Needless to say, progress has been zilch because I am absolutely knackered by life in general. I have about three-to-five Important Life Changing Events TM going on simultaneously which is killing me dead. I think things will get better after July; meanwhile everything else is sliding into a black hole of guilt and shame. It does mean, however, that whatever hilariously inadequate windows of free-time I get I have just about sufficient brain power and energy to play some NWN2 modules.

The depressing side-effect of having played something you had a massive reaction to is that everything that follows feels a bit inadequate. I am kind of looking at most modules through a kind of sad “oh but you’re not Live Forever” filter, which is bad for everyone.

I played through The Wizard’s Apprentice which … hmm … I didn’t enjoy as much as I could have / should have, and I feel quite bad about that since it seems quite popular on the Vault. It’s a debut module so you have to be a less of a total dickwad than usual, because it isn’t fair to start slamming it all over the place. I generally like class or alignment specific modules because I think self-imposed restrictions can be extremely liberating. I very much enjoyed The Maimed God’s Saga, for example, because you really got to feel like a Cleric of Tyr. I think it also helps with roleplaying options, since there’s so much more nuance possible in “what kind of x do you want to be” than the alternative which ends up running a gamut of generic. So in TMGS, for example, you can be a fluffy flirty cleric or a stern, justice-focused cleric, or a wise-cracking cleric or some combination, and the point is you feel slightly more like a person. Whereas if you try to map out every conceivable response for every conceivable personality type what you end up with:

I am a complete sap
I am trying way too hard to be funny
I am an arbitrary maniac

Sorry to keep banging on about Live Forever but even though the conversations are relatively linear there are a nice array of responses, most of which are things you might genuinely want to say to someone. And even the complete psycho answers are interesting enough to be tempting. Anyway, I am going somewhere with this tangent which is: one of the things I found quite frustrating with The Wizard’s Apprentice is that I never really felt like a wizard’s apprentice. I mean, yeah, obviously I WAS a wizard’s apprentice, and we lived in a tower, and he was called The Master, and he had weird experiments in the basement but it all seemed pretty shallow to me. I don’t have anything concrete to say really but I felt like lots of the quests I ended up doing were pretty generic, rather than explicitly wizardly. And there are several occasions on which you have to behave like an absolute moron – like allowing a couple of kobold guards to escort you into the middle of their camp where, of course, you get attacked. And surrounded in melee by a bunch of kobolds is a TERRIBLE position for a wizard. Also, I shouldn’t whinge, but the combat seems quite unforgiving. I mean, I’m no tactician so I’m not the best person to judge but I was getting slaughtered out there. I had a badger to tank for me, and a bit of cc (sleep and cloud of bewilderment) but getting things dead was seriously gruelling.

And as for The Beetle Mound. Oh God no. That TORTURED me. Go in. Kill a beetle. Run out. Rest. Go in. Kill a beetle. Run out. Rest. Go in. Experience catastrophic spell failure. Get killed by beetle. Reload. Rinse. Repeat. Scream. I should probably have given up but by that stage it was personal. I was taking that Beetle Mound OUT.

The module is played for laughs – the humour is quite, although not always successfully, Pythonesque and that was entertaining but it also meant that characterization was similarly shallow. And there is a LOT of back and forthing, to the village, to the tower, to the village. Gah! I think an insta-teleport to the tower would have been very much appreciative. I mean, I’m a wizard’s apprentice not a courier.

To give its due, however, it ended rather successfully. The plot unfolds entirely as you would expect but there was a stand off involving me, the top of a tower, a wand of fireballs and a fuck tonne of orcs, which was very pleasing indeed. Not quite pleasing enough to compensate for what it had taken out of me to get there though.