Skills describe what your character is personally capable of doing. In Dream, the more “mundane” skills that a human may conceive of simply don't apply; every Muse is just as capable as any other to carry out basic physical tasks, in as much as that even makes any sense for beings as borderline un-physical as Muses are in the ever-shifting Dreamscape.

What sets Muses apart from each other is their ability to channel their Ideal into each of four broad categories of action: Strife, Seek, Subvert and Sculpt. These powers can be thought of as a kind of magic by which a Muse may exert their influence over both Dream and the stories found in Vignettes.

Mechanically, each Skill has four power levels. Since Vignettes may each have wildly different scopes, it is difficult to describe the effective influence of each power level in a meaningful way. For example, a house fire in A Christmas Carol could change the course of the entire story; whereas in Star Wars it might take the destruction of an entire planet to have the same narrative impact. Muse scholars have struggled with this in the past - and, indeed, still discuss this with great fervour today - and so have developed the Theory of Narrative.

The Narrative is a force which pulls on a Muse's power, enhancing or diminishing it as appropriate to the scope of the story. As well as setting the overarching scope, the Narrative also seeks to preserve itself: disruptions to a single scene will only have larger consequences if sufficient power is behind them, and certain characters or objects may also be more resistant to change if they have a large Narrative importance.

Within Vignettes, the power levels may broadly be described as follows:

• Weak: Affects a single object or person within a single scene.
• Moderate: Affects a number of characters or objects within a scene, altering the scene as a whole.
• Strong: Affects a change which propagates through several scenes, potentially creating or altering a minor story arc.
• Exceptional: Affects a persistent change to a large portion of the story world, potentially altering the arc of the entire story.

On the pages for each Ideal, you will find examples of each Skill at each power level. These have been normalised to a human-scale Narrative standard which is common to many stories, or roughly what a Muse may expect to accomplish outside of a Vignette in the Dreamscape. However, a Muse would do well to bear in mind the Theory of Narrative: the Narrative of stories with particularly large or small scopes will significantly alter how a Muse's power manifests in absolute terms, but the narrative impact will remain constant.

Strife is the Skill which governs uses of powers to directly attack others. This includes both inciting and de-escalating conflict, as well as strengthening a combatant's abilities or defending against them. In addition to physical conflict, it also covers social conflict - wherever two or more people are at odds, Strife holds sway.

Subvert is the Skill which governs stealth, duplicity and forgery. Many different things may fall under this Skill depending on the Muse's intent - whenever a Muse wishes for an action to be carried out in secret, or to obscure the cause of something, they would benefit from having a strong Subvert Skill.

Seek is the Skill which governs uses of powers to gather information. This covers many different activities, as long as information is the goal: gathering rumours, conducting a scientific investigation, interrogating a suspect, reading signs in the stars or getting directions to the supermarket. It can't pull information out of thin air, but it can point a Muse in the right direction and make sure they find what they're looking for.

Sculpt is the Skill which governs uses of powers to modify, or even create, objects. The changes to an object may either enhance or diminish its usefulness, or be purely aesthetic. Some other Skills may incidentally change the properties of an object or the world in the course of their manifestation, but these changes are fleeting and fade as soon as their task is done. A change made with the Sculpt Skill, however, will generally be more permanent and allow for much greater nuance. Sculpt is also useful when an object itself is of great importance - a single Narratively important object will be immune to anything but the concentrated application of Sculpt.

Each Skill on its own may be useful, but truly great things may be accomplished when they are used together to the same end. If more than one Skill can be brought to bear during a single manifestation of a Muse's power - either by a single Muse or, more commonly, by Muses working together - the result will be more than the sum of its parts. Muses occasionally refer to this as “Sibilance”.

Tropes are small shards of pure narrative, hewn from dream and shaped by unclear processes into physical forms - iconic tools or weapons, stock characters, even well-established plot arcs. They are archetypes that transcend particular stories, recurring over and over in different forms across different stories, imbued with distinctive meanings and significance.

Tropology does not replace Skills, Ideals or ordinary objects, but provides an additional boost to their power, versatility or control of the narrative, and may be played alongside the use of a Skill in order to boost its power (though they may also be played alone).

When you are writing actions for turnsheets, you should detail how exactly you intend to have your Skills work if you wish to use them in a specific way. For example, if you've got the Pattern Ideal and wish to use a Strong Skill to Subvert, you might turnsheet to hide your allies within a crowd on one turnsheet, but to fool the Grand Vizier into being unable to read their advice on the next.

Specifying how you wish to use your Skills is no guarantee it will work that way - you might get distracted, or come up against another Muse who undermines your Skills in some way. Events simply might not turn out how you'd thought they would. The GMs will do our best to work around things by coming up with other ways of doing things where we can, though.

Your Skills will exhaust your Creative Juices, and using too much can potentially cause you to Fade if you're not careful. You can feasibly expect to use your Skills four or five times in an action if they're of your current level, around ten times if they're of the level below, and twenty or so if they're of two levels below.