Planescape review: Reflections
For the last three years, I've run a Planescape1 campaign through almost all of its modules. Now, after successfully finishing it, I want to look back and review these adventures, highlighting the pros and cons of each one.
Each module will be rated in three categories, up to 3 points in each:
- Presentation: how easy it is to understand and run the adventure.
- Openness: how open the adventure's scope is, regarding the freedom of choice.
- Quality: Overall quality of the adventure, including the originality and richness of its content, and players' enjoyment.
The full list of currently published reviews is available under the planescape tag.
Reflections
In which the heroes face an Ancient Foe of the Rilmani in an Infinitely Large library of mirrors.
- Designer: Monte Cook
- Source: Tales From the Infinite Staircase2, Tale 7
- Party: 4-6 characters of 4th-5th levels
- Play-time: 1 session
- Locations:
- Outlands / Sum of All, the Rilmani city
Overview
An open archway standing on a tiny landing leads to the city of Sum of All, though there's no city to be seen now — only roads, streets, and empty places where buildings should be standing remain. This is an effect of the Iron Shadow on the creatures of pure balance — for now, all rilmani have ceased to exist, rendered into their essential salts. The only building that still stands is a strangely angled, odd-shaped structure.
Created untold aeons ago, the Mirrored Library — as it is called by the rilmani, or Timaresh, the Collection of Hated Lore — as its creators have called it, contains a copy of any written work in the multiverse. Devised by Hallonac, one of the kamerel, the original race of xenophobic beings that were occupying the region around the Spire long ago, it is powered by their strange mirror magic and thus withstood the influence of the Iron Shadow just fine.
Before the characters get to the library proper, they must navigate its maze-like support structure. Out of about two dozen interconnecting rooms, only three are described in great detail, all others containing nothing of importance. The main library is an infinite grid of 20-foot cube rooms with shelves filled with books and mirror walls that act as portals between the otherwise separated rooms.
Two other groups can be encountered in the library as well. The first one is a party of adventurers working for the rilmani from a nearby village named Centered Focus, sent to investigate the disappearance of the city. The second group are kytons3 that brought the Iron Shadow to the Outlands. The third are the kamerel emerging from their quasi-realm of mirror reflections, where they were hiding for the last few millennia.
Since all Main Library rooms are basically the same, instead of having a usual list of room descriptions, the module has a list of encounters along the way. All of these are left for the DM's discretion to place whenever appropriate:
- 3 types of kamerel traps (the last one in 4 varieties)
- 2 types of kamerel ambushes
- 2 types of kyton encounters
- 1 type of kamerel/kyton encounter
Once the party gets the copy of Ever-changing Order and gets out of the Library, they will have one of the two puzzle-pieces needed to banish the Iron Shadow. If they also have Navimas in their possession, they can now proceed to developing the remedy. If the book ends up in kytons' hands, however, the party would need to either attempt to steal it back or find another copy somewhere in Sigil. Nothing besides these short suggestions is present for these potential side adventures.
Presentation
🖋️🖋️🖋️ superb
Usual for the anthology set of adventure notes and Magic rules for the Outlands is provided. The Mirrored Library map (grid included) is also present, along with rules for combat in such confined space, and mechanics for the kamerel's mirror magic.
Openness
☀️☀️ semi-linear
This is one of the two necessary modules in the anthology, alongside Tale 4, as by obtaining the Ever-changing Order book and the Navimas, the party can deal with the Iron Shadow. Of course, such a "speedrun" is highly improbable, since they also need additional information (most of which comes from Tale 5 and Tale 6) to lead their search.
As for the adventure itself, it could certainly go different ways depending on how the party's interactions with the rilmani and kamerel go, but there just isn't enough meat in the module to do almost anything else besides the main quest.
Quality
★ mediocre
Despite the outstanding presentation and interesting lore, I must note that the content-to-volume ratio in this module is not very high. Most of the backstory of the elusive kamerel most probably would not be revealed to the players, being presented for DM's eyes only. It certainly feels that the module's 16 pages could be better used by adding more encounters and keyed locations instead. The infinite dungeon of identical rooms also isn't that much fun in practice. Overall, this is the weakest module of the whole anthology.
Discuss this post on Reddit