Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

Thirty game years ago, a war was fought in Bloodstone Pass between the monster armies of Zhengyi the Witch King and the civilized forces of the Barony of Bloodstone. At the forefront of the war was Sir Gareth Dragonsbane, who was to become the next baron of Bloodstone and eventually king of Damara. When the war ended, Lord Gareth built two massive walls at either end of Bloodstone Pass. The southern wall was called Damara Gate, and the northern wall, Vaasa Gate. Like its southern counterpart, Vaasa Gate is more than just a wall. It is a well-manned fortress that stretches from one steep mountain face to another. The Gate hosts a thriving market where civilized folk from either side of the wall may trade. Its interior chambers serve as stock rooms and living quarters not only for the soldiers stationed there but also for adventurers on monster hunts. The most detailed description of Vaasa Gate that I could find was from the Forgotten Realms supplement The Bloodstone Lands by R.A. Salva...

Bloodstone Manor is the home of Gareth Dragonsbane, king of Damara. A paladin and cleric of Ilmater, Gareth donates no less than half his earnings to his church. Despite that, Gareth is a rich man, thanks mainly to the bloodstone mining operations that are the lifeblood of Damara. For "Faithless," I had to create a couple of rooms from Bloodstone Manor using the TSR module Bloodstone Pass as my reference. The map in that module dates from nearly twenty game years prior to the start of "Faithless," so there's plenty of leeway for artistic license if I needed to draw upon it. I figured that because of the twelve-year war that troubled Bloodstone Village, the king's manor would be made of sturdy stone for proper defense. The furnishings and decor would have to be elegant but not ostentatious, as befitting a rich paladin and king. I imagine that with the winds blowing off the Great Glacier from the north, Damara would still be cold even in early spring. To keep...

When I first took screenshots of the desert area in "Faithless," Corrugath told me that the landscape looked too mundane. He suggested changing the color of the sky to make the area look like a truly strange place. (Those were not his precise words, but I don't want to quote him directly and risk giving the story away.) It took me a while to change the desert landscape. I wanted to finish the mining camp first, after which, I got sidetracked with enhancements for "Battle of the Builds." It was only yesterday that I finally had a chance to redo the desert area. This entailed changing the colors of the sky and repositioning the sun. Although I didn't touch any other part of the area, when I was done, I sat in awe of the results. The desert acquired a strange kind of beauty. I don't think I got the effect I was going for, but the screenshots I took were amazing nevertheless.

I haven't been able to do any work on "Faithless" over the past week. Instead, I enhanced my "Battle of the Builds" module by adding three new power builds for player characters to fight. I had considerable difficulty creating the custom AI of one of the NPCs, the Blood Scholar, mostly because I had to work around the limitations of the NWN2 engine regarding NPC wizards casting spells with metamagic. When I finally released version 1.18 of "Battle of the Builds," I discovered a flaw in the rangers' AI. To make matters worse, I realized that a long-standing bug in the NWN2 engine was confusing players because clones of their characters were sometimes more powerful than the PCs on which they were based. I immediately set myself to ironing out these flaws. Three days later, I released version 1.19 of the module. Changing and debugging my scripts was unexpectedly difficult. It's a good thing I had invented a trace debugging technique for NWN script...

While idly browsing through the forums today, I discovered that four years ago, someone had posted an NWN1 module called " The Lord of Terror - The Diablo Campaign ". Here's an excerpt from the description of the module. This module is a remake/reimagining of the original Diablo game published by Blizzard Entertainment in 1996, as well as its expansion Hellfire published by Sierra Online in 1997. This module is HEAVILY COMBAT-ORIENTED with very light role-playing. In the four years that this module has been at the Vault, it has had 57,294 downloads as of this writing, and it has garnered 199 votes with an average score of 9.72. Can you believe it? I wonder if players of NWN1 are any different from those of NWN2. Bah, get thee behind me, Diablo.

Despite its abundant veins of bloodstone, the Galena Mountains in Vaasa don't attract as many miners as it could have. Besides the dangerous and hostile creatures that make their home in these mountains, the bone-gnawing cold keeps away all but the most foolhardy prospectors. Fortunately, the Forgotten Realms are never lacking in foolhardy people of any sort, and many of them seek their fortune in the Coldlands. One of the challenges that I faced in constructing "Faithless" was building the mining camp that the player characters will find themselves in. I've never seen a mining camp, much less set foot in one, but that didn't stop me from rising to the challenge. First, I had to do some research, which is not at all difficult in this age of the Internet. To this end, Google Image was my friend. Looking specifically for old photos of mining camps in the mountains, I downloaded as many images as I felt I needed. I also downloaded several images of mountain trails, w...

In my first post, I showed screenshots of an area that I created by modifying an existing area from Mask of the Betrayer . Yesterday, I created an area from scratch. Here are screenshots of what I have so far. The flying bats in the background are from Nihlar's A Cloud of Bats visual effect files. (Nihlar is also known as Amraphael at other forums.) I'll be posting more screenshots as I add areas to the module.

Over the weekend, Corrugath and I annotated the story outline to discuss its areas for improvement. We identified what parts of the story to flesh out and what parts to discard. Our comments, together with those of Melirinda, were color-coded for us to easily spot them from the regular text. We each used different colors, and after a series of exchanges, the text looked like a strange patchwork of tints. All told, it was a very productive virtual discussion. At this point, we have ironed out the main storyline, but there are still a number of side quests and alternative branches that need to be done. Nevertheless, with the material on hand, I decided to create a matrix that identifies which skills may be used in each scene of the story. In this matrix, I blocked out all the skills that players will use on their own as the need arises. These skills are typically the ones that may be used in combat. The skills that I did not block out are the ones for which I need to create situations fo...