I believe that there are two types of plans people make. The most common are the meticulous, highly detailed ones. The kind of plans that live on spreadsheets, have timetables, dates, and clockwork-like interconnected parts.
The other kind of plan is more like a map of options around a centralized intent. It shows different routes to get to the destination, but it assumes that conditions will change. It expects you to make the decision along the way using your understanding of the intent.
I hate the former and live my life by the latter. People aren't clockwork, so detailed planning is a level of insanity I can't fathom...
It's why I struggle with adventures that fall into that tightly wound structure.The Ravenloft line has a lot of those types of adventures. Something about wanting to recreate a specific story tends to lead people down that design path.
The Evil Eye, however, somehow combined the worst aspects of both tightly wound planning and a map of options to create a muddled mess. It is honestly wild how messy the 64 pages of this adventure are...
Cutting the Deck
As far back as I can remember, adventures that had some sort of narrative to them, gave you a summary of what was going to happen in the first few pages. The party gets a letter from a vampire, then sneak into his castle, and beat him with a rubber hose...
Or something like that.
Somehow they left that out of this meandering nonsense. Instead we get a whole lot of backstory about the Vistani darklord, her half demon kid, her night of passion with his demon dad, her werewolf lover... sorry, wolfwere...
Seriously, I will never forgive whomever at TSR came up with that naming nonsense...
We get all that bullshit about their relationships, the kid's destiny to kill all the Vistani, and some rules around the use of the Evil Eye ability, but literally no hooks. Sure, we get told to go buy the Van Richten's Guide to Vistani and...
No... Sorry... This is a bit much... I can't no talk about this...
The one adventure you would think that the Tarroka deck would be a central part of. The one time you would think it would be a big deal. Considering all the cultural appropriation that they have done to craft the Vistani, you would think this would be the moment that they would leverage the deck as a central part of an adventure that is ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE...
But no. You are told it is window dressing and use it if you want to. I can't with this...
Ok. I got up and got a coffee. I am better now. I can go on to the next section.
