Risen Hero Campaign NWN2

---Something Clever Should Go Here---

2011-12-28T17:28:00.000-08:00

No screen shots this time...Maybe next time.Progress has been slow over the past two months, though I keep the toolset open and chip away where I can. Mostly I have been working on wrapping up the conversations for the ogre tribe and polishing up the demonic merchant's conversations. I just added a new feat today, its part of scope creep. It doesn't do or offer the player anything other than maybe make them laugh. I still need to make an icon, if I'm feeling generous I'll post a screen shot of it completed on the next update.Conversations. I won't complain too much here. Anyone who has followed my blog knows that conversations are the most difficult part of modding for me. They are what make a game, adding depth and diversity to it. A short plot conversation for me is 2000+ words and only a 1/4, if even that, will be seen in any one play through. An example will be the most recent ogre conversation I have been working on. If is purely a optional branch that will add to the main plot line, but won't take anything away if it is not done. You can ask the ogres to help you after a lengthy intro. During the intro 1 out of 7 of the companions will randomly interject. The player will then have a chance to ask the ogres for help. There will be 4 skill based nodes that will only appear if the player has a high enough rank then 2 other opinions. One of the opinions is a slightly evil response that has no skill checks the last if an auto fail, but if the right companions are in the party, 1 out of 5 will interject with a success to move the conversation on.I have recently been playing Fallout 3, and the conversations have been bothering me. They are all very static with little to no change as the game progresses. The one that irritated me the most was the conversation for Gob, a ghoul in Megaton. I found his aunt later in the game and she told me say hi to him. So the next time I was in town I talked to him and nothing. I can't say "Hey I found your aunt" with either a compliment or insult added to it. This little thing, while it adds nothing to the plot takes away from the immersion and game play. I don't know if Bethesda improved their conversations with Fallout Las Vegas or Skyrim, I'll likely find out at some point. So to wrap it up, conversations are important. and I'm working like hell to make sure mine are interesting and have dynamic parts that add to game play. Screen shots next time.

Ogres of the Bone Eater Tribe

2011-10-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

So I have taken a break from conversation writing and moved into a small area within the Sunset Mountains.

Just a point of warning, there will be some minor spoilers from chapter 1 here but nothing too important, so read on.

After returning to the monastery, the player will have the oportunity to return to the mountains after hearing reports of an encampment of creatures. For those who played chapter 1 and chose the talking path through Dor'Gallon's fort, the green ogre mage below should be familiar. He is the new leader of the ogre tribe, The Bone Eaters. The player killed the old leader, the Ogre Crone in Dor'Gallon's Hall, the final battle for chapter 1.

I have been working on some type of inner turmoil for the ogre tribe. I need a reason why they won't kill you in revenge for the crone's death. Right now I have been looking at religion. What better way to cause turmoil? The ogre tribe follows Vaprak, the ogre deity. Under the Crone's leadership, she forced them to follow some other evil, non-giant deity, maybe like Malar. Since you killed her and freed them from her leadership, the ogres will at least talk to you before trying to eat you.

The ogres will offer some assistance with a plot quest given to the player. However, their help will come at a moral cost of sort. A player will be presented with the problem and a choice must be made, and either side of the decision will have positive and negative aspects. This will be far from an evil path and may even be beneficial to a good aligned player. I hope this will be a point in the game where the line between good and evil will be blurred a bit.

Now some information about the area itself. The area is set in a small valley with a flooded, slow moving river. The valley is a flood plane and will eventually be completely underwater (this is implied and will not happen during game play). There are a lot of grasses and ferns but no bushed or small trees. Some flood resistance trees are around as well as numerous dead trees. The land is fairly flat as layers of silt are left behind after each flooding. Also there are no rocks as they are either burried in the silt or washed away.
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For the simple fortification I used a similar designs to Dor'Gallon's fort, since they came from there. The entrance is protected by large berms of dirt with sharpened spikes. Some ruined trebuchets are also in the camp, likely plundered from Dor'Gallon before the ogres left.

Below are the screen shots. Currently the area is nearly complete, I just need to add lighting and a few more effects. The useable objects still need descriptions and all that, and there are a few floating trees and objects that need to be anchored down.

The green ogre mage. The two guards use the A2 playable ogre model so they have unique faces and armor.

The back of the camp and the water fall that feeds the river with mountain water. I still need to finish populating the camp with ogres.

Looking into the camp from the entrance.

Another picture of the camp, this one probably should have been before the last....

The river from the edge of the camp. That is a small island in the middle of the river.

Isn't there suppose to be a second chapter?

2011-08-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

Is there an expected release date? No.

I am hoping to start focusing a bit more time on modding soon, in all likelihood I expect building to increase again in the fall. There are just too many things happening in the summer with family, work and all those water related activities, its hard to commit the time to building.

Chapter 1 Update:

I have posted what should be the final update for chapter 1. The patch.hak may have a couple of files added if players encounter weird stuff, but I don't see any issues arising. Several changes to the fog of war was made, in particular it was changed to passive so the fog will always clear. I like the clear feat and the idea of mapping (as the system was designed by Lance Botelle ), but due to player feedback as well as my testing it didn't necessarily fit my campaign. The update also includes improved ooze scripts, they use some code that Lance Botell provided to to weaken weapons and armor before destroying them. So instead of having the +2 mace destroyed it will turn into a non enchanted mace then precede to drop in penalties, at -5 the weapon/armor will be destroyed.

The Community Project:

I have contributed 2 quest areas to the community project. Both have gone through beta testing and just need some minor updating that will happen later once the project gets closer to consolidating the individual modules. They were both a fun side project and helped the development of Risen Hero. Chapter 2 will include a larger ooze dungeon, which will be different from the community project, but this allowed to test the ooze design, scripts and challenge. The other community area was more an experiment with scripting and creating non-combat puzzles. While the same puzzle will not be present in chapter 2 some of the general ideas or scripting base codes may be reused.

So what is the status of chapter 2?

Plot:

The 2 hub areas, or base of operations, have been completed
The general plot line has been completed, a couple of holes still need to be completed.
Side quest: Several side quest for the swamp area have been created and completed. A couple of side quest have been designed but need to be created in the toolset. Horgath is one of these sidequest, he was introduced in the Halloween Project and appears in both the SOZ expansion and the Community Project, the side quest in Risen Hero will conclude his story. Additional side quest are also added during area and conversation creation, somehow this just happen mysteriously when sitting at the toolset.
Currently I am working on the plot NPC conversations in these hub areas. This is a large undertaking, especially since chapter 2 be a more open play style. In short order the player could engage the final boss, most likely with disastrous results.

Area Design:

There will be 4 area groups: The hub areas, western areas, eastern areas and a swamp area.
Currently hub areas are mostly completed, tweaking will continue throughout design
The weastern areas are in the same geographic area as chapter 1. Players will be able to return to some areas like the waste to complete the side quest there. The ruined village is also accessible and the dead bodies have turned to skeletons or scattered bones. The buildings are a bit more ruined and collapsed. About 4 to 5 areas are in the plans that haven't been created yet.
The swamp area is nearly completed. This will use an overland map to explore the swamp and add to it size while making it manageable to both design and explore. A vendor will be at the entrance to sell items to help survive the swamp and offer a quest about a giant alligator terrorizing the area. Just waiting for the alligator model, right now I have a eight legged alligator using the basilisk model.
The eastern area is only a concept at this point and nothing has been done in the toolset. This area will include the end battle area, which should provide a unique ending.

Design Delays?

I have recently download Fallout 3 from steam and I've been spending too many night fighting the horrors of a apocalyptic wasteland. To make matters worse I have found the Fallout 3 nexus and all sorts of mods for the game.

So that is what is happening. Chapter 2 is going forward, it is about a 1/4 completed (maybe, very rough estimate). Once the main hub conversations are done (or mostly done) I will be back to area design.

Back to Risen Hero, Update first then Chapter 2

2011-06-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

I have just about wrapped up my 2 areas I am working on for the community project.
See here: NWN2 Community Project

I have opened the toolset and started working on the big update I mentioned a month ago. The most recent kaedrin, 1.41.3, has been downloaded and I need to start going through that. I have pulled in all the improvements I made to the oozes in the community project and applied them to RH.

Over the next 2 weeks I expect to have the update just about wrapped up and will run some testing.

Then.....back to Chapter 2 - The Powers of Chaos -

Fog of War and other Updates

2011-05-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

Risen Hero has been updated to include the Fog of War, there were a few issues with its original implementation. Not all the correct files were uploaded to the vault. But, everything is up there now.

During June I am hoping to do the last update on Chapter 1. This final update will make Risen Hero compatible with the most recent Kaedrin, currently that is 1.41.3. Right now RH is at 1.40. I will also update the oozes and their scripts. I offered my ooze blueprint and scripts to Lance Botelle for his project and he made a number of suggestions that I plan on adding. Also with this update I am looking to move some content around. Scripts that conflict with kaedrin's unalter content will be moved to a HAK, so they will override his content should a player choose to drop a different version of his content in the override opposed to the one included with the RH download. I will also move the conflicting 2das to the HAK to do the same. Right now that should be all that needs to be done, I have a few other things I want to look at to smooth out and improve play. I just need to be careful, as I have found improving something that already works often breaks two other things.

With this final update I am hoping to get some feedback on the Fog of War system created by Lance Botelle. Risen Hero uses his default active mapping, the area map has to be open to remove the fog and it can not be removed in combat. I have also included the expert mapping feat that will change it from the active to the passive mapping, the fog is removed with the map closed. The feat is available at level 3 and a companion will meet all the conditions for the feat. So, as a player if you do not like the active mapping, you will only need to complete 1 1/2 areas before the feat is available. If you like the mapping you can choose not to get the feat and all is good.

As a player what do you think of the fog? Currently there is very little available content with the fog. I have created a poll that I will use to help make some decisions on the FoW for this final update. Please complete it and provide any comments. Thanks, Shaughn.

Temporarily: Risen Hero on Hold

2011-04-17T17:33:00.000-07:00

For the past month I have put Risen hero on hold and it will likely be for the next moth or so. I am hoping this break will re-energize me once I get back to building, much like the break between chapters 1 and 2.

I have started work on the community campaign, which is shaping up to be one hell of a game! I will be contributing 2 quest to this game. One of the quest will involve Horgath, seen in previous community campaigns (Halloween and SOZ expansion). I am hoping to develop a bit more of his back story, the conclusion to his story will be in the Risen Hero campaign (part of chapter 2, the next release).

I don't want to give away any spoilers of the community game, but I look forward to it; there are a number of very talented community members working on it.

On a separate note.
I have broke out my old HeroQuest board game by MB, and I have been playing it with my two boys (6 & 8). It is a fun run down memory lane and a great experience with my kids. It is fun watching their reactions as I describe the room they enter or seeing the fun in their faces as they slaughter goblins and orcs.

Who are all these NPC and why do they think they get to talk?

2011-02-19T13:25:00.000-08:00

So apparently Chapter 2 needs to have a bunch of dialog.

The swamp is mostly complete, with 75% of the sub areas completed. Still trying to decide if I want to add goodies, which will need to be completely reworked.

I have recently left the swamp and moved back into the plot areas. While making non-plot areas is fun, it does nothing to bring the story closer to it's end. They also tend to be a bit lighter in conversation and a chance to try new and different things with scripting. The main two area that are currently being put together are the Monastery and a second base of operations that will be located within the swamp.

The monastery is nice since the area is complete and polished, and most of the NPCs are created. They will be getting all new conversations that go with the second chapter, and that is where I am now. I have about three complete at this time and several others in various states. Some for the minor NPCs will have conversations rather similar to their chapter 1 conversation, with only the major conflict information changed. I have also added several more NPCs to the monastery that were met throughout the first chapter. The new area will have less NPCs and more that fall into a minor role. Currently only 2 will have more in depth conversation that tend to take forever to write.

Once I get these conversations and associated journal entries completed, I will be leaving the plot areas and will start work on the Horgath's side quest. He was originally introduced in the Halloween Community Project, then his fall was part of the SOZ holiday expansion. With the completion of that side quest, the player will be able to end his story and maybe offer him redemption.

Working On Big Update

2011-02-06T07:29:00.000-08:00

Getting ready to sit down and do a large update to chapter 1.

I decided to do a few play through of chapter 1 again for two reasons. First is I am starting to test different plot areas that are mostly complete. It is easier to use a character that has completed the game and has the items, bonuses and consumables opposed to trying to levelup and equip a new character.
The second reason for the play through is I have reached a dialog heavy part of design. I need to start working on all the dialog for the monastery as well as the second new base of operations. These will fill the player in with the plot and direction while starting to answer the questions from the conclusion of chapter 1. I found it more helpful to read the conversations of the companions and the NPCs in game opposed to opening the toolset and reading them there.

I was surprised how many little things weren't working quite right that were during playtesting. Fortunately I only found one large issue that has already been uploaded in the patch.hak. So I have a list of things to go and add or modify. While I am going through those items I have also gone and created two new scripts that need to be added throughout the campaign. The party will now receive experience for disarming traps. I have gone through all the base traps and created a CR based on damage, number of targets or radius effect, magical effects and saves. That CR is further modified by the traps DC to detect and disarm. The script will also check for a local variable so custom traps or the dart and arrow traps can be given a set CR since they do not use a trap_base_type. This is also the first scripts that I have written that pulls information out of a 2da. I am using the experience 2da, by finding the character level and the trap CR I pull out the appropriate experience to be awarded. The second script will give a single character experience for picking a lock. The experience is based on the difference of the lock DC verse the characters open lock skill rank including all bonuses. In regards to experience I have also modified the sneak script. I have discovered it is only giving the character who is player controlled the experience for sneaking past encounters. This throws off the experience levels, as the party would gain the experience for fighting the encounter so they should gain the experience for avoiding it.

With this update I am also looking at adding Lance's For of War. http://worldofalthea.blogspot.com/2011/02/area-map-fog-of-war.html
I am still deciding whether to use the original or the passive system. I like the original, but know that most of the feedback on the bioware forum and vault prefer the passive system. But for now I can set the waypoint for maps not effect by the fog. The only area that will likely take advantage of the map unavailable will be lost in the mountains, as I designed the area in a way that made the area map mostly useless.

So I am off to the toolset to find all the traps and locks.

OOZE GALORE

2011-01-16T17:08:00.000-08:00

Oozes and slimes. I have been going back to these creatures for my swamp area. Some players may have found them during chapter 1, if they snuck through Dor'Gallon's fort, but even then they were completely avoidable. The 3 oozes that made it into chapter 1 will be in the game plus a number of other oozes, jellies, slimes and cubes.

In chapter 2 they will be 1 of the three factions that wander the swamps, the other two are undead and lizardfolks. When wandering the swamps, in the southern portion, oozes will pop up up as wandering monsters.

Oozes have acids that can destroy both armor and weapons. Whenever an ooze is attacked there is a reflex save to destroy the attacker's weapon, main hand first then off hand. When oozes attack there is a reflex save to prevent armor from being destroyed, shield first then armor. If the reflex save fails the individual item also has a save before getting destroyed. I figured magical items should be more resilient then mundane items. For the items save it rolls a d20 plus a bonus. The bonus is figured by first counting all the item properties, then using the price of an item to assign a multiplier, (<18,000 x1, 18,000 - 42,000 x2, 4,2000 - 130,000 x3, etc). The DC is taken from the ooze, the bigger and nastier the ooze the higher the DC, the DC is then increased by the number of times the weapon has been exposed to ooze acid. Roll = d20 +(# properties * cost multiplier) vs Ooze DC + times exposed. At some point I will need to set up a script for a blacksmith to restore your weapons and armors or an item to restore them. There will be an Ooze resistant ointment that can be used on armor and weapons and will provide a immunity to the ooze for 6 rounds. during that time the exposure numbers will not go up. The oozes will not dissolve plot items or other items marked immune with a local variable.

