Knights of the Holy Grail (Ultimate Edition)

9 was a very generous vote for this module! I thank you for that... this module was most defintiely imperfect. I often refer to it as my "imperfect masterpiece" for that reason. When I first built the bare bones of it, it was just a remake of the old Sierra game "Conquests of Camelot" which was mostly a point and click adventure game from back in the DOS days. My first version of my remake, I had released initially seemed very... well, bare bones... compared to the vision I had in mind for it. So I started asking the fans and players of my remake what they would most like to see in it, and I sort of built it up from there into what you see today of it. I gave myself a rather perhaps overly strict deadline to finish it up within too, so a LOT of it was put together very quickly and with only a little bit of time in which to bug test everything. Basically, I played it all through from beginning to end once, and that is when I wrote my walkthrough for it, and when I saw it was able to be completed I deemed it finished and released the Ultimate version of it that we have here. It was WAY beyond the simple remake it has initially been, and had become something more along the lines of a single player MMO set in Arthurian times. The best praise of it I got was this fellow who claimed to be a scholar of Arthurian lore, who said that in his opinion my take on King Arthur (he was basically referring to the story I was telling in my module) was the best he had ever seen in any media. Given that Arthurian stories are often either set in the wrong time period when translated into movies, or altered beyond recognition compared to the old tales they claim to be based on, I  thing I get what that fellow meant. In any case, no this module is definitely NOT perfect. At the time I was designing it, I had tons of areas I was experimenting with on my hard drive... a few of which I think DID come from Tales of Celts. Since I was setting Knights of the Holy Grail in a Britian that was only just coming out of Roman and Celtic times, I was fascinated by the idea of a correct portrayal of such a setting. So a couple of areas from Tales of Celts had invariably found their way into the mix, but only after it became apparent that Tales of Celts had been abandoned and its' author could not be reached (she seemed VERY disenchanted with Neverwinter Nights modding due to her rule that anyone downloading her module HAD to vote a 10 on it or not vote at all, which was ridiculously silly). Bascially, there was one woodland area... a faerie realm... and a shrine (to Bran the Blessed in my version of the area) which were totally re-created from Tales of Celts but with massive edits, alterations, and changes to the point where they were different enough to fit in an Arthurian Britian. The thing about a LOT of module on the old Vault is that a lot of people were doing that... taking shortcuts when it came to world building by incorporating edited versions of areas from older modules that were abandoned by their creators. When I look back in it, it was stupid short-cutting but it was rather prevalent back in the day. So if those areas look familiar, I am not at all surprised. Personally, if I were to build a massive module like this today I would not take those sorts of short cuts, but I guess that is the wisdom that comes with maturity and I will admit I was a little bit immature thinking back when I threw this together. That said and out of the way, oh my gods were there typos in this thing when I was done with it!  Monstrous amounts of typos, sadly, that I only noticed once I had already deemed the project completed and officially released. Fortunately my poetry and writings are not like that... but for some reason I was rushing like mad when I created this so those slipped past my notice and found their way in, along with those few bugs that you've dutifully pointed out. A massive chunk of this module's areas came from prefabs, and some of those prefabs had some glaring mistakes in them, such as that flying coccoon... the traps you could not disable... and so on and so forth. Plus, unlike some of my other modules which had more... uniform... scripting systems, I kept tossing in scripts after scripts, even whole system of them into this module and before I knew it I was totally in over my head and could not easily go back and find the scripts I needed to fix because I had literally hundreds of them and many of them not named in a simple convention that would enable me to easily figure out what was firing up what. Precisely the reason I began to increasingly use "master scripts" in some of my later modules most especially in my Zork I remake. The good part about master scripts is that you can put smaller scripting routines into them and they will run whole sets of scripting routines that can be editied in more modular ways. In my (thus far) unfinished Ultima module that has been floating around on my hard drive for practically years now I made use of nothing BUT master scripting in order to create a uniform and easy to edit system with scripts that are clearly labeled and even almot self-explanatory in terms of what they do. This module had, I must admit, a