Literacy in the rpg world

Something for me to think about for Bedine, literacy.

No, not among the players. I assume players can read :-)

Instead I'm talking about the pc. I think just about every rpg ever assumes the pc can read. While a universal literacy assumption is reasonable in a modern day/future setting, historical/fantasy rpgs also assume pc literacy. The data dump to the player by reading books is an old, old trope.

In the real world, literacy rates were low, even among the upper classes/elites of society. Scribes were a well paid profession in the real world for a reason. Old versions of the Dungeon Masters Guide only obliquely reference the literacy issue in their tables of wages for common professions when they listed wages for a scribe (scribes are among the better paid of the commoner professions).

In Baldur's Gate it's entirely reasonable the player can read, after all they did grow up in Candlekeep! In NWN1 the player is attending an hero school at the beginning of the game. It's reasonable that at least basic literacy would be taught to a would be hero, knowing which book on the evil wizard's shelf is the one that has his plans is a useful skill in the hero trade. In NWN2 Daeghun could reasonably teach the pc to read given his knowledge of the pc as carrying the shard, and there are bookshelves in the players house so there are certainly books around.

On the other hand fantasy worlds are full of barbarians, nomads, tribal groups and other such societies where learning is an oral process, possibly supplemented with pictures or pictographic representations. What about a pc from these groups? They can be highly intelligent, yet illiterate. Back to the example of the evil wizard's shelf, how does the nomad know which book to take? How do you give them information while in the dungeon, so often done with a reading data dump?

Bedine update

I stopped working on proof of concept areas since I've discovered I can make decent looking desert areas with the toolset. I've done some work on implementing some of the quest ideas from the Anauroch sourcebook as sidequests. These are relatively straightforward quests along the lines of "merchant hires you to find something" and will make up some of the sidequests. Any obstacles for the player will go in later, puzzles, enemies etc. I've put in placeholder blank areas so I can put in the area transitions.

I've worked out a basic outline for a main quest and put in placeholders to support it. These are generic named npcs such as "shaman" and their conversation say things like "go click the clicky first!". While the written down plot outline has more detail than that, some specifics will be worked out over time as they grow into their spots organically. I haven't worked out the details of the ending yet, but that can come later as I currently don't have any inspiration for it. I'm not going to work on something like the endgame when I'm not feeling inspired, the lack of inspiration would show.

One big thing to come later, specific dialog lines for npcs. I try to find "voices" for the npcs so not everyone's dialog reads the same. Placeholder conversations will allow me to do basic testing of the main plot. The basic testing will focus on ensuring the story flow of the written outline is translated to game dialog correctly, making quest options show at the right times for example. Specific "voices" for npcs can come later.

Next step is setting up a test module and putting in these npcs/script to allow me to run through things and do basic testing of conversations and scripts.

Bedine

I've opened up the toolset again, and settled on a setting. I'll be working on things as I feel like it, instead of grinding things out, so who knows if this will ever see the light of day. These pictures are from proof of concept areas.

Bedine will take place in the Anauroch desert, and the player will play a member of one of the nomadic Bedine tribes. The timeline is some point after the NWN1 expansion Shadows of Undrentide.

Why Bedine? I like nonstandard settings. I like the cleanness/brightness of desert area settings. Tada!

I won't be forcing the plaayer to play specific race/class, but as a Bedine tribemsan the story will treat the player as a human male and a non-spellcasting class. Non-spellcasting as Bedine are very suspicious of magic, and there are very few Bedine spellcasters. Players will also be restricted to traditional Bedine weapons (dagger, kukri, scimitar, sling, spear) and armor (max of leather, Bedine are nomads) until they find other things or reach somewhere they can trade for them.

I'm trying to keep things relatively simple compared to PoE and Crimmor. Of the official campaigns plus my past work, it will be most similar to SoZ. Soz party building will be included, as will a number of cohorts. The cohorts won't have their own stories or quests, just be "lore appropriate" party members for players that would prefer that. The SoZ overland map will be used, though as a native and nomad the player won't be slowed as much by bad terrain.

Campaign ideas

I haven't had any motivation to work in the toolset, after pounding away at things for 2 years (Path of Evil), and then immediately another 2 years and a few months (Crimmor). Here are some ideas I've tossed around at various points. In no particular order.

A sequel to Path of Evil, with the player playing Tan, the tiefling companion from the first Path of Evil. The idea would be the PoE pc granted Tan's request, and now Tan is free to seek his revenge. This would be a high level campaign set in the Abyss (and possibly a short stay in Sigil to transition there, as the PoE stronghold has access to Sigil). Starting level would be 16-18. Instead of the open world and "blank" PC of PoE, the story would assume the player is Tan the Tiefling, so it would be more story focused than PoE. The PoE companion Carcarin the wizard also has unfinished business on the Lower Planes, so she may come along as a companion.

