The Aielund Saga Act I - Nature Abhors A Vacuum

Very good mod . Good feeling of progression for lvl1 characters . Sometimes challenging but always interesting . Played fighter/ thief and felt for a start that the thief lvls were a waste but there were traps and locks later on . Ended up with more gold and treasure than I knew what to do with . Also after trying the last fight a few times and failing I just ran thru myself and skipped it , but maybe I'm just rubbish . Highly Recommended.

Top-class module. Writing, characters, story, visuals, music and ambience are all A1.

I recently completed an epic thirty-four part recounting of the Saga on my blog, the first post of which is here.

Both the module author (Savant, now a novelist) and the current maintainer (Balkoth) have made various comments throughout the recounting.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing and recounting Aielund Saga, and recommend it to everyone.

-Lilura.

Best mod ever written - rating reflects entire series

...

Is there still somewhat updated walkthrough around to be found because I'm pretty sure hit a gamebreaking bug beceause not recieving certain part of the main quest after talking. Can't leave certain town at all to rescue certain someone (no quest no one letting me leave either)? Edit: found a hint with the toolset.. panic averted.

Just re-played this after SO many years, felt like a brand new game!

Loved it, onwards to Act 2! :-)

After Syrophir's post, and coming across Lilura's awesome blogging of The Aielund Saga, I've finished the first Act!

The only real difficulty I had, was with the barbarian Erag and his shaman Tald Black Tiger. Being a level 5 barbarian myself, this battle was painful. Erag is a level 10 barbarian, and power attack crits for over 40+ damage. He cleaned the heads off the entire party easily, five times in a row. With Tald Black Tiger in the mix, my frustration got the better of me.

Finally beating them both, and being the last barbarian standing (no rez scrolls for companions), I returned to the town, only to be attacked by mercenaries and died. My last save was before the battle with Erag and Tald Black Tiger, so I stepped away for a few days from the adventure.

An auto save on exiting through the passage from Erag's chamber would have been helpful - or an auto save on returning to town before the mercenary attack. It's only my own frustration and loss of focus that I did not make a save myself.

Another issue, although not game breaking, was I did not encounter any Ogres on the second level where Erag could be found. Loading up the toolset, there are Ogres placed on this level, but in-game, I never encountered one. Even the Ogre in Erag's chamber was not there, yet it stands in the toolset.

Probably a good thing, considering how difficult the battle was. Level 5 main vs. a Level 10. Ug.

Pushed through and I'm now on to Act 2 myself!

FP!

First up, this is a fantastic module, I loved it, great story and nicely balanced really well put together and puts most of the official ones to shame.

Now to my problem and i'm really hoping someone can help me out. I downloaded everything off here about a week ago and have just updated my copy of NWN using the patch (i have the GOG diamond edition). I have played through to the end of Part 1 and when i go to continue i find myself in a room with a sign that says that it is a placeholder for part 2.

I have seen that other people have played through the entire series so i am wondering what may have happened here.

If anyone has a suggestion i'd love to hear it because i really want to play the rest of this story out.

Finally finished the entire saga after weeks of playing. One of the best mod I ever played!

I have written newbie-friendy installation instructions for The Aielund Saga:

How to Download & Install The Aielund Saga.

I hope it can help some people out. The biggest barrier to playing many of NWN's modules is downloading and installing them in the first place.

Had good fun playing this mod with my brother recently, although there seem to be a number of bugs for multiplayer (it seemed to swap frequently for which one of us could actually progress the quests).

AIELUND SAGA offers an absolutely epic, long gameplay. You can scrap original campaign and just go straight to the Saga, downloading all the modules and required custom content from the NWN Vault. Stephen L. Nowland, the author devoted around 6-7 years of passionate scripting and imaginative writing to make the Saga, which currently has its own overseer, Balkoth, who constantly improves its performance. Aielund Saga is THE BEST NWN story up to day (2016) in terms of (a) epic scope of gameplay experience and (b) utilization of immersive custom content. This content makes you walk through snowy wastelands, burned-out forests, blossoming farmlands, soaking rainy villages, dvarwen cities, dense elven forests, windy deserts (indeed, Aielund offers lots of lovely open-sky-areas). You can wreak havoc in a gentlemen’s club, hire a helping hand of a dragon, travel with an elderly noble paladin, forgive your former enemies to befriend them and participate in court intrigues. Henchmen have their unique personality and a few romance options are available adding the spice (Robert for women, Criosa for men, starting from act III). There is also a feeling of familiarity as you visit the same places again after, not to mention horse riding that adds a realistic touch (and some possible bugs, for that matter).

