Game Saved: World of Warcraft

The World of Warcraft. Talk about your digital crack.

No, let’s not talk about digital crack. If WoW were digital crack I’d have lapsed by now. I’d have broken, screaming through jitters, jonesing for more, and after downloading the client buried my face in a great snowy pile of it. Smoke it, toke it, huff it, snort it. Tie off a vein and smack my bitch up. Class A games, uncontrolled; as addictive and dangerous as every Fox News editorial has always claimed.

I played for two months, coasting on in-box credit. Paid pennies for base game and Burning Crusade and got my money’s worth. Two months of grinding and questing and hiding from Alliance scum as they happened past. Two months of red names and nonsense text as they taunted me, too near to my hiding place, going thicket to thicket searching for an easy kill.

WoW has a reputation that’s entirely undeserved. Between all the stories about mothers abandoning children to raid Zul’Aman nobody thinks to mention that WoW is only a game, and a good one at that. Entering for the first time, The Valley of Trials was filled with leaping initiates clothed in rags, careening about the zone like a swarm in search of honey. They camped at spawn points offing scorpions by the hundred and crowded caves in confused knots, the drops they were looking for stolen from under their noses. At their back, unable to see over the myriad bald green heads I became part of a recursive queue. Players joined behind me, and more players behind them, and somehow the line looped around so we paraded in a conga circle through the cave system with no one player knowing what was going on.

It was confusing. Quest givers and tutorial tips told me how to play but there was more to WoW than inventories and fetch quests. When approaching the steely doors of Orgrimmar advanced players duelled like gods on the road which led to the city. I stepped around them, me, a lowly messenger, wanting to watch but too afraid to do so. A troll shaman planted a totem and my screen filled with mystic symbols. A warrior wearing a mine’s worth of bejewelled and jagged armour swung a sword the approximate size of a double decker bus. Meanwhile, sunning itself on a rock nearby, watching the whole affair, a big cat swayed back and forth, snapping its claws to a rhythm only it could hear.

Orgrimmar was a tank filled with tropical fish. Gaudy-armoured players ran errands, gossiped in groups, broke out MC Hammer moves on postboxes, sat cross-legged around a Tauren asking questions on gaming trivia. An orc fell from the sky; he’d run across roofs I hadn’t dared tread on in case whoever lived inside complained. There was clearly some kind of caste system at work--level 10s bowed and scraped whenever level 60s strode by--but it was one I couldn’t fathom, not least because I found it hard to distinguish between players and NPC shopkeepers, who bartered spider-silk for cloth the same way AI bots advertised illicit gold exchanges.

That was day one; or possibly day two. Days passed in-game with the turning of our real life globe. When I stayed up through the night--as I did all too often, spurred in hope of completing one more quest or reaching the next level--I welcomed dawnlight like a hippy straddling Stonehenge. The moon and newly risen sun offered the most cinematic angles on the gameworld, those big-sky screenshot opportunities that litter WoW fansites. Riding a bat below unfamiliar stars, the sky lightene. Far beneath Azeroth blurred by, and white ruins like bones erupted from the sands of a beach held in place by tides, by programming, by in-game history. I sought fossils there, and when three low-level Alliance players dared to track their stench across the crabgrass I offered them a friendly wave.

They huddled, clearly debating whether or not the three of them could take this lone Hordesman before deciding no, they could not, and waved back. They went about their business at the other end of the beach and when an enraged mob several levels too high charged their party I killed it with an off-hand spell. In words rendered incomprehensible by WoW’s translation subroutine they thanked me.

At least, I assume they did.

If not living, if not breathing, the World of Warcraft at least bears the semblance of life. Like a Frankensteinian golem it shambles on, the push and pull of interminable warfare raising breath in its lungs. The Barrens Crossroads are lost and retaken. High-level Alliance lay waste to Grom’Gol, then, bored, venture away from the Stranglethorn Coast in search of greater prey. In PVP battlezones where insects build palaces and plagues jaundice the sky factions contend with little impetus, grinding rep, then moving on. There’s little satisfaction striking down enemies in designated warzones; far better to lead an assault on an outpost or city or capital.

Our war lasted two hours on a Sunday evening. We were summoned by message board and then by word of mouth, to a massive PVP event on the Hillsbrad bridge. Factions massed on both sides, glaring across the river, fidgeting with excitement. When the clock struck, we’d surge like Biblical seas and meet battle, buffed and ready to bleed. Totems, druidic enhancements, a dozen sorceries, icons flickering on screen. I’d never felt so powerful.

