James Wyatt provides Wizards of the Coast with another high quality adventure module, this time leaving the dungeon behind for the tempestuous problems of the city of Brindinford.

Review Originally Published May 21st, 2001

Many adventures of would-be greatness are dealt an Achilles’ heel of crippling proportions through the simple expectation that the PCs will follow a specific course of action – taking them, predictably, from one encounter to another. James Wyatt neatly sidesteps this problem time and time again in The Speaker of Dreams, on his way to presenting the first city-based adventure released by Wizards of the Coast for the 3rd Edition.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Speaker in Dreams. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point. Three Days to Kill (Penumbra) and Death in Freeport (Green Ronin) will also be discussed in general terms.

The mind flayer Ghaerleth Axom has long been laying the groundwork for his plan to establish an empire of slaves upon the surface world, and the starting point for his conquest is the town of Brindinford.

The Speaker in Dreams is an adventure in two parts. In the first part, the PCs are attending a local fair in Brindinford when a troop of wererats begin strewing chaos. As the PCs attempt to track the wererats back to their lair, they will uncover other monstrous groups. And when they finally track the wererats down, they will discover that the rats were acting in the employ of a group of insane sorcerers. Once they’ve gotten rid of the sorcerers, the PCs – and the city at large — will believe that they’ve solved the problem.

The truth, of course, is that the sorcerers were being unwittingly manipulated by the mind flayer through the use of his telepathic abilities. As the PCs leave a feast thrown in their honor, the mind flayer’s remaining forces will launch an assassination attempt, launching the second part of the adventure. The PCs will, hopefully, escape unscathed – but the incident will provide a pretext for the lord of the town (who is also being controlled by the mind flayer) to institute martial law. Over the next few days the situation in the city will deteriorate considerably as the mind flayer’s demonic forces – empowered by the lord’s authority – tighten their grip of terror.

CONCLUSION

The opening of The Speaker in Dreams calls for comparison to Penumbra’s Three Days to Kill (which also opens with a fair). Here I feel that Three Days to Kill comes out on top: Not only by presenting a fair with a history and purpose – giving it a specific character and presence within your game world (instead of being simply “generic fantasy fair” – pun intended), but also by presenting several actual activities which the PCs can take part in while at the fair (something James Wyatt overlooks completely).

The rest of The Speaker in Dreams, on the other hand, calls for comparison to Green Ronin’s Freeport adventures (which also deal with an evil, mystical conspiracy lurking within the walls of a city). Here I feel that Freeport has the advantage when it comes to the conceptual and epic scope behind the conspiracy, but I feel that Wyatt has succeeded in organizing The Speaker in Dreams so that it is a more playable – and perhaps even more memorable – adventure.

My assessment, in short: Although not as memorable as The Sunless Citadel, The Forge of Fury, or the Freeport Trilogy, The Speaker of Dreams manages to avoid committing some of the minor flaws of actual design which tarnish the otherwise impeccable quality of those other adventures. Half a dozen of one, six of the other. James Wyatt has produced a high quality product.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Authors: James Wyatt
Company: Wizards of the Coast
Line: Dungeons & Dragons
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 0-7869-1830-6
Production Code: WTC11830
Pages: 32

The Speaker in Dreams was the third Adventure Path module released for D&D 3rd Edition. Although I had slotted the two previous modules — The Sunless Citadel and The Forge of Fury — into my  first 3rd Edition campaign, the same was not true for Speaker. This had nothing to do with the quality of the adventure, but was simply because there was nowhere to slot Speaker into my campaign arc.

Anecdotally, this seemed to be true for a lot of people: They ran Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury, but then parted ways with the loosely connected Adventure Path modules. This may have been because the event-based Speaker was more difficult to slot into a campaign than the site-based adventures, but I think it’s also likely that these adventures were just coming out too slowly. These were being released every other month, so if you started your campaign with The Sunless Citadel in September 2000, it would have been January 2001 before you could pick up this 5th-level adventure.

By contrast, when Paizo began releasing their stand-alone Adventure Paths several years later, the 5th-level installment would be released 30 days after the first installment, making it far less likely that a group could outrun the pace of the campaign, even if they started playing it immediately upon release.

