Sapphire Star

Does anyone know how to actually contract lycanthropy in this module? ive looked everywhere and even consulted the walkthrough and found nada. 

not sure if you've been able to find out yet ^^; but in case you haven't there's at least 1 way for both werewolf and wererat... in the reaching woods you have to go into the shack at night for the wolf, and for the rats you have to go into the caves where the rat queen is, it's that mining cave that I think you have to get help to move the rocks unless you use a cheat or a ton of magic to break them...

I think there's 1 more npc you are supposed to be able to catch the werewolf strain from but I think there's a bug that stops that npc from doing it... you can find him in the area you first are teleported/saved to, he's a really hard npc though so you have to wait a lot longer to try fighting him instead of just going to the cabin at the reaching woods ^^;

No respawn = no thanks!

A very fun and memorable module. Plenty of quests, secrets, dialogue, combat. There's even contractable lycanthropy, very beneficial for melee characters as well! It's a shame the next module will never be released. 

That being said, there are some issues in the module. 

Spoiler Alert!

1. Potion Brewing. Apart of requiring materials, it takes your XP for every potion made. In my opinion, the player should not be penalised for crafting, but rather rewarded with a small amount of XP, since he/she went through the trouble to do it.

2. Combat balance. Some encounters are very difficult, especially those that a lvl 1-2 character can wander into. One specific mini-boss is damn near impossible to kill, even near end-game, he will 2-3 shot + poison. One strategy I didn't try is trap spam and spell barages, but my character did not have the required skills.

3. Character Dialogue. Some dialogues don't really make sense, like flirting with barmaids, although it kinda funny in a way. Acquiring a certain companion won't be possible with low CHA, and there's no way to convince him otherwise. This can be problematic for fresh characters with low CHA, even if they are of a melee class.  Also, with lycanthropy in this game, I was quite upset to see no reactions at all to a werewolf or wererat standing in front of them.

Voted. My guide can be found here.

A good exploratin Module, I like the no respawn

I would have given higher but very hard to figure out what to do next! That seems to be the problem with the non-linear type modules (with "loose" journals) as you have so many options to follow up on, and in this one things that had to be done were not very intuitive, at all! Also some long ditances had to be traversed repeatedly, although later with Stones of Recall type devices at least.

Still, well done, good henchman interface, although it was tough to get one to join, you really had to work at it! A good effort to say the least. thanks for all the hard work. 

What do you do with the WBM file?

.wbm is the movie format for Extended Edition, so it goes in the movies subfolder.

I have only played a couple of hours and I guess I'll probably not finish this module, as I'm just not enjoying it as much as I might enjoy other modules in its place, but I hear it's always better to vote regardless so as to give the entry more attention.

It's a pretty solid module. I couldn't find much wrong with it other than that it didn't manage to hold my interest. Because while I was actually looking for something open and focused on exploration, I didn't find the exploration as rewarding as I was hoping for. There is very little direction on what to do, which is fine to me in general, but I felt it was kind of tedious to find your own path as well, mainly for these reasons:

1. A lot of areas you visit and NPCs you talk to don't have much of interest to offer to you. You find a named NPC and hope they will give you something to do or tell you something that will make you progress in some way, and some do, but just as often, they will just offer you a shop, tell you general lore stuff that doesn't seem to have much relevance to your current situation, or tell you they might have something for you but no, on second thought, you're not experienced enough. And the fact that there are several class-specific quests also means that even if you finally find someone who has something to do for PCs, it's not for you, further reducing the number of quests you get in your playthrough. (It's also an old module, meaning you can only ever have one henchman, and the module doesn't even acknowledge when that place is occupied already. And the henchmen don't have all that much to say either.)

2. There are some greater gaps in the challenge levels. You might be doing pretty well in the first area of a dungeon, possibly wiping the floor with your opponents, then meet very difficult or even "impossible" enemies in the next area (or even in the same one). Like, from rats to dragons.

3. Both of the above leads to a lot of backtracking and searching around for what to do next before coming back to an area or NPC you're currently stuck on, and while the area design is not bad, the maps can get pretty big and bland to repeatedly run through, back and forth. This, and the repeated disappointment of thinking I've found a new path to continue on, just to run into the next hurdle or dead end shortly after, just doesn't make it that much fun to me, and combined with the lack of a gripping story or background doesn't give me any incentives to play on (not that there aren't creative ideas in the module, but they are a bit sparsely distributed and the general backdrop is generic Forgotten Realms).

It's pretty obvious the author was inspired by Baldur's Gate where you can also run into very difficult encounters in otherwise easy areas (and there are also several characters from BG who make a short appearance), but I think the flow in this module is just not as good without directions, at least not good enough for me in the long run. Other players with different preferences might enjoy it more.