And I’d never been a team player, never braved instances, never grouped. My one companion in the World of Warcraft was a middle-aged Greek man who whispered to me whenever he needed help with a quest. He’d talk about his son, who’d hit level cap and urged his father to do the same. He couldn’t join his guild, he said, until he had the right armour.

Mine was falling apart. I was clad in hand-me-downs and whatever greaves I could find in the bellies of the few mobs I could dismember. I was a charity case, taken pity upon by a guild who fought the Warmaul champion in Nagrand in order to win me new threads. Still, according to the WoW armourysite I had the worst equipment on the entire server. I had no place in war.

Our organiser grouped us in a gargantuan raiding party. Prompts flashed on screen, red print accompanied by the dread chimes of computer crashing. On his word both parties jumped, ran and flew into battle. Screams split the air, magical effects fell like fireworks as buff and de-buff met and cancelled one another out. The battle crept forward; we held our ground and pushed, killing low level, high level, every level, forcing back the hated Alliance. They dug in their heels and sent pets and familiars baying, laying traps where we trampled, planting totems like pinwheels.

But we pushed, and we won, and after carving enemy lines both sides reset positions and prepared to fight again.

We warred in bouts, both sides exuberant, both sides breaching battlelines before word was given. Beyond the World of Warcraft, the Alliance complained we were attacking before they were ready; inside, gathered at the end of the bridge and muttering over raid chat, we said the exact same thing of them.

Their numbers thinned. Their army became ragged. Alliance scum logged off, bemoaning the state of the game, and our organiser scolded us like a teacher: “If you don’t behave and play by the rules this’ll be the last time we have a PvP event.”

The fourth bout of the night was to be our last. We’d spent an hour or more milling about, playing tug of war with an increasingly brittle Alliance army. One more push and we’d all go home.

Cobbles under our feet, we pushed. Enemies at our throats, we pushed. Bodies falling, spell-shimmer, cries of defeat, we pushed, we pushed.

We pushed enemies from the bridge, an unstoppable bulldozer sweeping them back, following their defeat onto road and on grass, on mud, on land, pushing harder, barking wildly as they turned tail and, no longer pushing back, fled.

This was unfamiliar territory: the enemy’s lands glimpsed only on stealthy midnight sorties. I’d hastened through snow, past farms, steering wide berths round NPCs patrolling by torchlight. I’d explored under cover of dark when few Alliance were awake, running quests that took me through lands where the Horde was emphatically unwelcome.

Now we were brazen. We snaked single-file up crooked paths, ignoring low-level players who gawped as we drove on. We fanned out, swallowing guards and spitting out remains. We were a terror, a plague engulfing the land. I’d been caught in daring raids on Thunder Bluff, where Alliance had captured elevators and people leapt, risking sudden death on Mulgorean grass rather than fall to their blades. I’d seen Cairne Bloodhoof roused from his tent, sending humans and night elfs flying to restore peace once more.

But nothing like this. No daredevil attempt on the capital city had ever driven so far. We hewed down gatesmen and as alarms sounded their champions fell beneath our onslaught. We stampeded through streets, and drove up through the tundra, rampaging across Dun Moragh to brand our mark on Ironforge.

How far distant was the nearest spawn point? How could we reclaim our bodies amid the thunderous shuffle of combat? To fall now would be to leave the assault, so we fought on, numbers falling as all of Ironforge answered the call to arms. We hid in alcoves to recuperate, then sprang back into the fray. Their champions massed against ours while their low level comrades skirted battle, killed carelessly by level 70s who knocked them unnoticed to the ground. Coming from every corner of Khaz Modan, every enemy was a target.

An army against his warhammer, qe reached the throne room to face King Magni Bronzebeard, With every attack our numbers thinned. We bled from hundreds to scores, then dozens, then tens, and only our fading buffs gave us any chance to succeed.

I kept out of range and still my health was whittled. We all had seconds left; only the strongest and most craven remained. I fought like a coward, attacking from the shadows, attacking, eager to witness what would happen next.

And Bronzebeard, best of all the Alliance could, was not insurmountable. Chipped in miniscule fragments his health bar ran low. His magics and special attacks ramped up in their ferocity; he clung to life, with only code to guide him. Our numbers sank, but his vitality fell faster. Surely he realised he had come to an end.

