Cutscene Movie

I was able to test out my cutscene solution and it works like a charm. I am able to switch the camera around the area with ease, although I still have some bugs to work out of the intro movie. The screen shot illustrates how I am able to get shots of the battlefield mixed in with shots of the throne room without needing to reload different areas.

Cutscene Solution

I think I have a solution to my cutscene problems. With some prodigious camera placement, and a little creativity on space I think I can squeeze 2 to 3 combat scenes, as well as 1 or 2 (faked up) indoor shots into a single area. Then the area loads, and I walk the PCs through each of the various story points. When the intro is done, then the PCs are shunted off to the starting area (the Brelish Camp). That only leaves me with two area loads, one on entering the intro, and one on leaving it. I think I can live with that.

By the way, the armors you are seeing are made specifically for the cutscene. I want to show a battle between Galifar I's forces and the remnants of his opposition. The previous armor was for Galifar I's soldiers. The armor today is Daskaran scale (Daskara being the name for the nation of Thrane before it was conquered).

Armor Creation

After having worked on outdoor areas for the past couple of days, I decided to spend some time on another aspect of the game. To my (not great) surprise, I also stumbled upon another bug in the toolset. It's not earth shaking, but it is just annoying enough to really tick me off. Fortunately I figured out a work around.

It seems that when you first create an armor, you can not save any tint information for the armor's base selection. Now, the tint always seems to revert to whatever it was originally each time you change the armor by adding additional models (bracers, shoulders, etc...). The annoying part is that changes you make to base armor tint are not saved. I have been able to get around this by 1) creating an armor, 2) saving the armor and closing the toolset, and then 3) re-opening the toolset and changing the tints. Without closing and re-opening the toolset, none of the tint changes made to the baseline armor stick.

Dragon's Crown

I had this idea that I would be able to use cutscenes in order to give the player a sort of introduction movie before the module starts. Something that outline the roles of rulers like Karrn the Conqueror, Galifar I, and all the way out to King Jarot, that will give the players some background on how the Last War starts and why.

Come to find out, cutscenes in NWN2 are driven by conversations. That means that my plans for jumping around from one great battle to the next, and into and out of throne rooms, is almost busted for sure. For one thing, you would have to wait for each of the various areas to load before their cutscenes played out. Well... the whole idea needs rethinking now.

In the meantime I will continue to plug away at my module. I want to create a few more of the important outdoor areas before I begin to populate them (either with NPC or with encounters).

Walkmesh Problems Solved

I finally solved my walkmesh problems. It took some rearranging of the three various campsites in the area, but I think I have something usable now. The image should be very similar to the one I posted yesterday, but if you look closely, you should be able to spot the differences. The only other real problem I ran into is that the walkmeshes for the two large military tents (in the lower right hand portion of the image) are backwards. Where the tent shows an opening, the walkmesh shows a wall, and vica versa. It's an obvious bug, and I'll wait for a fix. The walk around is, of course, to enter the tents from the rear.

The area itself is now probably about 40% done. My daughter spent a few hours helping me to place various mundane objects in some of the command tents. I have no problem with the swords, and armors, and other implements of war that might be in a soldier's camp, but leave it up to a little girl to ask, "What are they going to eat?" She's been a big help in making the area seem more real.

I'm going to try switching gears now and start working on one of the introduction cut scenes. I've never done a cut scene before, so we'll see just how painful this gets. Hopefully there are some helpful sites out there that can walk me through the difficulties I am sure to have.

Expanded Camp

I spent more time fleshing out my Brelish Camp, and now estimate I'm about 30% done. It is still slow going, but that's mostly because I'm looking through all of the placable lists without knowing exactly what I want or need.

I've also run into a slight problem with the walkmesh and baking. Apparently I'm arranging my placables in such a way as to prevent vast portions of the camp from being walkable. Not what I want. I'll need to play around with the placement until I get something usable.

My First Area

Well I've spent the last two nights messing around with area creation, and I can only say that I hope it gets better from here. The base camp for PCs during the early part of the module will be a Brelish military encampment on the outskirts of Mishann's Crown. I tossed my first attempt, because things just weren't flowing right. I can't stress how important it is to have a drawn design for the areas you want to create... however even that doesn't help if you refuse to look at them during design ;). Never fear I've learned my lesson.

The picture above is the culmination of about 2 hours of work last night. I estimate I'm about 10% done with the area. I really hope things go faster, but I can tell you that I am already starting to get the hang of the new toolset, and am picking up several tricks to area creation. My second attempt at designing the Brelish Camp went much smoother than my first.

