Recently I was thinking that the Mountainous Forest tileset captures fairly well the feeling I had as a kid of the pine forest in an old school D&D module I liked. So since Oldfog recently inspired me to pick up the toolset again, I decided to give this a try and made some areas. I'm discovering that this is a fun enough side project that I'll likely sustain it while helping Oldfog this year on Hill's Edge. If I ever put it up live on a server, I'll post the details here. Thus far, I've been thinking of reworking my ruleset for Arnheim, and sticking this somewhere in that universe although this module is geared more towards oldschool, sandbox, PVE style play with permadeath rather than the story focused stuff that Arnheim was.
The module will focus on just one mountain or hill and an adjacent fort. For old schoolers this is a riff on Keep on the Borderlands with a fair amount of wilderness. I'm calling the mountain, Vuurkrag, and the adjacent fort is Herrick's Fort. They are divided by the Zwarting River.
(My apologies to South Africans for sticking the word 'Vuurkrag' in a module. I did not know it was a real word when I put it together. But I will stick with it. I like the sound.)
Here's a map of what I have of the mountain so far:
I don't mind sharing that because NWN Tool does such a poor job of exporting minimaps that no secrets are revealed by this map. And I'm still making lots of changes anyway. The map shows less than half of the outdoor areas I'll need for the mountain. I've broken from my strict use of 8x8 areas in a grid to depict wilderness, and decided to go with 32x32 areas where possible. I know this is crazy, and leads to empty space, but I think it helps achieve the sense of scale I wanted along with allowing players to wander far off the paths. The goal is to provide a lot of detail on a single region, the mountain, rather than try to depict a whole country or world with a single module.
The "keep" itself, Herrick's Fort, is not shown on that map. For it I am using Project Q's TNO
Herrick's Fort
I'm very happy with Mountainous Forest, and thus far have only had to use Rosenkranz's Rocky Mountains for two areas. Here's two screenies of Mountainous Forest:
Vuurkrag - Banks of the Zwarting River
Vuurkrag's Southern Slopes
I wanted to use Mountainous Forest for everything, but I could not achieve the mountainside escarpment that I wanted for a few areas. Last night I had this idea to make an area that overlooks adjacent areas and tries to depict them as inaccessible scenery. This is hard to do well in NWN, but I think I did a passable job to pull off the illusion using lots of placeables and Rocky Mountains:
Vuurkrag's Eastern Promontory
Looking East
So thats all I have to share so far. This is very early stages, and I need to get back to scripting for Oldfog's module, but I'm enjoying this and motivated to make a module again. I'm also toying with pulling WoRms Scorched Earth tileset into this for an area also. Not sure yet if I want to go all out volcanic in an area, but the idea appeals to me if I can pull off a smooth transition using placeables between Mountainous Forest and Scorched Earth. This might be beyond my talents as a builder to do gracefully, but I think its better to take risks and fail than to play it safe.