If the World of Warcraft hadn’t been a game, on that night we would have claimed its throne. Let an Orc sit upon it, a Tauren or a troll. Let a Blood Elf wear the crown and decide the fate of Ironforge. For though Bronzebeard fell with so few of us left to gloat, in defeat he left his throne empty, and undeniably ours.

Alas, WoW is just a game and those within it merely players. Bronzebeard remained dead a matter of minutes. We jumped and danced and many big cats snapped claws in jubilation. Moments later he returned to his still-war throne and struck down those few brave Horde still dancing. I never saw his warhammer coming; he smote and then I was a ghost, suffering resurrection sickness rather than reclaim my body from where it lay at his feet.

The final tatters of the Horde army ran to safety across the bridge. Some Alliance followed, but for the most part they stayed close to Dun Moragh, in case we returned to conquer once more.

Azeroth. A living, breathing world, and a game unlike any other, where war rises and falls with the swelling of the seas, and epic battles are a staple every Sunday, after tea.

And while I only spent two months there, by which point I’d more than had my fill, sometimes I feel its call. If even the lowliest, weakest orc on the server can feel powerful its easy to see why for some the World of Warcraft is more than just a game.

Neverwinter Nights: It's Miller Time.

After playing and loving Maugeter I wanted to thrust into something at the other end of the Neverwinter Nights scale - something big and epic, where I was there hero, I had a destiny, and I'd adventure across the lands crushing evil underfoot, saving villages and kingdoms and all that kind of jazz. And in the NWN community there's nothing bigger or more acclaimed than Adam Miller's trilogy of campaigns: Shadowlords, DreamCatcher and Demon.

I was wary. A long time ago I had some dealings with various fan fiction communities, and it taught me that if there was one thing creative online communities like to do it's slap each other on the back. I reviewed stuff for my own amusement, I wasn't afraid to pull punches when it came to criticism - in truth, I was an asshole. Not being an asshole is not an easy thing for me, especially when it comes to creative talent - which is funny because my ego's as brittle as frost. With the Internet open to everyone it's easy for anyone to self-publish their own work to a wide audience, and most of the time they're doing it because they want to feel justified that yes, they are an artist. Their paintings are Van Goghs. their words worthy of Wordsworth.

Most of the time, they aren't.

These people cluster together and, in the company of wannabes such as themselves, indluge in epic bouts of back-slapping, often while the real talents of the community are ignored. There are real talents lurking in these communities, and they're often not getting the praise they deserve. That's why I reviewed so much dreadful fan fiction. When someone displays real talent that's overshadowed by people louder and more charismatic than them, it's nice to get a bit of recognition.

So before I began work on Adam Miller's magnum opus I'd practically made up my mind: This was not going to be good. I didn't care how highly the modules were regarded; none of them could possibly be any better than Maugeter. Maugeter was the sole diamond in the rough. The community be damned; Neverwinter Nights couldn't get any better than this.

The first module was pretty bad. I'm not going to say it was terrible, because I'm sure there are modules far worse than Shadowlords 1, but was it as good as the community claimed it to be? No, it wasn't. It felt old (which it was) and stilted. and poorly designed, and was lacking in imagination, and everything I loved that was present in Maugeter was missing here. It scored pretty highly on the Neverwinter Nights vault, which was worrying, because it didn't deserve a good score. The best thing about it was when I intimidated a guard into letting me pass by claiming to be a woman and flirting with him. I was a burly bard at the time, and after flirting worked (or failed, depending on how you view me scaring him away from his post) my alignment slipped into the chaotic spectrum. It was a single nice idea in a module lacking in nice ideas, but it showed that Miller at least had some ideas, even if he wasn't using them.

Things had changed by the end of the Shadowlords campaign. While the writing still wasn't great (as of DreamCatcher 4 it's still not great, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was) the scope of the adventure had opened significantly. The final battle for the fate of the world took place in three realms created from a fragment of my character's subconscience, each with a moral dilemma I had to unravel. It was a long way from the go here, kill things along the way quests of the first module.

And then came DreamCatcher.

By DreamCatcher Miller's mastered the toolset. Nothing illustrates that better than the opening, where we're treated to a cut scene, a dream (of the portentous non-Maugeterian kind), a moon-eyed discussion with your love interest from the first campaign, (I ended up with drippy Anera, largely because she was the only one of the three who was competent in a fight) a brief bit of domestic questing in an enormous pub and a outdoor carnival replete with magicians and performing bears. There is more character and confidence in this opening series of events than in the entire Shadowlords campaign. If I didn't know better I'd think it had been written by a different person.

