they don't put much credence in the rambling visions of their night; but the minions of the archon have begun to hunt them in their waking lives. They are followed; their phones tapped; approached by strangers. Everywhere there is a sense that they are being watched.
The next night they go back into the dream world; they watch, in a magic pool, as Prince Hero, astride his white stallion, confronts the Nazis. Prince Hero is the noblest warrior of the realm. The Nazis shoot him and he dies.
Over the next few days, the characters struggle desparately to understand what is happening to them. They see their childhood dreams devastated. They are hunted, at their jobs and at home, by some hireling thugs and a Skinwalker. If they're smart, they'll exchange information in the dream, and they'll be able to find each other in the "real" world. If they aren't smart, you can prod them.
They can go on a quest, trying to figure out a way to defeat the Nazis in the dream world, but they are children up against some powerful obstacles. Every night they can try to complete some aspect of their dreamquest, and then the next day they go about their daily lives. Except... the servants of Malkuth are hunting them now, trying to find them and kill them.
They might be approached by a hooker who has been possessed by Na'amah, a creature of Nahemoth who is identified with prostitution. Na'amah is almost powerless, and she will be destroyed with Nahemoth too, if his citadel is destroyed. Na'amah will possess a hooker, and give the characters obscure leads if they pay her. She eats the money, and a croaking voice comes out of her vagina, saying things like: "On that tree, the abortions kill from their fog of black fire," and "If he hadn't eaten pomegranate seeds in Detroit, then only children would dream the dreams of children."
If the PCs track down the creator of the fantasy world--he has a Wizard of Oz role in the dream realm--they can find him in the real world, living in immense isolation, caught between painful memory and beautiful fantasy. If they don't do it quickly, Malkuth's servants will have killed him. If he's killed, the PCs might find his obituary in the paper, and read how this man, a concentration-camp survivor, had written children's books with some familiar characters.
Either way, his house is full of portals to his dreams--a secret passage behind the bookcase, a door in the basement, etc. Through these passageways, the PCs can come into the dream world with their adult stats; they can bring guns, binoculars, and other equipment that should give them a fighting chance against the nightmare Nazis.
The Nazis are emanations of six aborted foetuses, kept alive by scientists at one of Malkuth's dream-research labs, Thornber Laboratories in Detroit. Thornber Laboratories and the tenement are both owned by Watkiss Industries. If one of the Nazis is killed, we see it shrivel to fetal proportions, and an image hangs in the air for a moment: a fetus hung like fruit on a tree.
If their efforts fail, the dream world will be destroyed, forever. They will come out of the dream standing in front of some strange building. Then the building will explode into flame, killing all the occupants--as well as Nahemoth, who doesn't even defend himself. Maybe the PCs are able to see through the Illusion long enough to see that it's a body burning, what looks like a young man in 19th century german garb, a _Sorrows of Young Werther_ type, burning, he looks like he's in pain but he doesn't even struggle. Nahemoth is dead long before the firetrucks arrive. Dozens of people are dead. It is declared to be arson, but the case is never solved.
If they get there before the place is torched, they come in to a building that's halfway into Inferno already....
If the players kill the nightmare Nazis or destroy the lab, or if they just go in and rescue the tenants of the building, the dream world survives, the building survives, the Death Angel of Despair survives, even if he doesn't care to. Somehow the PCs should learn what they've done--saved the life of Despair, and earned the enmity of one of the most powerful beings in the cosmos.
NPCs
Non-Dream NPCs
* The Skin Walker
An assassin in Malkuth's service. The Skin Walker cuts people open, carves them out, then climbs into their skin. It's almost impossible to distinguish him from someone he's imitating, but glass always frosts over before he enters a room.
His stats are only slightly above the norm, most of the time, although a fatal wound doesn't kill him, it only destroys the skin he's wearing. He slips out of the skin and stands exposed, shivering muscle and exposed bone. He can't survive too long without a skin, so he usually flees when his has been destroyed.
