Returning to Fort Locke

Part two of our adventure around Fort Locke in Neverwinter Nights 2.  Part one is here.

I left us standing in a dark, zombie infested graveyard, having said farewell to sunshine.

In the graveyard

Here we were tasked by Lt. Anton to find the missing commander of Fort Locke and any missing patrols he might have sent this way.  Our party was Fengorin, a dwarf warrior, Peri, a druid of some sort, and Sigwerd, a half-elf rogue.  In addition, we had as NPC companions Khelgar, the stereotypical fighting and drinking dwarf, Neeshka, the tiefling rogue of some repute, and Bard, Peri’s pet wolf.

And it was here that we would truly test our mettle as a group.

The first order of business was to clear the surface of the graveyard.  The zombies and skeletons, which came in small groups, were not terribly difficult.  However, contact with the zombies left you diseased.  You ended up with the “zombie stink” on you, which among other things was a debuff.

The “zombie stink” could be healed with a healing kit, of which we had limited numbers, or if a saving throw against constitution was met when resting.  Khelgar, a dwarf of astounding constitution, shed the stink on the first try most of the time, as did Bard the wolf.  Neeshka however was giving us a glimpse of her usefulness by steadfastly failing to get shake the stink no matter what.  Experiments with healing spells failed to find a solution, so in the end she just stayed stunk.

More after the cut.  Many pictures, lots of words, and so on.

Learning Lessons at Fort Locke

Another Saturday night found us with a small group, just the three of us from last week.  That meant a chance to continue our look at Neverwinter Nights 2 and the original campaign that came with the game.

In anticipation of this, I actually ran Sigwerd, my rogue, through the tutorial again to pick up the bits I forgot, like how to use a ranged weapon.  It seems as simple as equipping both the weapon AND the ammo, something I somehow missed on the first pass through.

I also went and remapped some of the default keys.  I moved PAUSE from the space bar, since my trained reaction in any such game is to hit the space bar to jump, leading to an annoying number of awkwardly timed pauses for everybody in game.  I also changed the movement keys so that they were the same for all of the character modes.  I am not sure who thought it would be a good plan for them to be different by default.

As the grouping hour approached, the next big test came.  Could we resume a saved game as a group.  One would assume “yes” I suppose.  But NWN2 is really a single player game that your friends can join you in, so Potshot, who was hosting the game, was the one to save it.  I wasn’t not completely confident that we could simply carry on from where we left off.

My concerns were unfounded though.  Potshot was able to restore the game for himself, and then the two of us were able to join as well (port forwarding continued to work for me).  I think the implication here is that other people could join or we could sit out a session.  He isn’t dependent on us showing up, though we are dependent on him running the game.  We were together again where we left off, at the Inn.

Companions reunited

Once there, it was time for some warm ups and then back to the story in progress.  All of which appears after the cut because I go on for pages as usual, plus there are some actual spoilers for the campaign.  If you choose to continue from this point, you have been warned.