Then meteors rained down upon the carnival massacring the townsfolk and I was summoned by the lord protector of the town, who sent me to a swamp infested with hags, elemental loam beasts and tribes of brain-washed lizard people to retrieve a fallen star.

This was different. Moreover, this was good.

It got better. The meteor I'd worked so hard to retrieve was swapped by the town's arch-magician, who took it and fled. I searched his quarters to try and find where he might have gone and instead found a portal leading to a vast underwater base filled with magical oddities he'd stored there over the years. Now that's the kind of shit I love in an RPG. For me, gaming doesn't get any better than the Clerk's Ward in Planescape: Torment, where there was precious little combat but loads to see and do. While the undersea fortress was nowhere near as wonderfully involved as the Clerk's Ward, there were echoes of it here and there, just as there were in the museum and menagerie sections towards the end of Shadow Lords. Solving riddles, lengthy conversations, whacky mystical gizmos - I love it. There was a seat that transported me into a woman's dream. She blamed the death of her son in a fire upon herself, and combusted accordingly. I ran away with her in pursuit until I located a ice mace which I used to club the guilt out of her. I love that, too; that in the middle of all the worthy adventure there's time enough for an unrelated subquest where I can go and make someone's life better. It's pleasant, you know? It warms the cockles of my stony little heart.

Back on track, my partner and I were to sail to an Elven island for the next part of the master quest. Along the way we were attacked by pirates, and although we managed to repel the boarders our defence against a flurry of cannonballs did not go so well. The ship was sunk, my love was apparently drowned (yeah, right) and I washed up on a mysterious island where I treated with suspicion and thrown into a dungeon.

Ah yes, the old 'dungeon escape' trope. No man's ever managed to escape! Of course, I managed it, but the escape showed off some more tricks Miller had picked up. There were elements of old graphical adventure games as I constructed a torch from pieces of rubbish, and some kind stealth as I pushed a crate down a hallway to trigger the traps strewn across it. All the while I was weak, diseased and dying, and without the gear I'd spent hours accumulating. I foraged for sustenance, killing and eating sewer frogs and drinking water from which I had to pick floating bits of god knows what. Once escaped there was a little girl whose dead mother wanted her to stay in the afterlife with her, and a new companion (and potential love interest, not that I strayed) who was worried about her father, the crazed mayor of the town who had me thrown into the 'inescapable' dungeon in the first place.

And then there was the dragon. After a nice long dungeon crawl that took in elder god frog people and a demon with five lives I escaped from a collapsing tower on the back of a golden dragon. I was impressed. I was even more impressed when the dragon informed me there were pirate ships ahead of us and would I like to rain some vengeance for my lost Anera upon them? As Bruce Campbell once said, I might be good, but I ain't that good.

We torched them and we smote them, and we went to the islands where they live and killed every one of them. I don't know what Anera's going to say when she makes her inevitable reappearance but damn it, I'd already given up one avenue for revenge. When I defeated the dwarf skeleton king and his cronies I gave their cursed spirits freedom. I could have bound their spirits in a weapon and used it against Anera's killers, granting myself a certain satisfaction but prolonging their torment. But I thought to myself, what would Anera do? And I let them go.

There was no such leniency for the pirates who took Anera from me. I hunted them from the skies and razed their towers to dust, and only when they lay in piles of ash did I feel sated and command my steed to move on.

This is what a good game does. When the talent is there, the experience is there, and when the experience is there the war stories flow easily. DreamCatcher is a good game. It's uneven, the difficulty veers from one end of the spectrum to the other, and as I've mentioned before, the writing isn't great. It's good enough, though. Good enough for me to get caught up in the story of Torin Lance, and good enough for me to want the pirates who robbed him of his love dead and scattered to the four winds.

Only one module of DreamCatcher remains, and then it's on to Demon, Millers final campaign for the original Neverwinter Nights toolset. Frankly, I'm looking forward to it. And - and I rarely, rarely say this - for once I'm glad I was wrong.

