Your caravan is ambushed near the small village of Lugard. When you agree to aid the villagers in dealing with the bandits that plague the area, you find hints that they are but pawns in a much darker conspiracy. Your only companion is a young ranger, and she resents the fact that the villagers has asked you to do the job she has been unable to deal with.
Just in case anybody drops by and is put off by previous comment. 1 I believe it is best to play with a fighter combination as magic items are limited in all classes. Gone through it twice now. 1 with a rg/ftr/ass (strength not dex)and secondly a clr/ftr started both as 9th lvl finished close to 13th. 2 Combats are simple to very difficult on average a challenge, which is what you want I believe. 3 Maybe take down an uber 8th lvl character but again for those looking for a challenge a 9th lvl character from a previous mod with limited equipment/gold or use a level up mod to 9th lvl and keep the gold. Less than 50k gp, maybe a few +2 magic items. I have a theory for each 4-5 levels +1 eqpt. That is levels 1-4 (5) +1 equpment, levels 5/6 to 9/10 +2 etc. This leads me onto the opening area, there are merchants but again limited equipment, +1 items. Choose very carefully. Spoiler the healer at the keep offers best deals for buying stuff. 3 The henchperson, do not confuse her with giving shield and arming with sword, or asking her to use melee weapons. She is so much better with +3 attk, +3 mighty longbow, point blank shot and rapid shot. Keep her at a medium distance in closed areas long ditance in open. Strategy involved here, lure people out into a corridor and protect her, try and block a doorway yourself with her behind. The number of times an opponent would veer off to attack her and then leave me with an attack of opportunity, too many to count (not bad for the rogue).You will find lightning arrows etc around but not many. Try and keep these for more difficult combats eg having a huge critical (50 dam) on a goblin bit of a waste. The number of times I would rush off to fight something and she'd already hit it with 4 arrows, lost count. Makes me feel like using a wpn speialist longbow fighter Conversations with everybody, save before and then choose options (good roleplaying?, if you say the wrong thing end of convo and no side quest). As with many mods I have played if you have buffed up and enter a movie scene buffs disappear. Another reason for saving often. Read books in temple library and take note of journal enties especially with convos with NPCs. The ending was a bit abrupt. All alignment should be OK but you would have to play good to get interesting info and side quests
Posted by Mirgalen at on06/05/06
I agree with lebowski on this one. I only replayed this because it is a CEP module taking place outdoor early on (I needed something like that for my rogue/druid) and because I wanted to see the conclusion. Well this is a first and probably last module so why should we blame the author for making all the common mistakes since the model was set by Bioware? Still some authors are making an orginal and fun to play first module I can hardly say this for this one. Since we are playing in the teen levels I assumed that the title was correctly implied in the story instead, I ended up playing a toned down version of HotU something I don't like to do. As we progressed in the story combats became insanely tough not only for the bosses (starting with a "cheated" bandit boss - a level 10 or so char with a BAB of 14) and continuing until the very end. Can't remember how many times I had to reload this one thanks to a lousy ranger who should be at least as tough as the average NPC. She does cast spells (cure light wounds and entangle no kidding) to counter the number of 1.67 eward's black tentacles. Also the XP and treasure was far from generous not to mention that you have most of the time no way to identify anything. I had to play another module to find that I had a special weapon to do the dwarven ghost sub-quest (the very quest I gave up after reloading 4-5 times thanks to the "uberness" of the two monsters you need to overcome). It took me forever to got the end (it feels like 100 hours) and I can't say that I enjoyed it (except early on may be). I will certainly not replay this one. Now for my vote: Layout / Design: 4 Visuals : 5 Sound : 5 Dialogue/Roleplay: 7 Gameplay/Fun : 3 Originality / Creativity: 3
Posted by Lariam at on04/01/06
My vote... This would have been higher (9.5-9.75) without the bugs (especially the problems with the dialogues central to advancing the plot)! _________________________ Forgotten Realms Weave
Posted by Lariam at on04/01/06
I managed to finish this one. I guess I wasn't able to finish some of the side quests. That could be because of the funny way that the dialogues work - see my previous post. This really was an annoying feature in this otherwise extremely promising and indeed pretty cool mod. The story was quite nice, the player is given some freedom in deciding what to do at which point. There are some nice NPCs, and the writing is okay (except that there is a bunch of linguistic mistakes of different kinds in the writing - didn't bother me too much, though.) The quests were quite good, and nicely intertwined. One other thing that bothered me was the fact that my character lost all his buffs always after the cut-scenes. This meant roughly that the most difficult battles were the ones in which my bard had to start without the buffs quite central to his survival... My bard(/RDD) leveled from level 8 to level 12. All in all this was very enjoyable, however. This could be a *very good* mod with some more polishing. I'd be enthused to play the sequel which, however, we probably won't see. Unfortunately. Thanks to Mattias for building this one! Cheers, Lariam _________________________ Forgotten Realms Weave
Posted by Lariam at on04/01/06
Hmmm. *So far* this doesn't seem to be broken - not even regarding the issues raised by the previous poster (I haven't face all the relevant situations yet, though). Also, so far I'm enjoying this quite a bit! There's nice non-linearity here, pretty cool NPCs and quests, etc. The writing is okay (except that there are too many typos perhaps some other language problems, too - but nothing that would kill the mood for me.) There are some serious problems with how the dialogues work, though (see below in the section with spoilers). So far it seems like I'm going to vote around 9.5 for this one. **** SPOILERS **** On the quests related to the harp and the temple. Yeah - I, too, had problems with the dialogues here, with getting the harp back, and with reporting my achievements in the temple. The thing is, that the drow cleric (?), for example, comes to talk to you always when you go near enough, and gives always the same dialogue. What you need to do is click on her again to start a new dialogue yourself. There might be a similar issue in the temple. When I went back, I first talked to Bedric (?) and he gave the same old dialogue to me. I answered in a way that I should have answered *a lot* earlier (the other alternative wasn't appropriate anymore either so I didn't care). Later on - having destroyed the altar - I think I may have had to go through this dialogue in the other way. And then, initiating a new dialogue, I got the right response, and was able to move on. **** END OF SPOILERS **** _________________________ Forgotten Realms Weave
Posted by Blatob at on03/17/06
Not a bad module, but deffinetly needing some improvements - dialouges, henchmen AI, journal.
Posted by Mirgalen at on06/05/06
Sadly this module is broken and cannot be completed. Found the module to be rather average overall. *** Spoilers *** Did pretty much everything until I got the cutscene with the drow and the merchant. Somehow my character was invulnerable after that cutscene had to use debug mode to fix him (remove God Mode). Found somebody below the rubbles but not the drow boss. Spoke to the Lord. Back at the elf camp I cannot get the harp back. Back at the temple I am stuck with no option to speak about the Lord or the harp. The only other loose end is the vampire girl in the prison as I never found the key to open her cell.
Posted by ericdoman at on01/26/06
See comments but does have that originality feel to it. The beginning is a great start and will prob get you hooked there and then so beware the time?
Posted by ericdoman at on01/26/06
Have begun this mod twice once with a uber geared up character and then not. Better and more of a challenge with the latter. (Former game lasted about 30 mins whne I replayed) oes have a good feel to it somewhat different to the norm. Good plots, interaction between npc and player not really any role playing but it didn't need it. Go on have a go.
Posted by Lariam at on04/01/06
Hey - is the work on the sequel still going on? The module seems very nice - I'll give it a try in the near future. Another question, though: how many levels can I expect a character to gain during this mod? _________________________ Forgotten Realms Weave
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