Merchant: The player would be a merchant trying to build and run a merchant company. This would take advantage of the customizable SoZ trade system I published. You'd probably start as a merchant apprentice, and work for a merchant company before striking out on your own.

Asmodeus successful: Official lore has Asmodeus repeatedly trying to drag Abeir-Toril into his plane of the Abyss, as part of plots to increase his own power. This campaign would start after Asmodeus has succeeded. Waterdeep, or some other suitably large power, would call Faerun's powers together to try to get Abeir-Toril back to the Prime, and provide portals to whatever locations were necessary to do so. You could easily have good and evil characters working towards this goal, since the evil Faerun powers would be facing existential threats from being in the Abyss (or being there is simply inconvenient to their own plans). Obviously this would be an epic level campaign as the most power people in Faerun would get called for the effort.

Generic adventuring without an overarching story, based out of Crimmor. This would let me reuse the Crimmor maps as the base, and this would resemble Wyrin's White Plume Mountain of different areas on an OM to have adventures.

Dark Sun: I'd love to do something here, but it's basically not doable as too much custom work would need to be done to do the setting justice.

Perfect World Employees posting as regular Neverwinter Online Foundry authors.

PWE employees are creating Foundry content which is not marked as PWE created. Something I pointed out. All PWE employees are supposed to have red or blue forum names instead of the orange of general users or green of community moderators..

 Forums link
 (assuming my post doesn't get removed)

Then a marked dev stepped in and removed the post.

The person lives 20 minutes from Cryptic studios according to his twitter account...









Edit: Apparently another PWE employee posting as a regular player.

Patching

It's virtually inevitable that there will be bugs found in any release, and naturally Crimmor was not immune to that. I followed the good practice of included a patch hak. What I've done is make the odd number patches via the patch hak, to allow updates for people that have already started and have savegames, and the even number a full update that addresses the things that can't be patched, map changes and such. Version 1.04 should be up at the Vault/Nexus today.

Crimmor is released!

Vault link.

Now to cross my fingers and hope no one finds any gamebreaking bugs. :-)

Crimmor is a module for solo rogues of level 8 (you can level up and receive appropriate gold ingame). Use skills and rogue abilities as a Shadow Thief in the streets of the Amnian city of Crimmor.

You may like this module, you may not. Crimmor is experimental and is focused primarily on the urban environment and providing the "feel" of a city, as well as rogue focused non-combat gameplay. If you are all about combat, this is probably not the module for you.

Crimmor pushes the NWN2 toolset's hard limit on objects in the external city areas, additionally, there are numerous npcs in the city. I recommend a modern pc. You've been warned.

Crimmor takes many things, from food, street, shop, and npc names, to the unusual relationship of the Shadow Thieves to the city, from Ed Greenwood's article on the city in Dragon Magazine issue 334. Thank you Ed. Some things I had to change in the interest of gameplay.

Characters without rogue levels are unsupported, though bards will probably work fine as well. You are not required to have levels in the Shadow Thief of Amn prestige class. You are not required to be evil.

Magic levels are low, there are few +2 items. Don't worry about that, Crimmor isn't a module about "powering up". You can reach up to level 14 in Crimmor. There are four possible endings, not all of which are good for the pc, and it is possible to end the game via decisions you make before the "end".

Among other things, Crimmor uses a custom lockpicking system (courtesy of RWS), all custom sound in the environment (courtesy freesound.org). It has custom weapon and item classes, and pseudo prestige classes (Crimmor does not change any 2das except for the loadscreens and trees.2das, so it works with any custom content that does not alter these, including class packs). Finally, the thieves speak cant. A pdf guide has been provided that goes over gameplay things, and includes a dictionary of the cant used as well as some background on Crimmor.

The module is completable without killing anything. There's no secret achievement or bonus for doing so. No xp is awarded for combat, only quest completion and exploration. There are approximately 10 hours of content.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes with things, and some things are pretty complicated. As with any 1.0 release, there are bound to be some bugs that managed to slip by, but there are two I am aware of:
Lockpicking does not consume lockpicks (yay for you, freebie!). Lights do not affect the hide skill though the DM will tell you it does, as there were seemingly unsolvable problems with this (I hope to get this fixed via patch). These have minimal game effect and were significantly delaying release, so I chose to go ahead and release.

Thanks to my testers: Arkalezth, PJ156, GFallen01.