Campaign Updates Labyrinth of Lunacy

Worked pretty heavily on the LoL quest in map 2 but I have been so distracted with my new video card and playing games on highest settings that it's getting in the way!

I hate working with dialog but I seem to be adding more and more to this quest because it just feels like it needs it to drive the story home. I may be revealing too much in this chapter as well but since I will not publish it until I have the campaign finished, it doesn't matter. I'm considering not releasing any of the campaigns until I have the whole story complete with exception of dealing with the main villain, which would be the climax to the story. Maybe I will have all that done before launch anyway so it's a moot point right now.

I fully expect to have quest 2 finished this week and then just fleshing out the dialog, clutter, lights and sound.

I also do not have any screenshots to post because there are some things I want to keep a secret for the player to experience first hand.

I'll snag some boring wall shots or something for the next update :)

-chili

Upgrades!

Waiting for UPS to deliver my new video card and headset I ordered from amazon!

My current headset, while was a cheap Yapster headset, lasted almost 4 years until the normal wear and tear of getting caught up in my chair wheels, dropping and just general all around abuse finally paid it's toll. So I decided to splurge a little and get a "better" headset and bought the Creative HS-800 fatality set. Hope they last as long as those $10 ones did.

The video card is probably a bigger upgrade as I will be going from a GeForce 9800 GTX 512 to an MSI GeForce GT 640 1gb. My old card has been a fantastic card for several years and still performs like a boss but sometime during some GW2 play it failed and I lost the 32 bit color and everything is now in 16 bit, which looks fine most of the time but some serious color banding appears. The new card also has Dx11 support and HDMI which will be amazing on my 47 inch tv/monitor. Every review I have found said for the price this little card is a monster.

I also just recently upgraded my ram to 4 gb and my OS to 64 bit (Windows 8)

So that is the latest update and pretty much why I have been slacking on the foundry updates.

-chili

Circle of the Living Flame: A New Threat

Circle of the Living Flame is what should have been the first campaign for the overall series since it introduces the main threat of the larger story plot, which is the Circle.

Basic plot for this campaign:

The area around Neverwinter has lately been encountering a new threat from the already hostile areas of Neverwinter Wood and Mt Hotenow. Short on men and resources, the Neverwinter Guard is asking for volunteers to aid with finding the source of this threat and helping to eliminate it.

Spoiler Version:

The Circle of the Lingering Flame is a group of Wizards who are wedging a war on Faerun starting with the areas around Mt Hotenow. They worship a (supposed) fire deity by the name of Netho'relok who is believed to have been born from the fires of Mt Hotenow's eruption.

So there you have the premise, pretty simple.

A New Threat

As for this particular part of the story, the player will be tasked to deal with the rising threat. The frst quest will take the player into a cave complex to nip this new thread in the bud. They are asked to team up with a Neverwinter Guard Veteran, Sergeant Graegos (Graegos was my first pen and paper character back in the 80s and has been a character in every RPG I have played since, I will do a bio on him later) as he deals with the threat head on.

I started working on this map some time ago but side tracked onto "Sewers of Insanity" which was to be the second quest in DoD but it got scrapped for Labyrinth of Lunacy. I have now decided to get this quest published to give more back story to the main plot of the series since it has a more direct connection early on than DoD.

Here are some screenshots of the new map:

The cultist of the Circle will cover a wide array of "intelligent" monster types including "civilized" races. To join the circle they must agree by contract to worship this new deity and serve him and the Circle until death as they plot to take over Faerun.

The player can expect some nice surprised in this quest as well as a deeper insight to some of the subtle hints dropped in CoC but will not make any major connections yet. It's not so dungeon crawly as DoD are but it still has that hacky slashy feel, because it is a quest to kill off a fledgling cultist group.

That's all for now on this campaign and quest, peace.

-chili

3/21/13

Made some more updates to this quest over the past few days but currently unable to access the foundry and take some screenshots, will do it later.

I have map one complete and functional it just needs some clutter love and to perhaps add an encounter or two. The dialog for the while quest is still very basic as well, I will be adding much more to it as I get the maps laid out as I get good ideas while laying out the maps most of the time.

Map two is almost completely built, I tried some really cool things in this one as far as design goes, it will be much less inhabited by living cultist and more undead and fire elementals and will be low light most of the time. I probably will not add much clutter to this level of the map as it's supposed to represent a newly formed cultist group who has yet to get a foothold in this cave.

As soon as I can get some screenshots of some of the content I will.

-chili

As promised, screenshots.

 

Labyrinth of Lunacy

I'm going to be updating my blog with changes I make to my campaigns now that I am in the Foundry Beta and can talk about foundry things.

Working on my 2nd map, the Labyrinth of Lunacy which will be a continuation of the story from the crypt flavor items. Darius is still allowing adventurers run through "his creations" but this time it should be a little tougher and the quest will span two dungeon maps, both smaller than crypts but combined they are larger.

I have the two maps created and the basic floor plan set and just started adding clutter, mobs and other interesting things to level one. I'm trying to get in the habit of doing the layout, naming each room something so I remember the layout (IE "library" and such) and then adding the details room by room and hallways by hallway as the player would reach them.

Some will be pleased to know there are no locked doors that require a mob's death to progress in map one, no skull lamps either, that is strictly a CoC feature, which will change down the road. I will be adding key drops for some locked doors, but most likely not until level two.

