Realms of Arkania: Shadows over Riva

Realms of Arkania: Shadows over Riva
Cover art by Ugurcan Yüce
Developer(s)	Fantasy Productions Attic Entertainment Software
Publisher(s)	TopWare Interactive Sir-Tech U.S. Gold
Designer(s)	Guido Henkel Hans-Jürgen Brändle Horst Weidle
Programmer(s)	Hans-Jürgen Brändle Lothar Ahle Wolfgang Schulz
Artist(s)	Vadim Pietrzynski Markus Henrich André Taulien
Composer(s)	Guido Henkel
Series	Realms of Arkania
Platform(s)	MS-DOS
Release	DEU December 1996 INT 1997
Genre(s)	Role-playing
Mode(s)	Single player

Realms of Arkania: Shadows over Riva (German title: Das Schwarze Auge: Schatten über Riva, translated as "The Dark Eye: Shadow above Riva") is a role-playing video game based on the German role-playing game system Das Schwarze Auge by Attic Entertainment Software. It is a sequel to Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny and Realms of Arkania: Star Trail. The original German version of the game was published by TopWare Interactive in 1996. Sir-Tech released the English version in 1997.

Shadows over Riva picks up where the party left off in Realms of Arkania: Star Trail. After uniting the dwarves and elves, the party stops by the harbor city of Riva, which is currently under siege by the Orcish hordes. The city is on edge. The countryside's once lucrative dwarven mine has been decimated and occupied by the Orcs after a string of well-coordinated attacks. For some unknown reason, the magistrate refuses to recognize the threat the orcs pose just outside the city gates. Meanwhile, rumors abound of traitors in the slum ridden-Hoberkian community and strange corpse disappearances within the city's graveyard, the Field of Boron.

As the party investigates each lead, more questions seem to surface than answers. After penetrating the dwarven mines the deviousness of the traps suggests that the Orcs have somehow become much smarter and more organized than normally possible. No longer are they fragmented tribes warring among themselves. They speak of a single, wise, all-powerful chieftain with the powers of a wizard. Upon confronting the chieftain deep within the mines, he summons a massive demon from the underworld to fight the party. This alone is rare, as orcs have never had the intelligence required to master magic, let alone the skills of one of the most powerful wizards. Since this has not been the only time the party has fought demons, the party manages to kill it, sending it back to the underworld. Upon killing the Orc chieftain, a tiny worm emerges from chieftain's head and flees.

Returning to the city with this new information, the party still finds the city's magistrate apathetic. They befriend the Holberkians when they save one of them from a mob. Far from the traitors they had been painted, it turns out the Hoberkians are faithful friends. Being half-elves and half-Orcs, they have knowledge of the orcish hordes, earning the enmity of the city, which thinks they are responsible for the Orcish siege of the city. They also have noticed a pronounced change in the Orcs' activity, suggesting an outside influence. They reveal a long-absent sorcerer living on an island in the swamp who could have been responsible for the changes in the orcs. The next day, one of the Hoberkians takes the party to the sorcerer's tower. There the party finds numerous experiments and letters all pointing to a person known only as Borborad and his shipment of two worm queens. One queen was delivered but a second was lost en route when the urn sank with a cargo ship in Riva's harbor during a storm. Research notes further reveal a wealth of information on the worm spawn from the queen. They possessed extreme intelligence and could possess hosts by entering their brains through the nose. They were also linked telepathically to the queen who spawned them and could not be killed unless you killed the queen who resided within a hive which was invincible to attack due to the queen's magic.