Placing Dark Avenger in the Realms

Been slowly getting back to the mod since the hassles of the past few eeeks, and got a new area almost finished and was working on some cutscenes last night. In a break from the toolset I actually played right through Chapter 1 (with some of the revisions I've been working on) to give me a saved game to launch tests in chapter 2 from for balancing. I took a Spirit Shaman as a kind of low-end benchmark (although I do quite like the class). With the party limit in chapter 1 it was much more difficult, so will look into that. Thanks to all for voting on that - what i'll probably do is set the party limit at 4 companions, but in the debug book, I'll eave an option for modifying this. In my playthrough, I only got as far as finishing the first sidequest in Chapter 2 (which took a good 90 mins or so). But man, it was tough going. I think I'm going to ave to scale back on some mobs, and I'll probably increase the number of plot-related XP gains to move things along a little more. But I did enjoy playing the sidequest and really happy with some of the set pieces.

So, I know I'm due a proper update, but not got much to show (again). So I thought i'd post some background. As I've said, Dark Avenegr the idea started based on the intro to a song. But translating that to the game I wanted to incorporate some proper D&D and Faerun lore. Because of some of the ideas I had, I didn;t want to commit to a specific area of Faerun - I didn't want people nit-picking any liberties I took. But, once I got going, I did always build with one place in mind

And that was Cormyr. Now this is somewhere that has been done to death in many products - if you've played pen-and-paper as well as the NWN work (Wyvern Crown etc), and many of the novels. SO there is quite a bit out there. But my main reasons were geographical for the type of terain and layout I was looking for. Chapter 3, which will take you to the city I call Ellesmere Port, which will actually be based on Marsember from FR canon. And I'm working in some Cormyr lore to chapter 2, e.g. the Purple (and Blue) Dragon Knights. Gork (the goblin companion) is also tied in with the Goblin Wars that befell Cormyr, but I won't go into that too much. So i'm going to be moving from 'FR-lite' to 'medium' in terms of formalising the setting, but still keeping the town names I set out with.

In terms of Cosmology, I'm sticking with D&D/Grayhawk canon rather than FR - because that's what I'm most comfortable with. There is one 'sidequest' (although many of the sidequests I have are simply different parts of the main quest which can give different options or make portions of the main quest easier) in Chapter 2 which involves planar travel, and more in later chapters (particualrly the climax, whenever that will be). So rememeber to wear a stick of celery in your lapel.