On damage the oozes will also split if attacked with a slashing weapon. This is for weapons only and will not split if slashing damage is done with a spell. The oozes will decrease in size by 50% with each split and their hitpoints will decrease by 1/2. The ooze will go no smaller than 25% it's default appearance size. When fighting oozes if the wrong weapons are used the player will quickly be surrounded by a swarm. Even low level oozes can be difficult with bad tactics.

Recently, I discovered an error in my scripting. Weapons were being destroyed when oozes where damaged by spells or eldritch blast. The Fred solved the issue and everything is working fine. I need to get that updated script into chapter 1, so far no one has reported it. So either they are close enough to the oozes that they think it is suppose to happen or their weapons are either ranged or just good at making the ooze saves.

I have also created a script system for oozes to be on the ceiling. I originally started using the acid blob traps in my swamp ooze area, but didn't like how it worked. A player shouldn't be able disarm an ooze over their head and traps are immune to damage. So I made a few blueprints and a number of scripts. In the toolset an ipoint is place where the acid blobs will hang out, they are immobile on the ceiling. At the first heartbeat they spawn in the actual ooze placeable and destroy themselves. I do this because the ooze placeable uses the citymblock appearance and it is invisible in the toolset. The ipoint makes it easy to the place the oozes but I was unable to mouse over and target it during testing. Initially the item is unusable and just hangs out hidden. There is a search radius around the ooze that the player may discover it and there is an attack radius. If the ooze is not found and the player is within the attack radius, it will "drop" down onto the character doing 2 d4 of acid damage and spawn in an acid blob. If the ooze is discovered the placeable changes to usable and has a green glowing ball floating in the area marking the ooze location. The ooze may then be safely targeted from a distance. If the ooze is killed the player gets xp on a scale based on their level, if it isn't killed the placeable item is destroyed and an acid blob is spawned. What is nice about this as well is, if the player has the feeling that some evil designer decided to pepper a corridor with ceiling oozes they can launch several aoe spells and try to wipe out a bunch. Those that are not killed outright will drop down and attack.

I am still working out a few things with this system, but I feel at this point it is nearly complete. The only thing I really need to do is modify the newly spawned acid blob to reflect any damage it received on the ceiling before dropping.

Another ooze related addition for this area is slime zombies. Base on the olive slime zombies from the Tome of Horror source book. While there are no olive slimes, I thought having the zombies would be a nice touch for this dungeon crawl area.

Here is a list of the oozes: (no screen shots, even though I've been testing like mad)

Simple oozes. Will split and destroy non magical items (item has no properties)
Acid Blob CR2
Grey Ooze CR4

Dangerous Oozes, will destroy magical items.
Black Pudding CR7
Living Muck CR9

With the oozes I have been setting up most encounters to have small number of the difficult oozes with a large number of the simple oozes. That way some items will be left after the fight. Certain points will have much more of the dangerous oozes and the party will either need to rely on spell and ranged damage or have the immunity ointment.

Jellies: Will not destroy items but will still split.
Ochre Jelly CR 5
Mustard jelly CR7 -Has a slow aura surrounding it.

Gelatinous Cubes: Do not split and do not dissolve items. Have damage resistance /magic
Normal cube CR3
Large Cube CR9
Huge Cube CR19

For the slime zombies their CR is between 1-3, depending on their source creature. Right now I have humans and lizardfolks, but some other swamp creatures may become slime zombies. I have been using Derek H's zombie skins, zombie_egg for these creatures.

For a large slime area I figured that there needed to be some kind of slime cult or worshipers. So there will be pockets of slime clerics and wizards that will attack from behind the hoards of oozes and slimes. I still need to go through and customize their spells to reflect their love of oozes and acids. I still haven't descided what the end boss will be for this area. I have the spot figured out and a little puzzle to get into that spot. I will need to come up with something that is mostly ooze like but has some form of intelligence, and be of monsterous size.

Demonic Merchants and Their Wares

2011-01-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

I have been working on a group of demon merchants that have been summoned to trade with the player. The player holds no power over them and they are only interested in gaining money and power with no real interest in the player's success or failure.

Once the merchants were fleshed out a bit and given a bit of history they needed wares worthy of demons. They will not generally sell items found at standard merchants. Instead the majority of their stock will be unique items. I have gotten a lot of suggestions and great ideas from the community.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/167/index/5499332

Below I have included a screenshot of the merchant and some of the new unique items and custom content. With these item I have started to edit some of the item property 2das. Allowing for additional feats to be added to items as well as custom spells so that not every item has a unique ability on use. The areas below are partially finished. Lighting both placed and area have not been touched as well as a few more visual effects may be added. The first three merchants all have usable and working crafting stations: smith, magical, alchemy.

The Damned Smith

Cursed to an eternity of crafting arms and armors for the Blood War this smith hammers away day and night with now rest.
Right now I have been playing with a animated suit of armor to actually sell and buy things from the player, figuring the smith is unable to leave his hammer and anvil. The suit may stay or be thrown away allowing the player to interact directly with the smith. He will carry a variety of items but nothing made from cold iron. Like all demons he is paranoid, he likely has a stash somewhere for both his own protection and to earn him favor with more powerful demons, but it is not for sale.

Items: (not all)

-There are ten Celestial Killing items, eight melee and 2 range. These are all adamantine, +2/3 attack to good. About half have a plus 1 enchantment and they all have a damage property that celestial aren't immune to or have a high resistance to.

-There are also ten Devil Slaying items, eight melee and 2 ranged. These items are all alchemical silver and and a +2/3 attack vs lawful evil. These also have additional damage that will maximize damage to devils. Depending on the items power it may or may not have a +1 enchantment.

The above twenty items will not have a enchantment greater than +1, as they are considered specialized items against certain foes. The global on equip script has also been modified so there is a 25% chance that the user's alignment will adjust towards evil due to the corruption forged into this weapons.

-Abysmal Battle Axe.

This axe is shroud in flame causing additional fire damage. The red glow of the axe will light the area similar to a touch but hiding will be near to impossible.

-Cursed Kama of Envy.

Once owned by a jealous dwarven monk who sought to be better than every other monk in his monastery. When confronted by his superior the dwarf struck him down in anger. The dwarf's god sentence him to an eternity in the weapon that he used. On hit this kama will select one ability and shift the wielder's ability towards the opponent ability score. Each consecutive hit that the same random ability is chosen will increase the shift and the duration of the shift.

-Dagger of Unrelenting Attacks.

This +3 dagger allows the wielder to attack again and again against any opponent. They will not back down or become filled with fear. While they may not realize the danger to themselves due to the intelligence and wisdom penalties they will have both haste and barbarian rage to aid them in their attacks.

-Dire Claws (kamas using sunlee's claws) main hand and off hand.

These +2 claws will cause slashing bonus damage with one hand and bonus piercing with the other, while allowing for an increased parry ability. While these blades are sold separately there is no special bonus for equipping both of them other than just looking cool.

-Festering Disease

Disease and death were crafted into this long sword by the Damned Smith. While it is an unenchanted blade, it offers a +3 attack bonus and will infect the opponent with filth fever with a very high DC to resist. Unfortunately the blade does not spare the wielder from it's disease process and they suffer both a constitution and charisma decrease.

-Gluttonous Blood Drinker

This club feast on the blood of it's opponent. Upon inspection it appears to have no magical abilities, but once it hits an opponent it starts to grow in damage. Each consecutive hit against the same opponent will add an addition 1d4 of damage. At each 5th hit the player movement rate slows by an increasing percentage as they become bloated and full. Starving the weapon and time will remove the slowing effect.

-Soul Taster

This +2 scimitar actually steals fragments of the soul and give them to the user as vampiric regeneration. There is also a 20% chance that the wearer will shift in alignment towards their target.

-Wing Ripper

This scythe was created for fighting winged opponents. For simplicity it attacks racial groups that generally have wings. Dragons, feys and outsiders as well as any NPC with the wing feat. The weapon itself is only a +1 weapon with bonus to hit the above racial groups. On hit the opponent must make a reflex save to keep their wings or be permanently slowed.

-Plate of the Fallen paladin

This +2 full plate belonged to a fallen paladin. Due to the loses of the paladin's divine abilities the armor grants the wearer the abilities of a level 2 blackguard. Dark Blessing, Smite Evil and Bull Strength once per day. The armor is only usable by evil characters, but it won't restrict anyone from putting it on. Once wore it will enforce the alignment by shifting the wearer to an evil alignment.

-Zombie Hide Armor

This +1 studded armor provides the wearer with darkvision and a +4 AC vs undead, if they don't mind the charisma drop.

-Wright Hide Small Shield

This +2 small shield allows the player to bash their opponent once per round doing 1d4 of bludgeoning damage as well as the chance to paralysis the opponent. While bashing the player will suffer a -3 shield AC penalty for 1 round.

-Devil Hide Mask

The tanned face of a devil is worn as a mask. Granting the player an outworlder's vision. They gain an AC bonus and true seeing while suffering a charisma penalty.

Forsaken Desire

This succubus who turned down the advances of a powerful demonlord was cursed with aging. Though she may be immortal everyday her wrinkles deepen and her body weakens.

This demon will sell magical items to the player. She will carry scrolls for the player to increase their spellbook, note they will not be friendly spells. There will be no heroism, haste, globes of invulnerability. Instead fear, disintegrate, crushing despair, feeblemind and such.

Items:

-Hanged Crinimal's Head

This mummified head belonged to an executed criminal. dried bat wings have been crudely sown to the side of the head. The head is a single use item and once thrown into the air becomes reanimated and acts as a summoned creature until the spell ends, when it falls lifeless to the ground if not killed first.

-Crown of the Damned

Only usable by warlocks this crown offers them ability focus feats to improve their eldritch blast. (feats in kaedrin's pack)

-Flute of Control ***Updated***

This flute is crafted from a dead god's rib bone. Each use requires a sacrifice from the user and the results differ.
One each use there is a 1% chance of death. Otherwise the player must make a will save (death type save), the DC for the save decreases with higher perform skills. If the save fails the player takes 1 of 15 random effects. The duration of the effects are decreased with a higher spellcraft skill. Penalties: disease, poison, blind, slow, ability decrease, natural AC decrease, attack bonus decrease, silence, spell failure 100%, negative level. The target must make a will save, again the perform skill effects difficulty of the save. The target then has 8 effects. -4 to AC & attack bonus, charmed, frightened, paralyzed, confused, insane, dominated, death. Higher skill in perform tilts the random choice towards the end of the list.
-Profane Ring

Created through dark rituals using a ring of a good Deity. This ring offers a +3 bonus to saves, and the ability to cast darkness 3 times a day.

-The Lyre of Orpheus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFb8AoiwmDw&feature=related

Twice per day the player can use the lyre. The target must make a will save or be killed, on success the Target takes damage. The damage and will save is based on the players perform skill. There is a 5% chance that the players strumming the lyre will anger the gods and they will be struck dead with no save.

-The belt of Unenduring Speed.

The wearer is under a effect similar to the spell haste, however they are unable to keep up with their increased thirst and hunger and also suffer the effects of fatigue.

-Wand of Darkness

50 charges of darkness, what more could you ask for.

Mistress of Passion

This Lilitu (from the Fiendish Codex I) acts as both the alchemy merchant and the divine merchant. Don't let her name or first appearance fool you. She would be more likely to kill in cold blood then to grant you your desire and passions.

Items:

-Belly of Blades

This sand like potion will rip through the drinkers stomach after drinking and surround them with blades similar to the blade barrier spell.

-Demonic Berserker Potion

Causes the the drinker to go into a battle rage similar to the frenzy berserker.

-Fleshing Gauntlets

These gauntlets act as a +1 spiked gauntlet doing 1d4 of piercing damage. Three times a day they can be activated for a duration of 2 rounds. During that time they will rend the flesh from their opponents causing and addition 1d6 slashing damage and a 1d4 decrease to constitution and charisma. A fortitude save will decrease the damage by half with no ability decreases.

-Hell's Fire

This potion will surround the player in a ball of fire similar to flame strike.

-Potion of Detect Undead

-Potion of Negative energy Protection

Will cause the drinker to ignore the first 5 point of negative energy damage for two hours. During that time they have a 10% vulnerability to positive energy damage.

-Potion of Remove Magic

Same affect a dispel magic

-Potion of Stoneskin

-Potion of True Seeing

-Taste of Demon

This potion will transform the drinker into a herzou for three rounds.

-Vial of Demonic Blood

This potion will give the effects of Spell Protection
-Poison Tooth ***Updated***
This fake tooth fits into the mouth of a character and allows them to make a touch attack once per round, unlimited uses. The player must have a vile of poison in their inventory to use the tooth and a random vile will be used with each bite. There is no check to apply poison to the tooth and a successful bite will cause 1d4 of piercing damage and apply the type of poison vile used. Should the attack miss the player must make a check equal to the apply poison check to avoid poisoning themselves. Certain races immune to the poison bite, constructs, elementals, undead and oozes. if the player chooses to bite them then several things can happen. When biting constructs and earth elementals there is a chance to break the tooth, destroying it. biting oozes causes acid damage to the biter, and fire damage for biting fire elementals. Biting an undead will infect the player with a random disease.

The Lord of Kiste

This fury little demon is filled with greed and is actually a very poor merchant. He doesn't want to part with his loot and would rather pay high to avoid losing an item in a drawn out haggle.

Still playing with the walkmesh helper but eventually he will be standing on the crate he is currently in front of looking the player in the eyes. I am also looking at creating a script for when his store closes, it will have him try to steal a consumable from the player and add it to his hoard.

Items:

-Box of Holding

Not nearly as convenient as a bag of holding

-Enchanted Lockpick

Grants the carrier bonuses to thieving skills

-Everlasting Inkwell

Originally made for scribes this vial and can exploited. Two times a day it contents dumped on the ground creating an effect similar to the spell grease.

-Face Paint, Camouflage

Provides effects similar to camouflage spell

-Face Paint, War

Provides effects similar to the spell heroism

-Mirror of vanity

Grants the user a charisma bonus due to their over grooming and can cast hold person once per day.

-Robes of the Madman

Trapped within these robes, that were once +2 Robes of the Shining Hand, is a genius madman. Now the influence of the madman will effect all who wear these robes. The weaer will be granted bonuses due to massive intelligence the madman had in life, but they suffer both penalties to their charisma and wisdom. aAn additional effect of the robe will cause the wearer to often shout out random phrases as they adventure through the land. Phrases are either based on their current actions, attacking, sneaking or searching, or the areas types they are in (interior, underground, exterior, etc).

-Rod of Dragon's Breath

This rod hold 3 charges and each time it will unleash a powerful black dragon's breath attack.

-Bag of Greed

Work in progress may be dropped due to mechanics. Looking to make a bag that will have a chance to either duplicate an item within itself or destroy an item.

The Keeper of Artifacts

This rat-like demon shroud in purple fire has one of the largest collections of artifacts within the abyss. All manners of creatures seek him out to make deals and trade with. He will not accept gold, but wants items of interest and power and will offer unique rewards for them. The demon is short tempered and will only make an offer once allowing the player no time to consider the consequences of the deals.

