Song & Silence is the fourth character builder supplement published by Wizards of the Coast for use with
Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition. As the title implies, this book focuses upon bards and rogues. There are new prestige classes, feats, skills (recycled only), items, spells and even a do-it-yourself trap-making section. There is also the expected advice on how to build and develop your bard or rogue character, with a slant towards maximizing his effectiveness as a member of an adventuring party. It’s all that you’ve come to expect in this series of products, but not more than that.
The style is identical to all previous products. The layout allows for easy reading, and the artwork inside and out is well done, competent and fitting of the book’s theme. By now this is what we’ve come to expect from these products, so I shan’t say more about it now.
The book jumps straight to the new assortment of prestige classes. Once again, I am disappointed. Most of these are aimed at the rogue, not the bard and they aren’t that good for rogues either. Bards are spell casters, so any class that doesn’t give them full caster progression had better have some awesome compensation or it’s just not worth taking levels in it. (Which means that the Virtuoso class is the only one in this book that’s worthy of consideration for bards.) Rogues are skill monkeys, so any class that doesn’t offer a like amount of skill points had better back up that up with some juicy stuff; this reduces the worthwhile rogue-oriented classes to the Dread Pirate, the Thief-Acrobat, the Royal Explorer and the Temple Raider of Olidammara. All of the rest, as usual, make better NPCs than PCs because they aren’t good adventuring classes; all of them suffer from a restricted scope of operation, a restricted scope of activity or they have a big ol’ target painted upon them. (Save for the Fang of Lolth, which is—like the Dragon Disciple in Tome & Blood—is a template masquerading, poorly, as a prestige class.) While the concepts, on average, are a fair site better than anything else published in this prior to this book the execution still leaves much to be desired: I have yet more than a handful of classes that can’t be done just as well with the proper selection of feats, skills and a little multi-classing.
After the prestige classes comes the new skills, feats and stuff that ties into those two mechanics. There is a primer on poisons prior to the section on traps, which covers their creation and use as well as the market considerations. The price chart includes official errata which supercedes what was previously published in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which may or may not sell this book right there, but no effects. The trap section is all about rolling your own, as it were, and the book goes into sufficient detail to allow you to just that. There’s sufficient wiggle room to go beyond the sample traps listed here and in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, but it’s not obvious; there’s no “Behind the Curtain” here to point out what the concepts behind the mechanics here, so you’ll have to suss that out for yourself. The new feats include a revised version of Expert Tactician that supercedes the version in Sword & Fist—again, this may not sell the book right there—and a number of feats that allow characters with Sneak Attack to trade in some amount of damage for a special effect. There are also feats that alter and extend the powers of a bard’s magical music, and a handful of feats that give a 2 bonus to two skills ala Alertness.
The gear follows, and it is a veritable plethora of mundane and magical equipment for bards and rogues to employ. This is best used as a catalogue for world-builders, so players ought not to assume that all of this stuff is instantly available; it’s a section that’s more useful for DMs instead of players. Many of the instruments are taken directly from past and present cultures in the real world, but there is nothing whatsoever said about the context in which these instruments did or do exist; DMs will have to do a little research to fill that gap. The rogue gear is oriented towards thieves of various sorts, and I speak not to either plausibility or historical accuracy; all I can say that these are neat tools and toys, which is often enough for Joe Gamer and his pals.
The sample guilds, colleges, gangs and other organizations are good to have on hand. If you don’t use them as they are, then they make good models for your own versions and they do just fine if you mix and match to suit your own ends. Again, most of this stuff is aimed at rogues over bards; this isn’t as bad as it seems as it’s easier to deal with groups for bards due to their ease of organization and their seeming rarity in practical gameplay. This nicely dovetails with the practical advice for building and developing bards and rogues as player-characters, because these are two groups who—like monks, clerics and paladins—tend strongly towards some sort of organization as a default condition of the class, however informal or adversarial this may be for them. The character advice section also addresses issues for flanking, garrote attacks and new spells for bards and assassins. The new spells are quite welcome additions to the game, and the rules are welcome clarifications and additions.
This is a better book than those previous to it in the series, and the first one that I will recommend purchasing- albeit as a secondary choice. Your mileage will vary, so (as always) check it out first.
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