'Celephaïs' (H.P. Lovecraft d20)
Finding something to adapt into game terms from Celephais, a short but evocative piece that H.P Lovecraft wrote in 1920 and had published in 1922, was much more of a challenge than I would have expected and actually led to me putting off working on it! In that the story is about a character who can create things in his dreams -- to include the title city of Celephaïs -- I finally decided to develop something that would allow a character to do the same sort of thing in a game and the following Feat is the result.
Finding something to adapt into game terms from Celephais, a short but evocative piece that H.P Lovecraft wrote in 1920 and had published in 1922, was much more of a challenge than I would have expected and actually led to me putting off working on it! This story deals with someone who exists alternately in two worlds, one an increasingly dismal physical reality and the other a fantastic dream realm, so initially I was thinking in terms of a template or other mechanism that would allow a character to do the same thing, but this direction was a little too complex for purposes of a single piece of story-inspired game content. In that the story is about a character who can create things in his dreams -- to include the title city of Celephaïs -- I finally decided to develop something that would allow a character to do the same sort of thing in a game and the following Feat is the result.
Prerequisites: Total ability score bonuses for Int, Wis, and Cha of at least +6.
Benefit: Up to once per day, a character capable of Dream Creation can visualize an item while sleeping and, when he awakes, there is a chance that it will have appeared beside him. To determine if this is the case, the character must roll d20 and add the bonus for his highest intellectual ability score. If the result is 16 or higher, than the visualized item will be there and remain so for six hours before evaporating into the ether. If the character makes a second roll of this sort, however, the item will be permanent. If both rolls are critical successes then the item will function as if it were of masterwork quality for the first six hours of its existence. If either roll is a critical failure then the character will suffer 1d4 points of temporary ability score damage to a random intellectual ability score.
The object created by the character cannot be worth more than a number of gp equal to the character's total intellectual ability score bonuses and cannot weigh a number of pounds more than two times this total (e.g., 10 pounds if the character has +1 for Int, +2 for Wis, and +2 for Cha).