This merchant has no store but will instead dig through the players items offer vague rewards for the items. The more powerful the item the better the reward. The player may be granted ability and skill changes, bonus feats and other unique items.

Several examples of items he may take. (Not going to give you too many because I don't want to spoil the surprises.) He will take the vial of life, for it was created in the upper planes and holds much power and could be horribly devastating if corrupted by evil. He will also take either Loroshin's Rage or Redemption, a long sword found in chapter 1.

Lots of the items above where created base on community members ideas and suggestion as well as from various dnd source books.

Planescape Chant

2010-12-14T16:21:00.000-08:00

Progress on Risen Hero has slowed down to a crawl over the last month and will definitely be slow for the next few weeks. Several reasons for this: First and most obvious is the holidays. The season of shopping and weekend parties is here. The second new time sink of mine is the game Left for Dead 2. Normally I have minimal interest in 1st person shooter games, but this one is like crack. So my nights are often spent shooting zombies instead of working in the toolset. Finally Kamal has released an updated Path of Evil to playtest. He has modified a bunch of stuff and added a number of new areas that I am looking forward to playing.

With RH I have been kicking around the idea of adding another companion, because apparently I like to torture myself with massive conversations that have too many branches. I have been mulling this over for a bit and knew if I was going to add this companion I needed to do it very early in the creation of chapter 2. The second chapter will open up and come away from the linear play of chapter 1. If I wait too long to add the companion, updating conversations would be a massive task to include them correctly.

That idea has come to pass but instead of one companion I am adding 2. In a moment of pure genius I figured how to limit conversations, one of them is a mute. He will still have a base conversation and interjections into NPC conversations with probing stares and dramatic fist shaking. The two new companions will be found together and will be using the relationship system. Their relationship will be between level 1 and 2, so they will join with individual bonuses if they are both in the party.

As I started writing their intro conversation, their history and personalities started to emerge. About half way through the conversations I discovered that they were not native to Faerun, but instead came from the Hive in the city of Sigil. This called for a immediate rewrite or modification of the first half of the convo. As I needed to work a bit of chant into the conversation. So now the new companion gets to call people fun things like Berks, Bashers and Cutters. She also gets to tell people to shut their bone-box, or pay up some jink, all while avoiding being added to the dead book.

The key as a research chant is having her conversation lines remain understable. It would be very easy to turn her conversation lines into complete gibberish very fast. Luckily not being overly familiar with the dialect helps, as I need to be able to read and understand what I am writing. For the most part just a word or short phrase is replaced with the chant. These are often easily figured out using the content of the conversation. So my approach will be little pieces here and there and the phrases and words used will be fairly consistent. If she uses a phrase she will generally use it for that saying instead of switching back and forth between common and the chant. I have included several lines with a lot of chant and those will be difficult to understand. But with the PC responses if the player has a high enough lore skill they will translate the line (and earn a small xp bonus) or they can either ask a companion or just say what and have the line translated. These will be very limited. Right now I have two such lines. One is a side-quest opener and the second is how the player discovers where they come from and kind of why they left. "We lived in the Hive half a turn back, but a cony-catcher peeled us into some slippery business and we had to bolt from the Anthill."

At some point I will put together some decent screen shots of the areas I have been working on to break up these rambling posts.

No Screen Shots?????

2010-11-16T07:50:00.000-08:00

The overland map is just about done.
-I need to work on the goodies. I am planning to create swamp specific placeables and not use the SOZ goodies. Most likely I will be using something similar to wyrin's foraging system.
-I changed the lighting a bit. I received a comment about another green swamp, so I have taken it and changed it to more of a brown area. The lighting I originaly used was the default swamp lighting from the OC, which is very green. I tweaked the colors making everything more grey and brown, generally making more of a drab area. The area fogs have also been changed from green and yellow to tan and grey. It is a darker lighting, but I do think it looks nicer. I did leave the water a darker green, but I figure there is just a high algae count.
-The wandering monsters are all set. I have created three areas within the swamp and each area has a specific creature. Slime, lizardfolk and undead. There will be an sub-area for each main creature type with a boss. Once the boss has been defeated that group of creatures will be gone. This next part I haven't started looking at too much but will give it a try if it possible with the system. I would like to go and if 1 of the groups' boss is killed then they will no longer spawn. But the balance of the swamp has been thrown off and I would like to increase the chance for spawning creatures in the other areas. Kill of the lizard folk and their chieftain and they will no longer have war parties to protect their territory and hunt the undead so the undead numbers will increase and cause the player more trouble. Once all three of the groups have been killed the chance of encounter will greatly decrease and mostly be natural predators: alligators, snakes and such.
-The final thing I need to complete is the area transitions from the swamp to the sub-areas. The placeables are all in the swamp so they won't be spawning like SOZ. I looked at the spawning in but with the true .5 scale I didn't like the look and I don't want all these big blue glowing placeables either. I am either looking at making a trigger that will start a conversation if the location has been spotted. With the spot an area transition VFX will be placed in the trigger location. The other option I am considering is using the SOZ system but instead of spawning in the location placeable spawn in a marker. So all the locations will have the marker outside them to start the conversation to enter. This is most likely what i will be doing, just need to come up with a nice looking placeable to mark these locations.

I have been working on 3 of the sub areas so far. 1 is 100% complete. A smaller cave complex filled with myconids (thanks to RWS). My 5 year old drew up the plans and populated the mushroom caves. I did have to redirect his original plot as it was complete and epic story in itself. The 2nd area is nearly completed. It needs a few conversations and loot. It is for much later in the game as the CR is well beyond what a starting player would be at in chapter 2. The final area is a set of ruins that is populated by a demon cult all it needs is to have loot added and lighting/sounds.

At this time modding has been going very well. I have only try a few areas in game so far. Most likely I will try to get the swamp area mostly complete then go through it tweaking and improving. So it will be a while to I put up a bunch of screen shots.

I would like to thank everyone who has played through chapter 1. The feedback has been great and I have been keeping up on the little bugs here and there that are found. Checking that page is definitely a great way to gain some motivated before jumping into the toolset!

Swamp Overland

2010-10-22T05:01:00.001-07:00

Since the last post, I have been working on the swamp overlandmap. At this point I think I have most of the area design all set. May need to reduce a few VFXs to lower some of the memory usage, maybe too many interior tan fogs over the mucky water. I borrowed the OC swamp day/night cycle and just increased the fog and decreased the daytime light intensity.

For the area I tried to maintain a true 1/2 scale, unlike SOZ that uses 1/2 scale for visibility but isn't a true scale. As for creating a swamp it was a true challenge figuring out how to create the land with a workable walkmesh and have minimum dips and bumps. I found what would be nice rolling countryside in a normal area turned into massive hills and holes. After a few different attempts to on how to create the random walkpaths through the swamp I discovered a fairly easy way to do it. I had created all the major points within the swamp first and just had to connect them. I flattened the ground so it was .1 higher then the water, with with a massive brush I used the noise feature at 100%. That created the random low and high points then it was a matter of raising and lowering the terrain to connect the low spots and smooth out the high spots. For doing that I used a inner of 3 and outer of 4 at around 15%. The water is all unwalkable for a couple of reason. The first is there are alligators in there and the second was trying to maintain a walkable height so characters wouldn't disappear just wasn't going to happen.

So now onto the terrain triggers, spawning 2das and whatnot.

Does anyone know of a good overland map tutorial. I search the vault and come up with very little. The official one is garbage and barely tells you anything. Right now I am going through the global scripts and poking through both SOZ and WPM to figure this out.

Below are some screen shots:

Chapter 2. Back to the toolset

2010-10-15T17:16:00.001-07:00

I have mostly wrapped up play-testing kamal's Path of Evil. It was a fun game and should definitely make every one's to-play list. He did a great job creating an evil game. Until this game I always was never able to complete a game playing evil. I definitely plan to use some of his approaches to evilness when creating evil routes in Risen Hero.

Below is a screen shot from Path of Evil. It is the general area from Risen Hero. In the upper left corner you have the Trielta Hills where the Ruined Village was. Then off to the right is the Sunset Mountains, where the monastery and Dor'Gallon's fortifications were. What took a whole game to cross, my character in POE was able to do in 1 to 2 seconds. But then again that guy was a hell of a runner. When I found the scale in the bottom cornor he could run 120 miles in like 4 seconds.

So building Chapter 2.

I made a bit more of a suspense or suprise ending to chapter 1 than I originally planned for. But it seemed to fit best in that spot and trying to place it into the beginning of chapter 2 wouldn't have worked as well.

For chapter 2 I am trying to grab the player and bring them right back into the game with the start. You get to return to a familiar area, had to do just a little updating to show the passage of time. The bigger twist I withheld for the beginning of this chapter. I won't give it away, but it was something that was very hard to do and I've been thinking about it for quite a while. I've been trying to see if I could avoid it or change it, but for the story demands it so it is happening whether I like it or not. But enough of that.

First day back and I updated an area, spent a bit of time in the visual effect editor, wrote and scripted 2 cutscenes (still need to do static cameras), created a new club with a on-hit script and a bunch of other stuff. So it was probably one of the more productive times I've had with the toolset. Maybe being away for a month just having this stuff rattle around might have helped.

With chapter 2 I plan on opening up the play, breaking free of the linear play of chapter 1. The player is now more powerful and the marauding army has been broken. The player has more allies and is no longer running for survival. To create a bit more of this free play I am working on a wold map. Yes, a world map, I don't really like overland maps. Too much walking and waiting. You have to load the overland map then trek across it then load the area you trying to go to. If there are wandering monsters you need to load the battle area then reload the overland map. So I will use the world map, click and go.

I do plan on using the overland map but more for individual area. I have a swamp that the player will be mucking through. For that area I am looking at using the overland map. There will be the plot area they are looking for and numerous other areas of interest they can look into. I am hoping to create more of a vast feeling to the area and offer more side quests. The swamp will be similar to the Waste area in chapter 1. A bunch of non-plot areas to gain experience, develop the character and just do and find neat stuff.

An another thing I have been thinking about (but no plans yet) is using the overland map to create a city. It will decrease the time needed to develop the city and reduce resources need to run a full busy city with wandering NPCs yelling out speak strings and such. In the overland map I could see some guards, or other NPCs wandering around to interact with. Then the individual areas accessed through the overland map could be a single street, alley, park or building interior. I think creating a single vibrant street would be much easier and a better experience for the player then trying to create a block or two that have maybe 1 or 2 points of interest and the rest is fluff. I hope to cut down on the 3 dozen NPCs either that don't talk or all use the same random talk tree.

So there it is. Chapter 2 is in the works.

Update done just need to pack it and upload it.

2010-09-27T19:20:00.000-07:00

Risen hero has been out for two weeks and over two hundred downloads. I am also very excited that the majority of feed back has been very positive. Fortunatley there appears to only been three larger bugs all of which have been corrected.
I managed to break an appearance slimming down the model hak pack
Left out a condition check for a companion that caused a plot conversation to fail. A fair amount of people decided to kill the half-orc barbarian thug.
And for some reason one script didn't fire based on int checks. Added a redundant journal check and everything went fine.

Spent the last day cleaning up some grammar, punctuation and bag spell check choices. Kamal created a great list of things to cleanup.

I have also added a few weapons and suits of armor in my ooze cave so a player isn't left swordless right before the end battle. The items were fun to create. I didn't want to drop mundane items in there but i also didn't want to reward the player for having their armor disolved by a bklack pudding. So a player can now walk away with a suit of dented plate mail, some modly leather armor, a rusty long sword and a bent mace. The moldy armor is by far the ugliest thing I think I every made. I tried to keep every color slightly different and it is a big mesh of clashing greens and browns.

I should have the update up in the next day or so.

I have been playtesting kamal's Path of Evil. This is a great game and does a really good job of making an evil game. Most of the time the evil path choices in other games are just random, meaningless and rather boring.

Release!!

2010-09-12T15:28:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1 has been released and is up on the vault. So I figure I will have a short break then get back to work on the second chapter

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2ModulesEnglish.Detail&id=458

Taking the Challange

2010-08-13T12:08:00.001-07:00

On a whim I decided that I would take a deep gnome and try to run through the campaign. I was doing just plot stuff, ignoring all side quest and doing only the minimum to move along. I made it 3/4 of the way through without ever leveling up. I still needed about another 500 xp for level 2. If everything was done at that point a player would normally be closing in on level 7. I will have to recommend that: (1) players try to take advantage of as much as possible to maintain balance. (2) avoid character races with more then +1 level adjustments unless a greater challenge is desired.

Below are the screen shots showing how well that gnome fared. The thing that kept this gnome alive for so long was her insane AC. With kaedrin's ninja class and combat expertise she was up to 26, not bad for a level 1 character with no armor.

Why would you do it that way?

2010-08-12T17:20:00.000-07:00

Play testing is going well, at this point I think I have made more big errors fixing little things. 1 playtester has made it all the way through and 3 other play testers (my wife being one). Hoping to have at least 2 complete play throughs before release.

There have been 2 game breaking issues. 1 was an ipoint placed in the area of the final battle that somehow wasn't set to plot and the last 2 lines of the end game convo where attached to it. So it an area effect spell destroyed it you can guess how that went. The other game breaking pointt I created fixing something small that I didn't like.

It amazes me all the different ways of approaching something. You rack your brain trying to come up with all of them during creationbut sure enough someone will habe some different idea.

So I am hoping to have a release on Aug 26th. It may get bumped a day or two but it is coming soon.

Play Testing is Starting

2010-07-29T09:58:00.001-07:00

The game has been uploaded and anyone interested in play testing send me a message.

Hopefully everything will go smoothly with no big issues.

Damn You Party Conversations

2010-07-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

That is how I spent the other day play testing.

I learned a important thing about party conversations and how starting them differs from other conversations. This issue I had was there were four items that would start a conversation when the player when used. The conversation would start but only the first line would appear as a speak string. Before switch to party conversations, one of the items used a nwn1 convo style and worked fine. On the use script I had the user start a convo with themselves. This however doesn't work with party conversations. If a companion used the item the conversation start but that companion wasn't part of the conversation. So I figured ok a player can't start a conversation with themselves with a party conversation, I could live with that. My next solution was to use an ipoint in the area, and since the conversation could be started anywhere in the area I have the script ignore start distance. With this I discovered that start distance and involved distance (I just made that term up) are different. Again the conversation would start but drop out after the first line since the player and companions were too far from the ipoint. At this point it was time to take a break and work on something else. When I returned I had the script destroy an ipoint with a certain tag then create a new ipoint at the users location giving it the same tag as the destroyed one. This worked. The conversation could now be in initiated anywhere and multiple times.

So don't know if my self taught scripting methods caught up with me or if this is an issue that others have run into as well. Regardless I figured I would share and maybe save someone some time.

Other then this play testing is going well, it is taking a little longer then I thought but nothing real earth shattering. My wife will be doing one play through now that I fixed all I can find. Then it will be going out to beta testers. If your interested let me know.

Play Testing

2010-07-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

With the first play through done I found 2 major bugs. One was game breaking badness and the other prevented the PC from completing several puzzles to free the necromancer companion.

The 2nd is fixed and the companion will join. Had an issue of a script looking for a blank tag, then a wrong tag and then I had a trigger destroy itself before the other conditions for the script to work would fire.

