Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me

As we all know, the collective for “clown” is “a horror of clowns.” Last month, I wrote “Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me” for Trilemma Games’ Patreon-sponsored blog. You can find it here for free to use and enjoy in your games. It’s a deviously clownish adventure about a town that suffers from dangerous insomnia after a circus comes to town.

I really enjoyed writing this adventure. It didn’t take terribly long, and Michael was great to work with, very understanding about my weird ideas for this town.

The concept came to me at 4 AM, for a dungeon where nobody can sleep. PCs can’t take a long rest, but neither can the monsters, so the only ones functioning even close to normally are undead and constructs– beings that are immune to the needs for sleep and rest. I ended up scrapping the undead when I decided to add the carnival angle to it, which gave me an excellent place for re-programmed constructs.

Update: Some very creative people have been fleshing this out and posting their results!

• Why Not Make the Dream Eater a Monster of the Week? (for MotW) by Mark Tygart
• All you need to run this for Dungeon World by Mark Tygart
• A Doppleganger wakes up from a nightmare – crowdsourcing ideas for doppleganger nightmares by Michael Prescott