Heroes, Gothic Shadows version

Strange dream last night. Part of it was based on a game I played last week, Shadows Over Camelot, but the characters were more like the characters on Heroes than Arthurian knights. We lost the first round badly due to the Traitor; like Shadows Over Camelot, one person could randomly be assigned as the Traitor at the beginning of each round. The Traitor I'll call Madden (no names in the dream, but he was a creepy old guy who reminded me of Madden in one of Charles de Lind's books); if you picture him something like Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, that would be roughly right.

Unlike Heroes, people's powers didn't come out automatically ... or else came out horribly wrong. Madden was the only one who already knew how to use his power, and thus made a particularly troublesome Traitor. He supposedly showed Peter (looked like Peter in Heroes) how to make a "Seeing Eye" which would allow him to take over someone's mind, as Peter's power would allow him to make use of this. Naturally, Madden messed up one important detail in making it, so Peter was powerless, but didn't find out until it was too late. Madden's own Seeing Eye worked just fine ... mostly he seemed to enjoy using it to make people say things that they normally wouldn't.

The first round ended too quickly for most of us to learn anything at all about our powers. In the second round (essentially, a restart), we kept our memories of the little we did learn, and it didn't take long to determine that Madden wasn't the traitor this time, though Peter still wouldn't trust him, and wound up taking apart Madden's Seeing Eye to figure out how to get his own working. I was looking for the equipment I needed to get my power working (cutlery, mainly; no clue what I was going to do with it), and being followed around by a floating hag of a spirit who wouldn't shut up, but I must have succeeded in ignoring her as I can't remember anything that she said. While I was distracted by an oddly shaped knife (Imagine a mold for making very flowery tortilla salad bowls. Cut off one or two of the flowery folds and stick them on a knife handle. That was the knife.), and I think she must have then turned into a rather large, floaty, tarantula, with maybe an 8 inch body and 22 inch span total including the legs. The tarantula began attacking some random person, but I still hadn't found a decent knife. Someone else stepped in to get the tarantula off with his bare hands (looked like one of my 123 students).

That was about the point where I woke up, but there are a few other random details from Round 2 that I can remember. When we were in Madden's room, we found a sort of piano bench, but it wasn't rectangular. It was as if someone had tried to construct a perspective rectangle into a bench to make it look larger (so it was much narrower at one end than at the other). A whole bunch of cats kept gathering around the bench. Someone opened it (maybe me), and it was stuffed full of dead, almost mummified, rats, birds, mice, etc. The cats were quite happy about this ... I just wanted the thing closed again, and managed to slam it shut. This was yet another reason none of us wanted to trust Madden even if he wasn't the Traitor this time around.

Though I think I did get a glimpse of who the Traitor for that round was. He looked like Chris Sarandon (think Fright Night, not Princess Bride), and could apparently fly (or float, depending on how you look at it). During the quick glimpse I got, he seemed to be turning one of the other players into a green-skinned zombie.