Maugeter Days, Neverwinter Nights

Welcome to Maugeter, a totalitarian city dominated by twisted lords who rank law and order above all else, where group gatherings and civillian dissent are discouraged by extreme violence and to which you have come, the chosen one, to break its walls and free its peop-

Er, wait. Dreafully sorry but there there's been a clerical error. You're not the chosen one, you're just a schlub who's ended up here. You're not Some Guy capital S, capital G - you're 'some guy', ie. 'some guy who isn't special'. What's your name? Dave? You look like a Dave. Well Dave, you're free to come in here and do whatever it is you Daves do, but take one step out of line and we'll be on you like sharks on a papercut. No loitering, no magic, no bothering the guards, no moving between districts without the proper paperwork and no - absolutely NO parties of four or more adventurers. You want to know what we do to parties of four or more adventurers? You see this greasy red smear on the cobblestones, the one with the clots of hair and fragments of tooth? Yeah, we do that. Got it? Good. Consider yourself warned. Now hop it back to your party of two and don't bother me again.

Maugeter isn't a game you can buy off the shelves of your local Zavvi - in fact it's neither something you can pay for, nor is it a game in the strictest sense. It's a fanmade module for Neverwinter Nights, the RPG Bioware released in 2002 that was supposed to revolutionise the games industry and didn't. The truth was that out of the box Neverwinter Nights wasn't a very good game. I tried it many years ago and gave up somewhere around the point I became bored of pointing and clicking and killing everything as if the game was a Diablo-esque dungeon crawler. Diablo-esque dungeon crawlers are all well and good and have their place in the panthon of gaming but I don't expect this kind of thing from a Bioware RPG. Bioware, who are praised for their storytelling, characters and dialogue had delivered a product that was subpar in each of these categories, and the fanbase built upon the Baldur's Gate games agreed. Neverwinter Nights wasn't a very good game, it didn't take off, it didn't revolutionise the industry, and years down the line after the likes of Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, it's not fondly remembered.

But there is another side to Neverwinter Nights, one the general gameplaying public knows little about but an important one nonetheless. While most Bioware fans were disappointed by the game and moved on to bigger and brighter things, others took to exploring its the inner workings, seeking to understand the toolset that shipped with it so they could craft their own adventures to replace the one the game itself didn't supply.

In 2010 there are hundreds of these adventures stored in IGN's NWNVault, and while I'm sure most of them are terrible the most important thing is not all of them are. Fans have crawled into every crevice of the toolset and stretched the game engine to breaking point. They've crafted new packs of models, character portraits, improved AI routines, music, sound effects - enough content to replace everything that shipped with the game numerous times over. In the vaccum left by in the wake of Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment et al, they've constructed stories that would not and could not be made for today's publishers and sold in today's commercial marketplace, and they've done so because they don't have to. They're not selling their games: They're giving them away for free, making them for the sheer joy it, and for the adulation of the Neverwinter Nights community. They're doing it for fun.

There are enough modules on NWNVault to give Neverwinter Nights an insane lifespan and even in 2010 people are still releasing modules with stories that become more epic and elaborate with every release - not bad for a dead game. While many other games with thriving modification scenes tend to be dominated by mods that offer familiar gameplay in unfamiliar surroundings the NWN mod scene has tried to cater to all tastes. They know that people want diversity from their games and have coded accordingly. Browsing through the NWNVault archives you'll find mods dedicated to pure hack and slash gaming, mods dedicated to a more stealthy gameplay, mods dedicated to roleplaying and storytelling, short mods, mods of epic length, funny mods, sad mods, and mods that do a little of all of the above. Some mods are as open as Deus Ex, allowing players to play their game in any way they choose, as a good guy or an evil villain, as anything they want to be. Others force the player down a certain route, making them play a certain character in a particular way - perhaps a trap-tricking rogue, or a paladin, pure of heart, smiting evil in the name of her chosen deity. Other mods are more occupied with subject matter few games will even hint at, let alone focus on. Free of marketing worries mod-makers deal with gender and sexuality as they see fit. This could be by flinging the player into a wanton orgy or by playing with the more delicate matter of your character's coming out. There are as many ways of making a Neverwinter Nights module as there are of telling a story.

Story's what I want from a game. Atmosphere, character and story, story, story. But an engaging story needn't be a sweeping epic narrative looking to me to save the world, and Maugeter shows that sometimes being a hero isn't all about being a hero; that sometimes it's just about doing the right thing.

