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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2008149" data-attributes="member: 9860">Beware! This review contains major spoilers.This is the 3rd core adventure for D&D3e by WotC. It is designed for four 5th-level characters. It costs $9.95.Presentation: The front cover features average artwork of a giant purple worm plunging through a fairground. The back cover has a short introduction to and overview of the adventure. The internal art is black & white, of mediocre quality. The page count is 32. 9/10 of the page is text, the rest a runic border. The text is clear and readable. The inside front cover has three good top-down maps – an overview map of the town of Brindinford, and the sets of rooms linked to The Reality Wrinkle and The Bell Tower in the module, whilst the back inside cover has five maps of the same quality showing The Manor House, The Temple Of Pelor, the Shrine of Heironeous, the Maze of Alleys and the Abandoned Warehouse. The maps of the rooms are laid out in 5’-square mode. The first page contains credits and contents.The Story: An illithid plans to take over a human town as a precursor to world domination. He has already infiltrated the town when the PCs arrive. He controls various gangs in the town and plans to take over the baron’s court. The module begins with an adventure synopsis and some character hooks to get the PCs to Brindinford. Next is an overview of the town itself, broken down into districts (with information on guard detail in the area), with a sidebar on attracting followers when the PCs reach 6th level. The module purports to be an event-based adventure (as per the DMs Handbook) and the rest of the module is set out with events and encounters, reflecting this style. The PCs enter Brindinford in time for the annual fair. A group of wererats causes a disturbance (drawing attention away from the illithid’s infiltration of the baron’s court) – the PCs can get involved in apprehending them. The PCs then need to gather information, either from a captured wererat or from the town populace. The PCs may follow a number of possible clues from this information, during which time they may: be stalked by more wererat thugs, attacked by a band of grimlocks, investigate a bell tower which is the wererats’ lair, or be attacked by giant purple worms summoned by an evil human sorceress. After discovering further information about the evil plots of Brindinford, the PCs come across an attempted kidnapping of paladins by mad alien-worshipping sorcerous cabalists. The PCs may follow them back to a bookshop, ‘The Reality Wrinkle’ which is their base. The cabal is led by the evil sorceress (see above). She is contacted in her dreams by the illithid (who uses her to sow chaos in the town). The PCs can explore the shrine fronted by the bookshop, discovering insane cabalists, gibbering mothers and more giant purple worms. At this point the players can be encouraged to believe it is the end of the adventure by the townspeople holding a congratulatory feast for the PCs. However, as the PCs emerge from the feast, they are attacked by assassins (including an ogre mage, a Grimlock, an infernal cleric and a lemure). The PCs are then visited in their dreams by the illithid. The next day they can attend a speech given by the baron who is now under the mental control of the illithid, who instigates martial law in the town and the outlawing of good-aligned priests. Infernal creatures then begin to take up posts within the town and exert the force of martial law. The infernal creatures are coming through a gate opened in the Temple of Pelor, now taken over by the illithid’s minions – the temple now burns with hellfire and should draw the PCs towards it. Various infernal clerics and creatures now inhabit the desecrated temple. The final confrontation comes when the PCs head towards the baron’s keep, where the illithid resides with an ogre mage and the dominated baron. The module concludes with some future adventure hooks, and statistics for the townsfolk, creatures and villains of the module, including an entry for the new monster – that giant purple worm (called a Wyste by the way). On the final page is an adventure flowchart showing the possible alternative paths the PCs can follow through the module.The High Points: I liked the fact that this adventure was event-based rather than site-based per se, with alternative routes through the module. There was plenty of information about tactics of the villains and creatures in the module, with sidebars highlighting relevant rules throughout the module. There was also good explanation of the information that could be gained by PCs (though see below), which could be used to encourage roleplaying to slowly uncover the mysterious plot.The Low Points: The first time I skim-read the explanation of ‘event-based’ adventures in the DMG, I felt sure that this slant would automatically create a more fascinating and open-ended adventure than the site-based adventure. The Speaker In Dreams proved that this is not necessarily the case. The module fell into WotC’s normal trap of providing a plethora of seemingly unrelated monsters, this time in a series of smaller combat scenarios that the PCs may or may not come across, depending on the luck of a Gather Information skill check. My advice to DMs is to ignore the Gather Information rolls and get your players to roleplay finding the information instead. However, the NPCs were two-dimensional and would need to be fleshed out considerably for this to work. My last gripe is that the opponents were sometimes too powerful for the PCs’ level (EL’s were mostly 6-8, but up to 12 at one point).Conclusion: I was very tempted to give this a Poor rating due to my disappointment at the content of this event-driven module. However, there are the bones of a very good adventure here. If you care to put in a fair amount of time to build these bones into an adventure with more depth and believability, I feel it would be worth your while. For the basic plot idea, the explanation of tactics and rules within the text and the seed of several good roleplaying opportunities to unravel the plot, The Speaker in Dreams scrapes an Average rating from me.</blockquote>

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