So, now the spreadsheet is actually totaling up the actual stars received. So far, none of Week 2 has broken into the prize level, but The Artifact dropped a spot, holding out hope that a story quest could grab the third spot at some point. Wow, week 3 already. First, one of the three quests the overworked cleric who stands near Sergeant Knox gives out this week. This is the only foundry this week where the quest page is entirely taken up by a disclaimer. I think I was supposed to sign and date it somewhere.
Yes, I will control the mobs I pull and not blame you if I pull too many. Seems in ancient times, long ago, the evil white dragon Malusnix hid a great treasure in the peaks above Icewind Dale, and then had the misfortune to die. The cult has lost its taste for raising dragons, but they dearly want to see what that legendary treasure was all about. Once at Caer-Konig, you meet with some very old friends who may occasionally help, and with members of the Cult of the Dragon who are somewhat less willing to help.
And then you get to the lair of the long dead dragon and discover the treasure… and the crazed cultist who wanted more. The quest has strong characters, a consistent plot, a sense of humor, and a satisfying final confrontation.
This quest got five stars from both Kasul and me. THIS is the bar. The average score is 4. Since we were already at the cleric, and had accidentally started his quest, we elected to start right in on Stop the Cult of the Dragon. The Cult has been seen in Neverdeath, disturbing graves and causing a ruckus. No lie; the Cult operations in Neverdeath are a major plot point in the Tyranny of Dragons expansion, which shows some impressive foresight by the author We walked through a version of Neverdeath that Kasul claimed was the Shadowfell map.
Killing as we go, we get to a crypt, where the ghost of a just-killed Cleric Human sends us on our way deeper into the crypt, where a Dragon Commander awaits us. There were no issues with this quest. The maps were competently put together, there was a minimal plot and some characterization. It was just a really dull quest. There was no excitement, the boss battle was perfunctory, the stakes seemed low. Average score is 3. After carefully asking if, perhaps, they were being made to fight to the death to distract the thirteen districts from their dystopian lives, the cleric says it is nothing THAT horrible.
The Mayor reluctantly sends us after a spell-scarred half elf who might have more information, but once we find her, she sends us into a pit from whence the kobolds came. Maybe we can stop this before anyone else dies. We soon find that very little of what we thought we knew was the truth… and that the dragons we were to kill would not be quite what we were expecting, either.
I was going to give this quest three stars, but Kasul started listing off all the things wrong with it. We compromised; I gave this quest three stars, and Kasul gave it two.
The Cult have been seen up around Icewind Dale… Lord Neverember himself urges us to meet with the wizard with all due speed.
And so we do! Some time in a market complete with a literal attack of conscience! Having extracted the information we needed, we were sent on our final destination to confront the Cult in their hidden lair. This quest was a story — with chapters, and side quests, boundless attention to detail, and some very funny bits. It did have a little too much fascination with pop culture, but not terribly so.
The lore fits in well with the Forgotten Realms, and… this quest was more like reading Dragons of Winter Night than playing a foundry. Kasul and I agreed — this one easily deserved five stars as well. Since featuring a quest just copies it, reviews and all, it started off week 3 still in For Review. And remains there still. In Week 1, The Artifact started off in the same position and quickly reached the third position — prize territory — in the standings.
But, three days along, Dragon Scroll is still For Review. Regardless of how we came to know all this, we understood that we must obtain this scroll before the cultists get it. It turns out that, like a quest from a week or two ago, this is really a quest about mindflayers, who have been attacking cultists and turning them into their own foul brood.
This was told to us by the sole cultist to avoid this fate. He charged us to kill any cultist we found, to save them from mindflayer-dom. After we got the ten and retrieved the body parts the cultist needed, we were sent into the dungeon.
Everything had respawned along the way, so we ran to the entrance and just killed everything as it came to us. The dungeon was just an interminable slog of random mindflayer encounters, so we ran through those. Kasul had a scroll to summon two dragons, but they were more trouble than they were worth, attacking things through walls and stuff.
We eventually reached a chamber with a mindflayer boss, which we killed, along with everything else in the room. A key was supposed to drop to open the way to the finish — we did get the ancient scroll to drop — but no key. The quest text said, the key will drop from an encounter in this room. We spent a good fifteen minutes looking for an encounter we missed, or this key. Unable to proceed, we quit the quest. We might have reset the map and tried again, but neither of us felt like clearing that boring dungeon of all the static encounters again.
Of its four reviews so close , one is by the author himself assuming reviewer denniss3, who praised it highly and gave it five stars, is related to author denniss The author also praised the quest for its good storytelling in the quest description… Well, nice to know he believes in his quest that much.
