Overall, the theme of this book is service: the duty of a shaman to serve his community and the spirits who grant him his powers. At the same time, it is also a book about individuals. Most of the characters presented herein are not part of any true organized Tradition; they may cooperate with some known figures, but overall, each shaman is seen as focusing primarily on the community he serves.
Being a Tradition Book, Dreamspeakers follows the standard format: exposition about beliefs and views of other groups up front, game mechanics in the back. This is made a little trickier by the fact that we're talking about a loose set of individuals; they tend to lack a unified view of anything, even their own magic. The overview of the Tradition shows us how the Dreamspeakers are re-organizing to deal with the urbanization of the world, where their new members are appearing, and how they deal with the Avatar Storms. This last, to me, is a bit of a cop-out. Since these characters, more than any others, must interact with the Umbra, the authors focus heavily on the idea of reducing the local Gauntlet (the barrier between reality and the spirit world) out of existence. These Shallowings are claimed to be a natural phenomenon, and therefore a coincidental magic. I say unto thee, "bullshit". Mystically aligned Nodes aren't even a natural phenomenon under a Technocratic paradigm. Nodes with a gaping hole in the walls of reality are not natural. This is a small flaw in the overall presentation, but I far prefer the perspective of the Dreamspeaker who says "All it really means is that I can leave my knives at home... and still have some good fresh blood for the drinking spirits."
Where this book best shines is in its listing of concepts for spirits and characters. Television as a totem spirit, a girl destined to be a tribe's shaman who was adopted away and now seeks her lost tribe... these are the sort of imagination-grabbers that give me ideas for new stories and new characters. There are rotes, but they're the basic stuff every spirit mage needs to do. There are sample Fetishes, mostly technological, nothing amazing. (Then again, if you want a Fetish/Wonder list, go look in the Werewolf stuff. In fact, if you really want to use Dreamspeakers, you ought to have Werewolf.) There are rules for the Derangements that spirit work will tend to give you, and rules for static sorcerers as shamans (since every village has a medicine man, and not all of those can be Dreamspeakers). Along the way, there are a lot of rules that I personally would not use because I feel they detract from a player's having to deal with the incredibly difficult job of being a shaman. Balancing the needs of the living and the dead, the human and the Umbrood, the magical and the mundane... these things are hard, no matter how much magic you use. However, that's just my perspective, and these rules could easily be tossed without detracting from the rest of the book.
Since I'm a Mage fan and I play collect-the-set with books of this type, I'm glad to have Dreamspeakers on my shelf. It's even given me a few good ideas. However, unless you're a collector like me or are really interested in the Tradition, I'd pass this one over and pick up Cult of Ecstasy instead.
One final parting note. Like most WW books, this includes suggested reading at the end. I would add to the list if you can find it, a comic series called "Muktuk Wolfsbreath: Hard-Boiled Shaman". It's a three-issue miniseries from DC's Vertigo line, published in the late 1990s. Should be available from most comic shops with a serious back-issue service. The Muktuk miniseries is one of the better blendings of ancient practice and modern archetypes that I've ever seen.
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