Right now I've just got the command tents in place. I still need to add the soldier's tents, supplies, and several sections of ancient ruins.

What Makes an Adventure?

This is an interesting question, and one that is important to answer. Of course there has to be a goal, something that all of the PCs can work towards. There should be obstacles in the way of that goal, something that prevents the PCs from achieving it with ease. The obstacles need to be hard to overcome, but not impossible. And last, but not least, there should be some kind of reward for the hero at the end of it all (this is a game after all).

It should be clear by now (it is to me at least) that the Last War is yet one more of those obstacles blocking the path of the heroes. It's not the goal of the adventure, and it certainly isn't the reward that they expect at the end. It's a stumbling block plain and simple. When designing the rest of this adventure, it's important for me to remember that. The Last War almost becomes another character in the play, one that will misdirect and waylay the PCs when they least expect it.

What Makes a Hero?

So what makes a hero then? Is it doing the expected? Hardly. Is it doing what's required? Not quite. Heroes have responsibilities, yes. They have duties that they can not shirk. A hero must meet all of these challenges and more. A hero must rise above the call of duty, and mere responsibility. A hero must go the extra mile. A hero must do the right thing, even if no one asks him to... or no one wants him to. This is what a hero is.

Now I'm not saying that war doesn't offer up some pretty compelling opportunities for heroes, nothing of the sort. But thinking within the confines of the NWN game, just telling a tale about a battle in the Last War does not make an adventure worthy of the time and effort of a band of your typical RPG type heroes. There needs to be more.

I think that's what I'll talk about next time.

Calling all Heroes!

So, here is one of the more important questions I was going to address, and the one that started me rethinking my entire module design. Why do we need the heroes?

At first the module was going to just be about the fall of Mishann's Crown, a small town on the frontier of Cyre. The Brelish PCs were supposed to stall Cryan forces before finding a way through the town's defenses and finally taking the town itself. Or so they thought. Unfortunately a greater force of unknown foes was also making ready to storm the town, and wipe out any opposition around them. The PCs would then have to escape this final confrontation with their lives and make their way back to friendlier territories. That's all well and fine (and the PCs will still have to accomplish all of this), but it shouldn't be the main focus of the adventure, because we already know it has to happen.

So what is going to make the heroes be... well, heroic?

Random Villians

Building from yesterday's post, I had the thought of making one or more NPCs potential random villains. During the initial module load, these NPCs would get some flag set marking them as a villain which would open up whole new dialog possibilities and actions from them. These would be minor villain roles, perhaps tying into future modules down the road. The idea is to enhance replayablility and make going through the module a more unique experience.

For example, perhaps the first time you play through the module, Joe Soldier is exactly what he appears to be... a tired, lonely soldier, looking forward to the day when he can finally be reunited with his family back home. However the next time you play the module, the switch gets flipped. Now Joe Soldier is actually an agent of the Lords of Dust, just waiting to spring his trap when the PCs least suspect it.

These kind of things take up much more time and planning, however I might be able to pull it off with a limited number of NPCs.

Secrets

One of my new design standards is that every NPC I create is going to have at least one secret. It may not be ground shattering. It may not even be pertinent to the adventure at hand, but everyone is going to get one. Hopefully this will help me to bring the world alive a little bit more, and who knows... some of the secrets might even lead to sub-quests or tie into the main quests themselves.

Why the Last War?

Well, the answer of course, is because the Last War is cool. Actually I have this pet peeve about writing history for a campaign setting, especially if the players never get to experience it in some fashion. Designing a module during the Last War lets me do just that, immerse my players in an aspect of the Eberron Campaign Setting that they might not normally have a chance to experience.

Having said that, creating a setting in history poses some of its own problems as well. First of all it can take a lot of control away from the players. Everybody (with a copy of the ECS) already knows what is going to happen to the Cyran frontier town in this location, in 969YK. It's not a surprise, and the PCs have no way of preventing it (without altering the future - which is a headache I want to avoid).

So how do I reconcile these two different ideas. The answer came to me late last night. I need to stop treating the Last War as part of the adventure itself, and start treating it more as part of the scenery. The module doesn't work if the Last War (and the specific battle in 969 that I'm focusing on) is the main focus for the players. However I think it will add quite an impact if I can make the Last War part of the backdrop. It's something that the PC will constantly be aware of. It's part of the adventure, but not the driving force.

Why Eberron?

