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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2008731" data-attributes="member: 924">One of the great things about these WOTC adventures is that you can pick them up really really cheap used on Ebay.  The downside is, you can end up buying them out of order. As is the case with this and me. So this review comes long after it came out (and since there are so many reviews, I'll make mine fairly short).Anyway, this is one of the adventure path modules from WOTC. Unlike most of them, it's not really a dungeon crawl. It's set in a town, and it involves something of a mystery. Really, it's a bunch of mini-dungeon crawls within a greater framework of events happening to a town.Basically, the PCs visit the town for a fair, and a bunch of weird things happen. Handily, the PCs are right by, and end up solving all the problems. Yet despite this, the town gets taken over by the evil bad guy. And he then opens up a portal to hell. So you then end up with devils walking all over, and the PCs on the run. Until they have a show down with the evil bad guy.My summation was a bit silly, but is fairly accurate. It also illustrates the main problem with this module - the overall plot is just plain stupid. Not only that, it doesn't make much sense.Basically, the evil bad guy has a lot of little nasty plots in order to make the people want martial law. (As a way of showing the town needs it). Yet I don't see why he would want that. Ultimately the evil bad guy uses his mind control powers over the ruler of the town, but I don't understand why wouldn't just do that in the first place, rather than try to enforce martial law with devils running around. I mean, isn't that like a beacon to any good character within miles that hey, maybe something is wrong with the ruler? I mean, suddenly he's a kind good, virtuous man, then suddenly he allows devils free run of the city? I don't think so. In the real world, that would be a sign that the guy went nuts (er, if you replace devils with really mean people). In a fantasy world, that would be a sign that someone is either controlling him magically, or has killed him and taken his place. So the bad guy would just kill the ruler, and then quietly take his place. Or quietly guide him behind the scenes. Evil does not mean stupid. There's also some other problems with it. For once, some of the guidelines are just silly. For instance, when entering the town, all wizards & sorcerers have their fingers 'peace-bonded', so they can't cast spells. That is one of the dumbest things I've read. For another, only 1 npc in the whole module is really given any sort of personality. And she rather resembles Yoda in both appearance and personality.  Details of the city are fairly sparse, especially the fair the PCs attend. What's at the fair? It doesn't say, it just basically describes it like any generic old fair. The DM is left to come up with descriptions of all the booths, merchants, entertainment, etc.Still, the module is not without merit. The nasty plots are decent mini-adventure in their own right. The name of the modules takes the title from one of them - "The Speaker In Dreams" is the villain controlling a cthulhu mythos style cult. Another reminds me of Lankhmar - a wererat criminal gang. The most obvious thing to me, and apparently to many others, is to set the thing in Freeport. You can then change the mind-flayer bad guy to give him a tie to the Cthulhu-esque cult (which exists in Freeport), and then tie the devil/portal to hell plot in with Jalie Squarefoot, the villain of Hell in Freeport. So, I actually found this module to be pretty useful. But I can't recommend this unless you're a Freeport fan and want to use it for Freeport, and want to do some work adapting it. And it's certainly not worth the cover price.</blockquote>

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