ALFA 14--Dalelands Application

[Murky Majare]

The Dalelands


The Dalelands & Cormanthor region is perhaps the most detailed region in the Forgotten Realms, and the amount of information released is staggering. It was where Ed started creating his gaming world umpteen years ago, and in many ways is the heart of Faerûn. It is a location visited by most PnP campaigns set in this gaming world, and it is thus a place everyone has an idea what will look like.

This is both a blessing and curse for anyone setting a campaign in that region and even more so when one is trying to recreate the region for NWN. On one hand we got all this material to dive into, but on the same time… we got all this material to dive into. There are many things a DM in a PnP campaign cannot do, without the players crying foul, but on the same time, the DM will have volumes of material to use directly, and of course, there are plenty of room for additions and changes.

Vision
The vision of the team is as complex as it is simple, we want to recreate the Dales and the ancient forest as close to canon as we possibly can, and make the environment rich and detailed. Minimum requirement should be what we have on SD, DD and VolV now. It is our vision that the players should feel home on the server, and enjoy the visual aspects of the game, but naturally keep the RP and DM aspects intact.

Humans are vastly more visual than we give ourselves credit for, and by my own experience, I know how more into character I get, once I get into costume and get the props when I participate in a play on stage (or on camera for that matter). We wish to give the players the most (and best) tools they can possibly get, to nudge them even more towards immerging themselves into their characters.

Environment is of overshadowing importance to make this happen. A halfling village must feel halfling’y. The poor sectors of Scardale must feel despair and poverty. Impression and tone is essential. NPCs and NPC interaction must also reflect this, and an equal amount of attention must be given to them. They should have a personality, and behave differently than the person next to him/her.

The Server
This region is naturally too large to try and do everything all at once, so we will start with the roads and rivers linking us to the neighbouring servers, and a few starting location. At the current time, these will be Shadowdale Village in Shadowdale, Ashabenford in Mistledale, Scardale, Tangled Trees and Dagger Falls in Daggerdale.

Shadowdale Village and Ashabenford will be added/created early, because they have the most resources we can export into NWN2. Scardale will be high on the list, because it is a city, and will provide a starting point for characters of a more dubious morality. Tangled Trees due to her uniqueness as a elven starting point, and finally Dagger Falls for its intensity for balancing on the edge between the Shades, the Zhentarims and the drow, while still holding their own.

Another location we wish to create is deep within (and beneath) the Cormanthor forest herself, the locations of the drow settlements, and thus provide a starting location for PCs that are normally confined underground.

Merrywood, Glen and Emerald Springs will be of the second iteration, among with the enigmatic Spiderhaunt Woods.

While the Myth Drannor ruins themselves is a tempting choice to do as early as possible, we think that we should wait. No one should be able to reach the ruins before they are much higher level, and we should therefore concentrate on making areas the players can reach first.

Quests
I said earlier that we will export from the current module into NWN2. The SD server have today over 230 quests spread all over the server, and while we will certainly come up with many new ones, the current stack of quests were made specifically to get you to know the server and to know her NPCs. This is something we think should continue into NWN2, and we thus get an easier job here. It is the teams vision that spawns and quests shouldn’t just be places for players to gain mindless XP and loot, but actually mean something to the setting and enviroment. ‘Social quests’, (like ‘go to the barn and milk my cows’), are needed and should be plentyful.

I am not sure what details we can really give which will make any sense and be actually worth anything. We will have quests for all character types for all levels, raging from low rewards to high rewards, depending on the quest type. While we have centralized the official governmental quests in each location/city/town, most of our quests, as they are today, will be socializing quests, which is spread out on the different NPCs around.
Centralizing all quests on a few nodes is unnatural, it gives a “brainless computer game, hack & slash” feel, and it is not something Dalelands will be about. If you want to do quests on D, you will have to go looking for them. Some will be easy to find… ask NPCs for where you can find work… others will only appear if you actually bother to RP with people and treat them well.
I can always write stuff like:
Charny Ricpeth, approx 10 CR 1-2 quests rewarding ~10xp and/or 10gp to 50xp and/or 50gp; approx 10 CR 4-5 quests rewarding ~20-100xp and/or 20-100gp; approx 10 CR 10+ quests rewarding ~100-500xp and/or 100-500gp.
Then copy/paste that for the X other NPCs which hands out these governmental quests, but what does that tell you about quality? Absolutely nothing… the above explaination does. We will continue to add quests like we have on SD up till now, but we are not fleshing out 2000+ quests beforehand, when there will be years until those areas will be made.
I can assure you though that all starting locations and as we add them, also each village, town, etc. will also have a great many quests and assignments. As mentioned, the quests on the server will be set up primary to get you to learn and know the server, and not as a brainless XP gathering mission.