Aside from the bug, we were puzzled at how this quest turned into a mindflayer quest. Technically, it did involve the cult… I really hesitate to bring that up, because if you go down certain paths in my own quest, you can get the cultists killed off pretty early and not see them again or, you can join up with them and see them a lot!
Your choice! Play my quest when it is featured! Nonetheless, I felt the cultists would want to respond to this attack on their own by the mindflayers in some other way than handing the mindflayers cultists to use for their own ends.
Kasul was getting pretty angry at it. Never a good sign. Average score is 4. Zed Wisdomancer the Unmatched has come to Neverwinter with his minions. There is something in the air…. But Zed — Zed Wisdomancer — when he calls, we come running. Meeting Senior Officer Wil Fletcher at a home, he revealed his suspicions that there were Cultists in this very house. Given that there were two cultists standing immediately in front of him, we believed there might have been something to his suspicions.
He charged us with finding Zed Wisdomancer and slaying him, and we could also rescue Unaril Cooper if we found her in the dungeon. Nice to have that option.
A drow delayed our journey to the dungeon by challenging us to find things for her in the largely empty house, filled with restless residents with names like Halfling Male and Half Orc Female. Kasul introduced the latter to Half Orc Male.
They hit it off immediately. Once finally sent to the dungeon, we wandered around killing random encounters with dangerous sounding names for awhile. Went to a second dungeon and killed fifteen scarily named critters, one encounter to a room, all easy encounters. On the last map, we just pulled every encounter to the boss room and killed everything at once. This is what I do. My Guardian Fighter uses an AE build.
So, that happened. Boss was as easy as everything else, even given we were fighting the last dozen or so encounters at the same time. The dialog seemed like it was written by a non-English speaker and translated. It reminded me very much of badly dubbed Japanese monster movies.
The nameds in the room were somewhat amusingly named. Week 3 is a pretty strong week. Who plays featured quests from the previous week? Some people do, but most will be on the featured ones for the current week.
We have two quests this week that should, in my opinion, be at the top of the charts. So far, interest seems to have been generally falling week to week. Three Week 1 entries hold their grip on the prize spots. Were the best three quests all just randomly in Week 1? Clearly someone was trying to communicate with Kasul and I via the medium of refrigerator word magnets.
That takes guts, and I have to respect that. Apparently, Frinko lost his friend in a sewer. Anyway, said friend was investigating the Cult of the Dragon, and Frinko wisely elected to send some other sad fools to do his dirty work. I think this was the first Neverwinter sewer system that was actually laid out like a sewer… gridlike.
We were sent to hunt numbered static encounters for no particular reason. Apparently the Cult just enjoys standing in sewer runoff. Not your brightest band of terrorists. We won? No more cult? The maps were simplistic, the story minimal, and the polish low. The spelling was poor. Two stars from both of us. When I saw only five quests for this week, I went looking in the For Review tab for the sixth quest, without luck. Another author succeeded in finding it since this week, there was no news post about the new quests to help.
We wanted to be sure to play this one the first night. The problem was clear… The note on the job board was asking for intelligent adventurers interested in scholarly research. The paper was already covered with obscene scribbles. Had to check it out. The address led us to a small apartment that had been thoroughly tossed. Books and scrolls everywhere, but no sign of anyone… wait, noise behind the bookcase… a hidden room containing only a kobold sage, who puffed himself up as he saw us. There was an ancient mine some distance away said to contain items of unsurpassed historical value.
The mine, however, had been flooded for hundreds of years… but the Cult of the Dragon have shown interest, and have summoned a sorcerous storm to break the rocks covering the mine. Because it seems to have been a theme in the contest thus far to help kobolds out, we agreed to accompany the sage to the mine and put our lives at risk for a creature whose hit points can be counted off on the fingers of one hand… if you had two fingers blown off in the war.
The area outside the map looked like EverQuest, circa Kasul and I finally decided it reminded us of Kithicor, with its featureless, polygon ground, and trees poked through in places.
Kinda retro. The maps picked up once we solved the riddle of the getting into the mine, turning into some sort of sodden, sunken, dripping city filled with angry fish people.
Take a decent maze, some interesting map mechanics, a lot of lore, and a kobold who enjoyed using large words without quite knowing their actual meanings, and we had a fun time. I was stuck beneath it, Kasul above it. We managed to complete the quest separately… but it was still a little annoying. Foundry authors — if you ever have a mechanic that blocks a path in some way, understand that you may be splitting up a group who can no longer then finish your quest.