The final issue is a little bit of a puzzle but I'm sure I'll get it over the next few days. As promised here are several screen shots from testing. The best I am keeping to modify and make load screens.

What is wrong with the below screen?

Several hill giants throwing boulders and the unfortunate companions about to be smashed.

A random cave litter with dead bodies. I used the cave tile set then the dead end placeable to create the stone walls.

Once I get the last bug or bugs (since it was a game breaker and I could go any further) worked out I will be looking for play testers. As a playtester not only will you be the first to play Risen Hero you will also get to submit a blueprint to be added the meditating monastery monks. You will need to wear the default monk robes but the rest is customizable.

QUICK UPDATE

2010-06-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

Testing has begun!

The other day the last static camera was placed and all the initially grammar checks were completed.

Tonight I will begin my play-through for any major bugs. Modules 1-3 have been play tested and only mod 4 needs to be checked for game breaking bugs. Once that is done I will move onto community testing.

Screen shots of testing will be posted soon!

Good News

2010-06-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

In 4 sittings I was able to script the conversations that took me months to write. The final areas have been finished off and the all conversations as well as everything else has been spell checked (thanks to spellplug).

What does that leave:

Static camera placement and grammar checking the conversations for this last series of I've been working on.

I need to update my 2das to be compatible with Kaedrin's most recent PrC Pack then finish off packaging my HAKS.

That will leave me to playthrough to make sure everything works and there are no problems. Then it will be time to recruit some playtesters (I will announce here and on the bioware board)

Exciting stuff!

-After my play through I will also post more screen shots to make up for my past few text only post.-

10109 Words

2010-05-31T12:14:00.000-07:00

The conversations are complete.

In theory all the conversations from beginning to end should be done. Hitting that save and backing up the 4th module after reaching the end point of that final conversation was a nice feeling. There still is a fair amount of work but hardest part for me is done. My estimate for the third path of 10,000 was pretty much right on as well.

I was able to cut back on some of the word count by using the party conversation in several points. This cut down on their interjections since they were the speakers. In the stealth path i used cutscene conversations to scan the fort from the various hiding points. Points of interest are discovered in these conversations. The player will make skill checks to find them if they fail depending on which companions are in the party and what point of interest is being looked at they will interject with skill checks. When the point of interest is discovered an item is given to the player. That item will represent the point of interest and allow the player to interact with it using the party conversation. This will prevent having the points of interest glow blue and give them away and the player can interact with them from a distance since they may be surrounded by enemies.

So now onto scripting the champion fighting, sneaking and talking paths through the fort, and then onto the final battle scripts.

I Need to Stop Estimating

2010-05-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Not much time has been spent on the toolset since my last post. The summer is approaching and sitting in front of a computer just isn't all that appealing. Been doing lots yard work and wrapping up some of the exterior stuff from the remodel last fall. I even put in a garden this spring and have several hop plants growing.

For a while I have had a plan for a master brewer NPC to chat with the player. Someone in the basement of a tavern or inn, surrounded with barrels of fermenting ale. He would tell the player his opinion about the best grains and hops to make a truly good ale, not some watered down flavorless thing that most of the taverns carry. But he never quite fit in with the areas. I almost placed him in the monastery as a brew master monk but it wasn't quite right. Maybe sometime I'll find a place for him but until then he'll just have to wait and drink his ale alone.

But back on topic, my estimate of 10,000 words may have been a bit low unfortunately. There will be 5 stages or points while sneaking through the fortification. The first point is in excess of 4,000 words. Granted this should be the largest of the 5 it is still is a lot more words then I thought it would be. Once I start typing and adding companion interjections it just seems to grow. I have started on the second point and I'm still under a thousand words but we'll see what happens...

So I guess that is really it for now. I'm still working these conversations and dealing with very opinionated companions who like to put their 2 cents in based on the player's choices or other companion interjections. There still is a bit too do once these conversations are done but they are the bulk of the work left.

That Much Closer

2010-04-20T15:57:00.000-07:00

Wrapped up another series of conversations. A player can now talk their way through the final fortification to to the final battle using either bluff or diplomacy with the occasional perform thrown in there for good cause.

Two of the three paths now have completed conversations and I have started the final path. The end game conversation is also written. So I estimate probably only another 5000-7500 words left for that last path, unless the companions start throwing in all sorts of interjections. At the most it shouldn't be more then another 10,000 words. The majority of the scripting still needs to be done, inlcuding the conversation switches for all the three paths. I have a script outlined and mostly created for the sneak path with a pseudo heartbeat checking if the player and the party is found; it needs a little more tweaking but not much. The base area design is done. The fortifications need to have NPC placed throughout, all the unique NPC already have blueprints created. In the sneak path all the usable placeables need to be added and scripted and several still need to be discovered or figured out. Currently there are 2 out of about 6 conversation/distraction points that still need a bit more inspiration. Right now they are at this point something should happen.....

So once all that is done and a character can play through the 3 paths I will move onto spelling (spellplug) and grammar checking. Exciting stuff.

So this is just a short post of what is happening, no screenshots. The conversation editor just isn't exciting enough.

In the words of gold five "Stay on Target"

2010-03-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

So here it is:

All the conversations for one path for the fort infiltration have been completed. You can now taunt and jeer goblin, orc and ogre champions into single combat. At least in theory. The conversations are done but I am holding off scripting until the conversations for all three paths are done. I know once Is start scripting I will go and complete all three paths and still have no other conversations completed.I have to thank the bioware forum members who threw in ideas for taunts and intimidation lines. This set of conversations actually went a lot faster then I thought it would.

With the combat path complete I am trying to get into the dialog path (bluff and diplomacy). The 1st out of 4 conversations is about 3/4 complete. Having 7 companions with a party of 4 (3 companions and the PC) is quite the undertaking. The number of drop throughs to allow almost all different combinations without redundant lines is time consuming. I am trying to create a little bit of banter between the companions and allowing the PC multiple options with these conversations has quickly become a web of drop throughs, links and whatnots.

The 1st conversation set went fairly fast, the second is much slower. I keep finding myself doing different things in the toolset instead of writing conversations. I have put a stop to all new load screens until I send out the Beta for testing. But then I went and started finding custom portraits for the companions and larger role NPC. -If anyone has a good picture of a bald female half-fiend with horns and flaming halo let me know... See previous screens shots; she must be there somewhere. - I also got sucked into creating blueprints. Artechoke's doppelganger and gibberling both needed some blueprints in my toolset even though I have no current plans to use them (and all the areas have been created). Once I was one the blueprint kick I started creating demon blueprints from the fiendish codex. The trolloc models on the vault make a great demon, I just now need some boot models to make humans and tieflings have hooves. but then again none of this has anything to do with conversations....

Items and a Touch of Evilness

2010-02-15T06:46:00.000-08:00

MAGIC ITEMS

Magic Stuff is Just Cool
As a builder I enjoy creating magic items. I have a ton of these sitting in my toolset, some have been placed in Risen Hero and others just sit there. So far I have only placed a few +1 items here and there. Instead almost every magic item found has a unique description and I have tried to make the properties generally tie into the description.

So is there too many magic items to be found lost in hidden caves or horded by evil critters.

Maybe. So I have made attempts to add some balance and limitations to magic items.

How to Balance?
One approach I have done is to make an item have both bonuses and penalties. Now a player must choose to sacrifice something to gain something. I try to relate these weakness to the description and the other properties. Some examples would be a massive hammer or warwace with an over weighted end. There would be a massive critical property or a Daze effect on hit but the attack bonus would be decreased because it is an unbalanced and clumsy weapon. Also with the above example an on equip script may be used to sure a player has a minimum strength the be able to lift and swing the weapon. Anther example of the bonus/penalty would also be a fire amulet. The wearer would be protected from fire attacks but vulnerable to cold attacks.

The more powerful items are often not found along the normal plot line. A player must find them through exploration and finding secrets, solving puzzles or completing side quest. The more powerful items are also possessed by more powerful creatures. These battles are often optional and the items are often used against the player before they gain them.

+1 is Just Dumb
As a player I have always enjoyed finding those unique items that have a back story in their description and unique properties. The standard +1 or +whatever are boring weapons. The only generic +something items to be bought will be ammunition and most of the + items found are from the global random treasure scripts. Currently only one store will sell magic weapons and it's stock is mostly just ammunition with maybe 1 or 2 unique items. The main black smith will not sell any magic items, just masterwork and standard weapons made with different materials. That smith is able to work with more unique materials as well that are beyond the players crafting skills. A small number of different items have been placed or planned that the player can bring to him to make unique weapons with. The different items can be made into a small number of different weapon/armor types and once done can't be undone.

EVILNESS

Item Stealing and Destroying
In the previous post I mentioned some oozes. I have a number of blueprints and will likely release these once all the testing is done. But in regards to items I have 4 oozes that dissolve weapons. Two are below CR5 that can destroy mundane weapons and armor and 2 are above CR5 that can destroy most any items. Only plot items and items that have an acid immune local variable are safe from their attacks. My mimic blueprint will steal a weapon but allow a player to retrieve it after the battle. This is an area I want to continue to explore as the game progress. Forcing the player to rely on their character and their skills opposed to having the biggest nastiest greatsword ever made.

Curses What I Have Been Doing Up Until Now
The curse flag in NWN2 is lame.

I have been using equip and unequip scripts for the few curse items I have placed. They have both bonus and penalties. One example would be a ring that increases combat abilities but significantly reduces social abilities. The curse is to prevent a player from equipping the ring during battle then removing it after to remove the penalties. When the item is equipped the the curse flag will be made true. While the flag is true the unequip script will re-equip the item. A remove curse spell turns the flag to false and the item can be unequipped but should it be re-equipped the curse will be activated again.

LET THE EVILNESS BEGIN

That has been the curse system I have been using and there are a couple of items using it, but feeling a little evilier then usual one day I put together a new curse include script that I will be using from here out.

It takes a copy of a normal item with an on acquire and equip script. The item can be anything an on acquire script will run with 2 lore checks. A a higher check will return that the item is cursed and a lower check will return that there is something peculiar about the item. When the item is equipped it is destroyed and a new evil item is created in the slot and is flagged cursed and can't be removed until the curse flag is removed.

The new item can simply be an opposite item, a ring of protect +2 will chance to -2. Or it can be truly evil and be a item with no properties but an on equip script. A fortitude save or turn to stone or even a save vs death. This script really makes most any evil idea possible and adds a bit of risk to equipping random items found in dark dungeons. These items will be rarer then other magic items but they will be included to help off set the other treasure found.

So there it is: magic items, weapon stealing and evil curses.

Wrapping up the areas

2010-02-08T14:47:00.000-08:00

Wrapped up another area today. Just need to add 2 encounters with RWS oozes, to call it complete. At this point almost all the area design is wrapped up. The fortifications may need a little added here and there but other then that I think it's good. There are a number of conversations and scripts that need to be put together, but a player can now travel through fun scenic areas from start to finish. This leaves 4 areas to write conversations for and script up.

The latest area completed is the ooze cave. There the player will get to fight acid blobs, a black pudding and one of my least favorite oozes from Baulder's Gate the Mustard Jelly. I found a script from NWN1 that seems to be working to make them split with piercing and slashing weapons. I have written up a rather nasty acid attack and damage script for the acid blobs and the pudding. These acid scripts will destroy armor on attack and weapons on damage. The blobs being a lower level ooze will destroy mundane items while the pudding will destroy everything but plot items. When the ooze attacks it first goes after any shield and once that is destoryed it will try to disolve the players armor. When attacked it will go after the main weapon while ignoring the off hand weapon. These will be optional battles so those who can't stomach the risk can avoid it but the spoils of the battle will offer the player some unique items and stuff.

The scripts use a a reflex save to avoid the corrosive acid. Each ooze has a different DC. Higher level oozes obviously have harder DCs. If the player fails the the reflex save their weapon if they attacked or their armor if the ooze attacked will have to make a save or melt away. The more powerful the weapon the better chances it will have not to be destroyed. I loop through the item properties adding +1 for each property. In the items properties there is a variable for how many times the weapon has been exposed to the acid (failed reflex save but didn't get destroy).

The save is d20+#of item properties vs ooze DC + number or exposures.

So eventually if a player has very bad reflex saves they will add so many exposures (weaken the metal) that the save will be impossible and the weapon or armor will be destroyed.

One thing I have been thinking about is the current system doesn't take into account what the enchantments are. A +1 sword and a +5 sword will have the same chances with the current script. Next time at the toolset I will likely look at the item cost and set up different multipliers so that more a power enchantment or combination of enchantments will have a increased chance of standing up to an acid exposure.

The next focus of modding will be the conversations for the champion battles and the Bluff/Diplomacy routes through the fortification then the conversations for the sneak route. I am trying to focus on the conversations as this is the most time consuming and most dreaded part of modding. Once those are done Scripting should move fairly fast. Now time for the screen shots, these are from the ooze caves. The hope is that the lighting looks like it is from a green phosphorescent moss. The area lights are all set to 0 intensity so it is pitch black. The light points are randomly placed throughout the area ,all a different heights and have a very slow flicker with a low variation. The bloom is set so it emphasizes any color but doesn't cause any substantial blurring/distortion effect.

This uses the cave tile 05. The light green on the floor is normally a light grey/tan stone

The mushroom here is a liberty cap from Wyrin's foraging system and the trapped thing on the left side is a brown mold.

Another Section Done

2010-01-28T17:53:00.001-08:00

The monastery is complete and I'm one huge step closer to the end.

That area was an extensive area and took way too long to complete. Granted I did do a kitchen and dinning room remodel, make a hide system for the kobold cave and create a small module for the holiday SOZ expansion. There were also numerous other distractions including editing 2das, creating visual effects, load screens and anything else that didn't involve writing conversations. The conversations were the largest task to complete with this area. There are a number of NPCs most offer plot information. Each of the companions have different conversation trees while in this area and I also introduced two more companions. A dwarven cleric and the ever popular power hungry necromancer. I still need to do the final grammar checks and little more editing but the bulk of the work is done.

I have moved onto the final areas, a large fortification and center hall with the end boss. The area design for the exterior is probably about 75% complete, that is just a random guess on my part. This area like every other part of the game has grown in scope. Initially I was going to have a deserter guide you through a secret entrance and after a number of battles you'd reach the boss and then done. However, the more I thought of it the more I didn't like that approach. A group of four people should not be able to take out an army and it only allowed for a limited approach and didn't make full use of the player's character or the companions. So now there will be three paths through the fortification. The party may try to sneak through the fort and create diversions to avoid notice. Failure will be death, once you are discovered the army will swarm and kill you. The second path is bluffing your way through. Trying to convince them that you are mercenaries to join their cause or foreign embassies trying to bribe them not to attack your land. And then the final choice if you don't feel comfortable sneaking and lying you can challenge the army's champions to single combat until you gain an audience with the final boss. The companions you choose will make a big difference with each approach. The half-fiend bard companion will be able to help you bluff while the half-orc taunting barbarian will ruin any chances at bluffing.

Closing in on the heart of the fort.

The placed creatures are currently set to a non-hostile faction while the area is being created, later on they will kill you.

This hill giant is a captive of the army. He is chained outside the slave pen to make sure that no one tries to free or eat the slaves.

The chain is a beam effect that attaches to his back and he is set to immobile and stuck in front of the door.