Level one is still using the dungeon tiles as I enjoy the flexibility they have and the low ceiling cramped feel they give, but level two will be more of an interior setting (house), you will see why then you play it.

I am trying new things with this quest as well and will not be using many undead as the labyrinth is home of fiercely territorial inhabitants, but there will be some as the story is based on the risen taking over the crypts and moving up through the lower levels of an apparent castle of some form.

Here are some shots of map one.

3/16/13 Update

Real life work has my off time work suffering a bit this week as it's spring and I am getting slammed with jobs, which s a very good thing!

I did manage to get some editing time in with the Labyrinth quest maps though and some more story bits including a dialogue with a very unlikely NPC (no spoilers!)

I think fleshing out a map is my favorite part of creating content, whether in the pen and paper days, NWN days or even in Skyrim when I briefly played around with that editing tool. A lot of my content ideas come while just looking through what I can place and thinking how cool it would be used in a non-normal way in the map.

Here's some more screenshots of some things I got added last night as I did a walk through.

 Working with the foundry is a bit slow right now but maybe next week I can get busy and have this done by the BW3 but it's going to be tough. I will not however publish this one until it is polished much more than Crypts were when I first published it.

Depending on when launch is, I should have all three quests finished in this campaign, or I may opt to publish quest one in the two campaigns I have written out that tie into this story and fill a ton of holes that this campaign has.

We'll see.

-chili

Update 3/24/13

I decided to work on this quest today and got a ton of things done. I love making up the story as I go!

I got the first level map completed and a completed working quest for it. It stays fairly true to CoC as a dungeon crawl but I added much more story to it, including updating the back story quite a bit. Darius you evil bastard! About half way through the map the combat starts to fall off and more of the story starts to come forth. It will take a little curious exploring to snag all the pieces of lore but it will make for  much deeper background if you do.

There is still a ton to do, since I do not like hitting the populate button for my rooms and would much rather self design, it takes a long time to get it like I want, but to me that is most of the fun.

Here are a few screens of what I worked on today.

Dungeons of Dread

These pages will discuss and promote the Neverwinter Foundry Campaign titled Dungeons of Dread and the two quests currently wrapped into this campaign.

The Two Quests Are:

Chapter 1: Crypts of Carnage

Chapter 2: Labyrinth of Lunacy

 History:

The Dungeons of Dread are a series of dungeons that I originally created for my pen and paper group back in the late 80's and early 90's. I later adapted it to Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 in a progressive world. It was met with fair success, enough to warrant me to want to recreate it yet again for NWO. As things change, the adaption for NWO has made me deviate from the original plan of just a hack and slash trio of dungeons into a full out story in which this is just the prologue to.

The purpose of the original and the NWN versions were to test the player to see if they could complete the dungeon without dying. In the NWN version this meant you had to start from the beginning if you died. In the pen and paper version, unless you were with a group who could carry you from the dungeon, assuming the rest of them lived, you died and were dead forever. In the NWO version this currently is not possible, since there is no way to currently reset the quest upon death and permanent death in an MMO is unheard of, with good reason.


The back story to this campaign will grow with each quest, revealing a little more about the maps that you explore and what happened to the inhabitants of each map also about Darius' role in all of it. Without giving too much away, our resident mad man will play a pivotal role in the larger story and perhaps even become a person in which you can fight.

-chili

Crypts of Carnage

The Crypts of Carnage is a single map created as the first in a three part series (Update: The campaign has been downsized to two quests) of quests in the Dungeons of Dread campaign. The layout of the crypt map is broken up in to four sections as you progress, they are:

Cell Block

The Cell Block This is where the criminals and spies were taken to be tortured. The various devices around this are tell the tale of a very unpleasant experience for the poor saps who were locked away here.

Morgue

The Morgue This is where those who had given in to the torture, or who were sentenced to death were taken, placed into a coffin and then taken to some unnamed grave yard, most likely in unmarked graves.

Crypt

The Crypt This is where most of the distance family and high ranking guardsmen were laid to rest. This is also where the twins were laid, separate from the rest of the royal family for their abnormal mentality.

Royal Crypt

The Royal Crypt This is where the closest members of the Royal Family where laid to rest. The Prince's chamber is a vast area risen above the rest of the crypt, most likely to signify his royalty.

Each section has a locked portcullis blocking the progression which must be unlocked by interacting with a pull chain, but before you can activate the chain, you must defeat the boss or bosses of that area. Chains are used instead of levers for the time being but will change later when they allow us to use levers.

The map consist of mostly undead of various types, most commonly skeletons and zombies. It is a fairly easy map to traverse, with a few side passages to explore. The side passages are short and mostly lead to dead ends. I recently added secret rooms, so be sure to look for them!







Because it is a dungeon crawl, the quest is very direct in giving you some objectives. The trap placement is sparse and mostly concentrated into one area with a flavor item telling you to expect them.



  




Some of the quest objectives do not allow use of the "golden trail" quest helper, this is intended to promote exploration of the areas to uncover possible hidden rooms and secret doors.




 

As this is the first of the series, and intended it to be the easier of the two, I wanted to not throw you into a scenario where you feel overwhelmed and so this map is relatively easy, compared to the ones that will follow. The final boss however has been upgraded.









This is not the only map, just the main dungeon, also in this quest is a lobby area, where you will meet Darius Red, the creator of these hellish labyrinths as well as some patrons and avid adventurers taking a break from delving into the depths beyond. The Dread Lobby is located on the Northern side of Mount Hotenow but the actual location of the crypt is kept a secret.