Consider one-way walls, or a map transition, or a teleporter, or something. Kasul and I both really liked the quest, except for the getting stuck part. The final boss fight was appropriately cinematic. We both gave this quest four stars. Authors waiting for your quest to get featured — get it off the review tab while you can. We were to help him free the ten dwarf miner hostages held by a group of Barbarian Mercanaries.
Guarding a caravan? Promises of fantastic adventure and northern cities with amazing skies? Sign me up! This is an opportunity — and a danger, and thus the need for adventurers to keep the traders safe. Being the manly man you are, you dive into the Cult portal before it closes and…. This quest takes a chance by putting you in a very specific role, a choice some players may not enjoy.
So, good maps — as promised, the sky above Svanem and the city itself were beautiful, and the dungeon itself showed some real talent. However, the encounters were stale and uninteresting, and the spelling needed work.
When I played this before, while it was in review, I gave it four stars because I felt it showed promise. I dropped that to three stars on this second play through because I really hate static encounters. Kasul gave it three as well. This quest is a punishment.
No possible reward could make finishing this quest worth it to us. Since we bailed from Culling the Cult, Kasul suggested we play through mine once more, so we did. I duplicated the issue Bordaaron found with the auctioneer, but way too late to do anything about that now. Basic plot: There are a number of legendary Dragon Cult artifacts, among them, gems called Orbs of Dragonkind.
One came up for auction in Neverwinter, shocking the nobility of the city. Speculator Zigto feels if a trusted adventurer were to put in a high bid, it would throw a wrench in the plans of other nobles to grab it. Current average stars: 4.
Still figuring out what Ello is for… slow at work today, new projects are being specced but this close to the end of the year and a department-wide vacation, not much is getting done. We had a release early this morning which went fairly well.
I was barely conscious. Then, this morning, I realized that I could have made my original idea, Crushbone Arena, instead. As I placed encounters in the Shard of Hate, the final location, and noticed how arena-like it appeared, I could have actually joined story and straight combat instead of the rather drawn-out story I have now.
Even though I plotted it out for once before I started building, the story got more complex as I built it. I made the Kelethin wood elves more sympathetic than I intended.
Average playtime for the quest in its currently published state is 37 minutes, though. All this expansion has come at a heavy price in time debt. Now, this IS relevant to EverQuest. This is semi-baked in, because you have to get five reviews before it goes live to everyone. Lucky me, I have four already, and need just one more. I need it to display on the most recent one. Hey, hey, magical sleigh. I didn't get this last year because I was saving up for the Frost Mimic.
It's been a full day since I released Crushbone's Revenge into the world. I've gotten a little feedback, most of it good, some with stuff I need to address. I was kinda hoping, of course, that it would catch on fire, but it didn't. Holy crap. I've just started rewriting my first foundry, Crypt of Befallen. I'm turning that into a single map dungeon crawl. It's important to be able to tell a story in a short amount of time.
Right now, my West Karana farm map pictured is my only quest people can do without taking up a good part of their day. Better authors can tell a story in less time. I dunno. I felt like I cut things to the marrow in Crushbone.
It tells the story I wanted to tell. Just takes too long. I accompanied Kasul through it last night, before we moved on to having Tom Paris taunt us in the Delta Quandrant. I need to make hard mode, harder. In retrospect, we should have chosen this week to review Christmas-themed foundries, of which there are a few. Opportunity lost. Maybe next week? The Cult of the Dragon is up to their new tricks again. Tiamat will surely appreciate the additional elemental powers the temple can grant.
Oddly, though, it was our mission to STOP this. All Hail the writhing heads of our Dread Monarch, of course, but quests being what they are, we must stop the cult. The temple is split into many wings, each housing a certain elemental power, eventually leading into a maze and a final confrontation with the powers of all elements at once, along with the cultists also vying for the final prize.
The map was pretty well done, with a lot of thought into making each wing look elementally distinct. The encounters are mostly generic, which can partially be explained by the variety of pre-built Cult encounters already in the toolchest.
Still, the recent Cult of the Dragon foundry contest showed how those same elements could be used to far better effect. Kasul and I both gave it three stars. It also used the tired chestnut of the quest giver being the quest villain. Pros: Decent mapmaking Cons: Vanilla encounters, no plot to speak of, surprise plot twist used in almost every quest and is no longer surprising.
First map is about thirty stacked Corrupted Dwarf encounters from Icewind Dale, and once defeated, the other twenty allowed Corrupted Dwarf encounters lead to the exit — which opens to another map, filled this time with a bunch more stacked encounters, so many that they glitched, and, as my video card struggled along at 1 FPS, managed to glitch to the next exit.