Another Update

2010-01-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

The holidays are done and it is time to get back to going through Risen Hero. I am hoping to be able to spend a fair amount of time working on this over the next two months. The kitchen/dining room remodel are just about wrapped up so that will open up some more time. Over the past month I have done a complete play through and the first three modules are pretty much bug free and working. Had to go back and do a few modifications to the sneaking system. The player is rewarded for consecutive hides and there is a multiplier added for each hide in a row. I ran into a problem when I used a ranger with his hide skill maxed out. For the last save he got over 500 xp for hiding from some wimpy kobolds. With a cap in place the system is working as intended.

I am working on re-organizing myself for the final few areas that need to be put together and wrapped up. These areas have taken far longer then anywhere else in the game so far. Some of that is due to less time spent in the toolset but the time I have been working on Risen Hero hasn't been very productive. I've been jumping back and forth between different areas, conversations, and scripts. I have started going through the fourth and final module starting at the beginning and working through everything. I need to find what is complete and what still needs work and what is just gone or missing. Hopefully everything will come together fairly quickly so BETA testing can begin.

New and improved monsters

The rescaled and tinted balor has been replaced with an actual minotaur and the war dogs have been changed from hell hounds to oversize dobermans.

Going Back to the Beginning.

2009-11-30T16:02:00.000-08:00

Having mainly just conversations left to wrap Risen Hero up I had decided to do a play through, mostly just to go through the old companion conversations and maintain the same personalities. I was rather surprised that most of my problems to fix where random descriptions for placeables and creatures of no real importance and a candle that had a flame almost burning off to the side, only like 6 inches from the wick.

Early on in the game the player finds themselves in a kobold's den. You may fight your way through the tunnels and gain all sorts of experience and treasure or one could find a way to confront the chieftain alone and avoid the multiple fights along the obvious route. While doing this play through I realized that a stealth character is really difficult to play. Even the OC sneaking really didn't help against encounters. So I decided that I needed to develope this third route (stealth) through the kobold cave.

I approached this as a trigger based system that would turn on the encounters for hide failures and reward the player for actually hiding so the experience levels should work out fairly close. I need to thank both _knightmare_ and and Lugaid of the Red Stripes for their advice on the making the trigger reset after a certain amount of time.

The idea of the system is the player or companion that enters the trigger must be in stealth mode. The script them cycles through the companions, if they are in stealth mode and within 5 meters of the player they get a chance to help the player. If they succeed either a spot or listen check the DC of the encounter hide is decreased by 1. They character that enters the trigger must make a hide save to avoid the encounter and receive the xp reward.

This script will likely reappear in different areas of the game. The XP rewarded is based on the player's level and number of successful saves in a particular area stored on an ipoint placeable assigned by a local string. I have also included a bonus for the sent feat released with SOZ, it will make it so the player doesn't need to do a spot or listen check.

The script in action

This is the first set of armor the player will find. The second set isn't much better but it is medium armor.

Congrats to the Alphas Out There

2009-10-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

It is motivating see others getting ready to move their projects forward and it gives me hope that sometime soon I will hopefully have this out for the community. Since seeing E.C.Patterson and jclef's alpha post I have found myself working a bit more in the toolset, still spending a lot of my free time working on the kitchen and dinning room remodel. The cabinets are on order then it really should just be trimming out the rooms and the flooring.

With the current area I have started to use the coloring tool more. In my past areas I have used it but generally just adding grey shades to define the terrain. I have been experimenting with using much more colors on top of the terrain textures and I am quite happy with the depth it adds. Making mud look wet, trails from run off and just general muck. I am closing in on the end and I am still discovering new ways to do things. Playing this campaign it will be noticeable as I gained more confidence and abilities in area design and scripting. I have gone back a little to touch up here and there so it would be overly blatant as well as improving or just trashing and making all new scripts.

And the area progresses:

A gate to nowhere good.

A bit of wholesome carnage

Part of the fortification.

Wet mud with the stagnant water in front of the wall

More of the same from the opposite angle.

Back to Some Area Design

2009-10-10T15:31:00.000-07:00

I have taken a break from conversations and started working on one of the last two area. A mountain fortification filled with an growing army. The bulk of the soldiers are goblinoids and orcs lead by a Grey Dwarf with the help of minotaurs and ogres to help keep the goblins and such in line.

A bunch of the conversations I still need to complete will be your companions advice on how to infiltrate this base so I figured having the area mostly completed would help with those conversations. There will be three ways through the fort and to reach the commander of the army.

The first and perhaps most difficult will be the stealth approach and will include more problem solving stuff to create diversions and remain unseen. Maybe having you necromancer companion raise some of the dead from the the burning piles outside the fort will be one such an option to hop the first wall unseen but then who knows.

The second will be for those of you who just can't get enough of beating things over the head. While you will not be able to assault the fort you will be able to challenge the champions and fight one on one battles up through the various groups of the army. So if you beat the worg riding goblin champion you get to fight the orc champion until you are fighting in the audience of the army's leader and he brings out some half-breed beast of a creature for you to fight.

The final approach will be talking: diplomacy, bluff, intimidation and probably a few other things as well and being able to asking your companions to jump in and help out. A half-fiend bard would probably excel in a situation like that.

For the fort I have been using Barry the Hatchet Watchtowers . A couple of small to medium sized forests were definitely clear cut in the creation but sacrifices must be made. The walk up to the fort I wanted to show the barbaric nature of it's inhabitants and their lack of value for human life. On the NWN forums Chaos Wielder pointed me in the right direction by using visual effect models and I was able to create rotting corpses standing in elevated cages and skeletons on pikes as well as a dead horse. Using the hanging copses and funeral fires included in the MotB and SOZ blueprints I was able to create a rather ghastly entrance.

So here they are the screen shots. The area design is still in it's early stages. Only three textures have been placed with little blending. Also in some of the screen shots the elevated cages are all funky. For some reason when I set the portcullis (what I used for the walls) to static they revert back to their default scale and when I then uncheck the static box they return to me assigned scale.

Elevated corpse cage, uses a zombie VF, no ambient idle animation and no walkmesh issues

Corpse Cage, impaled skeleton and hanging tree all in one screen shot.

The hanging tree. Hag spawns make nice discolored and bloated bodies

The main entrance with corpses and fire pits placed

Final gate to the inner walls and the fort's main hall

Main entrance, no corpses placed, slightly out of order but oh well.

Raven picking any last bit of flesh from the skull

A barricade by the main entrance and a dead horse

Another view of the cage. Zombie's head sticks out of cage so it's shoulders will be resting against the bars.

2009-08-08T14:40:00.000-07:00

Just about wrapped up another area. Finished placing the last of the lights and sounds then the walk-mesh cutters. The monastery for the most part has been completed. Still have a dozen or so placeables that need to have descriptions written up. All the conversations excluding the companions are in their initially phase and need a bunch of grammar work and whatnot. There is just a bit of scripting left but nothing too complicated. This single area has taken longer then any other area that I have created, so either I'm slowing down or this area just has more to it then others. If for no other reason I would prefer to choose the second because it makes me feel better but this is also the first area that is actually habitable and has a decent group of NPC living in it. As I wrap up this area I have started working on the final large area, the bad guy fort. It will be a mountain valley fortification based on descriptions of 9th century Saxon Burghs from Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Series (I'm patiently waiting till October when the next book in the series is to be released.) The fort will have three tall walls made of made of earth and reinforced with logs. A hall will be placed at the center and the player will need to find some way to get to it without having the entire army descending upon them.

I have also been spending some time working on the dwarven clerc that joins the party. I mentioned his twin axes in a previous post and over the past few days I have been scripting them. As they are blessed by his god so only the dwarf may wield them and he most be using both of them to gain the bonuses. They initially will appear to be normal axes but will grant him two weapon feats, battle axe proficiency feats as well on bonus divine damage and enchantment bonuses. There are seven levels, most of which will never be reached but I figured to go for it and do it up right just in case. Every 5 levels the bonuses improve from lvl1-lvl5 it is a +1 weapon and does 1 bonus point of divine damage and grants the two weapon fighting feat. All of this is currently untested so there is always the posiblity it will do nothing....

The hostility issue from the previous post has been fixed, at some point while updating stuff to patch 1.23 I stuck a repute.FAC with only the standard factions into my HAK. Now that it is removed everything is working again, much to my relief. I have included some screen shots. The top four are from the monastery then the bottom 4 are from a hidden crypt under the monastery.

Dinning/sitting area

Main Entrance

These two are from the quarters of the sorcerer Marick Tannesen, who normally resides in the city of Neverwinter. While he won't join you he offers guidance and will sell you items from his extensive collection.

The dead rest uneasy and will quickly swallow up any intruders.

Red gloomy fog. We all know nothing good can call a place like this home, but here's hoping there is some decent loot.

QK placeable gargoyles and Hellcow's cobwebs

They're All Attacking Me

2009-07-30T07:17:00.000-07:00

It has been about two weeks now since I played Rogue and battled an emu so I feel safe saying that the kick has come to an end. Here's hoping I don't stumble upon another vintage game.

On the remodel front I have discovered that I am actually a decent electrician. The wiring is now complete and everything is working like its suppose to. Now I just have to wait for an extra hot and muggy day then I can start insulating the walls.

I have updated to 1.23, was looking forward to some of the script additions especially set base ability. With the update I have had some frustrating behavior from my NPC with custom factions. All module factions behave as if they are hostile regardless of their settings. This is a major problem for me and I assume many others. It is almost as if the game is no longer checking the module factions but from what I could find their is no place for campaign factions nor could I find the a faction 2da to add my customs to. I have a post on the bioware boards as does loudent2 but no no solutions or explanations have been offered so far. I haven't had a lot of time to really go and look into it either.

The past week I have had a bit of dialog explosion when I'm not worried about neutral NPC attacking me in a fit of rage. Finished a number of conversations for some NPC that the PC will interact with, just need to do a little more scripting and check that all the conditions are right.

On area design I have gone and hidden Ree's Homage to Grinning Fool in the game. The player will need to have some decent spot skill to discover it and receive a little reward. So that is it now, no new screen shots unless people want to see crazed NPCs attacking....

ROGUE

2009-07-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

Very little to report on Risen Hero. My nighttime toolset time has been dwindling down. Just too tired after working on the remodel all day to do anything really productive at night. I ended up having to remove all three exterior walls on the dining room,one at a time of course. Now the framing is mostly done and the new windows are in. The past few days I spent wiring the kitchen and dining room and waiting for the plumber, insulation and sheet rock are next.

When I am working on Risen Hero I have been making blueprint. Easier then conversations and area design and they are something that you can usually complete in one sitting. Created all the NPC for the final battle and I been making a bunch of items. One of which is the Lyre of Orpheus

On another note I have found yet another way to waste my time. I have downloaded a classic game that as a kid I played way too much. ROGUE. What other game can you battle Emus as well as dragons. Other then running out of rations and starving to death or being killed by griffins and the Letter U (Ur-Vile), it is it is a great game. Random dungeons, dangerous monsters A-Z (excluding E, how dangerous can a emu be?), a yellow face for an avatar and it even makes a beep when you step on a trap. Well that is it for now, back to building and exploring the Dungeon of Doom.

So I lied.... And here is what I'm working on.

2009-06-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

The remodel is going along, and I am glad to report that I am still finding time to work in the toolset at night. I forgot I wouldn't be able to use nail guns and power saws after the kids bed time so at night I have been sitting down with Risen Hero and a beer. I have been listening to a lot of Boiled in Lead while at my computer, putting their album The Gypsy on a random loop and just typing away at conversations.

While avoiding any spoilers I figured I would give a run down of the available companions. In the last post I mentioned how each companion has something unique that they bring to the party and can help shape the story. The player will be limited to a certain number that will change depending on the current task. But I figure there will be three main task type. The numbers below are approximates and all changes will focus on maintaining balance.

Exploration: 4 companions (majority of game play)

Stealth: 2 companions

Large Battle: 6+

As the game development progresses the companions continue to evolve. Back in one of the first post I hinted towards betrayal and some companions may betray the player and the party. This will happen but which companions betray the player will remain a mystery. I have spent a lot of time writing and scripting the cutscenes so hopefully even if the player sees it coming it will still be interesting or it maybe a complete surprise. I have tried to write all the companion conversations like they are going to be with the player for the duration.

For the companions I have been trying to take advantage of NPC heads from the OC and 2 expansions. Right now 5 of the eight companions have unique heads and I have been watching the vault for a male half-orc, female gnome and a female tielfing/half-fiend.

The first companion encounter will be temporarily forced on the player. This is done for balancing and at the time I was learning the toolset and it was easier with interjections and completing that first quest without having to figure with or without the companion. Once the quest is done the player can boot him if they want. He is a CG human hunter. It is a custom class I created for him, a hybrid fighter/ranger. The idea is he is a skilled woodsman who is both proficient with weapons and tracking and has the skill progression of a ranger but has no divine connection, spells or animal companions. His feat progression is similar to the fighter for lvl2, lvl4 and lvl6 he is given specific feats to improve his survival and fighting abilities then he continues to get a bonus feat every other level like a fighter.

The rogue of the party will be a NG gnome. She will also be able to level as an illusionist and with enough influence as an arcane trickster. She follows the player and often interject with little rambles and off topic comments during conversations. I have tried to keep her from being a foolish and ridiculous character while still using her to add some energy and maybe some laughs.

A LN female elven ranger joins the party as a guide. She has a task of helping the player reach a point and will often discourage the player from taking side quest that do not move towards that point. She will be impressed with any one who has skills equal to her or better but has little tolerance for any type of criticism. I have created a lot of banter between her and the hunter. He has a strong dislike for elves after numerous bad encounters with elven druids while on hunting excursions. These two were the reason that I created the inter party relationship system. So you as the player can either encourage their bickering and have them develop a mutual hatred of each other or help them see through their differences.

During the start of the game the player is in the wake of a goblinoid army that has destroyed most everything in their path. A group of refugees can be found and a LE human fighter will join the party. If the player agrees with his ideals he will also level as a black guard. He will encourage the player to give into their self serving desires. He believes in a strict pecking order were the strong and powerful rule with an iron fist and all those below them serve and those that can offer nothing are without worth.

A CN half fiend will also join the party. She is a bard and claims to follow the changing winds that blow with no reason or purpose, randomly effecting all they encounter for good or ill.

Schemes are twisted and ideas are lost when the winds blow and when they truly howl through the night the planes themselves might be up heaved and torn asunder.

She seeks adventure and thrives on the unknown and chaos and will quickly become bored and voice her displeasure when the player chooses to follow the rules and play it safe. She gains racial abilities every other level. MoTB had it easy with their half-celestial since she was already lvl20 when she joined and they didn't have to worry about having her be overly powerful with her summon and resurrect abilities at lower levels. The half-fiend won't be able to do it right away but eventually she will gain the summon Hezrou spell-like ability.

For a while avoided creating a half-orc companion in order to prevent from creating an overdone cliché. He is CE and full of hatred, only knowing prosecution and bigotry, an outcast from both of his parent's races. He sees fear as respect and will assert himself in most every situation in a show of physical dominance. He is a barbarian and thug (Kaedrin's PrC Pack), using his rage and dirty fighting tactics to win at all cost. He will not step down from a battle no matter the odds and will often drag the player into battle. A player who relies on conversation skills will most likely not get along with this character. He also has some special ability feats that are modified taunts and are gained either by being in the party at certain points or through influence.

