Lucidity

Lucidity takes place in the world of dreams -- a world filled with Dreamers, real people who dream without awareness, and Lucids, those few who understand where they are, have a sense of self, and can learn to manipulate the dreamworld to their own advantage. The players, naturally, are Lucids.

Yet "a sense of self" only takes you so far; the Lucids have snatches of remembrance from their former life, and the process of character creation is, in fact, a matter of deciding how many memories you sacrifice for the sake of power and sanity -- and what things you do remember. You can bargain with the Dream King (that is, gamemaster) for some additional memories, by taking disadvantages in exchange.

Because the world is, literally, such stuff as dreams are made of, you can attempt to shape it, creating 'dreams' within it, and moving from one 'dreamscape' to another. There are, naturally, monsters -- both Dreamers' nightmares, and 'dreams from outside,' Lovecraftian extrusions into consensual reality. And there is danger -- the danger of dying, of losing your memories and ultimately your lucidity -- and perhaps the danger of 'waking.'

As with many short RPGs, Lucidity offers little more than a character generation system, a conflict resolution system, and an evocative background -- but the background here is very evocative, and something that, in the right GM's hands, could easily create a compelling and disturbing campaign. Something more is needed, I think -- an story arc, secrets of the dreamworld to uncover, the connection between this world and the waking one but Prahl, perhaps sensibly, does not try to provide that here -- after all, if it's in the game rules, then it's canonical and available to the players, which obviates the mystery of discovery.

Unlike many indie RPGs, Lucidity is not playing with the nature of narrative and its expression through play; instead, it's taking roleplaying into the world of dream-logic, the sense of epiphany just around the corner, always delayed by the stream-of-conscious permutation of one event into the next through a sort of magical connection that defies logical analysis.