Sanctum Saga: The Games
The Sight and The Quest are role-playing adventure games built in the Neverwinter Nights Toolset.
The serialization of Dawn of Chaos: Hell Gate will be taking a couple of weeks off while I catch up on some other projects and tasks. When it resumes I should also have some subscription plan updates and giveaways to announce, so stay tuned.
(If you’re jonesing for more of the story in the meantime, don’t forget that the single volume edition of the Dawn of Chaos Trilogy is already available in e-book and print — and that the e-book is on sale from all online bookstores through September 12th for only 99¢.)
One of the tasks I’m working on this week is a follow-up on my Sanctum of the Archmage RPGs. For those who don’t know, these are a pair of role-playing computer games I built and published as adventure “modules” using the Neverwinter Nights (aka NWN) toolset.
Neverwinter Nights is an old game (published in 2002), but it’s had a remarkably long lifespan. That’s due largely to the passionate fan following it developed thanks to a unique feature few other games provided: a toolset for players to create their own adventures. NWN’s Aurora game engine, scripting language and API, and ability to expand the game with new custom assets, put the game creation process, for the first time, within the reach of many talented storytellers.
A robust modding community developed as a result, in which thousands of projects and hundreds of high-quality adventure games were created. And while that faded in the decade following NWN’s heyday in the late 2000s, it’s strengthened since Beamdog’s acquisition of the game in 2017. Their release of an Extended Edition (or EE) to update it to more modern standards has helped rejuvenate that community in recent years.
I’m proud to have played a small part in all of that. For those interested in that history, see my stack on The Legacy of Neverwinter Nights.
My two Sanctum of the Archmage game modules — The Sight and The Quest — have garnered some awards and a bit of critical acclaim. And, with a player score of 9.9, they’re still among the most highly rated adventures on The Neverwinter Vault. But I haven’t done anything with them for some time, including reviewing them for issues with the current releases of EE or working to make them more easily installable. (And that’s leaving aside working on the next chapter, which I still want to get to someday.)
So this week (after some prodding from a new player) I finally set aside the time to install and review a program called NIT (The Neverwinter Installer Tool). It’s a fantastic utility for players to easily install and manage files for Neverwinter Nights modules. My modules have a cumbersome and error-prone manual installation process, and a working NIT installer for them would make things a lot easier for my players. And it would also, I hope, encourage more people to play my games, and discover the story world that my current and future books are be set in.
After learning how NIT works and corresponding with the author (who, it turns out, had pretty much already done the configuration for me), I’ve used it to do a one-click install of my own games. I’m currently running through a full play-test now. That’s to make sure there are no new glitches with the process, or with the recent builds of NWN’s Enhanced Edition.
So far it’s flawless, and it looks really good. And not having played it for a while, I’m really enjoying it. Here are a few screenshots from my current run to show you what I mean.
