This is a conversion of a Cliffhangers Adventure posted by Jesse Decker on Wizards of the Coast D&D Website. The adventure takes place around the village of Travensburg. The village has had a rough winter, and although the promise of spring seems just around the corner, the village has had to purchase food from a nearby town. The area feels peaceful, but the winter has driven a few small bands of humanoids to search for food outside their normal territory. To protect the valuable shipment of supplies, four guards were sent to escort the wagon. Now the shipment of food is overdue. I'm hoping this is enjoyable, short but sweet. The scripting is a real pain for me, I'm not finding enough time to really understand things fully. But I'll keep working at it. I've liberated some scripts from other mods, so if you see something that's yours, pat yourself on the back. Please leave a comment, and a vote, good or bad. All feedback is a plus.
I thank you for the detailed comments, Chris. The time it takes you to make a post like this is encouraging to me, to say the least. I must put forth more efforts in completing the next parts, for I will admit, I have been lax as of late. But let me address your commentary for now, and shed some light on some of what is going on in my mod. I come up with some good gaming ideas, but to put those thoughts into script form takes me a great deal of time. I was aware that Lord Traven could be stopped in the tavern, but I just did not want to take time away from developing the rest of the mod to write a script to correct it. I figured it was at the beginning of the mod, so if anyone screwed him up, they could just restart. Or not, like you said, it doesn't break the mod. As far as the size of my areas go, I don't consider them large, with the exception of the village area. I had planned to do much more with the village, but my slow game development skills and real-life time constraints combined to leave the village area under-developed. As for more encounters, I have a wolf encounter as you come back through the one area from the ruins, and a goblin encounter in the 1st area north of the village. The goblin encounter only spawns at night, so you might have missed it. I was hoping these 2 encounters would suffice as you traveled back to the village from the ruins. I was trying for some touches of realism with the shops closing at night, and the restricted resting. You could rest in the bear cave, and on the second lvl of the ruins, in the spider's lair. And on the 3rd lvl, in the great hall, after you do the bad guys in. I thought the bear and the spider lairs would have been fairly obvious spots, but perhaps I was wrong. Any of my new mod efforts will use the random encounters in HOTU, I think. I agree about the difficulty with x3 criticals. I would suggest you put your game setting to Normal, avoiding the monster criticals on PCs. I've played through it with a 1st lvl Druid, and Sorc, solo. With the exception of the final fight, I made it through without dying. But as the builder, I know what is coming. The spellcasters, with their ability to summon creatures to be their front line of defense, actually have an easier time with this mod than the fighter classes. Two of my friends played it with a Barbarian and a Sorcerer, on Normal setting, starting new characters, and the Barb died once. They had no previous experience with the mod, so I figured it was a pretty good judgement of the multiplay. I would think the biggest factor here is the game setting. For all those who will try this in the future, Normal setting is enough of a challenge. Thank you for the pat on the back, and letting me know what bothered you, as well. It helps a builder greatly, even if I can't accomodate everyone, to know where players have trouble. You've given me inspiration to take some time tonight to work on The Halls..... :) Farewell.
Posted by ChrisGardiner at 2004-02-0110:36:00
Gah! Something messed up all my nice paragraphs and doubled-spaced everything! Sorry about that!
Posted by ChrisGardiner at 2004-02-0110:35:00
Hi! I just played this module multiplayer with my girlfriend, and thought I'd post some feedback. The first thing that struck me about the module was its attention to detail. The barred door was a nice touch, as was the final riddle. You make excellent use of placeables and sound - keying some lines of dialogue to identical voice snippets is a particularly nice touch. In addition, the story is simple but tight, and the NPC dialogue is well written. I found only one bug, and that's a very minor one. If you talk to Travern after he's briefed you but before he reaches the tower, he will never continue to his destination, but just stands around where you stopped him. Perhaps a quick OnHeartbeat script to check if he's where he's supposed to be would sort this out, but it's hardly game-wrecking in any case. There was too much empty space, though - large areas with little content, and areas that could be removed entirely. I understand the desire to convey the idea of travel to the players, but running through empty areas is no fun, especially when you have to run back and forwards through several of them to rest and recover. Some addiitonal encounters (perhaps non-combat ones) might help justify some of these areas, but even then they should be downsized and you might want to consider removing some. Unfortunately, the module is too difficult for first level (and even second level) characters. There are a few things that contribute to this:- 1) Character fragility. I'm inclined to think NWN is inherently broken for 1st-level characters. They're likely to go down from a single hit, which makes their experiences a chancy and frustrating one at best. Orcs, strange as it may sound, are really too tough for first-level characters. An orc is basically a first level fighter, and no other class is likely to have much chance against them. In low-level scenarios axes in the hands of monsters can be a bad idea, too. Triple damage on a critical will drop any 1st- or 2nd-level character, regardles of build. As it is, the module is much better scaled to a single well-built 3rd level fighter character than a number of 1st- or 2nd-level characters. Using placed NPCs rather than encounters heightens this. Both our characters used up their single extra lives on the first combat encounter! Even after using the console to bump us up to 2nd level, we still had to reload several times and couldn't beat the final villain. 2) Orc elites! These will mash low level characters. They have extra attacks from their double axes, 16 hit points and 18 stength. They can take a lot of punishment and dish plenty out, and will go through low-level parties like a XP-hungry adventurer through kobolds. Plus they have spellcaster backup. Yikes! 3) No rest. The resting restrictions cripple low level characters. First and second level adventurers will use up almost all of their resources (spells, hit points, limited use abilities) on any one of the encounters, requiring they trek back across sizeable maps to recover. This leads to a lot of time spent running back and forwards. Spellcasters will have a very rough time of it. Perhaps more resting areas in the dungeon would help. I've had identical problems balancing a low-level module for a single 3rd-level adventurer and a group of 1st-levellers. It took ridiculous amounts of playtesting, the creation of multiple versions of monsters, and I *still* don't think it worked! Lastly, while the accurate day/night cycle is an impressive piece of scripting, it doesn't add anything to the module. It only means that sometimes, when you just want to visit the shop to get enough kit to get back on with the adventure, you first have to go to the hostel and use the sundial. Unless the day/night cycle has a significant effect on play, it only acts as a slightly annoying limitation. I've spent more time discussing the negatives than the positives just because I thought specific information might be helpful for you. Overall, I was very impressed with Unearthing the Past, it's a solid, compact little module to wile away a couple of hours with. I look forwards keenly to Halls of the Beast-Tamers (I remember that old classic from my original old grey-box FR set! And by the way - neat bit of plotting to link the two modules together, especially since they were written, what, a decade apart and for different editions of D&D!) You have a flair for visual design, an eye for detail, and skill with dialogue, and I can't wait to see what you make next. Chris Gardiner, Member of the Module Review Guild
Posted by Skather at 2003-12-0106:12:00
Thanks for the vote, Don. Glad you enjoyed it. The secret door is one of the things I cleaned up with the update. I got rid of the "inscription" and put the riddle on the door itself. When you say the correct response out loud now, a pop-up text tells you the door unlocks. I was trying to be different, with the way I had it the first go round, but most people thought it was sloppy. I had to agree. So if anyone happens to "see" an invisible guy in that chamber, ignore him, he's just there to listen.
Posted by Don at 2003-11-3015:21:00
A small mod, but fun. Area layout was nice. A little action, but not too much. I don't like hack and slash myself and tend to use overpowered characters so I can dispense with it quickly. Plot was good. I gave you an 8. One problem though, I could not get the secret door to open, even after I edited the mod and found the answer. The problem is, I could not get the door or inscription, or what ever, to start a conversation or respond to anything I said.
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