Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 DreamingGod05 May 05, 2015 11:33:04	I'm running a game in Eberron where all the player's are playing drow. The question whether drow (and elves in general) dream when they trance has come up. I thought I could find the answer, but there doesn't seem to be any i nthe 4E or 3E core book for Eberron. So I come to you all. Do drow dream? One of my players, a warlock, has in their backstory that they get prophetic visions. I initially thought of them as dreams, but now I'm wondering what form it takes.   Bonus question: One player has an Aberrant Dragonmark. Do Aberannt marks mark the prophecy like the natural ones, or are they specfically divorced from the DRaconic Prophecy?
#2 Tempest_Stormwind May 06, 2015 12:13:52	Generally speaking, trance isn't dreaming, and elves don't project to Dal Quor during trance - it's mental exercises similar to reflexive meditation. (I imagine trance in an Eberron setting as similar to a dreaming state in the real world, in a popular understanding - pulling stimuli out of the subconscious and visualizing it - whereas "dreaming" in Eberron involves psychic projection to Dal Quor.) You can probably say this is consciously channelling Dal Quor or something if it suits your games, though.   (I play in two Eberron games, one of which deals mostly with the Dreaming Dark. The party consists of a kalashtar, three elves, and a halfling (who, before we knew the game would deal with the Dreaming Dark, had described her psionic powers as having a nightmarish connotation). The fact that the halfling is the only one of the group who can dream (and therefore is open to all sorts of threats) is indeed part of the plot, both of her own personal story and as something the party has to account for. That said, we also have a strong subplot of figuring out one of the elves' mysterious pasts (which involves an unusual form of serial resurrection as a result of an ancient prophetic curse, in effect having past lives without actually reincarnating), and when we decided to investigate that by basically re-enacting Inception or Assassin's Creed, we invented a power that wrenches his subconscious into Dal Quor (piggybacking on the halfling's own dreaming) so we can visualize what's buried in there. So our game goes both ways - trance isn't dreaming, but it's close enough that the Rule of Awesome lets us cheat that a bit.)   As for prophetic visions, there's all sorts of ways they can work. Maybe his pacts somehow let him subconsciously sense the Draconic Prophecy in the way magic flows through him, for instance.       The relationship between all marks and the Prophecy is kind of fuzzy; the dragons were surprised when the marks started showing up, recognizing that they were connected to it but yet somehow had managed to not be foreseen. However, everything is part of the Prophecy in Eberron*, so yes, they'd show up. Exactly how, though - that's up to you.     * I made an exception to this when I was thinking of ways of fitting 3.5's pact magic into Eberron; it's centered around vestiges which exist nowhere (or don't actually exist, yet they have influence). I figured a good way to make this alien to the world was to have the vestiges actually missing from the Prophecy altogether. Not missing in the way Sarlona is (I liken that to having an index that references Sarlona, but the pages of the book are torn out and you can tell they were once there), but more like something absolutely not mentioned at all. As such, the Lords of Dust (and to a lesser extent the Chamber) are particularly interested in this, since a pact-magic-user can be a serious uncontrolled factor in prophetic manipulations. The rest of the world just interprets such monkey-wrenching as not understanding the prophecy fully - you know, "maybe they meant a different moon was ascendant? Or we got which empire it meant wrong?" that sort of thing.
#3 AvonRekaes May 06, 2015 14:07:37	The way I always ran it, is that Elves do not sleep, so they can't dream. They're specifically immune to the Dream and Nightmare spells (as they qualify as "creatures who don't sleep"), making them unable to psychically project into Dal Quor.   However, prophetic visions need not necessarily be a literal dream from Dal Quor. Whatever is sending the visions (obstensibly the warlock's pact patron?) could be perfectly capable of "invading" a trance-vision and delivering the prophecy that way. I like Tempet's analogy that elven trance-visions are like real-world dreams in that they're just imagry pulled from the individual's subconscious, while sleeping race's dreams are all psychic projections into dal-quor. In this state, the force sending the visions would just be employing a form of telepathy, communicating with the drow's subconscious.   As for your bonus question: Personally I believe that Khyber's chidlren (demons, Rajahs, etc.) can play as much a role in the prophecy as Siberys's children (dragons), despite being called "The Draconic Prophecy". In that view, I see no reason why Aberrant marks can't also be connected to the Prophecy.
(Reply to #3) Hellcow	I'm late to this party, but I'll note that in The Gates of Night, one of the plot points is that the drow Xu'sasar can't dream and thus can't accompany the other characters into Dal Quor.   With that said, I certainly support the idea that elves could have prophetic visions during trance. I can see a Tairnadal tradition involving communing with a patron ancestor during trance, or a Qaltiar tradition seeking to connect to the primal spirits of a particular location. Though skeptics could argue that both of these are essentially daydreams.