The Aielund Saga Act IV - The Fall of Aielund (Part Three)

there is no aielund finale hak in here

The Aielund Hakpack has it, just for anyone wondering.

Best mod ever written - rating reflects entire series

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

Great module, thanks.

Finally finished!  Outstanding saga with epic scope, the highest level I've ever raised a NWN character (wizard).  The storyline and dialogue are extensive and the scripting complex and top notch!  A great adventure and fine way to spend a holiday shutdown.

Great mod, but holy mountain of hitpoints some of the fights leading up to the end took a while. We were absolutely refusing to use any of the henchmen of course but I'm not sure how much of a difference that could have made.

Black blade of disaster is also super overpowered in ems, to the extent that I stopped using it until the hit point inflation got really bad; it was making my brother (paladin/fighter/cot) feel superfluous. And that's despite it being bugged so that it caps at 38 attack bonus and planar rift appears to stop working if you combine really high charisma and the conjuration focus feats.

An epic series! Truly recommended to every NWN player!

(rating is for the entire Aielund series)

Brilliant saga indeed!

Can i download all the parts and upload as a one big bundle?? or it would be aginst some rules here??

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!

I wrote my comments about the series as a whole in my comments on the first module.  Act IV, Pt. 3 is a fitting conclusion to an outstanding series.  It necessarily shifts the tone of the series to a more epic adventure for epic characters, while staying connected to the original story.  Combat isn't that hard (it's not easy to challenge high-end epic characters), but there are some interesting challenges along the way.  I think anyone who has played the first five modules of the series will find the finale to be a satisfying conclusion.

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 :)

Best module series ever should be made into a movie

Makes me want to read the books now.  A Cleric reached level 37 and a barbarian level 35, of course the Cleric had Find Traps and Knock(domain spell)

What an epic journey. This astoundishing campaign is way better than many offiicial games created by professional companies/writers and it's good to such an extent that it totally annihilates the OC.

Mate, this is a bloody ripper of a series.  Just great fun.  Got one request.  Any chane you could make the PC finish at level 40?  Played it 3 times and only managed to finish around level 36.  Would really love to see the series take a new character from level 1 all the way to level 40. :)

I really liked the modules, but was perhaps a bit disapointed (especially in act I), due to all the praise. I have played other modules I liked better (Swordflight, Almraiven, The porphet series, A dance with rogues). I think it takes the series into act three before I really felt invested in the story. But it is definitely a very epic tale, and one of the longest series out there. I rate the series as a whole 8/10, but act 4 is more like 9/10, while act I is 7/10.

Excellent series I through to IV and has reignited my interest in the game with the EE release - many thanks to the authors,

One quick q though - Is the Spell Sequencer item broken under EMS or some other hak used?   Works perfectly with the char exported into a "clean" test mod. 

All was fine until the space ship, then things went to hell in a hand basket! Robert Black turns hostile in this chapter, for some reason, when I try to recruit him or resurrect him, he attacks me or my team mates. He is powerful, so can do some real damage! Have to kill him then try it again and then he joins up and is okay. Finale is tough because you really do not know where to go to finish things off. I liked this series and it is a real opus of monumental proportions, just a bit exhausting. Time function used at end for urgency is always disliked approach in modules, to me, and here it was a major factor. Extremely tough foes in large bunches made it impossible to control the henchies, and they died even with super equipment. Had to quit this one, too bad.

What a wonderful adventure ... the music, the script, the characters, the atmosphere, the dialogues ... all were amazing. It is worth starting with a low-level character and seeing it go up gradually. This was especially my favorite part of this adventure. My ratings concern the whole series. Thanks to the author for this wonderful trip ... You should all try it!

Module Testing Tournement 2020

The end of what is perhaps the greatest mod series to ever grace the Vault. The music is a 10/10. Characters are 10/10. Story is 10/10. There was never anything I'd think to call a low point. From start to finish, the Aielund Saga was nothing short of a masterpiece. My sincerest thanks to the author for letting us experience this. In case my point isn't clear, you should play this mod!

Guess I'm going to be one of the very few not giving this a perfect score. Here's my take on it: I've played this twice overall, once "back in the day" so long ago I barely remember many of the details, and again recently (in 2020).

The setting: Amazingly well done and masterfully crafted, both in design and scope. The in-game history of the nations and regions felt real, very believable. Even the most bland (like the generic mountain passes) of zones still possessed enough attention to detail to be worth exploring. At times, it did feel a bit too real, too large, and I would just like to add it was truly a great idea for the author to add those boots of traveling (I foolishly missed that item during my first play through, it’s pretty mandatory). But even still, it was just exciting and fun to revisit the zones in the future Acts, see how they’ve changed along with the story. The world just felt alive!

The overall story: I’m going to keep in vague here just in case someone ends up browsing this, looking at ratings before jumping in for themselves ( don’t want to give spoilers) but it’s good. Starts off slow, and builds up to a dramatic ending. You can play from level 1 to nearly 40, if not 40.

