Trivia / The Dark Eye

• Artifact Title: Both as a trope and quite literally (see Executive Meddling below). Despite these "Dark Eyes" ostensibly being supremely rare and valuable, they were pretty common in the adventure modules from the earliest days of the setting, but became a lot less prevalent pretty soon - up until the point that they barely got mentioned any longer a few years in. They did make a return with the Gyldenland setting though; where the aristrocacy of the empire claimed descent from the so-called "Old Ones", a race of human-like mages who had a third dark eye on the brow (said aristocrats call themselves "optimates" and wear masks with a third eye).
• Captain Ersatz: The Dark Eye exists only because the publishers didn't want to spend their money on buying the Dungeons & Dragons license, and instead preferred to spend it on an advertising campaign. Which worked out rather well. Also, the trope applies only for the genesis of the system - both the rules and to a much higher degree the setting have taken a radically different path from D&D.
• Cultural Translation: The original German name "Das Schwarze Auge" translated literally means "The Black Eye". The name was changed to avoid the association with a bruised eye (in German, a bruised eye is called "blaues Auge" i.e. a "blue eye").
• Executive Meddling: Happened several times over the course of Ulisses' history.
  • The company behind the game, the now defunct Schmidt Spiele, wanted a flashier name for the new system than the fairly pedestrian "Aventuria", which is why it was named The Dark Eye instead (and also the reason why the creators of the game had to come up with a palantír-like magic item of that name so it makes at least some sense).
  • The Tharun-setting, which was released in 1988, introduced a completely new spellcasting system that was based on the use of magic runes. This again was because of pressure from the parent company that had a bunch of excess wooden tokens from another game and wanted to see them to be put to some use.
• Running the Asylum: The writing staff consists completely of fans. Unsurprisingly, considering that the game has been around since 1984 and even the youngest players of the early days by now are old enough to have kids who play TDE.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, TDE didn't really have a distinct setting (it was basically just a generic pen & paper that was cobbled together within the span of a few weeks because the company behind it wanted to corner the German market for Role-Playing Games before Dungeons And Dragons beat them to the punch); but after a few month the first module that introduced the bare bones of the setting was introduced. Said module was focused exclusively on Aventuria, but mentioned the other continents of the world and made it clear that Aventuria was a rather modest backwater of the world at large (hinting at an expansion of the setting in the future). However, due to Executive Meddling and even moreso due to bad planning, all attempts to expand the game beyond the borders of Aventuria weren't well received and more or less fell flat. While two of the alternative settings - the Gyldenland and Tharun - were outsourced to another company that poured a lot of creative energy into it, they didn't play any role of note on the Aventurian main theater.
  • During development phases, Divine Divinity and Sacred were supposed to be set in the Dark Eye setting. They eventually dropped the license and became established RPG franchises in their own right.

• The TDE orcs interestingly appear in NetHack: The description for one of the orc types cites the Dutch translation of the first edition.