Recently in Building a World Category

I was thinking on where to start with this project. I thought about beginning with the setting the whole module was going to have, but as I am actually modding something, I think I better leave the theme part for the weekend and start giving out some information on what I am currently doing.

As stated in one of my previous posts, there will be a main town, Adun, where most of the action will begin. It's supposed to be the main player hub, and that presented a couple of questions even before I started mapping; should I split the area in various subzones or make it huge? How are the players going to be presented with the city? Will they just appear in the middle of it? Will they have to move there by their own?

So, I finally decided I'd go with the humongous area version. Why? Well, first, I think It would help giving this certain feeling; as you'll see later in this post, the whole town is placed on a small plateau that should both help when defending it and, at the same time, give a wider field of view of the surroundings. It looks like a good place to build a city, or at least that's what I thought. So, I started giving the area a basic shape... (Click on the image to see it full sized)

Well, I had even worked a bit on the hills on the south when I took this screenshot, but you can see the skeleton of the area already. I also thought for a while on how to distribute the city: (Click on the image to see it full sized)

While I wanted to start the actual articles already, I've been messing with the "theme" of the module for a while these past days. I've started with the main hub already (the city, currently named Adun) but spent most of the time deciding a basic scheme of colors/setting for the whole module.

Now that more or less I've done it, I can't but share it with you. This is the first WIP pic! Click on it to get the full sized version, or click here to see the walkmesh underneath.

It's a bit funnier if you see the whole thing.

Welcome to the first post on the "Building a World from Scratch" series ;) I'll start explaining the tools I'm going to use for the whole process, as of now:

- Electron (NeverWinter Nights 2's ToolSet)

- Time

OK, for those who still don't know about Neverwinter Nights, you feel really ashamed. A bit of backstory: There are basically three NWN games, the first one being an AOL massive multiplayer online roleplaying game (sort of, as it was 1991) featuring the ADnD rules. It's still possible to play it offline, although it somehow misses the whole thing. 

11 years later Bioware brought up Neverwinter Nights, the game that most players actually now as the first one. Following the 3.0 ruleset, the game allowed players to engage in a horrible, predictable and boring adventure, through 4 different chapters, developing their characters up to level 20. There were two expansion sets, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, that added even more bland adventures to the original game, and lots of new content as well. I still play this game. Why? Well, it had the best multiplayer ever designed, as users were given the main tool the developers themselves used to create the whole game, the "Aurora" toolset (later used in The Witcher... although a bit modified, heh), as well as the possibility to easily create and import new content to the game. Needless to say, the game is still sold, and even got premium (paid) modules. DLC before it was common! (We should have understood back then what Bioware thought of this).

Years later, part of the ex-Black Isle team (Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1 & 2) formed Obsidian, and took the reins of the project that would be known as Neverwinter Nights 2 when every single one of us were thinking that Dragon Age would be the natural heir. We couldn't be more mistaken back then. Then, rumors actually spoke about all this I have just explained. I must make a small digression here to say that while Dragon Age was awesome, it completely failed to fulfill my expectations, now you can guess why.

So, Obsidian worked hard on NWN2 and managed to screw everything up. They run out of funds and the shareholders pushed the game out. The result? The most user unfriendly toolset mixed with a completely bullshit campaign I wasn't ever able to play for long enough to even hate it. It was just plain bad. This said, after a couple of patches the toolset actually became quite better in terms of usability. NWN2 also got two expansions, Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehyr. I didn't play through them although I have both. Same as with the previous title, they also brought lots of new content with them. And again, what really counts is what the community added. As it was a hell lot harder to create content for NWN2 (in comparison), it took a while for it to take off... and even now the NWN2 community is still smaller than NWN's.

Still, I'm using the second one just because it just allows a hell lot more. It also takes a hell lot more. Insert your preferred nouns there from the following list: [time, effort, love, pain, work].

This said, we'll start getting our hands dirty on the next chapter! Stay tuned!

So, after quite some time I've decided to take on a project I had dropped long ago, after a forced format (you know what they say about the need to have backups of everything? they're right): building a multiplayer Neverwinter Nights 2 module based on those certain dark and creepy things I do like a lot that are dungeons.

The idea is somewhat simple. There is a main town where playing characters start, with most of the basic things. Taverns, inns, different merchants (and of course, a marketplace), a brothel, the guard barracks, the lord's castle (in this case, an abbey) and random commoner houses. Beneath the main city, a deep complex of tunnels and old ruins of a previous, ancient town built by a long lost civilization.

Of course, there are also more areas outside the city, like the port, the woods, caves, barbarian lands and such things. The region is quite wild, recently colonized by the to-be-named-theocratic-empire. I'll be soon explaining the whole background, as I still have to tie a couple of things out, but, as I said, this idea is already old (and not particularly original, I know), so it's quite developed already.

I'll be showing off the whole process through several posts, sharing my thoughts about different design problems that may arise during it. I might even record a couple of videos if I think it's worthy :p

I must say already that lately I haven't been really having loads of time, so this may take long. But it's still a project I've been wanting to fulfill for over three years already. I guess there's not really going to be a "proper" moment ever, so, why not force it to be? Heh, anyway... I'll be back soon with the first part of the series!