Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

Dirtywick's comment on my last blog post made me realize that there are novels set in the Coldlands that I was not aware of. I'll need to read the Sellsword Trilogy to ensure that I keep within the known lore of the realms. To keep my story organized, I wrote a brief timeline of the events that lead up to "Faithless." Much of this is based on the official chronology given by your friendly neighborhood Wizards of the Coast, but I also found a very impressive timeline elsewhere. The events of Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, including their expansions, are not placed in any precise time period, however, so the year in which "Faithless" occurs is equally fuzzy. Not all events in the history of the realms are listed here, of course. Only the ones that are meaningful to "Faithless" are here. All dates in the following chronology are in Dalereckoning (DR). circa -25,000 DR - Death of the god Ulutiu resulting in the formation of the Great Glacier; end of t...

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...

Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite On Monday, I rewrote my story outline, deleting entire paragraphs in several instances and writing new ones. I'm not attached to the first draft that I had written, so I had no problem with demolishing parts of my story structure. The most difficult part for me was coming up with non-combat encounters to break the mind-numbing monotony of battling the hordes. There was only so much of it that I could do before I ran out of creative juices. Combat is the easiest type of encounter to put in a game. One simply decides what monsters need to be in each area and where to put the spawn triggers. It's easy to mass produce encounters this way. Trying to come up with role-playing encounters, on the other hand, is difficult because they have to be individually crafted rather than mass produced. Fortunately, Melirinda has been giving me feedback on the outline that I emailed her. She has an excellent sense of what makes for an engaging RPG story and what doesn...

Introduction Welcome to my very first blog. This is an online Designer's Diary that records my efforts to create an ambitious Neverwinter Nights 2 module called "Faithless." This blog may be of interest primarily to other module makers who use NWN2's Electron Toolset. Players who would like to know how my module is progressing without having to peek behind the scenes may prefer to access my post at the NWN2 Modules forum. Faithless: In the Beginning Life is hard in the cold wastelands that border Vaasa and Damara. A major war had been waged there nearly thirty years ago, but many treasure seekers had since picked the area clean of all spoils. Still, with a bounty on the goblinoids that infest the place, an adventurer could do worse than hunt down goblins for five gold pieces per head. Far more sinister things than goblins have started to threaten life at the border, however, so much so that the goblinoids have offered to ally with the Damarans against this new foe....