Neverwinter Fights
Alright so, this first post is going to be a fucking doozy.
As someone who grew up with D&D, I don’t like 5e. And by “Grew up with D&D” I mean I was one of the weird tweener millennials who did their formative growing in the tail end of the 90s and the early to mid 00s. D&D was part of what taught me to read, before PDFs were a twinkle in the average tabletop nerd’s eye, my mom was teaching me how to read with her AD&D books and the original Final Fantasy. Something that I’ve always grappled with that 5e brought into the forefront because of the overfocus on modules compared to the old editions I grew up with is that...
Well
The Forgotten Realms sucks. All the pack-in settings for D&D suck but The Forgotten Realms sucks bad. I’m not really going to get into it. Outside of video games I don’t really touch D&D with a ten foot pole anymore. I moved on to Pathfinder 2e Remaster. Because “They actually tried!” is better in terms of social consciousness than “They tried™!”, and most of the horror stories I’ve heard from Paizo workers are pre-unionization or from Owlcat employees, and you might even get to hear my gripes about Owlcat later!
So... I’m going to be talking about Neverwinter Nights today and for the forseeable future. Including Premium Modules, Fan content, and Expansions.
And I’ll start with saying “The Wailing Death is alright except for a single glaring writing issue” on the caveat that we accept that it’s the shchmaltziest, cheesiest, most black and white good and evil story you will ever read up until an insulting twist... I wanna call it ending but the last couple of chapters are dedicated to it in their entirety.
The single glaring writing issue is that Bioware made up Ancient Lizard Progenitors and the next expansion has to compensate for that by... not touching it and just kind of making fun of it. They also default to the actual “Societal Progenitors” in Shadows of Unrentide, the first official expansion and also not a work made by Bioware.
Bioware only made the base campaign and the toolset for Neverwinter Nights. I’m not going to be praising the setting itself. I fucking hate it here, Forgotten Realms can eat a whole bowl of dicks without any milk. I will be praising Shadows of Unrentide for actually...
Being D&D, though. The Wailing Death has a really strange disconnect with the setting at large, even as you roam through Neverwinter and its environs.
I will also be pissing all over Shadows of Unrentide, burning it, then pissing on the ashes again for being D&D. There’s a lot of reasons I hate The Forgotten Realms and aside from major ones I’m actually qualified to talk about will be brought up early and fucking often.
Or so I thought.
Shadows of Unrentide was completed in a few hours after getting... bored.
And then importing a character from a mod campaign that was strong enough to no-diff everything in the campaign just so I could see the writing. Which... 4/10? Even approaching it with D&D in mind it was pretty bad. Better than Wailing Death for the fact that “The Creators” didn’t need to exist because the Netheril Empire already did, but nothing really interesting was done with even the fact that the antagonist, in an actually clever twist, takes off her hood and instantly turns you to stone.
Because she’s a Gorgon.
The thing is, removing unreasonably challenging gameplay from the single player experience of a module... designed for a single player, according to the selection screen... even though it’s pretty blatantly built for four players, with the whole “Every single important item has four copies if it’s not one of a kind”, such as helmets meant to guard you from a poison gas trap.
The writing is really really really fucking bad.
It’s chock full of the same cliches of early Wizards of the Coast D&D. Where everyone thought they were being antiracist by having the “Evil Races” just sort of... decide to be “Good”, along with a speech about how they denounce their race, culture, and god? Oh no, is a hardcore lefty admitting that wokeness is fake and the real racists are the antiracists?
No, he’s not! Just saying that Wizards of the Coast is differently racist from TSR. Also maybe blame someone other than Gary Gygax. There was a whole team working on TSR D&D and he had literally no part of WoTC D&D, but somehow he gets all the credit and blame for everything related to D&D forever? Man’s dead, let’s make him spin in his grave so fast that he can power all those dipshit Large Language Model server farms all on his own by playing other TTRPGs.
I’m also a white guy so I’m not really qualified to talk about the different kinds of racism in D&D and its various eras, so I’m gonna move on to a few things I can actually talk about without talking over people. I’m not a fucking breadtuber. Christ.
Josh Strife Hayes disastrous review aside?
Shadows of Unrentide barely seems worth talking about. You don’t have to blame the game for letting you make an 8 STR Wizard/Fighter and not holding your hand in character creation to make it look bad. The opening is okay except for an instance of “I discarded my race and culture to be good.” from a Dreugar farmer. I’m fairly certain I spelled that wrong and don’t care.
But, your mentor at a small “School”, Drogan the Dwarven Wizard, gets attacked by a gaggle of Kobolds who sneak past him slinging spells at their peers to swipe him with a poisoned dagger and lay him out, and leave the cleanup in your hands. It’s a much more intimate setting than the Neverwinter Adventurer’s Academy that you were the only survivor of in Wailing Death (if you’re playing Single Player). You’re one of three apprentices, two of which are actually allowed to join you because one failed her last test and Drogan’s old friend from the Harpers needs her help to keep Drogan alive, anyway.
It’s another “Go get four things” hunt like most chapters of Wailing Death were, but it feels smaller scale and more... “Real” than graduating from college and being sent off as Our Only Hope. Culminating in even a realistic low-mid level dragon fight where you take a potion that transforms you into a Frost Giant and beat a White Dragon to death about it. White Dragons are the weakest and least intelligent, and this guy’s like... a young adult dragon, so he’s weaker and dumber than most White Dragons. It’s a perfect culmination to Baby’s First Outing, even if somehow a guy who hosted a D&D podcast both doesn’t know it’s a bad idea to cross class fighter into wizard with a -1 strength modifier, or that he’s not an “Ancient” dragon, or that Kobolds have any association with dragons in D&D. Or that the expansion was from 2003 and codified a lot of these tropes that he claims aren’t a thing.
