Now that The Ayleid Steps is nearly completed, I find myself toying around with a new idea which should satisfy my urge to build more, newer, stranger dungeons/levels/interiors. This is the concept:

A master alchemist lady has popped up in Cyrodiil. She travels everywhere in the empire, looking for special ingredients. Like Sinderion in Skingrad she has a unique skill: she can brew a very special potion. A potion that invokes conscious dreams and that fixes your memories of those dreams. She is willing to sell it, one at a time, for a mere 5000 septims. You as the Player buy one and go home to have a sleep on it.

You put on your nightgown, quaff the potion and lie down... to wake up in your dream. The environment may look like an ordinary dungeon or like an absurd bizarre house or castle or anything that can be stuffed into an interior cell. There may be friendly people, traps, riddles and/or enemies. You are naked, so you start looking for something to equip yourself with. Who knows what lurks around that corner over there...

In a dream nearly anything is possible. However, two things are out of the question: 1. taking dream objects with you back to the waking state, and 2. dying. So why would you do this anyway? What is there to gain?

1. You may not be able to take objects from the dreamworld, but you gain something immaterial: your memories of what you experienced and what you did. For instance, I remember certain real life dreams in which I read very interesting books containing stories, poems, or educational stuff. I even remember what I thus read. (Which is not to say I can make much sense of it. :blink: )
So this would be the objective of your dream journey: find three skill books. Read them, and have each advance one of your skills with 1 point. After you have found all (one or two or) three skill books, go find the exit to wake up.

2. While dreaming you can get involved in fights or be crushed in a trap, but you cannot die. If you die, you wake up. That's all.
No, wait. What about the skill books? Simple: if you managed to read them before you 'died', all is well; if not, that's bad luck - another potion is wasted, and if you want to try again you'll first have to save a fortune and then have to track down the traveling alchemist lady. Not easy, she's a restless type, she can be anywhere. Maybe some other vendor laid his hands on one of her potions? Shady Sam? Thoronir? Who knows, but you can bet on it they'll want a few 1000s of septims more to make a decent profit.

That's it.

On the technical side: one quest should suffice to handle the concept. When you start the dream, it removes your inventory to an invisible container. It determines which of your skills are not yet maxed, and then chooses 3 of these. It chooses 1 (or 2 or 3) of a collection of dream environments (= dungeon levels), and enables the books or book containers therein for the 3 chosen skills. Maybe it chooses a type of enemies at random, too. When you die or exit, your dream inventory is dumped, your 'real' equipment is returned and you wake up.

I'd like to keep it this simple, really. No fancy dialogs or epic stories, no custom items/textures. This is in fact a more or less twisted form of dungeon diving of course, which suits me because I like building as much as I dislike questing and scripting.
(I could even try to revive an old idea which was brought up in an early TAS thread: anyone who wants to build a beautiful or scary or bizarre or psychotic or romantic of whatever dungeon level can contribute it. The more the merrier. Imagine the mod having a hundred levels or more to choose from )

Questions:
Would 5000 gold be a good/balanced/worthwile price?
How many skills should a dream advance? 1, 2, 3?
Could you think up alternatives for skill advancement? What if a player has maxed all his/her skills?
Do you know of anyone else having tossed up this or a similar idea? Link?
Any problems I may run into, quest- or scriptwise?
Any other thoughts?

Thanks for reading this. It's late. Time to get some sleep.

Very interresting idea. :foodndrink:

The price tag for a few skill gains seems a bit high for me. Unless I'm somewhere around level 30 I really can't afford buying something like that. Not in my game that is...

Maybe the alchemist can sell "lesser" variations of the potion, with a smaller chance of finding skill books.

I absolutely love the idea . You could really create some crazy, bizarre, and creative things using this as a base because it could all be explained in the context of a dream. You could even possibly make a controlling ESM and allow people to create their own levels as addons

l think it's a fantastic idea, though the price could hinder some people from getting it right away.. Maybe you can have a choice if you dont have enough cash too pay the lady in the form of labor or other quest.

Perhaps there should be an option that gives you 0 skill books. However, you could still gain points from fighting various foes in the dream. An alternative reward could be powers that last for a limited amount of time outside of the dream world. Giving out powers that last for a limited time sidesteps the whole maxed out skill issue, and you can add in unique abilities.

Examples of powers
Summon nightmares (A small horde of friendly goblins rush to defend you.) They could last for 1min or until death and vanish.
Summon Abomination (Ultra rare reward, summon that huge shivering isle guardian for 1min or its death)
Dream Master (Touch skill that drags you and your target to fight in a dream. If you kill it there it dies outside of the dream(you could die as well.) Midas magic has a similar spell, astral combat if I recall right.

The powers could be awarded based on random things, surviving the dream for x time, finding a book or random item. (Chalices? Dinnerware?) To prevent abuse you could make them major powers, or one use only.

Just my kind of idea :drool:

I don't think it should be by money that you gain acess to the potion. To be clear: The chemist could be a daedra worshipper, or something similar... And instead of selling by money, by status/skill points. And instead of just gaining points you could lose sometimes - or just be left with the tributed -1 as the payment... Like a bet, you lose one, in the end can gain two. Or none. How? I would like also to see colateral effects to it, like really nightmarish worlds popping out once in a while, with no reward. Of course, if you got no reward this time (20%?), the next the chemist would appear sooner. And since you would always lose a point, you always would go for the venturing. And maybe, with you maxed stats you could find the daedra lord in a top dream/nightmare...

About the chemist... or a traveling merchant that only appear randomicaly at inn's, or a local merchant that once in a while is blessed by his master with a new potion that would leech one skill point from someone to him (the price that mortals should pay to go to dreamland and risk their sanity).


Sorry, sleepy and just carried here my actual dream...zzz

Very possible. Maybe have her sell the potion in three variations, once again like Sinderion did. Minor = 1 skillpoint, medium = 2 and 3 = major. Priced like 1000, 2000 and 3000 respectively?


That's the idea - to create weirdness. As for the addons: I merely imagined the player to wake up in a dungeonlike level, seeing a little plaque nearby, stating: "Level design: Cydonian_Knight" or something like that. Juggling .esm's and providing some level design framework would be beyond my modding abilities, I'm afraid.


...Or (as with Sinderion once more) you have to gather the ingredients by yourself.


Very interesting ideas. Makes me think of the Ayleid Wells that buff you with temporarily increasing skills/abilities/protections.


Like selling part of your soul to the devil?
Putting the Player's skills and abilities at risk would demand a (possibly much) higher reward and lower potion price. We wouldn't want to demotivate or scare away anyone, would we?

Thanks everyone for your input! Keep it coming, please.

1 Skill point per book, three books total sounds just right to me.
5000 for a potion sounds just right, too.

What this immediately made me think of, though, was the old Twilight Zone series. I thought Wouldn't it be fun to have some dream sequences modeled after some of the old episodes? I thought first of the one in which a man has a pocket watch that can stop time. Everyone around him freezes, and he can still move around. Some nice puzzles could be built around this idea. There was also one in which a diner counterman had a third eye in his forehead which was only revealed late in the episode. Delightfully dream-like. I remember, too, an old bibliophile who was the sole survivor of an apocalypse. He rushed to the library in a greedy frenzy, now having all the time in the world to read the books he loved so much. And running with a heavy stack in his hands, he trips, breaking his glasses to smithereens...

That's what dreams call up for me - not what you had in mind, but I think they could be wonderful.

gothemasticator