Wendersnaven.com (a resource for nwn2 builders)

A screenshot of the Tower of Gold, a temple once devoted to Waukeen and recently reconsecrated to the Risen Sun.

For testing in BD. Send them to me at zach[dot]holbrook[at]gmail.com. Also, let me know 1) whether you completed the Castle Joyous side quest with the character, 2) whether you had Gossam in your party with the character, and 3) a basic idea of your character's personality (I know this seems weird, but I have my reasons). Thanks!

No great advances in computer game modding were made this weekend, but I did make it to the beach. Even with the AC pumping my room is a stuffy den of indolence.

I hope that the new president makes everyone in America watch this every day!!! Featuring the lovely ladies of Dungeon Majesty.

This Wired article is pretty hilarious. Anyone who has been following 4e's reception on the WOTC boards will recognize all the types represented here. The nerd conservatism (consnerdatism?) that makes transitions from things like D&D 3.5 to 4.0 so painful to wounded souls the world over has a corollary even closer to home, of course--the persistent NWN1-->NWN2 discussion.

Check out the new song (to the left). I'm still not done tweaking it--but as the name suggests, this is the music that will play in the massive interior known as the High Tower of Iriaebor. The female vocals that come in toward the end are courtesy of my roommate. The other vocals are me pretending to be two different dudes.

1. The blog has gone through a few mostly superficial changes lately. As you can see, there's now a section for NWN2 blogs that updates regularly and another section with other links (there are some blog links here, too, because blogspot can't read certain blog types). If you have a blog and want to be added, let me know!

2. I have a new debugging notebook all for Bron's Daughter. It's the same style and size as the old one, but white instead of green. Here's a scan:



3. Did you know I'm on Facebook now? It's true. Feel free to get in touch with me on there.

A subject I've talked about with Michele in both of my NWN Podcast interviews is my love for naming things in mods. A new review of an old book on Slate brought this fondness to mind. Is this fondness a reflection of growing up, like the author of the review, amidst a hodgepodge of differently evocative names?


On frozen winter nights in Minneapolis, I used to lie in the dark and listen to the high-school hockey scores. They were read out on the radio—hockey is always news in Minnesota—but I didn't much care who won. I was 10 or 11 years old, a little bit lonely and a little bit bored, and for some reason I found comfort and distraction listening to the names of towns and cities around the state. Hibbing, Cloquet, Eveleth: the pinch and chap of the Iron Range, with traces of the Finns and French who settled there. Crookston, Warroad, Thief River Falls: the dark romance of the forested northwest. Moorhead, Brainerd, Saint Cloud: the dull thud of the flat and unlovely middle and its Norwegian bachelor farmers. Pipestone, Owatonna, Blue Earth: the dreamy vowels of the riverine south. Did I want to go to these places? No more than I wanted to go to Narnia or Middle-Earth. But I found in their names a kind of secular liturgy, beautiful and full of promise. Only later, reading George Rippey Stewart's Names on the Land, did I discover that I wasn't alone.

I guess one of the things that's nice about the Realms is the fact that you can get away with a wild assortment of names there, just like you can in America. But for a lowly modder working in the Realms, most places have already been christened and canonized, so I don't get to make them up--though I do take liberties once in a while. (The Netherese library of Nevreveh where Manfred discovered his important secret was my invention, for instance.)

The names of H&C's characters gave me more freedom. "Ianth" comes from "Ianthe," and some or all of the associations I wanted from that name are probably obvious. "Manfred" is named after the main character in Byron's dramatic poem of the same name. "Vroman" I just liked the sound of.