Dream Mastery
Running Dimm City RPG rests on a few hard axioms that keep the Dream sharp and alive. First, choice always matters: every action bends the city, even when the consequences don’t show up right away. Second, failure is fuel, not punishment: missed rolls push the story sideways into danger, opportunity, or revelation instead of stopping it dead in its tracks. Third, the city is an active force: Dimm City reacts, remembers, and pushes back, it is never just a backdrop. Finally, players and Dream Master are accomplices: you’re not opposing sides, you’re collaborating to make something tense, strange, and worth remembering. If the table leans into these truths, the Dream runs hot and the city crawls all over you.
Choice Always Matters
In a Dream, nothing is a throwaway decision. Even small choices leave residue. A careless word, a shortcut through the wrong alley, mercy shown to the right person, all of it bends the Dream.
Example: the pack spares a courier instead of shaking them down.
- Benefit: the courier spreads word that the crew lets runners walk, earning them smoother passage and fewer knives at checkpoints in that territory.
- Drawback: depending on who that courier answers to, the same story may reach a rival boss who now expects favors, assumes leverage, or decides to test whether mercy means weakness.
Consequences may be immediate or they may stalk the pack hours later, but they always arrive. The Dream Master’s job is not to punish choices, but to honor them. Treat player intent as real gravity, and the city will start to feel like it’s listening.
Failure Is Fuel, Not Punishment
Bad rolls are not dead ends. They are pressure points. When a Dreamer fails, the story should twist, not stall. Failure creates complications, reveals uncomfortable truths, escalates danger, or opens doors no one meant to kick in.
Example: a Dreamer botches a lockpick on a corporate side door.
The lock is open, but broke, and it’s screaming. A bored security tech recognizes the crew’s heat signature from a past job too!
Now the clock is loud, the stakes are personal, and escape routes are shrinking. A missed roll should make the situation messier, louder, or more personal. If failure hurts, it should hurt in ways that push play forward, not shut it down.
The City Is an Active Force
Dimm City is not scenery. It watches, reacts, and remembers. Districts have moods, systems have quirks, and the city has a long memory for disruption and liability. Example: the pack pulls a loud job against a mid-tier municipal data office. Nothing explodes, no alarms scream, and they walk away…clean?
Two cycles later, they’re sited for permits they never knew they needed, transit access flags their biometrics for “random” delays, and a routine service drone pauses just a second too long to scan them.
Streets don’t change, but the systems do. Factions respond quietly, paperwork can be weaponized, and the city pushes back through forms, fees, and friction.
When the Dream Master lets the city exert will, players stop treating locations like rooms and start treating them like institutions with teeth.
The Dream Is a Shared Conspiracy
The Dream Master and the Dreamers are not enemies. You are collaborators building tension together. The Dream Master plants the bomb; the players choose the blast radius. Most guides running an experience like this tell the PCs what they see. In Dimm City RPG, the more the Dreamers tell you about the sprawl they inhabit, the better!
Example: a Dreamer says, “I need chow and a longwhile to lay low.”
Instead of glossing over it, the Dream Master hands the scene to the Dreamers. Where do you go? The player describes a leaning noodle stall called “Send Noods” bolted into the shadow of an abandoned mag-rail pillar, neon menus flickering through cracked plex, steam venting from jury-rigged heaters, run by a mantis-like creature named Yingo who remembers their unpaid tab.
Suddenly a mundane errand has teeth, history, and risk baked in, because the player helped build it. Trust at the table allows risks, bold choices, and moments that sting in the best way. When everyone leans into making the Dream sharper instead of safer, the game stops being about winning and starts being about surviving something worth remembering.
Embrace the Unfamiliar
Dimm City is not a place for default bodies or borrowed identities. Playing human or using human NPCs is the path of least resistance, and Dimm City thrives on resistance. The city is built for the strange, the altered, the engineered, the fungal, the broken-and-rebuilt. When players step outside human norms, they stop reenacting familiar cyberpunk stories and start colliding with something uniquely Creaturepunk.
Non-human bodies change how the world treats you, how you move through danger, and how you solve problems. They invite discomfort, curiosity, and perspective shifts that human PCs never have to face. The farther a character is from “baseline,” the more Dimm City pulls them in, and that tension is where the Dream really comes alive.
Skin Is Expression, Not Leverage
The skin you choose is about identity, story, and how the world reacts to you, not about squeezing out mechanical advantage. By default, your form does not grant bonuses, resistances, special senses, or powers. It shapes roleplay, social friction, and narrative texture instead. If a skin does provide a mechanical edge, that decision should be made openly, with the consent of the Dream Master and the table, before play begins. Likewise, your body does not quietly evolve new abilities after the first session without a good reason. Any new powers, adaptations, or biological upgrades should be earned through play and approved by the Dream Master. In Dimm City, everybody’s strange, but power is intentional, visible, and paid for.
Sling Hex, Snap Necks, and Hack Decks
Taken together, these principles define how Dimm City RPG is meant to breathe at the table. Choices ripple, failure sharpens the moment, systems remember, and no one plays alone. The Dream Master rarely dictate outcomes and most Dreamers don’t chase optimization; lean into consequence, collaboration, and the strange logic of the city itself. Build characters that don’t fit, make decisions you’ll have to live with, and let the city respond in ways that feel earned, unsettling, and alive.
When you want to go deeper, the Dream doesn’t stop here. Our Discord is where other Dreamers are creeping in the shadows, with more guidance, community insight, and weekly Dreams you can dive into, run, break, and run your own. We’re waiting for you in the mist!