The Calligrapher's Sword

[Shreyas Sampat]

Today, I present you with a fresh plate of sacred steak - internal consistency.
The Calligrapher's Sword is a game about people in a dreamworld, something like a combination of Wonderland and Kadath.  It's called Elsewhere.

As the Duchess leapt toward me, I wondered how I could defend myself.  I was empty-handed, but this wasn't really happening.  I was dreaming...  Stepping back, I yelled Sword!.  Runes shimmered in the air, snaking down to twist into a marble rapier in my hand.  It pierced her breast, and she shattered into a flock of crows, which flew off in the four directions.

The Characters are either Dreamers, people from the Real who somehow fell into the Dream, or Dreaming, people native to Elsewhere, or at least wholly disconnected from reality.  Often the Dreamers are lost and don't know how to wake up, or are looking for something - a lost love, a secret, a metaphysical truth...

The Dreaming have power within the Dream: they are only meaningful in the way that they affect Dreamers.  Outside of that, it matters not whether they are sovereign powers or flower petals, drifting on the winds of madness.  The Dreamers have power over the Dream: they can create things out of thin air, sculpt the landscape with their minds, whatever they can imagine.  But Dreamers are limited by their finite force of will, and also by their consciousness - a Dreamer closer to waking up is more powerful, but will be jolted out of the dream sooner.

Dreamers have three qualities: Awake, Aware, and Intense.
Awake is a measurement of the Dreamer's awakeness, unsurprisingly.  With Awake the Dreamer does thinks outside of the dream's framework - will a nightmare creature out of existence, suddenly depart, whatever.  Strong uses of Awake slowly break the connection between the Dreamer and Elsewhere.  Awake always does things that distrub the fabric.  It is unsubtle and disruptive.
Aware is a measurement of the Dreamer's connection with the mind of Elsewhere.  Elsewhere is a communal dream-world, so it often doesn't make sense; it's full of insanity and secrets.  Aware allows Dreamers to see the method in the madness, or know the secret.
Intense is the Dreamer's emotional power, will, his intensity.  It allows the Dreamer to exert himself on others, and on the dreamworld, unconsciously.  Intense is the subtle counterpart of Awake; with Intense you could unconsciously cast a shaft of sunlight on yourself while delivering a rousing speech, lift mountains, walk over coals.

Instead of Awake, Dreaming have Asleep.
Asleep is the dream-mode counterpart of Awake.  With Asleep, Dreaming characters can turn into other people, move suddenly from place to place, pull unlikely things out of their pockets, fly.  Anything that other people do to you in a dream, Dreaming can do with Asleep.

Qualities run a scale of three steps - Slightly, Rather, and Quite, corresponding to d4, d6, and d8.

Finally, all characters have a pool of points, either Somnolence or Personality.
For Dreamers, you lose Somnolence when you use your Awake die (1 for Slightly, 2 for Rather, and 3 for Quite) and gain it when you make Aware rolls (same scale).
For Dreaming, the same is true for Personality.
When a character reaches 0 points, he ceases to exist, either because he woke up or forgot who he is.  Either way, if the character wants to come back, he can fall asleep again or remember himself in the space of about ten minutes.

The Die Mechanic:
When you make a roll, roll 3d6 and the dice for any qualities you might want to use.  You might want to color-code the quality dice.
Assign a single die to each of these three categories:
Longing:
1: You get farther from what you want.
2-4: You neither progress nor lose ground.
5-7: You get what you want.
8: You get something extra.
Import:
1: Something nonsensical happens.
2-4: Something happens that you don't understand, but could make sense.
5-7: Whatever happens makes sense.
8: You gain new understanding from this event.
Sorrow:
1: Something happens that makes you sad.
2-4: You are reminded of something that makes you sad.
5-7: Nothing happens to upset you.
8: Something that made you sad gets better.
Whenever you assign a quality die to one of the categories, you have to describe how that happened, using the quality.

Finally, you can use Somnolence/Personality as a resource:
Each roll, Dreamers can spend a point of Somnolence to add one to a single die a Dreaming character rolled; the reverse holds true for Dreaming and Personality.  This is part of the reason that Dreamers cavort with denizens of Elsewhere; there is a tangible safety in numbers.

