This post comes after a very great deal of thought, practical consideration and vaguely emotional perturbations of the sort generally practised by small animals stuck in quicksand...
Having just glanced over the previous post, I note I already stated that, due to never having released a Module before, save those very silly ABC things, I was intending to "test the water" by doing some other, straightforward Module release prior to tackling the ridiculously immense Doctor Who series (which, as I think I also mentioned, is now, essentially, finished).
(Whilst "glancing about", I stumbled across this old, but previously unused, screenshot of the 1967 "Evil of the Daleks" Emperor Dalek I made - it was still a WIP at this point; been improved and finished since then, but I thought I'd stick it here to make this post look prettier than big blocks of text tend to otherwise be).
The proposed "Test Module" was initially to be "open" for players to create whatever character they liked, but I soon abandoned that since I felt trying to have all the conversation options for assorted different character types was making all the dialogue terribly generic and stilted, clogged every interaction up with ten to twenty possible player responses and prevented me from really fusing characters and storylines in the way I like to do... So, having given up on that, I decided instead to dig up those old ABC Modulettes, including the third one that I never got round to finishing, and give them a radical overhaul and allow Starbright and Aurelia's stories a lot more depth...
It was whilst I was messing about with Starbright again with a view to putting my old ABC Trilogy up as proper Modules, that Proleric posted his "Proposal to Amend the Vault Guidelines" thread. This I tripped over and thus read by mistake. (I don't generally take any notice of stuff with titles like that since I feel utterly unqualified to pronounce upon such things - I just build Spleen Monsters and hit things with bricks).
Anyway, it may sound ludicrous, but at no time on this New Vault or throughout my years of throwing Undead Animals at everyone on the Old Vault, had it ever occurred to me that there might actually BE such things as "guidelines". This puzzling concept (somewhat alien to the debased mind of a Shabby Hyena Type) confused me to the point that I thought I'd better go and examine the forum thread in question so as to know what it was about.
Despite it being pathetically obvious that more or less anything must, by definition, have an underlying infrastructure of some sort, I had simply never thought about it in relation to NWN. Suddenly now there was talk of rules, regulations, tenets, laws, dogma and blood sacrifice... or whatever... Suddenly I was actually thinking about where it said "free and open if project hasn't gone mouldy" or whatever it sort of gives you by default at the bottom of your Vault subs. Could it be that these words actually held meaning?
To cut a not very long story exceedingly short, the entire concept distressed me at a molecular level. Commencing to foam rabidly and put my hackles up, which is my default response to more or less everything, my reaction was to instantly distance myself from the whole thing as far as possible, dig traps, lock the door and post guards. Which, roughly translated, means abandon the NWN Community entirely and never post any CC anywhere ever again lest some dire whassname happen or a crocuticidal guideline come at me with a pointed stick.
The core reason for this is, having formerly worked in the film industry I am naturally now a pathological wreck racked with bitter suspicions and paranoid to a degree normally reserved for Greenland Right Whales. Having stories, designs and ideas carefully worked on over months or even years ripped off by a cabal of freakishly talentless Spleens for their insultingly generic and derivative films does that to you.
Not that I consider the NWN Community to be a Cabal of Spleens, my paranoia has been subconsciously manifest since my earliest CC efforts in that there have always been some things (including several of my best things) that I've never released or even shown screenshots of due to not wanting them to get ripped off. (You never know who might see stuff OTHER than those you actually made the stuff available to - and some of those others could be Spleens... That was the problem before. Remote and insignificant as the NWN corner of the internet is, it's still part of the whole Spleen-infested web and search engines being what they are... Same reason I abandoned plans to put a lot of my artwork up on DeviantArt a few years back.)
Anyway, brief entanglement with Proleric's "Guidelines" thread made my paranoia entirely conscious with regards NWN for the first time and I was very, very close to never releasing any CC ever again. Had I been a newcomer, I would certainly have just turned and fled into the cover of dense bushes and not emerged again. But since there's already piles of PHoD Rubbish littering the Vault, there didn't seem much point in stopping, though I'll likely be even more careful in what I actually release from now on.
Then I thought again of Modules.
Modules involving complex storylines, carefully-honed dialogue, detailed characters...
If these Modules were just Doctor Who, it wouldn't really matter, since Doctor Who was thirty year's worth of many different writers' efforts to which I'd just be adding my own blobs.
But these Modules are considerably more than just rehashing old ideas, slavishly using all the approved lore of the series' past and throwing Daleks at everything in sight. There are hundreds of completely new creatures and characters as well as several old ones I've worked hard to do new things with. I'm very pleased with the dialogue between assorted characters (notably the Doctor and Velpa) and a lot of other elements - elements which I could very easily rewrite slightly and use for any number of my own projects wholly unrelated to Doctor Who. Projects which may one day see publication when desperation and an enforced need for money drives me back to the grim whassnames that are publishers and literary agents.
Thus, the idea of putting all this material out in the wilderness before a largely faceless and unknown quantity was suddenly standing before me in a way I'd simply not thought about before. The foam increased and the hackles went higher.
Though when I calmed down, as mentioned, I concluded I might as well continue to emit assorted CC I didn't regard as "classified", my paranoia was still having seething, fang-baring, El Freako Wombat fits with regards Modules. Any Modules. Not just Doctor Who, but Starbright and Aurelia's trilogy as well. And any other Module I might at some future point have pushed toward the Vault. (I was very vaguely thinking about maybe putting the Maldrapur Chronicles out since Kali and most of my Indian CC is/will be on the Vault).
But my embittered, rabid paranoia won, as usual.
Having considered this for a couple of months now, I have concluded that I will not be releasing any Modules of any kind. Ever. Or at least, not unless I suddenly suffer some bizarre paradigm shift of instinct and nature. (Which is unlikely).
It only therefore remains for me to say two things in conclusion.
Firstly:- In NO WAY is Proleric to blame for this; his thread was intended entirely positively and no blame whatever can be attached to him for the not at all debilitating horror of not having deranged PHoD Modules. That is entirely down to my warped paranoia and certain deep scars left by incidents of the past (which had nothing to do with NWN or anyone involved with it).
Secondly:- Sorry.
Fortunately I don't think more than ten people had any real interest in the Doctor Who Modules anyway, but in a way that's worse because I know that the few who did and have waited very patiently to be able to play them, really were looking forward to them and it does actually hurt me to disappoint them so resoundingly and terminally.
I do apologize, profusely, especially to Tarot and Rolo who have been so enthusiastic about the project. There's nothing I can do about my own nature however, nor anything more to do than say "sorry" again about the rubbish let down... I really must stop reading ominous, official sounding threads...
I'll gather all the Doctor Who specific CC I've done and all the Monsters (there's quite a bit of it) and seal them in a Big Box and add them to the list of things I ought to get round to dumping on the Vault some time...
Apologies again... but somebody reminded me that the Vault is essentially a Gate, bringing the fantasy we create within NWN into contact with humanity.
I don't do contact with humanity. Not properly. Not if it can be avoided.