Maugeter opens with small, rapt audience listening to a tale-teller plying his wares in - where else? - a taven. The story itself is a fairytale romance about a star who falls in love with a mortal woman and seeks to spend a day with her, but as the storyteller and his companions bicker over how the story should be told and Sara, the excitable young elf sat opposite my dwarven fighter interjects her own opinions a certain sense of dread creeps into the proceedings. The laws governing the city are so oppressive they seep beyond the city limits, and the storyteller is reluctant to tell the story as it is traditionally told for fear it might give us the idea that lawbreaking is a good thing. This is rarely the way a professional game starts out. Such scene-setting is condensed to cut scenes and CG intros. Common wisdom has it that people want to get into the game as soon as possible, not sit and read banks of allegorical text. All the same, the mood is set. The unease of living in Maugeter's shadow is palpable. We're sat by a fire, telling stories while we weather the storm outside. This is how our story begins.

My first quest is to get into the city. Gate passes are notoriously hard to find, and it's with a little questing and gentle persuasion that I happen across not one but two: one for myself and one for my new companion Sara, who needs to enter the city's sixth district in order to begin training as a wizard, and who I've fallen in with because, being scatty and excitable, she'd probably lose her head without my help. Maugeter is built upon a series of districts, each of which requires a new pass in order to proceed to the next. In order to find these passes and make money I need to take quests. There's a guardhouse in the second district that pays bounties for criminals brought in dead or alive, and a guild of mercenaries in the third that should offer good money to a grizzled fighter such as myself. Since I'm stuck in the first district without the pass necessary to enter the next, the only option left is to check the district noticeboard in search of work.

Some hours later the noticeboard provides me with a seemingly simple quest requiring me to go to the fifth district where the city's nobility live. I've accumulated enough passes to get to the sixth, taken Sara there and had her register for classes at the wizard campus - though classes don't start for a couple months so she's decided to accompany me in the interim. Also accompanying me is Catherey, a friendly private detective whose services I'd first employed to track down villains for the city guard, and later employed as my henchman. The three of us make for a formidable team. Delivering a package for some nob from nob hill shouldn't be a problem.

There are instructions: Here is the package. Deliver it to the red tower in the forest west of the city. Go there directly. Do not open or tamper with the package in any way. Deposit it in the container outside the tower. Do not tarry. Come straight back.

It seemed straightforward enough. Too straightforward, obviously, but I decided not to tempt fate and investigate the parcel further. I just wanted to do my job and get paid, and so we departed from the city and went straight to our destination (or we would have done if we hadn't been waylaid by a poor merchant whose furs and cash had been stolen by a band of barbarian bandits. But having helped him, we moved swiftly on). Once inside the forest I dropped the package in the container and was about to leave when we heard a scream coming from somewhere in the ground beneath us.

I could have ignored it. That's the important thing. I could have ignored the scream, obeyed my instructions, returned to district five and claimed my reward. I don't know what would have happened then. Maybe I would have been given the gold and a pat on the head in payment, or maybe something else would have happened; I don't know. What did happen was this: I chose not to ignore the scream, bashed in the door of the tower, entered it and found myself in a world of adventure.

Wights and evil magicians guarded the interior of the tower; we dispatched them with little fuss and set about exploring the labyrinthan confines of what turned out to be a vast underground complex of tunnels, traps and tricks. We found cages filled with bones, monstrous jailmasters, wells of inky black liquid that radiated evil and had to be purified by pouring healing potions into them, and in the very last room, an enchantress stripped down to her smalls, ready to bathe in blood as part of some arcane ritual our package had been a part of. We killed her and found correspondance between her and the noble house that had sent us on this quest, as well as a key to its front door. With righteous anger burning in my bosom I marched us back there, unlocked the door and slew whoever we found. We met riddling golems that had me answer jokes in my chat bar, crept through a network of freezing fountains, sought out silver keys to place on a magical pillar that opened a door to the cellar, and inadvertantly unleashed a plague of walking corpses that had been walled up behind a pile of boxes. When we reached the end of the dungeon beneath the house it almost felt anticlimactic. While some arcane ritual was clearly in progress as lightning lit the dank air, the mastermind behind this sceme lay unmoving, apparently dead on the floor.

I say 'apparently' because when we attempted to leave the ritual room he was transfigured into a gargantuan demon who roared and rolled towards us. My companions advised that we fled. It sounded like a good idea.

The beast chased us the house over until we found ourselves at a dead end in the master bedroom. "Trapped!" the demon boomed, and stepped towards us, moving in for the kill. But in a font at the back of the room I'd found a strange metallic device, the function of which wasn't entire clear, but as the item's description informed me, it had a trigger, and if it had a trigger, that trigger was meant to be pulled. I pointed the device at the approaching demon, pulled the trigger and shot a searing beam of energy into its chest. It screamed and clutched for support, but fell, crashing to the ground, weak and mewling but not yet dead. Then I took its head off with my axe.