Finally, there are Words.
Whenever a character uses a 1 or 8, he gains a Syllable.  Syllables can be combined to form Words or Calligraphy.
Words cost as many Syllables as it takes to say them.  A Word can actually be a single word, or it can be a short phrase.  Saying a Word can cause it to be true, in one way or another, without having to roll dice.  The player who spent the Syllables can describe the reaction Elsewhere has to the Word.

Calligraphy is three times as costly, but more powerful: Once a piece of Calligraphy is made, it can be reused.  Calligraphy takes some meditation to create; it is a poem in vision and sound.  When it is first spoken, the word shimmers in the air, and then the Calligraphy takes its final form.  With an 8 on a die, Calligraphy can be created instantly.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Now a few quick thoughts about the setting.

In the center of Elsewhere... as much as it can be called a center... there is a great city, the City of Sorrows.  Legend has it that the City is a great Calligraphy by its legendary ruler, the Queen-in-Crystal, who lives at the top of the tallest tower in Elsewhere, forever surveying her domain.

The City can be reached from anywhere in Elsewhere in nine nights of travel.  It is impossible to get closer to it travelling by day.  To each person, the City appears differently: one man's Crazy Haroun's Story Soda Fountain could be another man's City of Sorrows chapter of the International Library of Alexandria.

But some things are true for every man.  Sometimes, when the sun is rising or setting, you can see the words beneath the city streets, writhing like glowing serpents.  Everywhere, there are suggestions of calligraphy and the writer-painter's art - tangled columns like letters in ecstatic embrace, roads that widen and thin like brushstrokes, gold leaf and slashes of ink on the walls.  In the very center of the city is a moonstone tower, taller than the clouds.  When people come too close, the statues at its foot come to life - strange jawless armoured fish, things with fins and tentacles, jointed pincered horrors, all who swim through the air as of it were water.  These are the Moonstone Guardians - they make it sure the Queen-in-Crystal in undisturbed.  No one knows, though, if they are protectors, or jailers.

Time moves strangely in Elsewhere.  Once one is out of the City, it can do anything it wishes; in places it is almost motionless, in others very quick, or backward.  There is a Fountain of Youth that will slow down time for the person that drinks it: he will age more slowly, but everything else he does will be slower as well.

Besides reaching the City, the best way to travel in Elsewhere involves getting lost, and finding your way out.  It's a lot easier to get where you're going, if you don't know that it's not there.  Small regions are mapped - this is a result of the stabilizing influence of many Dreamers holding the region together.  Left to itself, the land is perfectly willing to twist into Klein bottles, crosscaps, Costa surfaces, whatever.  These are hard to map, so Dreamers who want to know the lay of the land tend to lay it flat first.

[Wormwood]

Shreyas,

It sounds like you have a very engaging setting, and some interesting mechanics.

I have a few questions about things which seem a bit unclear:

When spending Personality or Somnolence to add a die to the roll, what die is added?

In gaining and losing Personality and Somnolence, is that only if you use the die for one of the three catagories?

Due to the increased gain of P or S, as well as the advantages of rolling an 8, it seems that there is little reason to ever take Aware at less than Quite. Is this an intentional bias? (Yes, I know the idea of game balance isn't necessarilly your first goal, but it's still a concern.)

I do like how the syllables work, but something about the directness of that worries me. Not least because some words can have varying amounts of syllables in them, depending on dialect.

Lastly, when you assign a default die to a catagory, who describes the effect?

On the whole, I'm looking forward to hearing more on this game.

 -Mendel S.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Thanks for the comments, Mendel.

When spending P/s, you add *to* dice rolls: 6 becomes 7, etc.  I see that my wording there was a little murky.

For Dreamers, you lose Somnolence when you use your Awake die (1 for Slightly, 2 for Rather, and 3 for Quite) and gain it when you make Aware rolls (same scale)...

I also see that I failed to change the wording for P/S; it should go like this:

For Dreamers, you lose Somnolence when you use your Awake die (1 for Slightly, 2 for Rather, and 3 for Quite) and gain it when you use your Aware die (same scale)...

Yes, this only applies when you use the die for one of the categories.