The dialogue: Terrible. God awful. Like middle school writing awful. Honestly, it was hard to wrap my head around it. How could someone craft such a detailed world, but then create such bland two dimensional characters? It was so jarring to experience! It almost felt like he had someone else write the characters or vice versa. If you like a bit of roleplay, you won’t get much of it. It’s not just the npc dialogue that’s generic, it’s yours as well. Both your dialogue and the npcs’ do get MUCH better by the time you make it into Act 3 (still not great, but a massive improvement). I didn’t properly feel like my character until that Act. You can tell author got better at writing for his characters as time went on. I’ve heard in the years since he created this he’s gone on to publish books in this setting. I’ve not read them myself (yet) but I can assume that given the jump in skill he had between Acts 1 and 3, he continued to improve when he went into novels. I must make time to check them out.

Difficulty: It did seem to fall into the trap a lot of amateur game designers (and hell, some professional ones as well) fall into. Tedious is mistaken for challenging. Especially by the final acts. Mobs given massive amounts of hp, spell resist, immunities and high AC. And it didn’t make the game harder, per se, just kind of had it drag on. It took away of the epic scale of some of the bigger fights when you’re just staring them down, both of you swinging and missing. Perhaps I had a bad combo, I had gone with an auto-still spelled Sorc/PM set up who specialized in utility spells more than damage. Very tanky, able to control the outcome of most fights near the start of the series but by the end of the game (and the final fight) it was just me and the boss both out of spells, and me just casting an extended Tenser’s, sitting at 70+ ac and walking away to make myself a sandwich while they swung at each other (that’s not a joke either. It was a good sandwich). Remember, puzzles are challenging. Creating a difficult situation to survive in and forcing the player to utilize tricks they’ve learned during the game is challenging. Just tossing on a bunch of immunities and such on mobs doesn’t make it harder, just makes the fights longer and less exciting :( If anyone is playing this for the first time, I would recommend maybe a melee oriented class who is very good at landing hits. Definitely doable as a caster (both my playthroughs involved a spell caster after all, and a damage oriented caster would be that much better), solid caster gear and other goodies can be found but the combat encounters themselves seem more melee-oriented (a monk might be fun, lots of cool monk-shops placed throughout the setting).

Bugs: Pretty minor. Ran into some frustrating ones involving the whole romance subplots not triggering but that’s probably more a NWN thing than anything else. Certain npcs occasionally saying the wrong things at the wrong times. There was also another (maybe) bug with a certain demonic henchman you could potentially get. She had her model randomly replaced with a balrog model in the final act. I couldn’t tell if this was a bug or not. Maybe it was intentional, like a “this is my real form, mortal” situation? But there was no dialogue mentioning it, so...yea, she was just a balrog now and no one blinked lol. I’m sure there were a few other event/trigger based bugs I’ve ran into but they were so minor, they’ve slipped my memory. Overall, a few annoying bugs here and there but well made.

The Epilogue – all great epics need one, right? This one, however, felt oddly lack luster. Perhaps after the author concluded the story, he was tired and just wanted to get this part over with lol. Again, I don’t want to get into too much detail in case someone is avoiding spoilers. One npc’s ending seemed very out of character, another two had an epilogue even though they were dead (Like, super dead. Beyond ressing dead heh) And the player character wasn’t even mentioned by name in it. Again, felt jarring. The story (and dialogue!) got better as the game went on and once you hit the ending...boom. Flat. Bland again :(

Sidenote- The EMS: I didn’t let this affect my score as its not something the author created (as far as I know) but it is included in the mod and ought to be mentioned. I used this on my first play through and opted to skip it on my second. It’s certainly a fine addition, fixes some spells, weakens some others. My main gripe is since it didn’t change any of the in-game spell descriptions, I didn’t know what my spells were doing. Too many moments where I’d be confused because the description said one thing but the spell was altered to do another. Overall though, doesn’t seem to be a big deal. Admittedly there was a several year gap between my two playthroughs so perhaps I’m not remembering it all, but one didn’t feel particularly easier or harder than the other. The original game has some useless and OP spells, and the ems tweaks has its own useless and OP spells. Seemed to balance out in the end. Use it, don’t use it, it works either way :)

It was worth playing, both times. I wouldn’t call it my absolute favorite nwn fan-made epic story mod, but it’s definitely in top 3. All the other reviews talking about it being better than the OC and even other high production games aren’t lying. I do think it deserves another going over though. Fixing the bad dialogue, cleaning up some issues, given some more polish. Would love to see it brought up to date. I don’t expect that to happen though; that would be a lot of time spent for a free released game, but perhaps it’s a testament to how much I enjoyed it that I’m sitting here wishing it could the best version of itself :)

Rate:  8/10 nice game.