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Horzen
Thirty years ago, the citizens of the city of Horzen threw off their king and their old gods and established a Republic, with Azzacio d'Horzen as the elected "First Citizen" and four "Gods of Reason" as their new faith. Now the city is locked in a vicious battle against an undead horde from the north. The city is in ruins. Supplies and goods are scarce. Neither side will relent.
You are a citizen of Horzen, and as of yesterday you received a notice stating that you had been promoted to the illustrious ranks of the Second Citizens, on the recommendation of Arryn Qurtz. These capable men and women uphold the values the city holds dear and keep it safe from its enemies, leading their fellows against all foes. And so today, you report to the Citizen's Office to meet the First Citizen and make your promotion official...
This module is designed for one (1) player and roughly 6-8 hours of gameplay content. A new character is strongly recommended, and will be given enough XP to reach level 7 upon module entry, with characters usually ending the module at level 11 or 12. Mechanical changes include but are not limited to:
-Point-buy raised from 30 to 32
-Multiclass XP penalty removed
-Light Armor/Small Shields no longer suffer arcane spell failure
-Champion of Torm reworked into Divine Champion, now available for all alignments
-Certain PrCs, including Pale Master and Divine Champion, have caster progression
-Wizard, Sorcerer hit dice increased to d6
-Rogue, Bard hit dice increased to d8
-No XP, reduced gold costs for scribe scroll/brew potion/craft wand
-Barbarians & Bards are no longer alignment-restricted
-Monk facelift, expansion of monk weapons
-Rework/facelift of Harper Scout and Purple Dragon Knight
-Blackguards now have spellcasting
Spell changes include but are not limited to:
-cantrips scale with caster level
-New summons across the board; multi-summon for undead summons
-HD limit for daze & sleep scales based on caster level
-Keen edge can now apply to all melee weapons, not just slashing/piercing
-Scare is no longer limited by HD
-Heal/Harm now do 10 * caster level worth of healing/harming, to a maximum of 150
-Ice Dagger now inflicts 2 Dexterity damage if the target fails a Reflex save
-Contagion now inflicts 2d4 Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution damage up front
Notes:
-Currently the only completely deprecated skills are Craft Armor, Craft Weapon, Craft Trap, and Ride.
-Undead enemies are no longer immune to crits or sneak attack. Go nuts.
-Save often! The game will autosave in some areas, but you never know if the game will crash or if you end up stuck. Better safe than sorry!
-At this time, the module ends on a cliffhanger. I know that may be disappointing to some, but I needed to set a stopping point so I can take stock of everything the player had done up to that point and also want to be able to step back from it as needed. This does NOT mean I will never work on it again - quite the opposite, I fully intend to keep adding to the module in future updates - but if something in my personal life comes up, I'd rather have something out there that's relatively complete than be stuck with something that exists only on my hard drive.
Credits:
Xovian - Extended Henchman Dialogue
LuckyDay - Printing Press model
mr_bumpkin / WodahsEht - PrC caster level scripts
TaintedGlory - testing
Mymothersmeatloaf - testing
VKB48901 - testing
Crulon/MetalPig/Kyuzo - testing
Bioware - for all of the scripts I borrowed/stole from the campaigns in order to figure out how things work.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 horzen_v105.zip (25) | 11.95 MB |
 horzen_patchnotes.txt | 4.84 KB |
| horzen_v104.zip (128) | 16.74 MB |
Well met.
The screenshots are amazing, and the outline story of the module is neat. Very Neverwinteresque. Well done to the max.
Agree with your rationale of getting to point in the evolving story, and publishing for all of us to really enjoy, rather than code sitting alone and unloved on a hard drive.
—
Phyte: My heart has been locked for longer than I can remember.
Sharwyn: Done, and done.
—
Looks promising. Is is playable through EE?
The module was made for EE, and works just fine there. I don't know about Diamond edition, though.
It will not work in Diamond / 1.69
I had a good time running through this module. The author described it as ending on a cliffhanger, which is quite different to me than ending with things unfinished. I beat the final boss and learned more about the threat to the city. So one part of the story ended by introducing the main plotline of the next part of the story. I hope the promised sequel comes to fruition, but the module as it exists now does have an ending.
The overall story is "save the city" which isn't ground breaking, but it doesn't have to be. The backstory is interesting (a while back, the people overthrew the monarchy AND tossed the gods out for good measure, and installed new gods) even though the existential threat that looms in the background of the module (the undead are waging war against the city. Why?) is never quite explained. The world is decently sketched out with some holes that either will get filled in subsequent chapters or maybe never. And that's ok.
Here are some observations from my playthrough:
There's a custom crafting system in place. Find unique material, and a smith or enchanter can create unique items or add properties to your existing items. Some of the bosses (but also some non-bosses? Why?) drop unique materials, so I was able to choose my own rewards by enchanting the items of my choice, rather than getting a random magical item that I didn't want. I like that a lot. But it wasn't entirely consistent. Some bosses dropped random items, some dropped nothing much, and some dropped these unique materials. And some of the types of ore that the smith could use to make weapons or armor were just found in specific areas, with no need to actually earn them. And then there were the crystals. In a couple of areas, I found these crystals that could be used to add weapon enhancement or elemental damage to weapons, or various armor bonuses to items. In the first area, I found a small handful of crystals and had to decide what I wanted to enhance. However, in a second area I found DOZENS of them, and I was subsequently able to give my weapon an extra 1-4 points of every single elemental damage type. Adding a new type did not override previous damage bonuses, so I ended up with a VERY overpowered weapon that made combat a joke. For the sake of game balance, I wish that there were fewer crystals to find and that similar bonuses did not stack. So, good idea here but uneven and unbalanced execution.
I'm glad the author released it, and I'm glad I played it. It's a good module, but not (yet) a great one.
Thank you for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed! This is exactly the kind of feedback I'm looking for.
Weird that the final quest wasn't being offered. I will look into this. Do you remember which of the last of those three or four main quests you turned in?
v105 is now live! I have not had much time to work on the module lately, but I have made sure to at least update spells.2da to show Beamdog's new AoE indicators. Let me know if you run into any more bugs!