You make an interesting point about the high usefulness of Aware.
I had two ideas for this:
First, it's possible that the strong narrative power of Asleep/Awake counters this; Aware only lets you know things, rather than do things.  Asleep/Awake are intensely powerful 'magic'.
Second, I could devise two parallel resources that run in a rock-paper-scissors relationship, and have some awful occurrence befall he who lets any pool fall to zero.  This somehow sounds either kludgey or unspeakably elegant - the game could be about the relationship of your shifting inner forces, as much as it is about the sculpting of the dream.  Either that, or it could just be a hell of a lot of bookkeeping.  I'll try to think of something smooth here, but I'm tempted to stick to my guns with Aware being weak narratively.

There are two ways to go with Syllables - the subjective way, or the way of convention.  The subjective way, each player spends Syllables per his own accent.  Yes, this means stereotypical Southerners have to spend two Syllables to create a Word "Ann," but theoretically it shouldn't be that bad in play.  The convention way, you all agree on an accent to speak your Words in.
I'm thinking that it would also be fair just to price Calligraphy by letter-count, rather than triple Syllable-count.  I'll be interesting, and it fits the idea better.  (And yes, this means that Calligraphy in Japanese would only be trivially more costly than the corresponding Words, or maybe even cheaper, with liberal use of kanji.  Maybe that means that in Japenese or Chinese, you might price Calligraphy by stroke count.)

Finally, I think the answer to your last question depends on how you want to run the game.  I have a penchant to design games that can be run GMless, and I hope that this is no exception.  Part of me just wants to answer, "The GM, or if you can't find one, the player to your left."

[Henry Fitch]

Great ideas, Shreyas. While I was reading this, I had flashbacks to a crazy dream from the night before, in which I was sucked into a nightmare world that had a scary scissors-weilding guy and a scary little kid in a blue suit with a sharp umbrella that could steal your memories. And these peculiar bellydancing ghosts. And the landscape was all spirally. Freaked me out.

The attributes are weird; they need a lot more definition as to what they really do. I'd also like to see more differentiation between Dreamers and Dreaming; maybe Awake would let you do things that humans cannot do (that's okay, I'll just hover), while Asleep would let you change things in the setting (but don't you know there's a glass ceiling floating seven feet above the ground?).

[Shreyas Sampat]

Henry,

Thanks.  That's exactly the kind of imagery I want to be evoking.

I agree, the attributes are pretty weird.  I was sort of tossing down the game while the ideas were still fresh in my head, so they haven't gelled into something I see as playable yet.

I think something I didn't verbalize, that I sort of assumed, was that the Dreaming didn't have to be people.  Dreamers are more or less normal folks, people and children who've broken out of their little personal dreams into the bigger fabric, but the creatures of the Dreaming could be doppelgangers, weird mutated things, memories, beings of pure emotion that look different to every observer, much like the City.  Perspective is a big thing in this game.

Importantly, Dreamers are real actual people, but the things of the Dreaming are ultimately their creations; they're things people dream about.

This means that there's not likely to be a random Dreaming gym teacher wandering the City of Sorrows, unless he was created by some kid with a deep-seated hatred of hi...

...Hey, what if each character had to have a connection-of-origin with another character?  Sure, this implies that there can be no more Dreamers than Dreaming, but that's not so much of a problem, and it could be solved by saying that most Dreaming folk are agglomerations of several similar dreams.

So you could have a group of characters that looks like this:

Ethan William Haythornethwaite, a little British boy.  "My friends call me Billy."
Roberta Julitta Thistleton, his friend from elementary school.  "Bob.  Not Roberta.  Not Julie.  Bloody not R. J."
Toaster, Billy and Bob's imaginary friend.  He's a bear, but he can also turn into smaller things when he's scared.
On the road, they bump into these two, and become good friends:
Archibald Harris, an anthropology student.
White Tree Woman, a legend Archibald was studying, who brought him Elsewhere for reasons she hasn't explained.  He's still a little blown over by the immensity of it all.

Crash, bang!  Suddenly the PCs are interested in each other!

So, then maybe it makes sense to limit S/P transfer between characters that are linked...

[Henry Fitch]

The relationship thing is cool. I especially like the contrast between concrete dreamer-dreamer relationships ("she's my sister") and symbolic dreamer-dreaming relationships ("the scary ants represent my inability to fit in with the crowd").

