rikard.me/blog/015.txt Thu 11 Jul, 2024 Siege of Shadowfail I recently got back into Neverwinter Nights, a game I used to play a lot of when I was younger. One thing I never actually explored though was its community content, and getting back into the game I felt like trying something that wasn't the main campaign. The first campaign I checked out was 'A Dance with Rogues', a quite infamous campaign for perhaps valid reasons. I'm not going to talk about that one here, perhaps it will be the subject of a separate post, but needless to say I absolutely loved it. Aside from the adult themes, as an RPG it got so many things so right. Unfortunately, I played the remastered version which came out in 2020, and having finished part 1 after roughly 50 hours of playtime, I realised that I could not continue with part 2 as it's yet to be remastered. To get the full story I'll have to replay part 1, but use the old version (which I've heard some people say is better, and I was planning on replaying it anyway, so I'm not too distraught). However, before investing another 50 hours into ADWR and possibly burning myself out, I decided to check out another campaign first, namely the subject of this review: 'Siege of Shadowdale'. I chose SoS because it's very popular in the community. In 2023, Beamdog (the developers of the Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition), decided to include the campaign in their selection of curated community content, meaning that the campaign is now advertised and downloadable within the game itself. News of this was met with nothing but positivity from the community, looking at all posts surrounding this I was not able to find one negative comment. Let's explore it together, and find out if it lives up to the hype. The campaign does not require us to play as a pre-made character, and we get to freely choose our race, class and alignment. We'll be playing as Sali Aseph, a human sorceress. We'll also go with an alignment of chaotic neutral, because we're basic bitches. Loading into the module, we're plonked down in front of 'The Old Skull Inn' in the centre of the small village of Shadowdale. We start with an empty quest log and no objectives, we are a travelling adventurer looking for work. A man in front of the inn mentions that the there's trouble at the farms to the south. Cattle thefts, he says. If we want to be of any assistance around here, we should go investigate. We just got here though, and this seems just a bit too hard for us at the moment, so we instead direct our attention to the inn's bulletin board, where a number of easier jobs are posted. The campaign starts out very small scale. One of the jobs we pick up tasks us with cleaning up a barn, moving hay bales from one place to another. I assume there might be a strength check here, but somehow, our sorceress with a below average strength of eight manages to complete the job with praise to spare. Following on from this, we help the local merchant clear out rats from his cellar. We enter the dark space beneath his shop, spells at the ready, and after sending some rats to rat hell, a ratman appears, begging us not to do the same with him. For sparing his life, he swears that he'll move elsewhere, and repays us further by telling us of a treasure that's hidden in a burnt down house in the southern parts of town. We let him scurry away while we claim our reward from the merchant, some measly 50 gold coins (a lesser healing potion costs 34 gold). We leave the merchant's house, and if we're observant we would at this point have noticed that there's only one door leading out of the shop, but three leading in. We find that strange, but decide to go find the ratman's treasure. Despite having burnt down a long time ago, the ruined house still smokes. There's also a skeleton among the ruins; do the Shadowdalians (Shadowdalers?) not bury their dead? On the doorsteps we find a bag with some potions in it. Neat! Another job takes us to the inn, and this one seems to have some more substance to it than the other jobs we've done. The innkeeper, Jhaele, is having a rough time. The inn has seen a large influx of customers, and her only waitress, Kella, is home sick. Jhaele is struggling to manage things on her own, and tasks us with getting a cure from the local healer that we can bring to Kella. We're offered the generous reward of one gold coin, and free accommodations at the inn. We gladly accept. The healer's house is located just across the road from the inn. We enter and explain our business. The healer reacts with some surprise, and tells us that Kella visited her some days ago, and that she was given a cure already. Feeling that something may be amiss, we go to Kella's house to investigate. Kella lives in a two-story house with no bathroom (very few houses seem to have one in Neverwinter). The ground floor is empty, and we check the upstairs. In one of the rooms we find Kella, splayed out on her bed in a pool of blood. She's quite dead. I suppose we could have gone back to her employer at this point and given her the bad news, but sensing Kella didn't die from natural causes we decide to investigate further. On her desk we find Kella's journal. The last entry mentions a man named 'N' whom she seems to have been quite fond of. She mentions that 'N' is staying