Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

My upcoming module, Faithless, is still taking a backseat to another module I'm making for Bouncy Rock's Halloween campaign. I have less than three weeks to complete my little mod of horror, but I'm hoping to wrap it up by next week at the latest. I'm not going to say much about what my module is about. I'd rather have players find out for themselves when Bouncy Rock releases the entire campaign. To compensate for my reticence, I present the following pictures, each of which is worth a thousand words.

I haven't done any work on Faithless over the past week. Instead, I've been working on another module that will be part of Bouncy Rock's Halloween campaign . Deadline for module submissions is less than a month from now, so I'm prioritizing my Halloween module over Faithless. Hopefully, I'll be able to post a few teaser screenshots of this new module over the next few days.

In my last post, I mentioned that my computer self-destructed for reasons unknown, which prompted my sending it to the repair shop. Well, my computer is still at the shop, awaiting delivery of replacement parts. It seems that the supplier has a delivery schedule to follow and won't deliver the parts that I need before the allotted time. I'm hoping that deliveries are made at least once a month. It certainly doesn't look as if the supplier does weekly deliveries. In the meantime, I have to content myself with using Old Unreliable, a computer of mine whose specs barely meet the system requirements to play NWN2.This machine is slow and has a tendency to shut itself down twice a day (but thankfully not more often than that). I'm fairly certain that the more I use this machine, the quicker I'll be sending it to its grave, so I'm hoping that I can get my other computer from the shop before that happens. Speaking of the grave and all things dead, I created yet another ...

It has been a bad week for me. Seven days ago, I found out that I could not turn on my computer and external modem. To make matters worse, I also found out that my phone line was dead. It seems an odd coincidence that three separate machines would choose the same day to malfunction. When I brought my computer to the repair shop, I was told that both my motherboard and video card weren't working and had to be replaced. I can't explain what brought about this massive glitch in my devices. My guess is that my Intel Core 2 Quad processor and my GT8800 video card generated so much heat that they fried each other. Maybe the heat was so strong that it radiated to my modem and melted its innards. In its death throes, my modem then short-circuited my phone line. Sounds like a plausible explanation. Or maybe the gods do not want me to finish my module. Faithless is so blasphemous to the deities of Faerun that the gods have reached across the multiverse to zap my motherboard, video card, ...

Over the past several days, I took a break from area design to try my hand at 3D modeling, something that I've never done before. The closest that I have come to creating 3D models was to retexture several NWN2 placeables. Emboldened with my success in this endeavor, I figured that the logical next step is to try to create a new character head. Stands to reason, right? Right. My objective was to create a pretty half-elven head for one of my NPCs. Anyone who has tried making a female half elf character in NWN2 will understand why I need a new head model. The ones that come with the game are all pretty... pretty ugly. There are a number of heads that are available at the Vault, but none of them are appropriate for my NPC. With no prior experience and no patience to read tutorials, I jumped right in and fiddled with my 3D software. I decided that the best way for me to learn how to create character heads is to examine and tweak the ones that come with the game. This strategy opened up...

The Coldlands is a mountainous region that is rich in heliotrope, a gem that is better known as bloodstone. Despite the abundance of gems in these mountains, only the toughest and most desperate prospectors dare to stake a claim here because of the savage humanoids that infest the region. Gareth Dragonsbane, the king of Damara, offers a bounty on the heads of these creatures, but in attempting to collect these heads, many adventurers have lost theirs in the process. The initial part of Faithless is set in the Coldlands, where the player characters will eventually stumble upon an adventure far more dangerous than collecting monster heads. The very first area that they will find themselves in is a mining camp. Although I had created the initial area last April, I decided to change it because it does not measure up to the prefabs that I've been adapting for my module. I searched the Vault for an area prefab that would make a suitable location for the mining camp. I wanted the area to ...

In my last post, I presented the Basilica of Lost Hope, an area that I recycled from one of the modules of Mask of the Betrayer . Well, I'm junking this area in favor of a brand new one, courtesy of Josh (a.k.a. Anduraga). Josh has done a couple of beautiful area prefabs (namely, Surague Escarpment and Tropical Shore ) and is currently designing areas for "Misery Stone," a highly anticipated NWN2 horror module. Seeing that I had ripped the basilica right out of MotB, Josh decided to make a better one. The resulting area kicks serious ash and is even more terrifying than the one I made. In terms of floor area, the original basilica and the one that Josh made are the same size. The latter looks far more spacious, however, because of its higher ceiling. The stained glass windows are more realistic and are an integral part of the walls. Josh created this area using the RWS Pocket Cathedrals hakpak by Robinson Workshop. He also set up the lighting of the area and added the v...