In any case, having neither prepped nor run The Speaker in Dreams, my memories of the module itself are quite dim twenty-five years later. One of the quirks of the “living memory” we have of our RPG adventures.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Question: “How do you prep Tier 3 and Tier 4 D&D adventures? I’ve read a lot about how the game changes, but I haven’t seen a lot of guidance on what I should actually be doing. What am I missing?”

To understand how to prep high-level adventures, I think it’s important to first understand why the adventures you were prepping in Tier 1 and Tier 2 stop working as the PCs level up. What this largely boils down to is that if you have a group standing at Point A who wants to go to Point C, it becomes increasingly difficult to “force” them to visit Point B.

If you’re running a dungeon, the natural geography of the world creates pathing. Even in heavily xandered dungeons, you generally can’t just skip from Level 1 to Level 5. You have to, by one path or another, work your way through the intermediary content.

The same is true of an overland journey. You’re in Waterdeep and want to take the road to Baldur’s Gate? Then stuff can happen as you travel down the road. You’re in the Shire and want to go to Mordor? I can’t be certain what path you’ll take, but there’ll still be a sequence of procedural content from A to B to C that can form the spine of the adventure.

But as the PCs level up, they gain access to abilities like teleportation and passwall and scrying. They can nuke sites from orbit and plane shift and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Now they can go directly from Level 1 to Level 5.

Even if you’re running a railroad, you need to be able to force the players into predetermined actions and outcomes. But the abilities the PCs are gaining similarly make it more and more difficult to force them to do what you prepped.

This implies a couple of things.

First, structure is going to come from information. If the PCs know something, then they’ll probably be able to take very direct action based on that information. This is what node-based scenario design is good for, but these high-tier PCs also have access to abilities that can just proactively give them the information that they want. So you’re generally going to be better off thinking more in terms of clouds of nodes rather than specific sequences like funnels, because the PCs will sequence break.

In this sense, high-tier adventures become paradoxically smaller and shorter than low-tier ones, even as their stakes and scope are likely expanding to epic proportions. Because you can’t just, for example, stick multiple levels of a dungeon or a long overland journey between the PCs and what they want.

Second, if the opposition is going to meaningfully oppose the PCs, then they need to be similarly mobile and responsive.

You can’t just key some bad guys to a static location, have them wait for the PCs to show up, and hope it works out. You’ll want them to be set up to actively respond to what the PCs are doing, because you won’t know what it is until the PCs do it.

This means:

• Prepping proactive nodes that can be responsively or opportunistically deployed. (See Running Mysteries: Proactive Nodes.)
• Using faction turns to keep the bad guys in motion. (See p. 342 of So You Want to Be a Game Master or Blades in the Dark.)
• Thinking about what the bad guys are doing and how intelligence (i.e., things the PCs learn about) and blowback (i.e., the bad guys target the PCs for retaliation) from that can vector back to the PCs. (Check out mechanics like Heat and the Vampyramid from Night’s Black Agents to give you some interesting options here.)
• And, vice versa, figuring out what the bad guys know about the PCs and their activities, so that you can determine and actively play their responses. (You may want to create a simple system for checking counterintelligence if you don’t feel comfortable making fiat judgment calls about this. Also check out Campaign Status Module: Event Fallout.)

More than ever, in other words, this is about prepping situations that can be actively played.

Something to avoid, however, is an over-zealous and all-encompassing response, where every adventure rapidly turns into “…and then all the bad guys teleport to the PCs and A HUGE FIGHT HAPPENS!”

You can avoid that partly be playing fair, partly by creating impartial resolution mechanics where necessary (e.g., that counterintelligence check I mentioned to determine what the bad guys know), and partly by scaling up into these higher power levels so that both you and the players can figure out how to control information and protect themselves.

But it’s also, importantly, about setting goals — for both the PCs and the bad guys — that can’t be trivially solved through a giant melee. In much the same way that you should try to find more varied goals for your dungeons than simply clearing the dungeon, so here you set goals that don’t just boil down to Wipe Them Out… All of Them.

FURTHER READING
High Level Characters Are (Literally) Awesome
Soloing Smaug – The Struggle for the Soul of D&D

Go to Red Company of Magi

LETTER FROM GATTARA TO TIANT

Sweetest Tiant,

Your words tantalize me, and I shall be certain to reward you with the most delightful suffering as punishment for your impudence.