The party's healer will be a dwarven cleric. He will duel wield magical battle axes blessed by his god. These axes will have an on equipped script and when they are both equipped he will gain two weapon bonuses that increase with his level. His conversations have not been started but he is LG and he can level as a divine champion or paladin.This character is taken from the character I used to play through Baulder's gate I and II.

The final companion is a necromancer. Currently there are no plans for additional classes but that could change. He will have several unique spells that he will gain and if the player has enough influence they will also be able to use the spells. The unfortunate thing I have discovered is that wizard spells can not require certain feats to learn, so once the player reaches the required level they will be able to add these spells to their spell book. I have required a certain apprentice feat to cast the spell so if the player doesn't have the feat the spell will fail when cast. He is still in development so his personality is still growing and changing.

I have found that when creating these companions I had an idea for each one but as their conversations were put together and the interjections added in plot and side quest conversations there was an evolution and deepening of their character. My hope is that each character is interesting and adds something to the story even if their alignment and ideals don't match that of the player.

This is a rather long post but it still could use a few screen shots. These are older taken from my last play through.

And the adventure begins...

A barren land, all the vegetation is dead or dying and it is mostly devoid of life.

A dark ritual to Bane

The party walked in at the wrong time. These priest don't seem too understanding either.

Just another friendly dwarf to meet along the way....

A ruined fortress

These are just a set of dark tunnels. I included it for the companion pictures

I know it's a fire newt, just pretend it's a really big kobold.

A flooded cave with lots of vegetation and brown skunky water

This is the cave tileset using the SOZ walls and ceiling. The floor is either the illefarn or sunken ruins, can't remember right now . For the walls I also used the dead-end placeable and pillars for the corners. The hope is it looks like an old passage crumbling away after centeries of neglect.

I may of posted her before but here is one of my ghost

Conversations, Companions and the Summer

2009-05-06T19:45:00.000-07:00

After a quiet month I figured it was about time for an update post. I have spent a bunch of time writing conversations, which is admittedly my weakest point. Over the past few weeks I have written a little shy of 10,000 words but it seems to be a faction of what I need. I have been working on a large plot area with a number of NPC as well as companion dialect specific to this area. This part has turned into a bit of a chore unfortunately but I continue to plug away, if nothing else I at least open the toolset most days and read through the most current conversation correcting grammar and adding lines here and there.

In between working the conversations I have been working on the companions as well. They have turned into a bit of a drug for me. I really enjoy creating them and their personalities. For this campaign I have a total of 8 companions all of which are optional, excluding a small 2 level cave area were one companion is forced. They are found throughout the game and only 2 of them will approach every player. One of my early post talked about companions and using them as a tool to tell the story. Each companion has a in depth back story and will offer something unique to the party. That something varies between the companions, some will have access to special abilities, open different parts of the game or directly effect the plot. Most of the companions will need to either be in the party at specific times or have certain levels of influence with the player to unlock these bonuses.

My addiction to companions has made my conversations that much more difficult. They will often jump into conversation offering their opinion to either the player or the NPC that is being talked to. Many of these interjections are random. In some instances a specific companion will talk but in most one of the companions will randomly be chosen to speak. Now there are eight companions but some will have different responses based on their influence with the player or if their unique ability/or whatever has been unlocked. So eight quickly multiplies especially when companions will also have banter with each other with multiple lines based on inter-party relationships. So it quickly becomes a spiderweb of conversation lines.

On a different note when I should have been writing conversations I was working on a spell that a necromancer companion will have. The end result of the spell is a powerful zombie in advanced rot. Looking through the models available I didn't want to use the zombie appearance as it just seemed too mundane. I have already used the ghast for several creatures so I was left with little other choices. I have been looking at the drowned since I got SoZ and trying to figure out what I could do with it. For most of my custom monsters I have modified visual effects or created glow/tint maps but the lack of feet cause me to look at the diffuse map. With a little copy and paste I was able to take his arm texture and add it to his missing legs and feet. Below is a screen shot of that creation.

I have been considering giving him a visual effect of a green cloud him as he is off gassing. A brownish green cloud just a little bigger then the cloud with the mummy dust effect.

This will likely be my last post for the next several months, but since I am on a once every month or so schedule it may not make much difference. I will be breaking out my old tool belt and doing a remodel on my kitchen and dinning room (the dinning room also happens to hold the computer). So instead of working on Risen Hero I will be banging nails for the first half of summer.

So there it is, my update. And to anyone reading this have a good summer.

WHAT?! Why is this broken now?

2009-03-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

Play testing. . .

With the completion of 3 out of 4 modules I had begun play testing. Had to start from the beginning again to check everything with SOZ. I Added and changed some things and wanted to make sure everything was still working right.

Most everything seemed to be going how it should until it came to leveling up my companions. I sat their confused when I discovered that I could not use their custom packages and they were all set as either a bard or a monk. After two days of changing, resetting and double checking I came across an post in the archives on Keadrin's site. Apparently the game only reads up to line 255 and mine started at 300, which I assumed would work since Keadrin's start his packages at line 407. So a quick 2da change, update several blueprints and scripts and I was back on track.

I continued on till the screen turned black the died when entering a new area. Originally it was a area transition to a speak trigger but had already been upgraded to an on client enter. I spent way too time picking apart the script then the conversation, assuming that it had to be the problem. I was stuck on the conversation because there were two ways into the area the first triggered the conversation and crashed the second had no conversation and worked fine. It was finally this morning I discovered that the conversation had nothing to do with the crash it was a bad custom visual effect. At a certain distance to the effect the game crashed it just happened that the first entrance was close enough to crash while the second was not.

Using Lance's patch HAK I was able to export the corrected area as a erf then with NWN2Packer I took the area information from the erf and stuck it into the patch HAK and the area worked perfectly with no crashes! When the time comes to release this I will definitely be including the patch hak.

Just a Bit of Blood and Gore

2009-02-14T13:38:00.000-08:00

I have been working on one of my interior areas and have started creating a makeshift infirmary for a handful of refugees. They are severely to mortally injured and are being cared for in their last few hours of life. Thanks to Camb's Placed FX Factory the floor is covered in the blood of the injured and dead. When I went to place the NPC I was very disappointed. They looked healthy, happy and no where near dying. So. . .

My initial attempt was to create some type of visual effect to make the NPC bloddy. After spending way too much time I have discovered while I can change or combined effects, creating them is something entirely different. So cutting my loses and ditching what I had been working on I took another approach. The next thing to try would be making MDB. I would have less options then with the visual effect but I felt confident that I could pull this one off. I took the player heads #1 for the male and female model and the cloth armor #2 for both sexes. I made copies of the MDBs and their associated diffuse textures to modify. Using MoTB blood placeable DDS I was able to create a horrific set of blood splattered MDBs. Placing the blood took several attempts, the biggest issue, especially with the faces, was to avoid too much blood near or along the center line because it created a perfectly symmetrical blood splatter that just looked wrong.

During play testing I was happy with the look. By using the player heads I was able to give each NPC a different hair so I didn't have a massacred group of twins and triplets. For the hair I used a base of dark red to create the look that it was matted down with blood. I am very happy with the proneb animation. The breathing while I assume was done for a sleeping looks to be agonal breathing as the NPC lays there covered in blood. For sound sets I could not use the usual choices so I created a male and female set. Clicking on one and their greeting is "Don't have much time left. . ." and the other is "I've life in me yet. . .I think." The rest of the sounds are all pain grunts and groans.

Here are several of the screen shots.

Another thing that I did unintentionally was that since I copied a player MDB the bloodied heads are available at character creation. Initially I was going to look into changing them but who am I to say you can't play with a beat up and bloodied hero if you want to.

The making of a sword

2009-02-10T10:47:00.001-08:00

I am working on one of the three final areas that I need to complete. Below I have a blacksmith who will be an important NPC to the story. What started out as a simple walkpath turned into a something a bit more. I wanted to show the smith creating a weapon and have him actually moving the weapon through the process where the player could see the NPC moving from step to step with the appropriate animation with sounds happened at each step. The final part of the process was adding the sword. I had three placeable swords, one for the fire being heated, one for the anvil and the final being cooled in water. I also had two swords in the blacksmiths inventory, one with a heated blade and the other cooled. The blacksmith equips the appropriate blade as he walks between the waypoints then a the sword placeable appears and disappears at each waypoint. So between the five swords only one is visible at a time.

For the placeable swords I was hoping for a function similar SetScriptHidden() for placeables but that doesn't exist. So after several different tries I set local locations on the area and used those to create the swords on and then would destroy them. First I was using an on client enter to set the local location but then I was concerned that walk paths may run even when the area was not loaded like heartbeats so at the start of the walkpoint script I identified the three swords objects, if the object was valid I had the script assign the location to the area as alocal location.

Here is the start with the blade heating in the fire

While the blade is heating the smith shovels more coal to feed the fire

The heated blade is removed from the heat and carried to the anvil

Time for some hammering. The smith equips a light hammer for this.

The sword is removed from the anvil and the still hot blade is move to the water basin

The sword appears in the water basin in the upper corner with some nice hissing sounds

The cooled blade is carried back to start over again.

Just a Saturday Morning

2009-01-17T07:25:00.000-08:00

Storm of Zehir is complete.

While it was a fun game it is definitely light on story and interactions but I am not going to repeat my last post. I have moved my party to Indira's Trial and Terror and bumped up their levels and upgraded their gear. My first attempt was just with my level 18 party with out improvements and I quickly proceeded to have my party ripped apart in one horrific moment.

Spent a better part of a day and a couple of pots of coffee while I updated all the 2das for Risen Hero to work with SoZ and Kaedrin's PrC. For the most part I have very few conflicting lines and was able to copy and paste. The placeables and packages where the only two 2das that I had to change the lines. Changed all my on enter scripts to on client enter. Removed all speak triggers that the player would have jumped into on a new area and used on client enter to start the conversations. Updated the handful of placeables that lost their 2da line number to SOZ content and my companion package change scripts.

I will still be forcing certain classes on the companions and not allowing the player to choose how to advance them. In trying to create companions with more personality I want them to be their own character and mostly control their class progression. With influence and how some events are handled within the game additional class options will be opened. I don't know how this choice of mine will be received but I think it is best for what I am trying to create. prehaps I will create a poll to get some feedback.

The death system was surprisingly easy to implement, just a check True/False. I do need to come up with some type of rasie dead item that will make sense with the story.

I have been also been working on load screens changing and editing them in paint.net. Belowing I have two finalized area. The first may be recognized from an earlier post when I was fooling around with the sepia setting.

This final group of screen shots are from the work in progress Tentacled Horror. The wraith body has been dropped and changed to the yaun-ti guardian tinted dark purple/blue. It has gained a more fluid movement with the yaun-ti and no longer does the big spin in circle attack that the wraith would use.

Slithering through the door way.

This is how most of the test go with my would be adventurer being ripped apart.

I have also been working on my design document in attempts to get just a bit more organized.

At 80 pages I have only three more areas to write up. What I thought would be an easy task of really just collected and consolidating a bunch of stuff has turned into a rather large project. Between plots, side quest, NPCs area descriptions and a bunch of other things I have cranked out massive document. It's length is a bit exagerated as it has embedded spread sheets and uses at lot of bullet point outlines that eatup space.

The last kid on the block

2008-12-30T06:44:00.000-08:00

Storm of Zehir

Spent most of the first day installing, updating then downloading plugins and what not. Discovered a number of plugins that I didn't even know I had and never used. When loading up the toolset I received two nasty error messages about the non-updated plugins. I decided that since I had no clue when or why I got them that I could probably do with out them.

I won't spend too much time talking about my opinion of the game since I am a month late and a number have already written up their thoughts and the debates on the vault and such. But I can say that I found some parts very interesting and others disappointing.

The biggest short fall for me is the conversations. With the right characters in the party I can pretty much do everything or at least have the option to with the first play through. I find the conversations to be shallow and unbelievable. The interjections could be nice in some areas but being able to have the main conversation with every character is difficult for me. I guess I would prefer some check on the main conversation nodes so that only the party leader could move the conversation forward and the party members could jump in with their skills/race/class/etc to help the party leader. I also miss the cutscene views with the lips flapping and the flamboyant arms waving around. The cohorts are also disappointing with their conversations. I have a dinosaur druid guy who could have been used to introduce a bit more of the land, lore and all that stuff since this is a new location but instead I can tell him to either leave or never mind. All the cohorts have this two line option and offer you very little information about their back story, history of the land or the story in general.

The overland map is fun but a little overwhelming. After a few hours of play I decided to download E.C. Patterson's SoZ Overland Encounter Reducer (BETA). I have been going with the 50% now that I am up to the Sword Coast I think I may drop down to 33%. I do like the idea of the overland map and how it is implemented, the skill checks and movement speeds changes. I see a lot of potential for the community with additions and modifications. Some of the areas off of the world map seemed slightly pointless and very small. Other then bragging points for beating the snot out of a dozen odd monster there isn't much that these areas add to the game. Most of them have no story behind them and have little effect that I have seen on the story in general. Slightly different point but why do all the jungle town's all have the same common room in their inns? I know that it saves time to duplicate an area but that little effort is definitely noticed in game play.

Some changes I have been think about while wandering the overland map are adding more factions to the wandering monsters and linking the random locations to the wandering monsters. Right now the monsters only attack the player's party and the guards walking the roads. I think it would be interesting to add in some food chain and territory battles between the monsters. Giant spiders would probably be just as happy to eat a group of kobolds as a group of adventurers. The random areas could also be linked to the monsters. If the player wipes out a couple of goblin caves there should be a noticeable decrease in the number of goblin encounters on the world map. So as you take out more bases you make the map safer to explore. While an area is still untouched by the player there should be a higher chance for that monster in the perimeter around the base. Those encounters would also protect their territory from wander monster that could be deemed a threat.

So there are some of my thoughts. I am sure that some of this could be done but honestly I haven't even looked at any of this in the toolset or any of the scripts that handle this system. I am just trying to explain why I am wiping out all these random caves and ruins while trying to provide some benefit other then just experience and some loot.

What about Risen Hero?

It will not be using the party conversation and it will remain a single character game, the additional party members will all be companions that are created for the game with hefty conversations. The world map will not be implemented in the current work but there is always the option in future stuff.

I don't have a screen shot but I have been playing with the Tentacled Horror, replacing the wraith with a tinted black/purple yuan-ti guardian. So far I have only done it in the toolset but I like the look and will need to run a in game test at some point. Once that is done I will share the results and screen shots here.

I have been slowly working on the wrapping up the conversations on the third module while trying not to get too much into the area design for the fourth module. For my news years resolution I have decided that I need to get a bit more organized with my modding, I don't want to end up like one of the Lost that appeared in my Halloween module. The week before Christmas I started to gather all my notes, spread sheets, diagrams, multiple word documents and random thoughts I haven't written down and consolidate them together. So far I have a 19 page document that is steadily growing but having everything in one place will definitely help wrap this up. If everything goes as planned play-testing should start in the summer some time, which will be about the two year mark. But there is a lot of work to do before I even get back into the toolset. I need to begin the process of updating all my 2das with SOZ and Kaedrin's PrC pack. At some point I also need to start creating HAK packs, up until now I have been using the override with multiple folders to organize everything to make updating and adding material easier. I also want to look at the death and bleeding system and possibly implement that, but I will need to check the balancing and adding raise dead stuff for the starting characters.

Well there it is my epic post.

Taunts and Tentacles

2008-11-26T05:20:00.001-08:00

Not much of an update as I have been working on conversations and such. The last cutscene for module #3 is about halfway done with the conversation script completed for it.