Kasul bailed, but I kept trying to make it through until I had max wounds and had used up the two scrolls of mass life I got from the Simril event. Neither Kasul nor I finished this to review it. Good RP farm. Works well as a prequel to the Hobbit, as Erebor has been exquisitely brought to life in Neverwinter.
They should try this one. A magic carpet swept us into the Menagerie, leaving us suspended high above a forest crawling with creatures. The Keeper of the Overlook, the glass-bottomed structure suspended above the menagerie, tasked us with clearing the Overlook, then finding the mad mage in the forest below and saving the creatures of the menagerie, largely by exterminating them. So we killed them all, found the mage, found the true source of the discord, and were done and done.
A very basic quest. The Overlook was a nice idea, but could have been vastly improved by such touches as adding some white, cloud-like mist to the invisible walls comprising the floor. The menagerie itself was just encounters placed more or less randomly. It was an okay quest, neither bad nor good. But he felt we should drop everything and do whatever it asked us to do. Neverwinter, I present to you Guard Frinko. Once we traveled to the place Frinko indicated, a mysterious, hooded man handed us a letter, which seemed a little sketchy, telling us that we must travel to another place, Spire City, capital of a lost civilization that was undergoing some sort of crisis, probably under attack from animals escaped from the Mad Menagerie.
The airship to Spire City was under attack by elements of The Corrupted, a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Spire City and all who would travel to it by airship. We stood back while the NPCs aboard handily disposed of most of the attackers, leaving just a few out of range for us to clear. We were admonished by the Hooded Man, who eventually capitulated and acknowledged we had little choice.
I think this person was killed by NPCs before we even got on deck, so not sure how we were really involved. Well, it turns out that our Hooded Man is actually the ruler of Spire City. I thought the ruler was supposed to be the Archlord, but that would mean the Hooded Man was actually the Archlord, which would be crazy. There is a surprise plot twist you will never, ever see coming, and I would not want to spoil it.
I just get the impression the plot to this foundry was thought of on the fly, as in the end, an NPC has to spend pages and pages explaining what the plot was.
Well, I dunno, spread it out a bit. The maps were largely bare, with doors and other elements standing away from walls and so on. Pros: Story is nice, but could be integrated into the quest more evenly Cons: Bare maps with poor element positioning, numerous spelling and grammar errors. This is not a screenshot from the Neverwinter quest.
This is from one of my EQ2 quests. It was suggested that, these days, it might not be a bad idea to make a little video about your new Foundry quests. My first foundry quest, Crypt of Befallen, was confused, poorly plotted, etc — all the same mistakes I see made by every first time author. It's embarrassing to have that quest be the entry point to my Adventures in Norrath campaign.
I'm sketching ideas for a remake with an entirely custom map, no pre-built rooms. I'm building this version in mid-air so I can have actual drops to the second and third floors. The old story, such as it was, will be discarded. I'll still keep the concepts of other adventurers camping bits of the dungeon in. The current villain, Mezzinia, will be tossed out and replaced with a dark elf villain to connect with the plot running through the next three adventures and finally culminating in my next new quest, Bloody Kithicor.
The old Befallen was build with three maps. This one will just be one map. Problem with this is that this severely limits the number of NPCs I can use — the limit is 50, but if you want them to do any sort of acting, or behavior changes based on what the player is doing, that uses up another NPC slot. In Fire Sale, I started having to use friendly encounters for non-speaking parts.
One of the first things the player will see is some skeletons beating up a sleeping druid, who, once saved, will wake up and tell players about a quest this appeared in a crude form in the original. Then, there'll be more dialog when the quest is complete. This takes up four NPC slots. I probably should add "The Nondescript House" to the quest, as I use it as the starter point for all the quests to follow.
More work on "Newfallen". Added some walls so I could see how the map was looking. There will be a few more rooms.
This is an outdoor map yay for horses in dungeons! This is tough because the dungeon ceiling pieces are one-sided, and light from the sky shines right through. I put an opaque rock over the entrance, but rocks like that ruin the minimap remember, sparkly is useless in custom maps, players will need the minimap.
The only workable door solution I found was this openable door, which requires a lintel and those columns to fill up the space it doesn't fill. It should do the trick. Anyone who played the EQ Befallen back in the day remembers the well. This is my first pass. I'll probably lose the sewer assets and figure out ways to make the tiles work. The grate inside is a volume gate and will send the player plummeting to the third level, where they will be attacked by epic critters and, if they survive, be very close to the final boss and the end of the dungeon.
