Brave the Dreamer

When you were young, at that tender, malleable age, you touched the Dream...

Brave the Dreamer is a game about an enthralling experience from your youth, the tender life you’ve built in its aftermath, and the tension between the two.

Journey to a fantasy world more real to you than this one. Attempt, with your co-conspirators on a niche Web forum, to capture the experience. Grow up and shape a new life for yourself. Then watch it all come to a head as your facade cracks and your resolve is pushed to its limits.

Is the Dream the truest life you’ve ever lived? Or is truth what you’re tending in the Present?

What brave choices will you make to find out?

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Brave the Dreamer is a GMless, Descended from the Queen storygame for 1-4 players inspired by media like I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Past Lives (2023), the self-aware portal fantasy of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and hopepunk works in the style of Becky Chambers. Play to embrace all your childhood fantasies, young adult disaffection, and adult actualization.

• 18-page black-and-white PDF with guidance for playing with a standard deck of cards, with the print-and-play deck, or online
• Optional materials for print-and-play
• Access to Story Synth version of the game for online play
• Import file for playingcards.io (alternate online play option)

Content advisory: Possible themes of loss, alienation, addiction, and derealization.

Free your Dream. Cherish your Present. Discover your Bravery.

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Things playtesters said:

• “Brave the dreamer is beautiful, it really messed me up.”
• “immersive and nourishing game [...] of shared fandom estrangement and belonging, of rescinded belief and one last chance, of love doubt and what ifs”
• “oh man. let me just... lay face down in the dirt for a while”