"Aielund Saga", treated as a whole, would be a first of two modules recommended for any NWN newcomer not satisfied with original campaigns and addons. "A Dance with Rogues" would be the other module. 

This is one of the best NWN campaigns I have ever played, and the only one adapted for horses where there was room for mounted combat and not having to dismount one small area after the next. I was spoiled playing it before the horses were added however as at last play the horses bugged some romance scripts and I rate that as more important for all these well written companions.

Was a great and fun module (I'm playing through with friends). The last fight was really difficult and despite us having done everything we were only level 6 (I think) at the time, which means it seems we're a bit underleveled (and are starting the second one too) but we got through that fight after quite a lot of tries. Also we did end up causing each other problems because of our actions effecting our party so people alignments were getting messed with, but someone here helped me change it so there aren't any alignment restrictions on classes any more so it ultimately was okay. The limited resting was a bit frustrating but added some tacticalness so not the worst thing ever, though it feels like my buffs like bulls strength and things are running out far quicker than in the original campaign, but might be my imagination.

Did encounter a couple of bugs though.

1) When you get to Culdeny (might be spelt wrong) you get a quest from the lady in the church to go to the mausoleum and there you ultimately kill some goblins and get a bloodstained note. Before we did that though I went into the north shore trading company, when the lady told me everyone was too busy I smashed down the door, lied about being a member and could talk to them. However, I was already getting dialog about the bloodstained note (which confused me, we hadn't done that bit), and it lead to one of the guys running away. This meant when we did get the note the quest got kinda borked. I don't know how easily it might be fixed but we just started over (which wasn't too bad as one friend had left early so he wanted to play up to the point we were at any way).

2) On Kith and Kin (I think it was called that). Once you've got the items from the dead dwarf, when I spoke to the dwarf (brother in the inn) nothing happened, and when one of my friends did he got some message about there being an error and to contact the module designer. Turns out he had the journal but I had one of the bits of the dwarf's equipment equipped so until we put our various stuff together we couldn't hand it in.

An epic series! Truly recommended to every NWN player!

(rating is for the entire Aielund series)

This is an outstanding epic series that will leave you wanting more when complete. The module author clearly put tons of hard work and effort into building one of the 3 best series on the vault. This series is one of the reasons Neverwinter Nights still exists 15 years later.

The story, the battles, the music, the visuals all are top notch. I solo'd a Human Wizard from 1st to 34th level. I highly recommend this module to everyone.

Voting 10!

The quality of the entire Aielund Saga is at least on par with the official campaigns.  All the modules in the series are detailed and polished, story-driven with plenty of fighting too.  It looks good aesthetically, and features custom music which is a nice touch.  It is one of a very few modules or series that takes your character from 1st level up into the mid-30s.

Of the series, the story development may be weakest in Act I, perhaps understandable since the plot must be paced over a long saga.  The story set-up in Act I starts paying off in Act II.

As far as combat goes, Act I is probably the best balanced of the series, providing consistent challenge, but always beatable with smart play.  That is impressive, because it is probably most difficult to find that area between pushover and frustration for combat in the lowest levels.

There area  few minor annoyances.  Dante Colt, your fighter henchman with 1 level ranger, insists upon trying sneak attacks like a thief and there is no apparrent way to stop him (other than constantly clicking him to deactivate stealth),  Your henchman otherwise have a pretty good AI.

I dislike EMS as the alternate magical system, when trying a spellcaster as a player character.  It is possible to disable the EMS hak, but I did not want to do that, because it would risk throwing module balance out of kilter.  Playing a spellcaster, I had to frequently pause the game and consult the EMS documentation to research various spell changes.

(Edit: I have changed my mind about EMS, after recently completing a play-through with a Sorcerer.  It took me a while to figure out all the spell changes- with a lot of trial-and-error because the EMS documentation is spotty at best.  But now that I am familiar with the magic re-balance, I actually like it.)

Though I have crash problems generally with NWN, the Aielund modules seem to cause (what I think are) graphics-related crashes more than any other module.  I don't know know much of that is an individual problem with my computer set-up, or something more widespread.  I save the game early and often, keeping multiple backups.

I have replayed the Aielund Saga several times.  Of the community modules I have played, I think the Aielund Saga ranks as my second favorite.  This module series should be near or at the top of anyone's list of community modules to try.

A solid series of modules.

Played through multiple times and only ever encountered a handful of miniscule bugs (none of which could be reliably reproduced).