The Skin Walker likes to have the advantage of surprise on his side. He likes to attack dressed in the skin of a loved one, or failing that, a cop or a child. He keeps his "masterpiece" in his lair, along with about fifteen spare skins. His "masterpiece" is a boa constrictor with twenty pairs of human arms and a shark's head, that he'll climb inside if cornered. It has a lot of handguns, and ambulates like a centipede. The only way characters would stand a chance is with Miss Cummins' help (see below), or with explosives and fire.
The Skin Walker is informed of the characters' whereabouts by telephone; at the other end of the phone, someone has placed a kind of psychic "trace" on the characters, so for gaming purposes, the Skin Walker can always find the characters whenever the gaming feels slow.
* Bryan Watkiss
A wealthy, elderly, legless businessman who does whatever Malkuth's lictors tell him to. His assistant, Miss Cummins, is actually an azghoul. When he was a young man, he was involved in the occult; he and some of his friends tried to summon a demon, but they had the wrong name. The demon (azghoul, actually) showed up and began slaughtering them all. Watkiss panicked and began trying all the other names he could find, while climbing a ladder to escape. She reached up and tore his legs off, just as he finally found the right name: Krentzschapiutl. She's been his servant for four decades now, and made him rich, but he's terrified of what's really out there. When there's any hint of powers he considers "otherworldly," he instantly capitulates.
Watkiss can be convinced to tell his story to PCs who seem curious. He might even give them some leads. If he does, the Skin Walker will kill him.
* Miss Cummins (Krentzschapiutl)
An azghoul in Watkiss' service. Does whatever he tells her to. If the Skin Walker kills Watkiss, Miss Cummins will join the characters in an effort to avenge Watkiss' death. Once the Skin Walker is dead, she'll return to Metropolis.
(I include this, just because I can't see any other way the PCs would be able to stand a fighting chance against the Skin Walker in his "Masterpiece" skin.)
* Death Magi
Well, there have to be Death Magi performing the spell that would drag Nahemoth's Citadel from Inferno into the Illusion, but I haven't detailed them at all yet. Feel free to invent some Death Magi when you need them.
* The Abortion Tree, wombed in a fog of black fire
Six aborted fetuses attached to a machine, each inside a kind of jar that's pumped with amniotic fluids and strange drugs. They've grown to about the size of 18-month old babies. They are kept in Thornber Labs, in Detroit; four scientists work on the project, but it's rare for more than two to be with them at a given time. If PCs attack the lab, the abortions will sense the hostile intentions and force them into a dream, a waking dream of living in a lightless, burning endlessness. EGO rolls galore, to remember there way through the room, to take a step, to swing blindly at the jars or the delicate machinery that keeps them alive.
* Pawel Antschel
Holocaust survivor, Romanian jew, children's book author. His house in Ohio is a crossroads between the Illusion and Labrionalla, the dream world. A quiet, kindly, distant man.
* Na'amah
Inferno creature. Almost powerless. Na'amah wants to help the PCs, in order to save herself, but she needs to be paid. She speaks through prostitutes, but only when paid to do so, and even then what she says is often cryptic or paradoxical. * Don Fornshell
An unemployed 20-something whose life has fallen apart. He lives in a hellish slum in Detroit, where he daydreams incessantly about Labrionalla.
Labrionalla, the Dream World
Pawel Antschel dreamed up the original country; since then, children have come in at all times, and added characters of their own imagining, and pop-culture appropriations from their time. So Labrionalla has a starting-point, where Antschel as a boy dreamed, and then it radiates in layers of time. A PC in her forties wouldn't remember a dream NPC who only showed up in the 1980s.
Most of the characters in the dream are cute. But then again, most will die gruesome deaths.
* Donnie
Don Fornshell's dreamself, is a child in Labrionalla, just like the PCs. He works with them, behaves like them, but he no longer can understand what they mean if they mention a world besides Labrionalla.
The PCs might notice that Donnie is always there before they arrive and after they leave. One of the female characters may have had a crush on him when they were little and dreamed together. Good roleplaying can convince Donnie to become more aware of himself, and his predicament; a PC who chooses to ask probing questions about Donnie outside the dream might provoke him to realize what's going on for him, which in turn could help the PCs puzzle everything else out.