at the inn and that she would like to go visit him. But wait, what's that? A knock on the door? It might be 'N'! The entry ends. Intriguing! Could it have been 'N' who came knocking, and could he have been the bringer of such untimely death? Or is this, more likely, a red herring? Hard questions indeed, we best go tell Jhaele what we've discovered. She is aghast. She tells us that a person going by 'N' is indeed staying in one of the rooms. She gives us a key and asks us to avenge her waitress (it seems Shadowdale lacks a justice system). We go upstairs. Jhaele did give us the master key to the inn, and we reckon that revenge is a dish best served cold, and that we should let it cool a bit by exploring the other rooms first. Unfortunately, we don't find a lot of interesting things; some books on regional history, we flip through one of them and learn of the Drow, a dark elven race who once lived in this region. Remember these for later! There are also some coins, barely worth the effort of picking up. Most rooms are empty (so much for it being busy here), but in one of them we find 'N'. We ask him about Kella. We don't ask him if he killed her, if he knows that she's dead, or indeed if he's even met her. We simply ask if he knows Kella, and with absolutely no further prompting he openly admits to having murdered her, and that he was planning on leaving tonight. 'If only we hadn't caught him' he exclaims. He gives us his reason, he had found her with another man, and he certainly does not seem regretful for what he's done. With a single speech check we tell the man to turn himself in (turns out Shadowdale _does_ have a justice system). He gladly does so and merrily struts off to the town guard where a sure death awaits him. I was expecting more from this quest, but sadly this is all it had to offer. There are so many twists it could have taken. What about the other man 'N' mentions, shouldn't we be allowed to suspect him? Why is 'N' so willing to give himself up, so willing indeed that he does it with no prompting? Even if we had a solid case against him (which we didn't), why did he not try to shift blame onto someone else, buying himself enough time to leave as he had planned to do? Why can we not involve the guards in this? Why could we not have been given the renegade option of helping him? Beset by these questions, we go downstairs and tell Jhaele that justice has been met. We receive our reward, and then promptly leave the inn. The fresh Shadowdale air hits our face, and we try our best not to think too much about what we've just experienced. Having done most of the things on the bulletin board, we remember the farms to the south and their missing cattle. We've gained a few levels during our questing in town, and now feel confident in tackling this problem. We head south. The journey takes us one in game hour, the game tells us, and we now find ourselves in a small area with two farm houses and a wind mill. We enter one of the houses, and are immediately thrown into combat with a band of goblins. Slaying the stumpy little green things is quite effortless, and we're thanked for our timely intervention by the owner of the house. He tells us that the goblins have been stealing his cattle, and that they've been taking them to the 'pits' south west of Shadowdale. Ordinary people are not usually allowed entrance to the pits, but he gives us a ring which he tells us will give us passage. We strut away to the pits, and after another in game hour or so and some back-and-forth with a guard, we find ourselves inside the goblin cave. This is the first dungeon we're placed in, and in terms of gameplay it's fairly straightforward. The goblins are all quite weak, and die from a single crossbow bolt. The only real challenge comes from the cave's one troll, but he's guarding the dead end of a corridor and we can easily avoid him. There are some optional rooms with treasures, but they don't really offer anything of note. Money in this module is never a problem. From the moment we set foot in Shadowdale, we start finding plenty of magic amulets, weapons with +1 or +2 magic enchants, and fancy armours. We don't need all of these things, and selling them nets us a good amount of gold, gold which we can use to buy things we actually do need. This easy access to money takes away the necessity to explore, as we never have to be on the lookout for upgrades or potions (and even if we weren't able to buy good gear, the enemies are so easily dealt with that upgrades are not needed to begin with). The only reason we'd explore is for the sake of exploration, which I'm usually a big proponent of, but sadly this module does not know how to reward exploration in any meaningful way. Following some twisting corridors, we finally come face to face with the goblin leader. He's not much harder than his minions, and we quickly dispense with him. The farmer asked us to bring back his head as proof of his death, and while separating it from the rest of his body we discover a journal in one of his pockets. From this we learn why the goblins recently moved into these caves, and that it is because the Drow (who we familiarised ourselves with while burglarising the inn) chased them from their old underground dwellings. Something to note here is that the journal is prefaced