I'd reccomend letting some characters specify who they're related to at the beginning, but leaving the nature of the relationship temporarily mysterious. Sort of like how you can interact with a dream-character for a while, then suddenly realize it's your mom.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Henry,
Interesting idea.  I'll keep it in the back of my mind.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about the 'writing' mechanics and the division tween dream and wake.

Awake, the quality, is used for personal miracles.  With Awake, the character accomplishes things by transcending variou subconscious limits: Yes I cal fly, yes I can break down this door, yes I can sing in three simultaneous voices..
Asleep describes the world working for Dreaming: yes the door happened to be open, conveniently she did wear just such a dress, interesting the way the branches seem to move aside, strange that woman turning into a flock of crows.

I'll get to calligraphy in the morning.

[Henry Fitch]

Cool. Hey, that reminds me; does a Dreamer in the dreamland have to be the same as their real-world form, or could you be dreaming that you are something else?

[Shreyas Sampat]

Do Dreamers necessarily look like they do when Waking?

This is a great question.  I was thinking about it like this:
Dreamers, when they're not thinking about it, conform to their environment, consistent with the limits they impose on themselves unconsciously.  So a Dreamer walking into a fancy-dress ball will be dressed up, unless it's important to the character that he not be able to do such a thing (such as if the character were particularly self-conscious of being impoverished, or had recently lost a favorite tux in a punch accident).  When they do think about it, it turns into a conflict roll.  This is true of much of everyday life (think of it as parallel to the Co9C color roll; it's a mechanic that adds description and little else).

Dreamers can look like something other than their everyday selves: this ties into the Riddles/Sorrows mechanic I'll be discussing later.  It happens to be the case that things of this magnitude need to be defined as Riddles or Sorrows, as it isn't ordinary for dreams to mess with self-image, unless that's what the dream is about.

Now, as for Riddles/Sorrows:
I've rebuilt the result ladder, such that it goes like this:
1: Something awful happens : You discover that you need something else / Something happens that you don't understand / Something happens that makes you sad.  Take a Syllable, and take a Riddle Token (for Import), take a Sorrow token (for Sorrow, which we rename to something else), or take a Desire token (for Longing).
2-3: Something bad happens : You get a little farther from one of the things you need / Something gets a little more confusing / Something gets a little sadder.
4-6: Something okay happens.  You don't progress much toward your goal / Whatever happens isn't that confusing / Events don't really upset you.
7-9: Something nice happens.  You get a little closer to your goal / Things start to make sense / You start to feel better.  For this and any higher result, take a Syllable.
10-12: Something good happens.  You achieve your goal / Things clear up / You resolve an issue.
12-14: Something great happens.  You get a little extra / You get a spare clue / A second issue begins to improve.  Take two Syllables instead of just one.

You'll notice the success curve goes all the way up to 14.

This is because of the new mechanic I'm thinking of using to provide characters with differentiation - Illumination.  An Illumination can be gained through expenditure of Syllables, just as Calligraphy is.  (I'm starting to have to think how these can be fairly priced; it's awful.)  Anyway, Illuminations allow characters to use both a default die and a quality die as part of a result, summing their values.  This can lead to results up to 14, 6 on the default plus 8 on a Quite die.
I'm deliberately not saying what Illuminations represent, or why they work.  They're like Calligraphy; they just work.

So, back to Riddle/Sorrow/Desire tokens.  Whenever you get one of these, it just sort of site there in front of you.  While narrating a result, any person can take it from you and narrate a thing you need/a thing that makes you sad/a thing you need to decipher, per the appropriate token type.  You note that down.  If the person wasn't you, they have to pay 3 Somnolence/Personality to do it; they give this to you.  On a result of 7 or better, you can narrate a solution to one of these problems.  Now, theoretically you could model being a different shape as a Riddle or a Sorrow:
"I dreamed I was a butterfly, but now I do not know.  Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly, dreaming I am a man?"
"I have no mouth and I must scream."

