Planescape review: The Dream Well
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.
The Dream Well
In which the Scheming Survivors of a war-torn Githyanki Citadel struggle to learn the Secret of Dreamt Dreams — so it behooves the Heroes to Discover it First.
- Designer: Monte Cook
- Source: Tales From the Infinite Staircase2, Tale 6
- Party: 4-6 characters of 4th-6th levels
- Play-time: 1 session
- Locations:
- Astral / TorNav'roc, the Githyanki fortress-city
Overview
The doorway of burnished bronze covered with intricate, baroque carvings leads to an empty stone building in the abandoned githyanki fortress-city of TorNav'roc floating in the Astral Plane. A few moments later, the building collapses, cutting off the portal to the Staircase, leaving the party stranded.
Four random encounters are provided to liven up the ravaged fortress:
- A pair of shedu3 explore the ruined city of their enemies, hunting down the surviving githyanki, and can provide valuable information to the party.
- A pack of feral spectral hounds attempts to ambush the characters at the opportune moment.
- A group of sahuagin4 treasure hunters will attack the potential competitors immediately, using full Astral advantages of three-dimensional combat.
- An injured psurlon,5 one of the city's attackers, prowls the fortress, looking for easy prey.
A party of five gihyanki adventurers occupies a building near the most interesting construction in the city — the Dream Well. This curious artifact is the main focus of the module instead of the usual threat of the Iron Shadow. Resembling a conventional well, the ancient magical device affects the dreams of anyone sleeping within TorNav'roc. Githyanki are trying to solve the riddle of the well and will attempt to use the party for this, planning to attack them after they get all the useful information.
Once the player characters try to sleep, each of them will see a different dream, so you would need to arrange short one-on-one sessions if you play IRL, or prepare a separate voice channel if you play online. For an even better effect, the first time the characters see the dreams, try to make each player feel that it all happens in reality.
I will skip the description of the four dreams for brevity. Each of them is a sort of puzzle that the dreamers must solve (dreams repeat every night). By cleverly coordinating their dream actions, the party can "unlock" the final dream for one of them. Once this dream is also solved, the characters can get valuable information (similar to the contact other plane spell, but with a 99% chance of a correct answer) and come into possession of a valuable artifact — the key of dreams. This yellow gem grants a multitude of powers to the wielder (the one who completed the final dream), and the party can now escape the void, for one of these powers is to summon a doorway to the Infinite Staircase once a month.
Presentation
🖋️🖋️🖋️ superb
Potential additional threats, depending on the current stage of the campaign, are described along with a set of rules for adventuring and magic on the Astral Plane, as usual. The stat blocks are highly detailed, describing all encountered NPCs (two shedu and five githyanki) thoroughly. A gorgeous rendition of TorNav'roc's stylized side-view map and a couple of half- to quarter-page illustrations adorn the module.
One welcome improvement, though, would be increasing the number of dreams by a couple more, to cover the most usual party sizes without the need for the DM to modify or come up with new dreams if the party size is larger than four.
Openness
☀️ linear
While first appearing as a sandbox, there's not much going on except the main focus around the Dream Well, and there's only one solution for the dream puzzle.
Of course, the characters can avoid all this trouble by travelling the Astral normal way, eventually finding a portal. One such portal is hidden in TorNav'roc itself, leading to Limbo and Tale 4. Otherwise, you'll probably need A Guide to the Astral Plane6 supplement.
Quality
★★ good
Overall, the module is moderately enjoyable, but only if your players are not averse to puzzle-themed adventures. Good idea, average execution.
If you use ambient music during your sessions, I would recommend preparing a special playlist for this module to fit the astral dreams theme. Something psychedelic or avant-garde would fit here nicely: Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, etc.
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