The Taunt-like feats have also been scripted and add to the spells and feat 2das. Still need testing and what not. There are six feats total each with their own modified icon (tinting, contrast and other tweaks). They all use a will check, many use a combination of taunt skill with another skill then each has unique effects.
The penalties and duration will be based on the taunt skill. With every 5 ranks in taunt the penalties will inflict another -1 and add +1 rounds to the duration.

Lineage Mockery:The ever infuriating insult to heritage, ancestry or anything that the varied races of the FR hold dear.
Taunt skill
Penalties: AC, to Hit, Concentration

Desecrate Corpse: A horrid and vivid description of what will be done to the enemies corpse after the battle trying more to instill fear then enrage the target.
Taunt and Intimidate Skill
Penalties: to Hit, Saving Throws, Skill Checks
Chance to instill fear into the target

Sarcastic Spellcasting Mimicry: The taunter does an amusing imitation of spell casting. The real trick to this taunt is the taunters ability to take the incantation of spells and twist them into horribly insulting or obscene rhyme that the spell caster can't get out of their mind while casting.
Taunt and Listening Skills (need to hear the incantations before you can make fun of them.)
Penalties: Concentration, Spell failure 10+taunt rank%

Belittling Cat-Call: Useful against both the opposite and same sex, no one likes unwanted suggestive comments from an ugly half-orc (except maybe another ugly half-orc).
Taunt and Spot Skills (Spot used to see the physical attributes and the reaction to the comments)
Penalties: Same as mockery
Makes target switch to melee weapon and charge taunter. Good to pull attackers off of weaker companions or bring archers and spell casters into battle.

Absurd Accusation: This is a bluff and taunt skill and deals more with confusing the target then enraging them. A comic version of this would be the Frenchmen in Monty Python's Holy Grail, "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"
Taunt and Bluff Skills
Penalties: AC, Saving Throws, Spell Resistance
Chance to daze the target as they try to figure out what you just accused them of.

Obscene Taunt: This will be a group taunt, with either an AOE around the target or a cone area from the taunter. The words and actions of the taunter are so insulting to most anyone or anything they all attack in a blind rage.
Taunt Skill
Penalties: Same as mockery only a group affect

Below are some screen shots of the tentacled horror from the last post. The exterior area it was shown in for testing just didn't fit the creature.When I finally get SOZ I will likely try the yaun-ti aberration in place of the wraith.

Back to Risen Hero

2008-11-06T08:41:00.000-08:00

The Community Halloween Campaign is out and getting a lot of good feedback. That was an incredible accomplishment by all involved. I am definitely glad I was able to be a part of it. It was also my first mod release on the vault and a very encouraging experience. I do have to admit that so far I have only made it through about a third of the houses but I'm making some slow progress on the rest.

I am back to work on Risen Hero and the last month has been very productive after the summer slump.

The campaign is now fully compatible with Kaedrin's PrC Pack v1.33. I will have to update with future releases as they come out and yes I am already behind with release v1.34 but it will get done. Fortunately none of my custom content was in conflict so it was fairly easy to combine the 2das. The added classes and feats are a lot of fun. The final release will include this material as well as Tony_K's AI.

The conversations (The most dread part of modding) and most of the larger cutscenes for mod three are completed. Only 2 move larger cutscenes need to be put togther then several small converstions scattered throughout need to be completed.

A new companion will has also been added. Originally he was just going to be a henchman to help out in a battle heavy area, however, as I developed his character he was just too much fun to have only in one area. He is a half-orc barbarian/thug (taking advantage of Kaerdrin's new base class). My plan is that he will be far from a cliche tank. He will be a powerful fighter but will be an expert taunter. He is be that obnoxious guy who as the talent to enrage just about everyone he meets. He is able to throw insults and say it with just the right inflection and sarcasm to set anybody over the edge. While in the party he will have no problem interjecting in a conversation dashing any chance you may have had of talking your way out of the fight. The taunt skill is hard coded so he will receive special ability feats that will have taunt like abilities to use in combat. These will be given to him either when he is in the party at a specific time or encounter or some will be influence based and given during conversations with him. These taunts will increase in ability and have additional effects other than the standard taunt penalties.

I have gotten some great feedback about this on the bioware forums.
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/myviewtopic.html?topic=654922&forum=111

Following the tutorial put together by Shagret's A Texture Tutorial, By (Semi)Popular Demand. I have created some visual effects for some of my custom monsters so they aren't just scale and tint jobs.
So far I have created one glow map for a flesh golem. I was trying to give it more of a freshly pieced together corpse with blood and oozing through the stitchings and connections. In addition to the glow map I took the mummy dust and made it a nice dark red and slowed it down to have a nice blood dripping effect.

By having the dripping attached to the hands it gives a nice splatter effect during the attack.

Here is the description from d20srd.org.

Once I started playing with the visual effect editor and gaining more confidence with it I went on to create this next aberration. It has tentacles attached to both it's hands and the spirit eater to it's back. The black cloud on it's body is mainly there to help hide/smooth the added effects but with during attacks and damage some of the tentacles will appear to be floating in mid-air. This creature comes from the converted monsters on enworld.com

This is how my level 5 fighter fared against it.

The third module is about half way complete with the bulk of the remaining work being conversation and starting to script custom taunt abilities (once I decide on what execptly they will all be). It is nice now that I can definately say I am on the down slope and the end is getting closer.

Done

2008-09-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Halloween module has been completed!

It's been turned over to Bouncyrock for them to work their magic and create the neighborhood.

Before I truly return to working on Risen Hero I am playing through The Subtlety of Thay. I just finish replaying chapter 1 and I'm starting the new chapter. I am using Kaedrin's PRC pack with this play through and there is just a crap load of options for character development.

I started the introduction conversation for my third module, it is a companion interjection after a narrow escape. It will be a short conversation but is fairly important one for setting direction and mood. It has turned into a large undertaking in Patience and mapping. There a five possible companions and non are required. Interjections for this conversation will be random, who starts it and their responses will be different depending on influence (positive, neutral and negative) Then other companions will interject their opinions depending on how their relationship is with the initial companion and influence to the player. So what will liking be seen as four maybe five lines of conversation (not including the PC responses) will actually be a huge conversation. But first I must finish my battle with Thay.

The All Consuming Halloween Module

2008-09-03T03:53:00.000-07:00

So since joining the Community Halloween Project I have done little to nothing with Risen Hero.
I have found some time for a little more play testing over the past week with another page of little updates and changes. It is nice so far nothing game stopping more of little changes, tightening up cutscene or little preference changes that the player most likely won't notice one way or the other. I have two characters working through the first two modules one evil and one good. I want to see exactly where they are before I start populating the third module to maintain balancing.

The Halloween Module is a medium size interior of my basement. No combat or skill use so a player of level 1 or 30 can come in and have the same experience. Playing a lot with the sounds and lighting, Oneofmany's voice set is great for random spooky sounds. The game itself will be more of exploring, small puzzles, a mini scavenger hunt type thing and fun visual stuff with a fair amount of humor thrown in.

I believe that as of last night I have most of it completed. The areas are all put together. Conversations and scripts are written. Now I just need to work on play testing to make sure everything is doing what I intend.

Here is one screen shot of the starting area. Being that it is only one area I want to keep most of it a surprise so you'll have to wait till Halloween to see more.

Community Content:
Cobwebs by Hellcow/Spajk
A Cloud of Bats by Amraphael
Lip Flappers v1.0 by Rogue Dao
RWS Deep Hall Tileset http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=119651&id=327

An August Update

2008-08-18T13:20:00.000-07:00

So the goblin side track was fun but nothing really came from it. I have a campaign and hak all setup and ready to go but nothing else.

Nothing too exciting happening with Risen Hero. I have been going back to the start and tweaking the areas. It is nice to have the sound and light spheres working as well, surprisingly I had to do only a little adjusting with my guesses being fairly close to correct.

Playing a little bit more with area lighting and bloom in some areas and adding creatures to the creature cache, not quite sure while I ignored these originally should of figured they would eventually be fixed.

Downloaded Wyrin's Foraging system and while I'm tweaking the areas I have been adding a few plants and mushrooms here and there. This is a great system that he put together and I'm trying to place the plants in partially hidden areas so you won't be able see them all by pressing the "z" key, instead you need to do a bit of looking.

Also downloaded Companion and Monster AI by Tony_K and was very impressed while play testing, it adds so much to the game. I no longer feel like I need to babysit my companions to keep them from killing themselves or dropping a fire ball in the center of the party wiping everyone out. The monsters also offer more of a challenge.

And finally pulled my load screens back into the photo editor and went with the sepia setting to clean them up and try to create a darker mood.

Something just a little different

2008-07-21T16:09:00.001-07:00

The giant boulder toss Hak and override have been released on the vault http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=359

Now I should of returned to Risen Hero like a good designer but something happened.

Somewhere between searching the vault and reading the bioware forums an idea struck me. I had discovered what the game was missing . . .

It was time for a goblin module.

No more elves, dwarves or those silly half-breeds. It was time for the underdogs to have their day. No longer would they be experience providers just to get your character through those first few levels. No more will the goblins give out 7 experience points instead they will be collecting the experience points.

At character creation there is only one choice for race. Goblin.

Custom color 2da allows for a varied color scheme that matches the above description.
Unfortunately only the skin is tintable and there is only one head and one hair style.

But to make up for the lack of physical alterations there are six goblin gods to choose from. They may not all be from the Forgotten Realms but these are what my internet searches found.

The last bit of changes made gave the goblins more appropriate sound sets, they now grunt, groan and hiss. I was hoping to get into the random name generator so you could be offered a name like "Foul Toe the Rank".

Now I am not really sure what I am going to do with this since I already have little time to work on my main project, Risen Hero.

But the idea that I have floating around is a small noncombat module that is made up of various puzzles. The goblin PC will have to interact with other humoniod and giant races either helping them or getting around them; what chances will a goblin have against a troll? This would be the type of module where you wander around collecting all those bizarre items because you may need them all for different quest and puzzles. Something that is fun with a different challenge (opposed to the usual kill your enemies) and has a bunch of humor thrown in.

But there is the time issues, and this may never come to be.

There be boulders in the air!

2008-07-14T07:56:00.000-07:00

Duck and cover!

A whole new element has been added when battling giants. Sure you have a helmet but don't expect it to help too much. Just ignore the ringing in your ears and get ready for the next volley. What is a good adventure without a few concussions and some traumatic brain injuries.

This is also the introduction for the ever popular hill giant. He has returned to the game after being left out from the NWN2 release. He's big and ugly with s huge club and yes he does look vaguely like a half-orc.

Now onto the boulders. . .

First is the hill giant

He lifts

He throws

You find your yourself standing in a pile of rubble

The fire giants animation sucks so he does't have a lot of screen shots. For whatever reason he was never given a casting animation, but 2 out of three giants works for me.

The frost giant doesn't even need to do the overhead hurl, he just holds the boulder at his chest then sends it flying at you.

I sure hope the this guy has a good reflex save . . .

So there it is the Risen Hero boulder throw.

Thanks to:

Tony K for pointing me in the right direction at the start

Dirywick and his post on user defined events on the BouncyRock forum

Little Baron and his Cowtapult! LB's Ballista projectile demonstration

I have a little more testing to do but right now everything seems up to par. Once it is complete I plan on releasing a erf for other builders. It will contain the three scripts: Boulder throw, the giant on spawn and giant user defined events. Three blueprints of the giants with their scripts and variables assigned (yes you get a copy of my outstanding Hill Giant). And spells.2da. It is used for the animation of the projectile. I was unable to find a way to have the boulder fly through the air without referencing a custom boulder spell. The script does work without the 2da, it is used only for the animation CastFakeSpellatLocation.

Lost in the Mountains

2008-07-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

Well summer is here, and I have been trying to take advantage of the weather to get stuff done outside and enjoy myself. I continue to work on the toolset but not nearly as often.

I have been moving my campaign into a more mountainous region. This is proving to be quite a project working with the camera controls. With the large incline of the terrain at the bottom of the screen will be clipping to blue as I am trying to place objects and such. A little bit of rotation and I find myself inside the mountain side looking through the ground at tree bases. But the over areas are shipping up.

The main idea to this mountain area is the PC and their party are lost trying to find their way I kind of stole the idea from that swamp in IWD II. I have one large main area that makes up the bulk of the mountains. I have taken it and divided it into 9 separate sub areas. Each of the sub areas has two area transitions, one is right and will move the party to the next subarea and the other one is wrong leading to badness. If the player goes the wrong way they have a chance of a random encounter and then will be placed randomly in one the subareas that they have already visited.

To help the player and not make this a total act of frustration trying to navigate the mountain side each sub area will have a conversation. Companions will give hints and PC skills will be used to find the right way. But just to make things fun some of these hints will conflict, this will be the exception though. I have no intention of have the player have to guess which way to go at every turn, that would be tedious and just generally obnoxious.

A river fortress that the player will need to find a way through. Still working on the conversations but I hope to have numerous ways of getting through for multiple skills, classes and alignments. Fighting your way through will hopefully be a last resort.
The banners were made using Cloaks of Faerun (pk2) by Wild Bill

The subareas in the mountain are defined but a slightly different texture on the walkable path. Then boulders, trees and dense grass set up the boarders. The subareas are placed so that they don't line up; so there isn't a linear progression through the area and the area map will not be the cheat sheet to navigate through the mountain.

Beware which path you choose certain death could be waiting for you and your party, or maybe just a bunch of filthy goblins and such.

I couldn't help myself with this one. One wrong turn in the mountains will lead to a wandering monster screen. 6 deactivated encounters are here and one will randomly be activated each time a player finds themselves very lost.

One of the encounters will be hill giants, but don't get your hopes up too much though. I don't have the same talent as other community members and my custom monsters are just tinting and scale jobs. I don't currently have a screen shot but I have used a half-orc made them really tall and gave then very broad shoulders (for throwing boulders).

Giants will be throwing boulders in Risen Hero. Each giant should have three boulders to toss at adventurers. I found the script used in NWN1 and tweaked it quiet a bit. The giants will use a range touch attack and the PC will be given a reflex save to dodge and reduce damage should the giant hit them. The main script is working but I am still working on the User Defined script which will fire the main script.

Bioware forum post

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/myviewtopic.html?topic=638602&forum=114

Bouncy Rock Forum Post

http://forum.bouncyrock.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=127&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=10

I did try to create a custom ranged weapon for giants but due to hard coding you are unable to link new ranged weapons to ammunition and the throwing boulders will show out of ammunition when they were used in battle.

So that is where Risen Hero is at now.

Back at it, whatever it is?

2008-05-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

Well the short break didn't last long, but I did get a chance to play test Dark Avenger Chapter 2. It is an excellent game and a great continuation of the story from chapter 1. Anyone who hasn't played this or the first chapter needs to give it a play through, Wyrin has created a good solid and enjoyable story.

I never got around to playing any of the other games that I wanted to though, Risen Hero started calling to me again. I went from DA to play testing the second module of Risen Hero. Found several big bugs that I was able to quickly squash. Know what is a bad idea, placing a script on the fail to open of a lock door that assigns the PC to open that same door. A few speak triggers that didn't have the speak now turned to true so the NPC would run up to the PC and all the cutscreen cameras showed a bunch of different angles of nothing. But overall things are coming together, a bit more hack and slash then I originally planned but I feel that there is enough substance between the battles and reasons for the battles so they don't dominate the story.