with a short description of our character's reaction to it. It tells us that the journal is written in the hand of a child, and that it is full of misspellings. You would expect this, as it's written by a goblin, a race not known for their grasp on the Common language. However, we also get to read the typo ridden text itself, and nothing about it feels thought out. Someone with a poor grasp of the written language would write in a way that more mirrors the spoken language. For example, if you were to write 'knight' but didn't know how to spell it, 'nayt' may be a fair attempt, or maybe 'nite' if you were more familiar with written Common. Unless you've seen the word written down, you would not be aware of the 'k' or the 'gh'. In other words, if a goblin were to write a text, they would mainly be excluding letters, not adding them. But the mod author has done exactly the opposite in writing this text. For example, instead of 'during night' he writes 'during knight', only to later spell 'night' correctly. Thematically the text makes no sense, and feels ill thought out. Anyway... We exit the cave and decide to explore the small area surrounding the entrance. We spot some tracks leading off to the east, toward the farms. Our character says the tracks seem to belong to some small humanoid creature, but cannot identify them as goblin prints, even though we've just become quite the expert on them. Oh well, best not to think too much. We head back to the farmer with the head. He thanks us for ridding the world of some its evil and rewards us with 250 gold and a big chunk of XP. Proud of ourselves, we return to Shadowdale. Nothing new seems to present itself here, and there are no new job postings on the billboard, so what now? There's a road going east that we haven't been down. Let's go check it out. We travel for about an hour, until we come across a band of three adventurers bickering which each other around a campfire. They seem quite tired of one another, and we get to choose one that gets to come with us on our adventure. They don't know who we are, we have no previous history with any of them, and they don't know what quest we are on if any. This doesn't seem to matter though, they are so tired of eachother that they will join us no matter what just as long as we ask them to. Best not to think about that too much. With our newfound 'friend', we continue our journey east and soon come upon a forest. There are some wild animals roaming around that send us to an early grave and force our first reload. We're more wary of them our second time around, and we manage to navigate further into the forest where we find a group of rangers. We approach their leader, but he doesn't really have much to say. As we're talking, the camp is suddenly attacked by a pack of dark elves; the Drow that have been foreshadowed for a while now. With the help of the rangers we quickly deal with the situation, indeed these elves seem no tougher than the goblins we just faced, and it begs the question, how were they able to drive the goblins away? We put this question off for now, as we simply can't say no to some corpse pillaging, and we quickly busy ourselves with desecrating the dead elves. The leader has a large 'Stone of Recall' on his body, wonder what that is for... Luckily we don't have to wonder long, as he also has a note on him which details exactly why the Drow attacked, and what the magical stone does. We present all of this to the rangers, who are able to open a portal to the Drow's base camp using the stone. We step through the portal, have a very quick confrontation with the elves who we wipe out without much effort. There's a large tent in the corner of the camp, we enter it, face the Drow leader, smash her face with some magic missiles and loot her corpse. Wouldn't you know it, she has a note on her describing why they are here and what their motives are. We're roughly two hours into the campaign at this point, and it goes on for another four hours or so, and I could continue, describing each major step in its story, but I believe you can see where it's going. You do not require much imagination to fill out the rest. I went into this expecting a really good campaign, what else could I have done having read everything there is to read about it online? Yet, having now played it, I struggle to see why it is held in such high regard. It is certainly not for its writing, and I'm hard pressed to think it's for the gameplay (which is basic, and overall very easy). If I had to describe the storytelling with a single phrase it would have to be 'on the nose'. Everything is so basic and surface level. Nothing is ever left to the imagination, and the easiest explanation to any given mystery is always _the_ explanation. The story is extremely linear, you're never able to approach any given problem in multiple ways; there is only one way, and this way is mostly dull and uninspired. Pair this with the fact that the combat is trivial, save for some rare 'boss' encounters, and you end up with a very boring module indeed. As I said, I really don't know why it's so popular. Perhaps it was good for its time, when it first came out in 2002? I have a hard time thinking so, but I'm ready to give it the benefit of the doubt. Would I recommend it today? No, play something else.