very sloppy scripting system to it due to my adding TONS of things into the mix and not bothering to create a proper framework for any of it. But this was my very first (raw) attempt at creating an open world-style module for Neverwinter Nights and so it was largely for me a massive learning experience in which I did a lot of things wrong and messed up, but also a  LOT of things right and interesting too as a part of the whole experience. In the end, the story did shine through the rough edges, bugs, and rough scripting, and that was at the time the most important thing to it in my eyes... telling this story about King Arthtur, the Holy Grail, Camelot and the end of one era as another was beginning. The mount system was actually an afterthought... I had added that last, and initially intended the player to be walking about the game world rather than riding. But one of the players complained that the map was too massive (it was!) and so I added both that wraith death system and the mount system in order to make up for the lack of fast travel or a decent map to guide the player. I think I just figured the average player would simply refer to my walkthough if they got lost, but I forgot that many of the more hardcore (and even some casual) players would not want to resort to using a walkthrough. So in that respect I was thinking a bit old school when it came to game desgin. Like, back in the days before decent in-game maps and fast travel systems. I had a retro design in mind for this, to keep it in line with its' retro game remake roots, but its' massive size really did make that notion a bit less than desirable in the final analysis. However, even I never expected that I would end up creating a module THIS humungous in size. I think, when I said it was basically a single player MMO that really IS the most accurate way to describe it since many of the complaints a lot of players had (the generic respawning mobs, the massive size, the long length, etc.) are most often the same complaints I have heard people mention regarding MMOs in general. But probably what threw a lot of people was that they went into Knights of the Holy Grail expecting a simply hack and slash experience and what they found themselves in was something way more vast. Which can of course be daunting if one is not expecting such... scale... in a module designed around simple hack and slash combat mechanics. Would I recommend this module to new players? If they have an interest in the setting and the story, if they don't mind MMO style gameplay, and if they are prepared for a long game set in a massive world that darn near recreates whole regions of an ancient and bygone time period... then I am certain they will enjoy it. But if they are looking for a simple hack and slash module with a quick length and a simple story that one could get through in a  single afternoon or a few days... then no, I would not recommend it to them, since this is the kind of game that can take weeks or even months to complete depending on how much time the player takes seeing everything and doing everything there is to be done (and if they want to try both the good and evil paths the game has to offer). Basically, I would say this was my most ambitious and demanding project ever... not my best, not my worst, but definitely by very largest project of all. I did discover one thing out of it all though... I do my best work with creating highly detailed prefab areas. But that is what makes Neverwinter Nights modding so interesting, fun, and unpredictable... you can go into a project thinking you know all there is to know about putting together a module, only to discover that there is ALWAYS more to learn. That said, I hope everyone who is playing this module today is having a lot of fun with it! If you like this one, be sure to also check out my other module projects. They are all a LOT smaller in scale and scope, and there are more than a few interesting remakes in the bunch (such as Zork I and Cryot of Medea). Peace to all! And, happy NWN modding. *Big Smiles* :D

I am happy you like it! I was actually going for almost an MMO kind of thing with those spawns. At the time I was building this module, I was playing a LOT of Ultima Online, Phantasy Star Online, and quite a few other MMOs too, so I was partially thinking along the lines of a single player MMO, hence those rather over-frequent respawning enemies. I put most of my effort into the story though, and that is pretty much where this module shines, despite the typos that arose from the deadlines I imposed upon myself for finishing and releasing the final version of Knights of the Holy Grail. I like to call it my "Imperfect Masterpiece" since it is not my most perfect work (that would be my various prefabs) but it is far from my worst work either, and could easily be called a "kind of" masterpiece even if only due to its' size, scope, and perhaps overly ambitious attempt to create an open world style Arthurian setting with all of the fantasy, mythical, and magical (and relgious too) elements left fully intact and if anything elabortated upon tremendously. It is great to see this old module of mine still has its' fans, despite how long it has been out for! *Smiles* :)