Below is a collect of random screen shots in no real particular order from both module #1 and #2.

A little break

2008-05-18T14:08:00.000-07:00

Module #2 is now mostly complete and I do believe that Risen Hero has reached the half way point. (Not sure but I may have made this same halfway announcement before but oh well.) The completed module reveals a lot more about your companions personalities and their back stories, though most of the main plot is still unknown to the PC. I was able to wrap up the the side area mentioned in a previous post, the 12 cave area. Several side quest were created; some tried to explain why the area is so large as well has provide some area history and some others are indirectly tied into the main plot and the companion back stories.

I need to do some play testing of the game to make sure that there are no game stopping bugs or other weird stuff before moving on to the next module.

But it is now time for a little break from modding, I will be taking some time to play some of the other games out there. I will be staring with Dark Avenger Chapter 2 then I need to actually complete Asphyxia and Harp & Chrysanthemum. I was able to get about half way through but trying to play and working on Risen Hero just didn't work. I kept forgetting to move overrides in and out of the folder and made a mess out of everything multiple times.

Once I get through the testing of the 2nd module I should have some screen shots to show.

Demo Material on the Vault

2008-04-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

I have posted a small demo campaign on the vault. This demo includes the relationship system and feats. I still need to complete the companion conversations with checks when adding or removing members in relationship extremes (hatred and inseparable). There is also the half-fiend as a playable character with racability feats that are given as they level up and the tintable quasit. Several of the half-fiend feats still need some work, one being a blank script and two others still need some more testing, but the half-fiend will now be able to desecrate holy spots. I have an ipoint that if it is is the area of effect it will identify any alters and the script will destroy them then fire off a second script. The second script will be unique to each ipoint so if you go and destroy an alter in a temple of helm all the clerics and paladin will attack you.
I originally had no intention of going and releasing this material separate from the game so there may be issues with reserved lines in the 2das.

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2Scripts.Detail&id=125000&id=213

Dank and Gloomy Underground Ruins

2008-04-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

So again I am posting that progress is being made. For the Past, oh... long time, I have been working on caverns and ruins. A while back I made a medium size area for a side quest and following whims and just plain old craziness during the area design I started added cave openings in the cliff walls that surrounded the area. I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing or more importantly the consequences of what I was doing. When I was done I realized that I had 12 cave openings in a single side quest area. So several other quest have been added so these are not a bunch of random nothing caves. This area isn't part of the main quest and the story will not be broken if it is missed, though after all the time I've spent here I hope it isn't missed. Decisions made in this area will have some effects that carry into the main plot and some companion story-lines are also developed here. It has also given me the chance to try somethings that I have been thinking of but had nowhere to place them. This story is really being developed as it progresses. It has a main outline of the plot and major points in the story but there is a lot of freedom and room for growth in the story as it goes from point A to point B.

The first several caverns were fairly standard with several having multiple entrances (trying to use up some of the cave openings.). But as design went on the caverns slowly became slightly larger and started to develop darker stories. I am sure some of this had to do with my choice of music while working on the toolset, Nick Cave is slowly becoming one of my favorite modding artist.

Below is a series of screen shots of various areas in these caverns of DOOOOOOM.

Green glowing fog......what could possible go wrong in an area like this?

This is a different set of ruins accessed through, yes one of the 12 caves. I took full advantage of the broken and destroyed furniture to build this area as well as all the skeletal corpses. I tried to give it the look of a plundered mountain stronghold. The dead occupants had made numerous barricade points of piled up broken furniture during their last stand.

Every set of ruins needs a ghost who is willing to talk to you and shed a little insight on the history while maybe even give you a quest or something like that. This is the second ghost to appear in my mod. The other ghost is much taller and skinnier but they both have distorted scales. My ghost also have a single color in varying shades for their tints.

This is a maze that you may encounter, it is made of many single tile rooms with 1 to 4 doors each. Whenever a door is open there is a 25 percent chance for zombies to "pop out" of the floor in the new room and your room, then the door behind you closes. The area disables your companion's on blocked scripts so they don't go around opening doors causing other doors to close and possible spawning in an obsene amount of zombies. My first test of the area went horribly wrong with 4 companions running around opening any door they could find trying to get to zombies.

And finally here are some screen shots of some older areas just to prove that this game isn't going to be all doom and gloom crawling through dank dungeons and stuff.

So here is a nice sunrise at a river crossing.

A small house where a fisherman lives with his wife and cow. The House is situated on top of a hill at a bend in the river. This also shows the retaining wall for their little garden.

The second module of the campaign is getting closer to completion. Two more areas need to be designed and maybe a half dozen plus conversations need to be completed. I believe most of the scripting has been completed with the exception of one cutscene that will end this module. So once this is completed that will mark approximately the halfway point for chapter 1. So that is where it is now.

Party Relationships

2008-03-21T19:23:00.000-07:00

I have completed the companion relationship system. This will tracks how certain companions feel about each other similar to how the influence system tracks the opinions the companions have for the player. There are seven different levels on a scale -100 to 100. As the relationships change the characters will be given feats to match their relationship level (excluding the starting neutral level.) Bonuses or penalties will be given to attacks/saving throws/skills as the relationships develop. Once the relationships reach a certain level their positive or negative feelings will carry over to the rest of the party members. The effects will only be applied when both companions are in the party together.

-Neutral: nothing
-Friendship:(level 1 positive) +1 to relationship companions
-Unwavering friendship:(level 2 positive) +1 for all party members
-Inseparable: (level 3 positive) +3 for relationship companions, +2 for all party members.
Companions will also not separate from each other and must either both be in the party or out
of the party. Similar to BG1, Dynaheir & Mincs.
-Untrusting:(level 1 negative) -1 to relationship companions
-Dislike: (level 2 negative) -1 to all party members
-Hatred: (level 3 negative) -2 to all party members.
To have both companions in the party an influence check will need to be made. And if both
members are in party random interjections between companions could lead to companion
leaving party or companions trying to kill each other.

Quasit

2008-03-07T10:28:00.000-08:00

So instead of writing conversations like I should I have been exploring custom content and I have now added another NPC for the PC and their party to battle, quasits. The demons were feeling a little left out since the devils had their imps. At first I was just going to tint either the imp/mephit/homunculus. But all the tint maps just weren't right and didn't allow much variation. So with some help from crystal violet from the bioware custom content forum I was able to create a tint map for the ice mephit. It has three tintable areas: skin, horns and spikes, wings and detail squiggles and stuff.

Quasit Stats Outsider level 2, CR 2, Chaotic Evil, Hitpoints 13 Armor Class 17
Strength 8, Dexterity 17, Constitution 10, Intelligence 10, Wisdom 12, Charisma 10
Feats: Weapon proficiency (creature), weapon finesse, improved initiative, Darkvision
Attack: claw 1 and 2: 1d3 with poison(DC=14 Dex 1d2), Bite 1d4
Imp Skin (immunity to poison, fire Resistance 5/-, regeneration +2)
Damage reduction 5/cold iron
Special Abilities: Cause fear, invisibility

Half-Fiends Spoiler Ahead

2008-03-05T14:59:00.000-08:00

I have completed a new subrace for my game, half-fiends and are part of the planestouch racial type. They will be a playable race but not a PC race with custom racial abilities as well as fire and brimstone. The half-celestial was used as a template and I also used d20 web site.

Half fiends :

Ability Adjustments:
Strength +4, Dexterity +4, Constitution +2, Intelligence +4, Charisma +2

Race Abilities:

Darkvision, Damage Reduction 5/magic, Immunity to Poison, Natural Armor +1

Resist (Acid, cold, fire, electricity), Spell Resistance, Smite Good, Wings.

Racial Spell-like Abilities:

level 1 Darkness, Level 3 Bane, Level 5 Inflict Serious Wounds, Level 7 Poison, Level 9 Contagion, Level 11 Mass Inflict Serious Wounds, Level 13 Unholy Aura, Level 15 Horrid Wilting, Level 17 Summon Demon and Level 19 Destruction. (several of the spell-abilities don't quite match with the d20 but not wanting to make a bunch of custom feats I choose some that best match but are far from a perfect match.

Favored Class: Barbarian

Level Adjustment +4

The spell like abilities I have been unable give as the half-fiend advances in level and from posting on the bioware forum I found that racial feats are only applied at character creation.

For the NPC placed in the game I have several different blueprints with the correct feats in place. For the one companion (if the player chooses to take her) she will gain the feats in conversation after she levels up.

Similar to the half-celestial which use the aasimar the half-fiend uses the tiefling as a model. The female half fiend shown above has the fire genasi visual effect for the flaming halo and the erinyes wings. The other half-fiend has smoldering feet and no wings, unfortunately the succubus wings do not line up with the tiefling bodies. The whole wings thing in this game drives me absolutely mad how the wings only line up with a single model most of the time.

Screen Shots

2008-02-16T16:21:00.000-08:00

The starting point in a quiet destroyed village

A fun kobold cave

*Please note your companion off screen is talking not the severed head as cool as that would be*

A nice forest cave filled with kobold death

A wonderful sunset in a desolate mountain valley

Here are several screen shots from the game, they are progressive through the game. The areas in my opinion have greatly improved visually as I gain experience and comfort using the terrain tools. I have been doing numerous touch ups to old areas as I discover new techniques.

Companions

2008-02-16T15:39:00.000-08:00

Companions in my opinion can truly make a good game great or long and tedious. Having fun and different companions in your party who interact with the PC and the other NPCs can add a whole new depth to a game. Each companion needs to have their own personality and reason for being in the party. Interjections are also a must. The companions need to let you know their opinions and feelings throughout the game. These are some of the ideas that I have tried to keep in mind while designing and writing the dialog for the Risen Hero companions.

Currently there are five companions available to the PC. Some will come forward and offer their assistance while others will only join under certain circumstances It is likely that when playing this game not all the companions will be willing to join the PC's party. This will be determined through choices in conversations as well as alignment and class, one companion even has a random 50/50 chance in a conversation to join you. Each companion will have thier own back story some will be more elaborate and other will only be revealed in bits and pieces throughout the game. From the start of the story you will be warned about your companions, some will help you and others will betray and try to use or destroy you.

The majority of the companions (currently all but one) have their own class packages with feat and skills. They were chosen based on the companions personalities and history as well as to allow some to multiclass later in the game.

The MOTB influence system has be used and their influence amount will show up on their character sheets. Currently there are no influence feats and I don't even think that I will be using a system similar to the MOTB influence feats. Current plans are to grant some companions special powers/feats based on influence through conversation.

All companions will be added and removed from the party through conversation. They will remain at the location when you dump them unless you have some base of operations and then you have the choice to leave them or send them back.

A lot of time has been spent on companion conversations. There is a common conversation skeleton that is the same with all companions -History/background, -skills and abilities, -Area information/recommendations and -Opinions of party members. These four groups each have dynamic replies from your companions that continue to evolve throughout the game.

A relationship/friendship system is also being established between the different companions. Currently the main backbone script for this has been written. During conversation the companions will interact with you and each other and this will have a positive or negative effect relationship. Most of these changes you the PC are the catalyst that can either improve or destroy these relationships. Other characters will slowly built a mutual hatred of each other despite your best efforts to make them get along. There are only a limited number of relationships between companions for the simple reason that managing too many would be a nightmare for the player and me writing the stupid conversations. This system still has a lot of work to be done but I feel the companions and the game play will greatly benefit from it.

So this is the end of my rambling post on companions.

Campaign Announcement

2008-02-12T17:36:00.000-08:00

The Risen Hero Campaign, Chapter 1 is nearing the 50% completion point after a little over 7 months of work. It will be a single player game for a new character. It is slow progress due to the fact that I am the sole designer and writer but progress continues. I would like to thank all that have answered my questions in the bioware forums without the help this project would have been dead in the water long ago.

Campaign Description:
You awake in a destroyed village covered in blood, all around you are bodies dead and nameless. Your memories are gone yet there is no sense of urgency or burning desire to discover your past. You are pulled into an epic journey and battle that extends throughout the realm. You will rise to become a powerful hero against an unknown and growing evil that threatens all.

This first chapter has a more linear storyline that will open up as your character advances in level. You start off in the wake of a destructive army and yes your memory is gone (I apologize to all who tire of this cliche start but some things are what they are and you have no memory . . . deal with it.) Your only guidance is that of a mysterious stranger who tells you to travel east into the mountains. From that point you will be sent off into the big bad world and thrown to the wolves or more accurately the kobolds. It will be generally a story for good and neutral characters but there are plenty of opportunities for evil characters and there will be separate paths for good and evil characters to choose. Those choices will be separate paths not opposite paths. All races and classes will be fully supported.

It is set in the forgotten realm world yet it is a independent story line. I will admit my sole knowledge of the forgotten realm comes from playing computer games starting with the SSI Pool of Radiance. It will make references to some forgotten realm history and lore but won't really fit into any time line. It loosely takes place some time after Icewind Dale 2. On a whim I played an evil party and the power that they obtained by the end had me a little worried for the safety of the citizens of the FRW, so this campaign is my solution of how to stop them after they cause way too much destruction and pandemonium.

The game currently includes:

2 modules (1 complete and 1 needs a bunch of work)
23 areas (keep in mind many of these are smaller sub areas)
5 Companions that may join your party -future post on companions coming
A whole bunch of NPCs to talk to and a bunch more scripts and crap
Custom load screens
Custom load hints
MOTB rest system, time system and influence system
Currently there is probably about 6 +/- game hours

This is my first module created in the NWN2 toolset. Risen Hero did have a short life as a NWN module but was never close to being called complete. So despite all the recommendations to start small and get to know the toolset I did just the opposite. This method has involved a lot of going back and updating or changing things as new techniques are discovered but I feel the end product will be a decent and enjoyable game.

Risen Hero Campaign NWN2

---Something Clever Should Go Here---

Ogres of the Bone Eater Tribe

Isn't there suppose to be a second chapter?

Back to Risen Hero, Update first then Chapter 2

Fog of War and other Updates

Temporarily: Risen Hero on Hold

Who are all these NPC and why do they think they get to talk?

Working On Big Update

OOZE GALORE

Demonic Merchants and Their Wares

Planescape Chant

No Screen Shots?????

Swamp Overland

Chapter 2. Back to the toolset

Update done just need to pack it and upload it.

Release!!

Taking the Challange

Why would you do it that way?

Play Testing is Starting

Damn You Party Conversations

Play Testing

QUICK UPDATE

Good News

10109 Words

I Need to Stop Estimating

That Much Closer

In the words of gold five "Stay on Target"

Items and a Touch of Evilness

Wrapping up the areas

Another Section Done

Another Update

Going Back to the Beginning.

Congrats to the Alphas Out There

Back to Some Area Design

They're All Attacking Me

ROGUE

So I lied.... And here is what I'm working on.

Conversations, Companions and the Summer

WHAT?! Why is this broken now?

Just a Bit of Blood and Gore

The making of a sword

Just a Saturday Morning

The last kid on the block

Taunts and Tentacles

Back to Risen Hero

Done

The All Consuming Halloween Module

An August Update

Something just a little different

There be boulders in the air!

Lost in the Mountains

Back at it, whatever it is?

A little break

Demo Material on the Vault

Dank and Gloomy Underground Ruins

Party Relationships

Quasit

Half-Fiends **Spoiler Ahead**

Screen Shots

Companions

Campaign Announcement

Half-Fiends Spoiler Ahead