AFAIK this was originally meant to be a trilogy, which is why I'm not overly critical of the goofiness thats starts to happen in the last two modules storywise. To be fair, it's not as though it's badly written, but rather a significant change in scope (almost unavoidable in epic level romps) and an enemy that  came from WAY out of left field, perhaps more at home in Spelljammer than Generic High Fantasy Kingdomland.

9/10 for the whole series

-Requires CEP2

-Item strip. Both in the first module AND much later on (I suspect in an attempt to reign in the "phat lewt" factor)

+Free startng kimono

Great fun. Played through it with several different classes; druid, rogue bowman and a dwarf fighter. I really liked the extra comments my dwarf did when underground, commenting on the worksmanship of the walls, etc. I wish more modules had little nice touches like that. When i met the bulette i thought i was in for a really tough fight, but it went down very easily. Now, I haven't played pnp AD&D in many years, but I remembered them as being much tougher. I didn't bother with horses, since none of my characters were a knightly type.

Overall i really liked the module, and plan to bring my three characters over and play the second part of it next. 

Can I just extend a thanks to Lilura for her page dedicated to the Aielund Saga and her computer savvy. I got NWN! Diamond from GOG (owned the original game which will not still play on any of my computers, sigh) and, although it says it comes as v. 1.69, it wouldn't even run consistently until I applied the patch manually. I think I've gotten spoiled by the NWN@ mods (or those ported from 1 to 2) that self-extract or combine all necessary files in one giant download. Looking forward to it despite the labor-intensive nature of the install!

Gotta agree with all other positive posts.This (I'm well into part 2) is at least the equal of some of the paid content available and equals or excels every other mod I've played. It's like hunkering down with a lengthy, absorbing novel or series when you have an extended weekend and time in which to savor it. The only difficulties I've encountered are weaknesses of the NWN1 engine: no control of henchies and their development. Playing as a Druid and had an OMG moment when I had donned my medium armor and got the floating text message "Druids cannot cast in metal armor," then couldn't switch out the armor due to some glitch that kept saying I couldn't change armor while in combat (when there was no combat in the game in either direction for several hours.) The one thing I might recommend is that, if you would not normally roll up a rogue, take a level of rogue at some point: lots of locks and traps and your henchies are a ranger and a cleric. Lots of fun magic items for bards and monks (or for anyone with a high enough Use Magic Item). XP awarded generously, and except in two spots your enemies don't swarm you but come in manageable waves of 2-3. High loot and nice pace of leveling up. A shout out to Lilura, who made the daunting installation process a smooth ride and who provides a free walkthrough on her site. Just, top marks all round for this content, and I can't say enough in praise of it!

10 for the whole Campaign

Hey guys! I'm really excited about getting into the game. My girlfriend and I plan to play the game together, and got everything installed and fired up with no problems. We've run around in the game for a little while, doing the basic stuff in first town. But a few problems arise: The game does feel difficult for a couple of reasons:

As 2 players, the game seems difficult without the use of both henchmen. At the same time, if we need a resurrect scroll each time a henchman dies, that becomes extremely expensive. Two issues with that: it's impossible to fund so many scrolls, and impossible to continue without a henchman. Do we need to load at every member death for this reason?

The game will feel easier once we hit level two, I know this. We are still level 1. But some quests have missing experience, such as certain homeless man, and the Mayor's "A Descreet Assignment" quest. As far as I can gather, this should have awarded a bunch of experience, but we chose the non-lawful (neutral) option at the mayor, which awarded no experience at all, and we still have the quest item. This alone should have given us half a level basically, but since it didn't, we're stuck fighting Challenging and Very Difficult enemies in the south road.

How do we go about these issues so they won't be the main barrier of entry into this magnificent game?  

Thanks!

Excellent Epic Saga. First character is a CG Dwarven Barbarian, like the convo and look fowards to trying other characters

Kudo's to Lilura for her great installation guid

the only real downside is the alignment choices as while Good is easy to max out many of the Lawful options are Chaotic Good as well and most of the Chaotic choices are Chaotic greedy.

Thank you Savant for a wonderful adventure.  This is by far my favorite NWN module and beats the Bioware campaigns hands down.  It ranks right up there with BG2, my all-time favorite computer game.  All your time and creative efforts are well appreciated.  Also many thanks to Balkoth for your efforts keeping up and all your convos with Lilura whose blog led me to this woderful game in the first place, and whose walkthrough helped keep me on track during my 1st playthrough.  I also borrowed her character for my last (3rd) playthrough, although I used a lot more levels of CoT.  After only discovering all these amazing NWN and NWN2 mods about 2 years ago, I have a lot of fun times ahead (If I don't spend so much time with one campaign).  I think Bastard of Kosigan is next.  I'll try not to judge it against Aielund Saga!

