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The Drowsy Downs
Name: The Drowsy Downs
Type: Region
Location: Where dusk lingers longest. Exact placement on the map in development
Core Thread: Imagination, with a strong vein of Memory
Patron: If, the Spinner of What Might Be
Keeper: Reverie RestWell, Keeper of the Quiet Quilt
Notable Inhabitants: The Noddlings, Hushrooms, Counting Sheep
Themes: Rest, Dreams, Imagination, Renewal, Comfort
"You call it drifting off. I call it arriving somewhere."
-- Reverie RestWell
The Drowsy Downs are a land of soft, rolling hills, rumpled like a duvet that someone has only just climbed out of. Dusk lingers here longer than anywhere else in Threadbare, and the air is warm, heavy, and faintly perfumed. Every Threadling who has ever slept has, in a sense, been here. The tellings say the Downs are where dreams go when they are dreamed, and where some of them choose to stay.
The name holds two meanings, and the Noddlings who live here enjoy both. Downs are gentle, grassy hills. Down is the soft feather inside every pillow and eiderdown. In the Drowsy Downs, it is hard to tell the difference.
- The Yawning Yonder - Springy, feather-soft slopes that give gently underfoot. Travellers who lie down to rest here find it very hard to get up again, and very easy to forget why they wanted to.
- The Quiet Quilt - A vast patchwork of fields, laid out like a quilt across the heart of the Downs. Each patch holds a different dream. Stepping from one patch to the next can change the weather, the colours of the sky, and sometimes the rules of the world itself. The Quiet Quilt is tended by Reverie RestWell, who stitches new patches into it from dreams that would otherwise be lost.
- The Snoring Stones - A ring of ancient standing stones that rumble softly all night long. No one knows what they are dreaming, and the Noddlings consider it very rude to wake them and ask.
- The Waking Edge - The border of the Downs, where dreams fade as their dreamers wake. It is here that unfinished dreams drift loose, and here that Reverie walks each dawn to gather them.
- The Knotted Knolls - These small hills are said to be hollow and hold the creatures that might haunt the dreamer. Unsettling dreams originate here, but Noddlings are quick to point out that there are valuable messages in bad dreams too.
The Downs answer to sleep the way the Imagine Isles answer to imagination. Here, the line between waking and dreaming is thin, and a traveller may find the same hillside quite different depending on whether they are awake to see it. Paths appear in dreams that are not there by day. Creatures seen in waking hours curl up and vanish by night.
The Downs are gentle, and they are generous. A night's sleep here is said to be the most restful in Threadbare, and Threadlings from every region have made the journey simply to sleep well once in their lives, and to wake with an idea they did not have before.
Reverie RestWell - Keeper of the Quiet Quilt. See his page.
Noddlings - Small, soft, sleepy creatures who live inside sleep itself. No one has ever seen a Noddling awake. They drift from one sleeper's dream to the next the way a moth drifts between lanterns, and in every dream they visit, they stitch a small record of what they find onto a patch of cloth: a colour, a shape, a single bright moment. When a patch is full, they carry it out through the Waking Edge at dawn, and it is sewn into the Quiet Quilt. The Drowsy Downs, the Noddlings like to say, are made entirely of other people's dreams, and they should know, because they stitched them. See Noddlings.
Hushrooms grow thickly here: drowsy, faintly perfumed, and watchful. A grove of Hushrooms falling suddenly silent is as sure a warning in the Downs as anywhere.
Sheep All night long they leap the low fences of the Quiet Quilt, one after another, to help sleepers drift off.
Where the Void touches the Downs, a thin, silver frost settles over the sleepers. It is beautiful, in its way: it glitters in the moonlight, and it makes no sound at all. But under it, dreams stop. Colours fade to the pale of moonlight, Counting Sheep freeze mid-leap and hang in the air like ornaments, and the Noddlings find the dreams they were stitching gone still and cold around them. The sleeper wakes having dreamed nothing, and rested not at all. The Noddlings call it Dreamfrost, and it is spreading.
A people who no longer dream have stopped imagining that anything could be otherwise. It is no surprise that the Obscurists find the Dreamfrost so useful, or that the Downs are where Null's first denial, Not, is felt most keenly.
The Drowsy Downs are Threadbare's region of sleep, rest, and dreams. They carry If's temperament gently, and are home to Reverie RestWell, Keeper of the Quiet Quilt.
In gameplay, the Downs suit a waking and dreaming mechanic: the same space shifting between a waking layer and a dream layer, with paths, creatures and puzzles that exist in only one. This can build on the existing Time and Weather systems. The Downs' role in the main narrative is in development.
- The Downs welcome StoryQuests of lullabies, bedtime stories, and dream lore from cultures around the world. As with all cultural material, research carefully and represent it respectfully.
- A note of caution: Threadbare does not talk about death, and sleep has long been used as a euphemism for it. In the Drowsy Downs, sleep must always mean rest, renewal, and imagination. Never write sleep as a way of saying someone has died, and never describe anyone as sleeping forever or never waking up.
- The Void can still take sleepers, as it takes anyone. Being unwoven, unravelled, or taken by the Void is acceptable language; only sleep itself must never stand in for death. See Content Guidelines.
- Bad dreams belong in the Knotted Knolls, and should stay gentle: unsettling at most, never frightening, and always with a knot that can be untied.
- If - patron of the Downs
- Reverie RestWell - Keeper of the Quiet Quilt
- Hushrooms - native to the Downs
- The Imagine Isles - home of the Counting Sheep's troublesome cousins
- The Mythical Meadows - the Downs' waking neighbour in spirit, home to the myths of other worlds
- Noddlings - who live inside sleep, and stitch the Quiet Quilt's patches
- Null - and the denial Not, felt in the Dreamfrost