Spawns
In regard to spawns, it is the same thing really. Our spawns aren’t just placed to give players something to kill, but actually have an RP purpose. They actually have a background, and with the implementation of the faction-attitude system, your actions towards one tribe will affect how other tribes view you and will even open up for more quests.
Here too I could write stuff like,
Cave NW, 10 meter from entrance, CR1 spider, normal.
Forest, central, 20 meter radius, 3-5 CR1 orcs, longswords, rusty, rags loot…
But again, what does provide you? We do not know anything about what monsters what will come with the game, and what we will have to make models for ourselves. The creature / spawn lists are bound to expand many times as we move along, and the community releases new content.
Further, deciding all the spawns beforehand will greatly hinder creativity in making the different areas. We need to allow for a builder, when adding a creek or pond to think that “hey, I created a really cool place for a X to have its/their home” and be allowed to do so.

Merchants, etc.
Answer to everything above is to just look at SD today, and know what we will not make mistakes like not having a merchant to sell stuff, or forget to add X or Y. Further, it is not like we will think…”Ops…cannot add a leatherworker merchant, because I forgot to plan for it before I started to build”. Creation is a ..um… creative process and ideas comes all the time. Inspiration is what has drawn the SD builders to build as well as they have, so far, and they certainly will do so in the future. To me personally, it is the only way to make a great server. Dalelands builders should be allowed to be creative and inventive and let the muse speak to them when they build.

The Team
The Team I am not going to give too much details about at this current time. It is a useless effort anyways, because things change, people leave and come back, and interrests change. It is also basically fruitless because it will take years for any DM team to finish all the work it takes to build a complete region. It should be sufficient to say that most of the current SD DMs and a few others will be going to work on Dalelands. Since I started writing this, I have had a few people joining the team, and a few leaving it.

Deadline
In regards to the deadline; We will not push Dalelands to live if she is not ready for it. Until we feel comfortable with having high quality/content on our server, we will postpone any date until we are ready. We are not saying that we will take forever, or delay and be slow about it, just saying that it will just have to take the time it takes.

Classification
Trying to classify Dalelands to fit one of the four available categories, to get the best chance of becoming one of the first four servers, is a politics which honestly does not sit well with me. Dalelands has a rich environment and would be an excellent starting point for drow, smurfs, and other dark/underdark creatures, so if there are no other underdark server…hey, why not claim Dalelands to be one…except for a cave ceiling over everything, she got everything else. Does it make Dalelands an Underdark server? Of course not.

Dalelands is urban, she is rural. There are large cities inside the territory as well as vast unpopulated forests, there are mountains, swamps, even desert. The sea, rivers and lakes. Small villages, hamlets. All races are located within the borders... even with their own villages. All kinds of alignment and classes are represented… so how do I classify her? It would be wrong to try and classify her and try and be manipulative about it. No server should be allowed an easier change at becoming one of the first servers, based sole on which name tag you print on the application.

Thing is, Dalelands is in many peoples eyes and hearts the heart and soul of the Forgotten Realms. Even people that knows little to nothing about FR have heard of that region and in many ways asossiate the world with that location. I do not think ALFA will be as strong as she can be without Dalelands around, and I sincerely hope that she will be one of the first four.

Thank you for taking time to read this and for considering us.

[fluffmonster]

Thank you Murky for providing this proposal. As best I can tell given the organization of the proposal, all required components have been spoken to in at least some minimal fashion.

I will, for the benefit of other preparing their own proposals, offer the observation that it is difficult for me to see how the qualities of the team might be judged without any of its members beyond one being specified. It has been stated that persons on the team should state their intentions as such. It is not clear to what extent the Selection Team will accept less; I suppose we will find that out during the deliberations.

[Wynna]

In my own judgement, I would like to know who the team members will be at the time that building starts. I've no need to project a year or even 6 months into the future, because Murky is quite right, people come and go. But the beginning team is of vital interest to me. It's impossible to judge how a server can develop without knowing at least how many people are going to be building. Knowing the build team's expertise and history in building/scripting is at least as important as knowing the HDM's expertise and history. Additionally, an indication of who will be RP DMing on the server would be welcome. People come and go, but people also stay, and knowing who intends to RP DM on the server is pretty important, even taking attrition into account during the building months.

Thank you.

[Audark]

Well I would ask anyone from a proposal that was not accepted to perhaps consider throwing some weight behind a dalelands/cormanthor server, I think the moonsea proposal looks great and the quality of cross server plots between these two potential servers would be off the chart.

I know its presumptuous of me to ask people to now devote time to dalelands/cormanthor, but I really do think it would be wonderful for ALFA, if such a proposal was to pick up more steam to be resubmitted I would spend as much energy as it took to learn to build so I could make it a reality. Think about it please folks

Anyone who still has the will or inclination to build or staff a dalelands/cormanthor server I would very much appreciate a post here, even if it's just musing over possibilities. I believe there are enough people out there with skill who would want to see this server see the light of day, and the critiques of it have been on the staffing side of things.

With the events of the Last Mythal series, I would be very sad to see an ALFA without mistledale, shadowdale and myth drannor. So anyoen interested please post, I'd really like totry to kickstart this, or even create an entirely new proposal for an expansion server.