Review: Ward of the Eye Tyrant

Today we're looking at Ward of the Eye Tyrant by Derek Ruiz and published by Elven Tower. Elven Tower has been producing Shadowdark content since the early days of the system. I remember they got some feedback then that their adventures had a bit too much of that 5e feel. Let's see if anything's changed.

The adventure begins at the home of a seer called The Prophet. She asks the party to defeat an evil cult that is trying to resurrect a beholder eye tyrant somewhere across the desert. They are also joined by an anachronistic Indiana Jones analog and told to join up with a caravan that is headed to an oasis that holds clues about the cult's whereabouts.

I'm not really sure this qualifies as a hook. Which is to say, there's really nothing to hook the PCs in the way this is set up. There is no reward offered, no mention of the stakes or what will happen if the cult manages to resurrect a monster on the middle of a desert somewhere, and ultimately no reason why anyone should really care. The party goes on the adventure because this is the adventure presented to them.

The NPC Indiana Jones (here named Allan) is a strange and maybe unwelcome inclusion. His main function throughout seems to be picking fights, which isn't something I'd put up with for very long as a player. Other than that he doesn't serve as a guide or move the narrative forward in any way.

The first part of the journey involves going on a short hike before arriving at the caravan camp. The format of this and the following sections are a bit strange. They are ostensibly overland travel but they don't use Shadowdark's travel rules. Instead it's a bit more like a pointcrawl, and everything between the points boils down to a single possible encounter. And at each of the points we're given a keyed map even though what's being presented is more like a scene. 

At the first stop we meet another tagalong NPC - a scholar named Tobias. Then we're told to roll 3 random encounters before the caravan heads out. There is a map of the camp with four areas, but the first area actually describes the journey to the camp and the fourth area describes the next leg of the journey. There's a strange mismatch between the text and the intended gameplay. It's laid out like a dungeon map but clearly meant to be presented to the players as a sequence of events, not a location to explore.

The second location has a similar kind of dissonance, but also includes an inscrutable puzzle:

The whole thing is weirdly abstracted such that I don't see how I could present it to the players in a way that would allow them to solve it. We don't actually know the names of the stars or what the constellation is or what direction to turn the skulls. The only way I can see this playing out is for the party to make a roll or spend an hour to be given the solution, and then I guess the GM narrates them solving it. But there doesn't seem to be any opportunity for the players to actually interact with the puzzle.

After another day of travel and a single possible encounter, we arrive at the dungeon proper. It has eight rooms and is largely linear, with one possible shortcut hidden behind a secret door.

All the loot is also hiding behind secret doors. In Shadowdark and NSR gaming generally, it's typical that if the PC looks in the right place or in the right way, they find it with no roll. Ward of the Eye Tyrant assumes you're not rolling to find these doors, and does not give a DC. But it also doesn't provide enough detail to make that sort of ruling. There is no description of how the doors work or what tells there might be, so it's difficult to make a determination of whether a PC's actions will uncover them or not. Some instructions for the GM on running these doors would be welcome.

There's also a trapped hallway with a similar problem. The mechanism aren't really described well enough for the players to engage with the fiction of it. If you have a thief the whole thing can be overcome with a DC 12 DEX check  (with +3 DEX and advantage, they have more than a 70% chance of success). Otherwise you make a DC 12 STR to lift the bars blocking the hallway and pass through. A trap that is properly detailed, with a clear trigger (not vague "motion sensors" as presented here) and logical mechanics can be defeated through critical thinking and clever play. But as written, this one is defeated by rolling dice.

In the final room the party will look impotently through a magical, impenetrable barrier (a "cinematic effect" the description calls it) as the eye tyrant is revived. Nothing the party can do or could have done will prevent this. Whatever they did prior to this point, whatever choices they made, the monster is coming.

Then the eye tyrant gets mad, kills all the cultists and the party has to fight it. We know they have to fight it because the adventure tells us "there is no way back" even though there is very obviously a way back. I think a single level 10 creature is probably a little weak for a party of level 5 PCs. They eye tyrant does have a number of spells but, because they are spells and not innate abilities, there's a chance it will fail a cast and lose them. It's also worth pointing out that it does not have a spellcasting bonus listed besides its +4 INT bonus. By way of reference, a level 10 Archmage has a +7 spellcasting bonus. It does have a couple level 1 minions but considering there isn't really a lot else going on in this adventure, the climax really needed to nail it. I think this might be a bit underwhelming.

On the positive side, the production value is very good - layout, art, and maps look great. But when you strip that away, there isn't much adventure in this adventure. A couple of travel scenes, a puzzle that wasn't meant to be solved, a trap that's reduced to a dice roll, and a pitched battle in an empty room. There are no impactful choices to be made and precious few opportunities for creative thinking and problem-solving.

On a scale of 2-12, Ward of the Eye Tyrant gets 4 stingbats.