In fact, you have spurred me to a wonderful bit of inspiration: I have sent a messenger to Runshallot Street and asked them to send you the next several doses of their liquid pain as soon as it has been extracted from their apparatus. I know how much you love to indulge, and I would not ask you to restrain yourself entirely, but save some for our games later.

Bring it to the curse den on Nethar Street and we’ll get a private room.

And a private plaything.

 Gattara

GM Background: “Runshallot Street” is the Vladaam’s Slave Trade Warehouse. Gattara is also referring to the curse den in the Guildsman District.

REPORT FROM THE RESEARCHERS ON CROSSING STREET

Guildmaster Arzan,

I hope you find these tissue samples as fascinating as we have. You have several days before the preservations spells would need to be renewed. I have also included chrysalid samples.

I think you can assume that we’ll be continuing our work at Crossing Street for the foreseeable future. Not only are there still many questions to be answered before we untangle the riddle of what was being done here, but Mistress Navanna has been delivering new artifacts for our study. Due to the demands, Master Aliastar has had us establish an additional laboratory.

The work is hard, but fascinating. I don’t know that we could sustain the long hours without the assistance of Master Grui’s arts.

                                                                                                Sathara

GM Background: Sathara is a Vladaam Researcher working at the Oldtown Apartments. The tissue samples come from a pain devil, while the chrysalid samples were taken from the nests of the venom-shaped thralls. Master Grui is a Vladaam alchemist who has been supplying draughts of Morpheus to help the researchers work long hours.

A GUIDANCE FROM RENN SADAR TO THE ARCHMAGE CRETAI

Cretai,

I am, of course, disappointed to learn that there’s no chance the Box of Shadows might have been placed within the Banewarrens before they were sealed, although I suppose it’s good not to have wasted the effort on a fruitless enterprise.

I’m also sorry to report that I’ve been unsuccessful in obtaining any of the crystalline research from the Eslathagos project for you. The oversight triad is being unusually secretive, one might almost suggest panicky. If you can think of anything that might influence Unirthorm, Rinirgen, or Kaeran Altarstone to loosen their lips, I do hope you’ll let me know. I can confirm, however, that the crystal lenses are a crucial lynchpin in the operation of whatever the technomantic devices seal the Spire.

Fortunately, this missive is not wholly dedicated to disappointments. In the immediate aftermath of Rehobath’s power play, the Inverted Pyramid suffered a paroxysm of panic and certain old archives were unlocked. Among these were journals of Peruun pertaining to the Divine Blight. The project was only briefly pursued before those fearing it might trigger the very return to the Days of Blood that others sought to guard against prevailed. During this time, however, I was able to secure copies of Peruun’s notes, which I have attached here. I wish you luck in unlocking the secrets of the Blight and look forward to reaping the rewards with you when that day comes.

Don’t forget that you owe me a cup of ale next time you see me at Danbury’s,

                                                                                                Lord Renn Sadar

The attached research notes pertain to an arcane energy, referred to as Divine Blight, which temporarily severs the connection of a priest to the Nine Gods.

The efficacy of the energy cannot be questioned, but mastering the Blight for practical applications — a targeted spell or an enchantment upon a weapon, for example — appears to be an unmet challenge.

GM Background: The box of shadows is described in Ptolus, p. 636. “Eslathagos” refers to Eslathagos Malkith, the Banelord (Ptolus, p. 79) and the “Eslathagos project” assumes that the Inverted Pyramid is involved with the exploration of the Banewarrens (as described in the Banewarrens adventure). Peruun is a founding member of the Inverted Pyramid, who in his latter years became fascinated by chaositech. He wrote a number of journals, some known and many lost, which were encoded with an arcane cipher designed to confound comprehend languages and similar spells.

Go to Part 14: Surveyor’s Guild

So You Want to Be a Game Master has been released in a hardcover Polish edition from Black Monk Games!

I was in Poland last week to celebrate the release of the book at Pyrkon, and you can now order it from Black Monk Games directly or find it at your favorite local gaming store in Poland!

It’s an absolutely beautiful edition of the book. It was truly thrilling to be able to hold a copy in my hands for the first time!

BUY NOW!