The problem is that the module goes off the goddamn rails as soon as you get the artifacts and return them to Drogan.
Crossing the desert and our guide gets kidnapped by scorpion monsters and we have to save him before we’re stranded because they sacrifice him to the goddess of poison? Yeah, that’s fine. That’s... a sensible encounter on the encounter table.
When getting water at the oasis, having to settle a thousand year war between the Bedine people and an ancient Lich is. Something. Clear padding and so meaningless that the leader of your caravan just kind of goes “What took you so long?” and brushes the whole thing off.
Then you find the archaeologist Drogan sent you to find, give him a healing potion because apparently the Church of Ao, a god that does not normally have followers and this is never even commented on past this moment, does not have a single potion of Cure Light Wounds they could part with for a dying man.
Then he sends you to the site where his guys got attacked
then the Gorgon thing I mentioned earlier happens.
THEN UNRENTIDE IS FLYING AND YOU GOTTA STOP IT GO GO GO SAVE THE WORLD SAVE THE WORLD by collecting three things and putting them in a slot then completing a bunch of busywork puzzles, then fighting a boss that consists of bashing some world objects and beating her up.
I haven’t mentioned that the caravan is a bunch of Roma coded halflings. I’m not qualified to discuss this beyond “It’s a thing I really am uncomfortable with.”
Hordes of the Underdark is bad for more mundane reasons. “We’re teleporting you HERE now!” is the name of the game here because they couldn’t think of a cohesive reason for you to be doing anything, I guess.
Why is it like this? I don’t know. I just don’t know. I even LIKE this game and replay it often, but usually user made modules and the base campaign, not the expansions.
I actually kind of respect The Wailing Death more now that Beamdog has started following it up with new expansions, actually. Because I always found Hordes of the Underdark openly taking potshots at it really weird. Yeah, player, why were you so stupid as to play the packed in campaign with a game you bought? Shadows of Unrentide might have wrapped up a little rushed but at least it wasn’t THAT garbage, right? Imagine liking THAT, player? Nobody did, right?
It’s genuinely trying to be funny, and it just kind of falls flat.
Speaking of comedy that falls flat on its face but is actually endearing about it... let’s talk about Penultima.
Penultima is a semi-parodic campaign that came out for Neverwinter Nights in 2003. Beamdog being absolute wizards with code, mods for the original version work with Enhanced Edition. So it works right out of the box with no need for conversion or anything. Shame about Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition... anyway.
Penultima is pretty unfunny. But in a really charming way. It’s meant for multiplayer adventuring so either drag in a few friends or get ready to make like Billy Mitchel and totally play the game legitimately I promise I swear I pinky swear!
It starts off relatively quickly, because the campaign isn’t super long, it’s not a Go Find Four Things per Big Hub journey like the... every campaign in the base game has in it. It’s a short story segment, maybe a little area to dick around in, then a dungeon crawl and a payoff.
Glod Gloddson’s mine is a Linux joke that ends with a little girl summoning a minotaur to kill you while throwing a tantrum that’s honestly kind of... rough to read, in an intentional way. Her name is Sally Malevolent and her father’s name was Viscera Malevolent. This will be relevant. Relemalevolent. Malevorelavent.
I’m having an ambulance please call a stroke.
The second mission is a trip to a magical university where Dewey Plowshare wants you to find him a thesis about using magic to farm. Earthquake and explosion magic. Look at his name. The thesis is called Operation Plowshare. Yes the guy who wants to do farming with earthquakes is named after the US government’s attempt to farm with nukes.
The third mission is to retrieve the stone that is the compressed body of an ancient god, apparently named Kaos, from the Dayglow forest, where magical radiation has taken root because the ancient god is starting to recover. This is where you find out you’re being lied to and Sally Malevolent is being manipulated by Kaos, but the elf guy who’s paying you has unclear goals and genuinely didn’t give you enough information because he expected you to die and he’s angry you lived.
The fourth mission starts with you finding out that Vigil, Mr. Elf Guy, wants to cast Power Word Mediocre and destroy the ambition, creative drive, and internal lives of everyone in Penultima to protect the peace, and that Penultima used to be called Pax Ultimat.
I have not yet completed the fourth mission, but I think I’ll continue the Neverwinter Nights discussion in a second part. Maybe even a third where I talk about more serious mods, and ‘fandom’ mods, too, aside from it. There’s a remake of the first two Eye of the Beholder games, a version of Diablo recreated in Neverwinter Nights...
I guess a problem is that they’re all created with co op in mind? But you can work around that and still have a decent challenge. That is kind of the major problem with a lot of Neverwinter Nights content in general, that it’s made for more than one player. I’ll see if I can find any kind of solution to this beyond “Increase your INT in the console to give yourself enough skill points to have utility skills without needing to abandon a melee class, because buddy you need to be one, solo”, because there’s a lot of cool stuff to go through but it’s very difficult on your own.
Signing off for now, dunno if I’ll get back to NWN right away or open up with something else next! Stay tuned! I have ADHD and schizophrenia! Actual diagnosis I’m not just making an ableist joke.