Eyes of the Lich Queen (Stephen Schubert, Tim Hitchcock, Nicolas Logue) is the 591st book I've read for the blog (hazzah! only 379 to go! here's to another six years!) and it's fair to say, when it comes to rpgs, I'm a little . . . jaded in my tastes. You give me a story where heroic adventurers explore a mysterious ruined temple, only to discover a deadly curse, leading to a daring prison break where they must free a pirate tattooed with a map to a mysterious tomb so that they can confront the ghost of the last explorer to suffer the curse, who reveals that the curse is in fact the lingering energies of an ancient weapon, one sought by a dragon who is at that very moment claiming possession of the weapon's power source, the one thing that can lift the curse, and so the adventurers must travel to the forbidden dragon continent in order to fight for their very lives in the middle of a mysterious dragon observatory . . .
. . . and my instinctual, knee-jerk reaction is "what is this D&D bullshit? Wake me up when something interesting happens."
I fully recognize that this is a me problem. I'm ridiculous. There's nothing here that I can willfully misinterpret as a commentary on transportation infrastructure or a model of fantasy geopolitics and I get grumpy. "Don't you see, people, they not doing anything but going into dungeons and fighting dragons!" (Actually, one of the fights was against a dragonne, which I will forever associate with early TSR's fumbling attempts to nudge us away from fighting public domain foes and towards using creatures they could successfully trademark).
I guess the most interesting part of this adventure, to me, was an unusual twist on the "macguffin chase" formula. After you finish searching the first temple, the last thing you find before being cursed is a series of alcoves, all of which contain treasure except for the last one. Then, after you leave, you're confronted by an agent of the Blood of Vol, who demands you turn over the "Dragon's Eye" and you're meant to think "ah, the Dragon's Eye must have been whatever was originally in that alcove," but actually, the Dragon's Eye is the curse. You go through the whole adventure seeking the macguffin and nobody, not you, not the villain, not the dragon who sponsored you, ever realizes that the macguffin was with you the whole time.
It "does not exist as a material relic," but is rather a process of transformation that kills because it cannot be completed without the energy source. You end the adventure with a free Dragonmark feat, and all it cost you was jumping through a bunch of hoops.
There are other high points - one of the pirates is named Damog Hellscurvy, which isn't so much "on the nose" as it is outright parodic, and it deserves to be in a funnier adventure. His rival, Captain Krail Sorrowbringer is both a ninja and a pirate (as per her character class and role in the story, respectively) which had to have been intentional, but is sadly not explored. (I think they were going for only the standard D&D background levels of incidental camp, that's why these are "high points" and not reasons for me to regret my earlier intemperate words).
But the high point also comes with a low. When you're doing the prison break, you're able to infiltrate this incredibly secure facility because the warden has a side-business of running a slave-operated mine out of the prison's basement. This allows you steal a pirate ship (on behalf of your partner, Damog Hellscurvy, from the notorious Captain Krail) that has been used to deliver slaves to the mines (because, apparently, prison oversight is a bit better in the world of Eberron than in ours and people started noticing that some of the prisoners were going missing). Then, after you free the prisoner you came to free, the adventure anticipates that you might be tempted to free the other slaves too, but "the PCs know the Lucky Lady is not equipped to handle a large number of refugees. If the characters balk at leaving the enslaved prisoners behind, Jukkeam announces that one he and the party have made a safe escape, he will uses his father's resources to see the shard mining operation shut down."
Jukkeam is the son of a pirate-turned-merchant who was close friends with Damog Hellscurvy, and his rescue buys you the pirates' aid, but isn't actually related to the reason you're there in the first place (a different, entirely unrelated pirate). The reason this plot is merely a "low point" and not a "yikes" is that Jukkeam is as good as his word. Nonetheless, it feels like a hard misread of player psychology ("the PCs know the Lucky Lady is not equipped to handle a large number of refugees, so expect them to get real creative with their Bags of Holding.")
Overall, I'd say that Eyes of the Lich Queen is . . . a D&D-style adventure. The Lich Queen is less involved than the title might suggest, but otherwise it's fine. As a book, it was visibly high-effort, in a good way. Full color all the way through, attractive glossy pages and every single one of the combat encounters got its own 1-2 page subsection, with a zoomed-in map, list of relevant lighting and environmental conditions, and suggested tactics for the monsters. Which maybe wasn't so fun to read, but I am not yet so lost in my own mission that I've forgotten that a book like this wasn't meant for reading, it was meant for at-table utility. And on that count, my gut tells me it's gonna be all right.
Ukss Contribution: Another high point - Ship Eater, a "great orca slain by whalers years ago . . . now an undead monstrosity with an insatiable hunger for living flesh and an unquenchable need for vengeance."
Awesome. Kind of wasted here, as a means of slowing down the story pacing and getting your daily encounters in, but Ship Eater has definitely got the star power to anchor an adventure all by his lonesome. I'll probably go with a slightly more sympathetic take. Like instead of being reanimated by the out-of-control necromantic energies of a nearby tomb, maybe he'll just be a revenant who pulled himself out of the grave to punish the injustice of his death. . . but not in an overly precious way. He's still an orca and it would be somewhat hypocritical for him to be too outraged about the crime of murder (which, of course, is exactly what makes it a great ghost story).
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