Pity the guys in the red shirt

April 23, 2003 by Adam in NWN1

Pity the guys in the red shirt.

When I used to watch Star Trek as a kid, I used to get excited when security would go down with them, wearing their red uniforms. I could tell that a particularly horrific death awaited my eager eyes. I'm sure it was because the writers needed a way to express the danger the crew was in, though they couldn't actually kill off a main character.

I've done the same for my module, making certain defenders of the lakeside keep "red shirt guys". Their fate in life is to suffer the various assaults in vivid detail. Unfortunately, it does get a bit comical. I was testing out the catapult boulder attack and this poor elf kept flipping off the castle wall over and over. I wanted to hold up a "10" sign rating his gymnastic skills. After several hours working on it yesterday, I think I'm done with the necessary modeling. Now I've just got to script the whole thing.

I got a note from Raflar, who put together a bunch of material I used for Dreamcatcher 1 (the Dancing Cyclops in particular). He was enthusiastic, though putting off playing the module until he finished Shadowlords.

I also had someone from Japan e-mail me about translating Shadowlords into Japanese. I wish him the best of luck, as the amount of dialog, item descriptions, script-related text, and journal entries are a bit daunting. It is amazing how many people around the world have played my modules. I got an e-mail from someone in Ukraine yesterday. Almost half the e-mail I get is from outside the country. Pretty neat.