So, finally, Calligraphy:

There are several different kinds of Calligraphy.  I'd like to name them after Arabic calligraphy terms, if at all possible, so if anyone knows about that...
The first type is the physical object.  This Calligraphy is, for its creator, an actual thing, which can affect the world.  The Sword is an example of this.
The second type is the message.  With this Calligraphy, you can tell someone something, even when they're far away.  Message calligraphy traditionally appears as a bird who flies to the recipient and vanishes, the message forming on the floor in patterns of falling feathers.
A third kind is the singature, which holds a little bit of the calligrapher's essence.  Signatures can hold somnolence or memories.
The last kind is an independent thing: a truth or a living creature.  With this kind of Calligraphy, you can make little bits of worlds.

So, yeah, I need mechanics for all that.  I have a long path to walk...

[Jonathan Walton]

Dreamers, when they're not thinking about it, conform to their environment, consistent with the limits they impose on themselves unconsciously.

"This is what we call 'Residual Self Image.'  It's the mental projection of your digital self."  -- Morpheus (quoted from memory and probably wrong)

That's the kind of idea you're getting at, right?

There are several different kinds of Calligraphy.  I'd like to name them after Arabic calligraphy terms, if at all possible, so if anyone knows about that...

If you do that, I might write a Mod that's based on Chinese calligraphy.  When you write Chinese characters, there are 5(?) main types of strokes that you can make (dot, horizontal, virtical, sweeping, hooked), which would be cool to have represented in a system, with different types representing different things.  In this kind of system, different characters would have different powers, partially based on their meaning and partially based on the different strokes that make them up.  Course, it would definitely help to have some background in Chinese for this to work.  But it might be possible to have a list of basic characters that people could look up if need be.

What I found confusing, on first read, was the exact difference between Asleep and Intense for Dreaming.  In Dreamers, the Awake/Intense distinction seems fairly clear, but the Asleep/Intense one is far less so, since both deal with manipulating the dream environment in similar ways.

It would seem to me that the Dreaming are probably not defined by physical form as much as concept.  If their physical shapes are changing almost constantly, it would be their soul/knowledge/emotions that give them a common identity through all the forms they take.

So where does the "sword" in the game's title come in?  I know about the weapon, but if you're going to name the game after it, I think that warfare, combat (at least on an emotional level), or swords has to come into the game somehow.  Or is it just supposed to be an overarching metaphor?

[Peregrine]

Hi FWW

This looks like one of the best treatments of a dream-game I've seen.

Some suggestions:

Dreamers and Dreaming seems a little too close for comfort. Try Dreamers and Dreamed. Makes more sense to me anyway.

I am a little unsure about the way you are dealing with Awake and Asleep. It appears to me that you are suggesting that a more awake person is more lucid. But I am not sure that being more lucid in a dream makes one more likely to wake up. It is more a measure of being aware that a dream is a dream, and then being able to respond to the Dreaming on Dreaming terms. Are lucid dreamers really more awake, or deeper in REM sleep? I am not sure. A differet take on this you could take is that a character who is more awake acutally becomes less powerful, but is also less subject to being hurt, either 'physically' or emotionally by the Dreaming. They are in effect less part of the Dreaming.

On words: I am very unsure about the syllable cost thing. Words which are more core to our existence tend to be represented by simple one-syallable words. Me, you, death, life, sex, blood, birth, are all one syllable, and therefore shockingly cheap compared to 'procrastination'. Also, the English language being chock full of synonyms will simply encourage players to contort their sentances into a strange form of Tarzan-talk to get cheap words. 'You die' is a pretty short sentance.

I really, really, love your die mechanic, Import, Longing, and Sorrow. Stick with it. Great idea.

MAybe I missed it, but what do characters do in this game? Linger about and wax poetic? I didn't get much from the setting except an urge to sight see. You make some suggestion of problem solving but I am kind of unsure what sort of problems you mean. Real life problems turned into metaphoric dreams? The problem about being beaten by your uncle with that is that solving a dream problem one night will do you no good if he beats you the next day.

I am trying to think how dreams helped dreamers in Sandman but its been a while since I read that title. Basically, I think you need some sort of conflict for the characters. Either personal, internal conflict (the shadow-self ala Jung), or a setting conflict. A battle between dream lords or something. Or to take an example from Mr Gainman, the loss of the Dreamings master for forty years, and a general struggle to put some order back into the rampaging nightmares.

Anyway, all in all a good thread, and one I'll try and keep an eye on.

Chris

[Shreyas Sampat]

Chris, thanks for the comments.

