It's a Mod, Mod World
Neverwinter Nights

The Penultima Series
By day, Stefan Gagne is a webmaster for the Food and Drug Administration. By night, he is one of the many role-playing fans who create mods for BioWare's smash-hit role-playing game Neverwinter Nights. While in this instance the word "mod" actually stands for "modules" (the term used to refer to individual adventures in the pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons game) rather than "modifications," the end result is the same. Neverwinter Nights includes BioWare's Aurora toolset, which gives players the ability to create new locales, characters, situations, dialogue, and more. There are currently more than 1,000 free user-created mods available for download on BioWare's community site. Gagne's latest achievement, which has received a lot of attention from other fans, is known as the Penultima campaign. The module is now its in fifth and final chapter (titled "Home Sweet Home"). A brand-new second campaign is in the works, too.

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An example of the sort of humor you can expect from the Penultima module.
The Penultima series differs from the single-player campaign that ships with Neverwinter Nights in that it's much more humorous, it's shorter, and it emphasizes dialogue and brawling more than puzzle solving. Players start out in Penultima City, where they can shop for gear, chat with interesting characters and join the Guild of Middlemen, where other modules in the campaign can be accessed.

"As for how you 'finish' it," Gagne said, "I don't want to spoil the story, so you'll find out what the mission goals are when you play!" What he will reveal is that the player starts out with an ordinary contract job within the guild and is asked to clean some goblins out of a mine. "But it gets weirder and more complicated from there on out." Gagne said. Each module took roughly a week to create, with a few days of play testing thrown in for good measure.

Neverwinter Nights players looking for a new adventure can find this mod on Stefan Gagne's Penultima site.

The Spires of Ravenloft
Since Neverwinter Nights is based on the official Dungeons & Dragons rule set, it comes as no surprise that another popular mod for the PC game was inspired by a classic pen-and-paper campaign setting. This module is a computer game conversion of the original Spires of Ravenloft module created by Tracy and Laura Hickman in 1983. Spires of Ravenloft was created by "Raven Builder" (a Michigan math and computer science teacher who prefers to use his online handle). When I started to play with the [Aurora] toolset," Raven Builder said, "I knew I had to make a module conversion of it for the NWN engine--it was just too good of a story not to retell yet again."

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A reproduction of a classic pen-and-paper adventure.
The story revolves around a group of heroes invited to "save" a young woman from some evil. As explained by Raven Builder, what begins as a basic "damsel in distress" adventure quickly evolves to reveal an amazingly complex history including a tragic tale that began hundreds of years ago. The combat-heavy mod was released in early July 2002, and the author said that he "spent just about every day from the day the game was released to the public until then working on it."

The author said his favorite component of the mod is the way he "managed to create secret doors without having the ability to create a secret door." He explained, "What I ended up doing was making certain items usable, and when used, they would teleport the character to the other side of the wall. There they would find a more obvious object (like a floor lever) to take them back."

The Spires of Ravenloft mod includes both single- and multiplayer support, and it can take three to five hours to complete. It can be found here.

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