To let people know it exists, there will be a fight in this room where the mobs have some knockback. With any luck, the player will be knocked into the well at low health, fall, narrowly survive, then get killed, respawn up top, and then treat this encounter more carefully. The first shadow knight fight will be in an unbuilt room to the west, Skeleton Lrodd in the well room, Gynok Moltar in the main room, and the unbuilt rooms to the east will crumble away to reveal the trap-filled drop to the second level, where the necromancers live.
The original dungeon also had an illusory floor in the area which dumped people in the second level as well, but unless there's an illusory tile platform, probably won't work for this though I could have it crumble away to show the supposed rock beneath, some of which rock will be illusory. Now, making an entire dungeon that fits into one room is more of a challenge than I was looking for… but I can snake a hallway into another cavern if I really need it.
Anyway, now that Newfallen is inside, I have control over lighting. There's nothing more that sets the mood for a dungeon than lighting, and not working on lighting is one of the more common beginner foundry mistakes. For instance, see my original Befallen, where I had no clue. Anything you let the foundry do FOR you, like lighting or adding room decoration, just means your quest will look just like someone else's quest. Found some lessons about mixing static and dynamic lighting for different effects, so have been starting with that here.
Also redid the well room, put some mist coming out of the well just because, and tossed a bone golem in there to stand in for Skeleton Lrodd. In the actual version, he'll be patrolling in a loop along with some other random undead who will knock you into the well to your death. I don't really want to get hung up on putting encounters in at this point. I'd like to get the first floor completely built out, start decorating it.
More progress on Newfallen. I've been getting some recent good reviews on Befallen as it exists now, which is puzzling. Maybe it's because I joined Scribe's Enclave. But it gives me pause about totally ripping out all the old stuff. I think people liked the adventuring party on the second level best, so I'll be sure to keep them. Roofed up the entry hall. I added some arches to separate it from the main room. The original Befallen did not have them, but it adds so much to the look that I think people will agree that the original ought to have had them.
Not much changed in the well room. It is now on the way to SK1, whereas in the original, it was just a trap for nosy adventurers, or those few who needed Lrodd for the quest. Since there will be no quest objectives except to kill the final boss, Newfallen is going to be very linear.
I'm going to have the druid you save provide hints on what you're supposed to be doing next because the sparkly line won't work, and neither will any markings that would normally project on the floor. They don't do that on these false floors. SK1 room is constructed, but not decorated. It will have the usual mix of necros and stuff to keep the player busy.
SK1 will pop when those are cleared. I'll have Gynok Moltar wandering about the main room when the players get back from SK1 with the key to the second level. Won't bother making them do the quest. I've started sketching in the second level, but will probably skip right to the third level, so I can see where best to connect it up to the second. Then the layout of the second level should become clear.
Since the second level is just going to be playing around with the adventuring party, it can be whatever makes that the most fun. We've been off a couple weeks, but we're back with four new foundry quest reviews for your adventuring enjoyment.
A child has fallen into a sleep from which he cannot awaken. Followed soon by a guard and a farmer. Lord Neverember has kept this quiet, but if this keeps up, all Neverwinter may descend into panic. Well, the bravest ones passed. But for some reason, you showed up. This is the first chapter of a longer story, that it sets up well. The enchantress who sends you into the dream and checks up on your progress there is a great character, as is her monstrous companion. The next chapters will let you catch up on decisions you took in previous chapters by taking certain items from a shelf in the first map — this shelf was empty for this first chapter.
The encounters were all placed with a purpose, which is truly rare in foundries. Both Kasul and I liked it a lot, and plan to continue with the campaign next week. Four stars from both of us. The idol may be powerless… or it may hold ultimate power. You have to find it.
A Scottish bartender gives you a sidequest to gather some ingredients for a brew later. And by Scottish, I mean dwarven, because of course dwarfs are all Scottish.
But why? When did they all become Scottish? They were all Germanic back then. Whoa, sorry, lost some time there in TV Tropes. Anyway, dwarves are all mysteriously Scottish and nobody knows why. You also have to fight a common housecat. Kasul and I are both cat lovers, so I kept aggro on the cat while he dropped aggro and completed the story up until the next map, so we could leave without fighting the little kitty.
The quest ends with one mystery solved, maybe, while another begins. The maps and characters were memorable. Four stars from both of us, and the next chapter is on our list. Pros: Fun puzzles, decent battles, good maps and characters Cons: Hidden object sidequest. One fight was a little glitched. One thing about being an adventurer; everyone wants to give you treasure. Hold a shovel, and you get to shovel centaur poo all your days. Drop the shovel and pick up a sword and BAM! Become a Hero of the North today with a Founder's Pack purchase!
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