Dreamed: Yeah, I've been sort of quietly looking for a better term.  I really like Dreamed; it's less 'verby' than Dreaming, though as a verb form it's still hard to pluralize.  I might just use Dream.  We'll see.

You picked up on the fact that I tied lucidity to actual wakefulness.  I'm aware that this isn't actually a firm causal connection, but at least IME, there's a strong correlation.  I do like your idea that more Awake Dreamers actually become disconnected from Elsewhere, any I'll think about how to implement that, though it seems to me that my mechanics as they stand can't support it.  (I suspect that what that concept would do is reduce the variability of die rolls, increasing minima across the board, but also reducing maxima.  So, nothing really devastating happens, but nothing very exciting can happen either.)

On words:
I'm very seriously considering some simple, but rigid, guidelines for this.  Like, all Calligraphy must be in some kind of metred verse.  All Words can only create something, or modify/destroy that which was Word-created in the first place.  Words never use pronouns without explicit antecedents.
I especially like the metred verse rule.  It means players can make little haiku and heroic couplets for simple effects, or weave whole scenes in tanka or quatrains.  Unfortunately, that mechanic would be highly complex, but I think it could be appropriate.

Credit goes at least partly to lumpley for his OtherKind mechanic, which I expanded into mine with some elaborations.  This game wouldn't exist without him.

As for what characters do...
I think an important part of this game is rediscovering things and uncovering truths about yourself.  Maybe you lost a favorite imaginary friend once, and you're trying to follow his trail, or maybe you fell into Elsewhere in the throes of a nightmare, and you have to get out.  I'm hoping that the Sorrow/Riddle/Desire mechanic can guide play.
But, as you say, that's highly arcane; there needs to be something out in the open.  I'll have to think on it; I like the idea of battling Dream-lords.

Jonathan, hope your finals went well.
Yup, residual self-image, sort of.  A little more dyanimc than it's presented in The Matrix: If you've ever had longish hair, you will feel it swaying in the wind, even if you recently got an Elsewhere buzzcut.

Chinese Calligraphy:
This ran through my mind: "What if I could make an explicit system for the use of a Chinese/Egyptian mixed logographic/phonographic writing style?  That would be cool."
Now, I don't have the knowledge to do this with real-world data, but it would be awesome.  I would want to play that game.  Your idea to break down the characters further into their actual strokes, too... that's something I'd love to see implemented.

As for Asleep/Intense:
I've got to clarify these attributes.  All of them.
I'm starting to think that they don't really identify how you make things come about, but, Ghost Light-style, why.  Then Asleep describes things happenning because the dream environment acts of its own volition to bring things about in the way you need them to; Intense describes things happenning because you ride on a surge of emotions, or scare the environment into bending to your will.  Sharper distinction?

Frankly, the game's name is just a pretty phrase, but it started to refer to Words, Calligraphy, and in general the power of tongue, brush, and pen.  At another level it could represent dream conflicts of all kinds.  Maybe I'll weave swords into the Calligraphy mechanic somehow...

...Hey.
So, I was thinking of extended combats in the style of Hero Wars, where characters bet Somnolence against each other.  Supposing that this level of combat was the 'emotional' level, and its resolution ended in Somnolence exchange or various hardships: Sorrows/Riddles/Desires, I could posit a second level of combat, which would represent calligraphy power, where the results would involve exchange of Syllables and weird Calligraphy combat.
This could be really awesome with Jonathan's idea that the various strokes have different powers: Each stroke could represent a different momentary mindset, and through stroke comparison you could come up with various outcomes.  What's more, in a natively Chinese version of the game, you could have people actually trying to construct glyphs, which would have effects when they were completed.

[Jonathan Walton]

Jonathan, hope your finals went well.

Greek took me to the cleaners.  I'm just not cut out for languages that conjugate and have real grammer.  English doesn't count, because I grew up with it (I don't think I could have learned to speak it as a second language).  I'm going to stick to 400-level Modern & Classical Chinese next semester.  MUCH easier.

This ran through my mind: "What if I could make an explicit system for the use of a Chinese/Egyptian mixed logographic/phonographic writing style?  That would be cool."