The Aielund Saga is one of my favourite RPG of all time! The module excels in every aspect, especially in terms of the story telling and companion character development. You can find my review here. Highly recommended to every RPG fans :)

To be frank, this is one of the best modules I've played so far.

I found the story to be very captivating as a branching off point for the other parts of the Aielund Saga. I've never played any of the Aielund Saga, up until this point, and I just now began The Aielund Saga Act II.

I've heard that the saga gets better as the games go on, and so I'm really looking forward to how the other modules will play out. However, I did have some problems with this module in particular...

First, I played the game as a Rogue class on core rules. I found that the traps were a little heavily utilized in the game. Sadly, I don't think a wizard/sorcerer will have an easy time playing this module, as the beginning of the module is incredibly difficult, and there is a steep learning curve.

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Second (and this has no effect on the rating I gave, but I want to mention this anyway), I took the risk of trying to use PRC with the module. I actually ended up beating the game as a Rogue at level 5. I was confused as to why this happened, until I figured out that, while PRC does seem to install fine, XP for killing creatures DOESN'T register! Instead, I reinstalled the module, and used LETO to change the appearance of my character to that of a Tiefling. All I really wanted were wings and a tail.
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Again^ The ABOVE only happens if you use the PRC mod with this game!

As far as I can tell, Shayan's Subrace Engine seemed to register correctly for me, as I entered "Tiefling" as my subrace. I also received the little ear token and magic resistance even with PRC uninstalled, and after changing my race to human and subrace into Tiefling (using LETO).

Now, onto the problems. There were times I couldn't reach a box to open it. At other times, traps seemed to outright kill me even with my dexterity modifier. I admit, I probably wasn't the correct level. However, my HP would have equaled, or been at least close to, a wizard/sorcerer class. Therefore, that would have meant insta-death for characters with crap constitution, especially when playing an elf + wizard combo.

Other than that, I had to knock some points off for the trap placement. I don't know if this can be helped, but I absolutely HATE when the red trap goes below the floor and you can only see a small edge of the discovered trap. At one point, I ran over a trap I'd ACTUALLY discovered only to have my character die because I, myself, couldn't see the whole trap because it faded below the tile.

Besides me disagreeing that all classes can play, as I didn't find a rogue companion, the companions are almost devoid of depth. This was... more than a little shocking to me because your companions are very, very interesting, and they often have stuff to say in-game. However, there's really not much in-depth conversation with them through dialog boxes.

For instance, you can ask Neilise (I think her name was? Sorry for the mispelling) about her racial heritage and God. That's about it... The same also goes for Dante, except for ONE instance when you meet a girl he likes. I hope they change this in the future installments, because even the original NWN expansions had a lot of new dialog between companions as the game would go on.

Well, that's my review. I would like ONE final word. With this review, I was being a little nitpicking with some problems I found. That's only because with a module this great, it's hard to find flaws. I want to give a review that's both helpful and constructive.

I HIGHLY recommend everyone play this module. It's 10/10 game with some minor problems that hinder some gameplay for people choosing to play specific classes. As in, you may want to set this game on "Normal" instead of "Core" settings if you're thinking about playing that wizard/sorcerer class, peeps!

Thanks! :)

best module series ever

So can you make it work with PRC 3.5 properly or no? Without any issues?

Aeilund is one of the mods I've replayed I don't even know how many times.  I've been a Bard, a Sorcerer, a Ranger, a Rogue.  My only quibbles are:

1. I've never been able to figure out the correct syntax for entering subraces in these mods.  This is, of course, a failing of the base game and not the module itself.  But if anyone has any tips so that I can finally give my Aasimar Paladin/Monk a try, please let me know.

2. While the mods are fairly deep for what was available at the time, there is a level of superficiality that becomes apparent on replays.  The limited romance options (only one for each gender, hetero only) are somewhat disappointing; I almost exclusively play as female characters when given the option and Robert just isn't my taste for most of my characters. Some of the henchmen dialogue in particular can seem a bit trite.

But truly, these are only minor complaints relative to the entirety of the campaign presented.  I will continue to replay this one as long as my computer will run the game.

Splendid. Finally, henchmen that use healing kits! What could I add apart what has been posted above? Tough at the beginning but, hey, that's a Masterpiece.