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 46A: Among Madmen

At the last possible moment, Zairic twisted aside so that the arrow lodged in his shoulder instead of his heart. Letting his book drop to the floor, Zairic vaulted over the high arm of his chair and jumped for cover. In mid-leap, he released a fireball through the window. Tee ducked down as the fiery inciting pellet passed over her head and avoided the brunt of it almost completely, but Elestra (standing in the open further down the alley) was caught by the edge of it.

Most of the others – clumped together across the street and still debating how they could (or would or should) use Elestra’s homunculi – missed the flash of the fireball. Fortunately, Ranthir – who was providing the daisy-chained camouflage near the mouth of the alley – recognized it for what it was. “Fireball!” he shouted, hurrying into the alley.

The fiction-mechanics cycle is arguably the heart of the roleplaying game experience: The ways in which we use mechanics to create fictional outcomes; declare fictional actions that are resolved mechanically; and use the outcome of either to feed back into the other form an intricate and interwoven dance at the gaming table.

A key component of this dance is how mechanical outcomes are explained in the fiction. For simple, straightforward intentions with unambiguous results, this is often so obvious that one can easily miss that something is actually happening: The player said they wanted to jump over the chasm; the dice said they succeeded; therefore, they land on the other side of the chasm.

Intriguingly, therefore, it is often true the failure requires more of an explanation than success: Success, after all, merely assumes that the stated intention which triggered the mechanical resolution was achieved. Failure, on the other hand, almost seems to demand an explanation for why the character wasn’t able to achieve their desired outcome.

(And this is before we even start considering advanced techniques like failing forward.)

There are a number of techniques you can use in creating these explanations, and different RPG rulesets will often help you in different ways. A universal technique I find useful is explicitly thinking about different factors in the game world that could affect outcome. It’s really useful for keeping things fresh and varied.

(One key insight from this is that you can often make the description of success more interesting by lightly spicing it with the same details and factors that we use to explain failure.)

Something else to consider is the often unexamined assumption of who at the table is responsible for providing these explanations. In my experience, this almost always falls on the GM in their role as adjudicator and world-describer. Every so often, though, the infectious spirit of communal improv will unleash itself and people all around the table will start collaborating on the answer. And another key insight is that, as the GM, you can prompt the players to get involved in explaining outcomes.

(Matthew Mercer, for example, has made, “How do you want to do this?” particularly famous.)

In fact, you can go further than that and create specific expectations for action resolution in which describing the fictional implications of mechanical results defaults to the players. (Storytelling games often do this because their mechanics revolve around determining which player is in control of a narrative outcome.)

But I digress.

What I’m particularly interested in talking about right now is a very specific slice of these table interactions: The moment where a mechanical outcome prompts a conversation between characters, which I’m going to refer to as ex post facto roleplaying. Here the character dialogue is being triggered by or being described as the key factor in an action’s resolution.

In this session, for example, most of the PCs failed a Spot check to notice the flash from a fireball spell going off around a corner.

Why call for this check at all? I mean, it’s a fireball spell, right? Shouldn’t it be really obvious? Well, to some extent this depends on how much noise you think a fireball creates — is it a huge detonation or a more ephemeral flash of flame? More importantly, what I was primarily concerned about here was how quickly they would react to the fireball: Would they be able to leap into action and immediately join the fight? Or get caught flat-footed and have to wait a round before being able to rush to Tee’s aid?

In this case, the players asked the same question in a breakdown that looked something like this:

• Why wouldn’t we immediately notice the fireball?
• We must have been distracted.
• What could we have been distracted by?
• We must have all been continuing our debate about using the homunculi!

And then they briefly acted out a few lines of that dialogue, giving Ranthir’s player (who had succeeded on his Spot check) an opportunity to interrupt by them by shouting, “Fireball!”

This is a good example of these ex post facto roleplaying moments, which are often played as kind of funny throw-away moments. But they can, of course, also be more protracted and/or take on a more serious tone, particularly if you make a more conscious effort to notice, prompt, and/or define these moments.

In fact, rather than just reacting to skill checks with dialogue, you can also deliberately frame skill checks to set up roleplaying interactions. Using mechanics as a roleplaying prompt like this is described in more detail in Rulings in Practice: Social Skills.

Campaign Journal: Session 46B – Running the Campaign: Speak with Dead SFX
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index