Never say never.  I can see how that might actually work.  What if you developed your own "dream language," and claim that it's the subconscious language of dreams, which we all speak in the dreamworld but spontaneously forget when we wake up.  Of course, the dream language forms the basis of all waking languages, since you unconsciously remember bits and pieces of the primal tongue and, when waking languages developed, they tended to form as bastardized versions of the original.  And, as people in different parts of the world tend to dream about different things (Mes-American tribes aren't going to dream about Elephants or massive glacial flows), so the various waking "dialects" that developed vary strongly by region.

Your combination Chinese-Egyptian language could definitely work.  Since nobody knows how it's pronouced (the first thing you forget) all you have to worry about it how it works conceptually, represented by the written version of the primal tongue.  You could develop radicals (little bits of characters) that combine to form larger characters.  You could even have a "fractal" language, where any character can turn into a component of a larger character.  You could have an entire novel written as just one insanely-complex character the size of a large building.  The more powerful the calligraphy, the more effort and time it takes to write it correctly.

It would take some serious work to develop it, but boy would that be fun.  I want to play that game too!

I've got to clarify these attributes.  All of them.
I'm starting to think that they don't really identify how you make things come about, but, Ghost Light-style, why.

Good call.  That makes it much more interesting.  It means you can use different attributes to do the same thing, but it's the consequences that'll be different and not the actual results.

Maybe I'll weave swords into the Calligraphy mechanic somehow...

Or maybe you have to write the calligraphy with a blade, cutting the words into the fabric of dreams (or into your target?).  Then, characters might actually carry around knives and little X-acto blades and calligraphers' swords.  Just a thought.

[Shreyas Sampat]

So many good ideas, so little time...

What I'm thinking about right now is that Words don't get enough attention.

So, Words are quite literally the ephemeral, instant-gratification counterpart of Calligraphy: they have to be set in verse, but happen instantly and only last while the sound still exists.  So, flashes of light, mild creations, messages that move at the speed of sound (a strange thing to define in a spaceless, timeless world...), whatever, but no instakills.  That would be uncool.
In-game, Words are spoken in the language of the speaker.  This is not necessarily comprehensible to everyone.  That's okay.  They take effect simultaneous with their speaking.  It costs a Syllable per actual syllable.

Calligraphy takes elements from China, Egypt, and the Maya.  There's a closed set of simple signs, with specific associations.  (I'm thinking 108 is a good number; 9 and 12 are quite significant, numerologically.)  In addition, there are name-signs, which are all unique.  These can be nested within each other in a closed set of ways, which represent different grammatical relations.  This echoes the various syllable layouts of Maya glyphs.  Of course, they can be multiply nested.  So a single glyph would be unlikely to make sense, unless you're just like waving your hand around and pulling coins out of the air.  Composing Calligraphy involves drawing out the piece of Calligraphy you want and explaining it.
In-game, you have to draw out the Calligraphy.  This can be accomplished in any number of ways - you could actually write it with brush and paper, draw it in the air with a sword, even dance it onto the ground.  The Calligraphy is unmistakable, even while it's being drawn.  It takes effect once it's completed.  Calligraphy is permanent, until it is undrawn or forgotten.  It costs a Syllable per glyph.

So, then what's Calligraphy combat?
Well, basically, in a Calligraphy combat each person is trying to create a Calligraphy, and prevent his opponent from doing the same.  Each 'round' or some more evocative term ('pass'?  Something fencingy would be nice) you make a roll and compare Longing scores: the higher roller takes the difference between them, and can 'erase' that many glyphs of his opponent's or draw that many, or a combination.  You can change what you're planning to draw out, but anything that's not exactly congruent with your new goal, you lose outright.   (Suppose you're trying to draw the sequence night-lily-moon-mind and then you decide to draw lily-night-moon-water instead.  You could keep lily, night, or moon, but nothing else, because they're differently related in the new layout.)  With Calligraphy combat, you only pay the Syllable cost when you complete a piece.

Other long combats would work the same way: For Somnolence combat, the winner of each roll takes from the loser the difference of rolls in Somnolence.  I don't know how I can get hardship combat to work.  In any long combat, the descriptions for each success level of Longing are meaningless, but the Syllable rewards and hardship creation/resolution still apply.  Of course, this means that very long Calligraphy combats with enough Illuminations could create fearsome Calligraphies indeed.