Cormyr/Shadowdale Overland Map

I've uploaded my overland map covering Northern Cormyr and Shadowdale up on the vault. It covers Arabel in the south west, Hullack Forest and Thunder Gap in the south east, up past the Storm Horns, Tilverton, Shadow Gap and Spiderhaunt Woods, to Shadowdale itself in the north-east.

Part of the shelved project, it has encounters balanced for level 7 (if you set global int nChapter2enc to 1, if left at 0 then tougher encounters will spawn), with some new encounters of my own devising thrown in too. Can be used with the Arabel prefab I've shared too.

It also has several hidden sidequest locations scattered over the map - but I haven't made the actual areas for these and they will need developing by the builder.

The goodie system drove me to distraction - as far as I could tell it should be working, but I couldn't get it going. That said, all the needed ipoints are in place on the map for someone who can.

In other news, David Eddings recently died aged 77. I read the belgariad/Mallorean as a young teenager and absolutely loved them. Might have to dig out some copies for a spot of nostalgia.

The project that never was...

...has rightly been put out of its misery. Yep, this is the project-that-I-didn't-want-to-admit-I-was-working-on-because-it-was-unlikely-to-go-anywhere-but-really-was-working-on-regardless-and-making-the-same-overambitious-mistakes-all-over-again. I might make parts of it available on the vault - we'll see. Beginning to think it must be a conditioned behavioural response amongst modders - that's it's impossible to make a short, simple mod. I know that there are plenty of short simple mods out there, but I'm talking about proper modules rather than someones dabbling with the toolset. It does make me wonder

1. if we modders are partly to blame for how the NWN2 community developed
2. if the same mistakes are going to be repeated with Dragon Age

We all know the reason that's rolled out every time someone asks why so few modules for NWN2 are out there is the longer development time in NWN2 and the increased complexity of the toolset. But rather than tackling these problems, are modders acknowledging their presence then just carrying on regardless? How long have some projects been in development now, and how many of the players that we sought to cater to have long since gone?DA is only going to make things more complicated and involved from what I can tell...

Back on track, the main reason I've abandoned the-project-that-never-was is to help out with the writing on BouncyRock's Shattered Dreams. There's some interesting ideas in this and it's a different setting to writing in which is proving a fresh challenge. You'll have seen some of the development reported on Elysius' blog to give a hint of the effort going into this project.

So in case you thought this blog was going to turn into me sharing my holiday snaps and poorly-formed opinions on things, rather than anything related to building for the NWN2 community... afraid you ain't gotten rid of me that easily.