1940s dream characters
Handsome and heroic, on a white stallion, spends his time killing dragons, fighting ogres, beheading black knights, etc. He's the first one to have any contact with the Nazis. He rides up to them, overconfident, and challenges them. They shoot him, and one breathes fire over his dying body.
* Miss Emmaline Thistlewhite
Beautiful but misfortunate, Prince Hero's one true love. She spends her time as a scullery maid, cleaning spitoons, etc. She dresses in rags, and whenever she and Prince Hero are about to declare their love for one another, someone calls him away to battle an evil duke.
* Luciano Bottlestrop
Aristocratic, opera-singing, stuffed-shirt walrus.
* The LollyPopUp Girls
A field of lollypops; when you lick one, it turns into a 40's pinup model.
1950s dream characters
The fastest draw in the Spaghetti West. He's made of soapbubbles. He'll arrive in town for the shootout, get the draw on them, and empty both his six shooters before his opponents are ready. The result? Twelve soapbubbles float through the air. The Nazis , who were stunned by the speed of the attack, begin to laugh. They shoot and shoot, until only a soapy puddle is left.
* Elvis Bottlestrop
Bouffant hair-do, pink bodysuit (with ten-inch garden hose), Elvis-imitating walrus.
1960s dream characters
Cartoonish Soviet superspy. The PCs remember him as an enemy, whose plans they always had to thwart, but now he fights the Nazis too.
He'll pester them, with all his James Bond gadgets, and his cartoon-spy ability to hide behind a piece of string--and he actually does carry a gun. He may even be able to kill one of the giant fire-breathing Nazis.
* Tie-Dye Sky
A guitar-strumming hippie longhair with beard. His beard has grown into the grass, and the sky above him really is tie-dye in color. He warbles atrocious folksongs about peace, even as he's being shot to death. When he dies, the sky behind him goes out.
1970s dream characters
A boxing kangaroo, Koo's rival. Personality based on George Foreman.
* Koo
A boxing kangaroo, Ranga's rival. Personality based on Muhammad Ali.
* Jock Bottlestrop
In a white suit open to show gold chains and a hairy chest, the disco walrus.
1980s dream characters
Chained to her desk. Mad Mary is actually from our world, the illusion; her name is Michelle Calcagni. She worked for a publishing company, and fell asleep while reading one of Antschel's manuscripts. When she woke in Labrionalla, she was chained to her desk, in the middle of a field, while rabbits playing at a nearby pool table talked dirty to her (or at least a child's idea of dirty). She has always insisted this isn't real, just a dumb children's book, which is why the characters here think she's mad. She can tell the PCs Antschel's name.
* The Singing Ninja Spoons
A barbershop quartet, very well-trained in ninjutsu, only--they're about three inches tall.
* MC Macky Genghis Bottlestrop
The rap walrus, carries a 9 and an uzi. The Nazis will probably have ravaged all of Labrionalla before they get here, so they're likely to be overconfident: the first few musically-inclined walruses they encountered didn't put up much of a fight.
* Platoon of giant, fire-breathing, nightmare Nazis
All they want to do is kill and destroy, though they might stop to gang-rape the LollyPopUp Girls and Mad Mary Mullamoo. As they are a congregate of Antschel's fears, their guns never run out of bullets, and they never get hungry. They are not immune to the effects of their own fire: the first time one breathes fire, he chars his own lips off, and the next time, his gums, so his teeth fall out....
Locations
* The Sea of Lost Socks
* The Tie-Dye Sky
* Antschel's House
* The Spaghetti West
Locations in the Illusion
* Watkiss Industries, Manhattan, Upper East Side offices
* Skin Walker's lair in Detroit (if he travels to another city, he brings his accoutrements with him--spare skins and the "Masterpiece" could show up in an apartment in any town)
* Antschel's house, in rural Ohio
* Tenement in Detroit, where Don lives, that's becoming Nahemoth's citadel
* Thornber Labs, in downtown Detroit, where the abortion tree is kept