The house's doors had locked behind us, but in the corner of the ground floor were three pillars: one with a lever, two with square indentations on them, as if in true Resident Evil tradition they awaited some kind of crest or seal. I'd already found one family crest; the second was on the demon's body, and pressing them both into the columns unlocked the lever which in turn unlocked the front door and allowed us to escape.

And that was it: Adventure over. But as the blurb for Maugeter goes, the city is bigger than you are, and though the adventure was over the game was not.

In truth I don't know how much game I have left. It could be two hours; it could be ten. At the moment I'm working with the mercenaries guild. We've left the city in order to find out what keeps happening to city merchants heading along the eastern trade route. An army of us are accompanying a dignitary eager to study the land (but absent-minded enough to forget his study papers in his home, where I had to return to to retrieve them from his disgruntled wife while the mercenary band made camp far out beyond the city's limits). We were attacked by forest folk and many of us were killed, but the guild captain loosed a glass bird into the air to send for reinforcements and tomorrow we plan on taking the fight to the enemy. Tonight however, I dream. When I sleep in Maugeter, I dream of strange things. Some things resonate with my current predicament - when I dreamt about leaving home and leaving my childhood friend behind, when I dreamt about searching for the one fire elemental who'd disguised himself as a dwarf in a city full of them, the one I needed to track down to act as witness in a courtroom trial of one of his brethren who'd been accused of race betrayal by taking position in Maugeter as a ferryman working with the water. Some of these dreams are nonsensical. Some are scary. One was so disturbing even now I shudder to think of it. While searching for the red tower I dreamt of another tower, coiled and dominating the landscape, at the top of which was a minotaur who would exclaim "Sexy, sexy!" whenever I approached him. In gaming terms these are brief interludes, interactive distractions that take place while you're healing the day's wear and tear, vignettes that reflect your situation, your state of mind, or are just out-and-out odd in the way only dreams can be. But as silly as they sometimes seem, they reflect the mission statement of the game perfectly. Every other game that features dreams does so in a way that adds something to the story. Maugeter has the sense to know that not ever dream has to be portentous; sometimes a dream is only a dream, and as such it adds a surprising amount of believability to your character. When you sleep you don't loose track of your mind, you stay with your state of consciousness, just as you do in the real world. It seems such a simple, throwaway idea, but so many hours into the game the dreams have yet to repeat themselves so the module's creator must realise how important they are to Maugeter.

Maugeter is a place of adventures and mysteries, but it's also a place that endures beyond your own interactions. It's something like Sigil from Planescape: Torment in that way. The are parts of the Sigil the game only briefly touches upon. Though there is a grand, overarcing story in which, yes, you are the chosen one, but there are also deities beyond your imagining. The Lady of Pain, Sigil's strange ruler doesn't acknowledge you unless you deliberately catch her attention, upon which she flicks your tiresome soul into a dimension she's crafted to imprison gnats such as yourself. There's a certain elegance to games that can send you on adventures in which you're not be-all and end-all. For all its bells, whistles and sophistication, Maugeter is a humble game, where you can choose to do great good and have it go unnoticed by the people around you. Ending up back on the streets after my tower adventure, I was back where I'd started, a little wiser, a little more experienced, and with a cracker of a tale under my belt, but there was no fanfare or procession that greeted me. As in life, if I wanted a pat on my back I'd have to do it myself. Much of Maugeter follows such an approach. Storming the thieves guild with my own netted me cash, not fame. Life goes on in Maugeter. New things happen in districts you think you're done with. If watching a group of four adventurers get creamed by the city guard for gathering in too large a party didn't drive the message home for you, playing the game further will: You're a hero, but you're not the hero. There's a certain kind of honesty to that.

It's all the more amazing that this game is not a game, that I didn't pay a penny for it, that it's a bolt-on module for an old game that costs pennies, that it's one of hundreds of its kind, and that while it's very, very good it's by no means the best reviewed of all the Neverwinter Nights modules out there. But I'm guessing that while it mightn't be the best module of all time, it's certainly one of the most unique. A high fantasy adventure where you don't have a destiny? There can't be many of those.


Download Maugeter for Neverwinter Nights

Buy Neverwinter Nights Deluxe Edition