Why indeed? There must be some reason that I want to set my module in the world of Eberron. Some of it is nostalgia. Yes, Eberron is a new world, but I broke my RPGing teeth on the OD&D world of Mystara (or the Known World as it was called back in the day), and although I loved that setting (and still do) there were several things about it that just didn't sit right with me. Eberron has many of the qualities that I liked about Mystara (such as intrigue, diverse nations and cultures, dragons who are more than treasure guardians, and the potential for very epic story lines) with fewer of the downsides.

So which of these qualities do I want to show through in my NWN2 module? Intrigue is definitely number one on the list. That means there will have to be secrets for the PCs to discover, power players working behind the scenes weaving a web of lies and deciet for the PCs to be caught up in, and of course some way for the PCs to figure all of this out.

I also want the PCs to be able to control their own destiny (at least to some extent - there are limits of what one can do within the constraints of NWN). Translated directly for my module I think this means that there need to be several possible tracks that the PCs can take, all possibly leading to a different ending.

Something is Wrong

Going over my story lines and various quests and sub quests the other day, I started thinking that something was wrong. Quite frankly what I was trying to achieve with my main quest was turning out to be rather boring and uninspirational. Rather than scrap the whole project, I decided to take a look at it from a different angle. Before I had been focusing on making a module for the Last War. Well... that just doesn't work. I mean anyone who has the ECS knows exactly what is going to happen and when. That doesn't make for an exciting mod. So I started asking myself several questions:

1. Why choose Eberron in general (and the Last War specifically) as a setting location for my NWN2 module? What is going to make such a module special?
2. What game elements are going to make it feel like this module is actually set in the world of Eberron?
3. How is this a story about Heroes?

I started writing this blog to help me direct the thoughts I was having about this module, and so far I'm not disappointed with it. Over the next several days, I'm going to try and answer the questions I posed above (both to myself, and to anyone else who might be reading this). Hopefully the module I'm designing will benefit from it.

The Stranger from Karrnath

What was a minor player in one of my side quests has grown into a possible companion for the PCs. The Karrnathi soldier will play the tank role for the PCs, as well as bring a substantial story role to the table. Things are starting to fall together plot wise, though the module is growing larger than I thought it would. I want to try and keep my first attempt to something manageable so that I have some kind of shot to actually complete it. The epics will follow later ;).

More Plotting

I've spent the last couple of days going through all of my quests again, trying to clean them up in order to streamline things when I finally get the toolset. I've also been designing 2 or 3 different paths to accomplishing each quest (for most of the quests), as well as multiple possible entry points. Having a good design document is the key to rapid and successful implementation, unfortunately I don't think I'm at that place yet ;).

I stumbled upon some pretty good community work down at the NWN Vaults the other day at NWN Vault: User Screenshots (of special interest were the shots of Minas Tirith, Myth Drannor, and the Planescape material). Seeing them made me realize that I'd have to redesign some of my areas, which is not entirely a bad thing. Quite the contrary. It appears that, at least for outdoor areas, the new toolset is leaps and bounds beyond the first.

Backstory

I realized that I needed a bit of an introduction for the module. Something that describes what the Last War is and how it started. I spent today working through a cutscene for the opening in which we see Galifar I's conquest of Khorvaire all the way through to King Jarot's death and the start of the war. It's a bit ambitious, but if I can pull it off, I think it'll add a nice touch to the module.

Brave Companions

The module has three major parts and I've decided that the PC's companion choices will change depending on what stage of the adventure they are at. Since Part I relies heavily on stealthy activities, one of the possible companions will be a hobgoblin rogue whos name is Tak Huukec. Unlike most of the goblinoids around camp, Tak is not a Deneith mercenary. Instead he was born in the depths of Sharn, in an area known as the Cogs. Caught by the Sharn watch for some petty theft, he was given the choice of rotting in some dungeon or joining the army. Tak is beginning to regret his choice when the PCs meet him.

I also plan on having a fighter type companion available, for those players who choose a less martial character. He'll be someone to help out in a fight. The PCs will have to do something for him before he agrees to help though. At somepoint I'd also like to thrown in some help from a Thranish priest (of the Silver Flame), though I don't quite have the details for that one worked out yet.

The Plot Thickens

I've spent most of yesterday and today fleshing out the main plot of the module. It's coming along, but still nowhere near finished. I'm also spending some time developing the NPCs in the first part of the module. It's amazing how these electronic individuals start to take on lives of their own even after as little as a paragraph of writing.

I'm anxious about getting my hands on the actual game (and toolset). Not only will it allow me to get a better feel for what I can and can not do in the module, it should provide me with much better screenshots to show here. Until then, you are stuck with my pitiful conceptual drawings.