264 replies to this topic

[Pandæmonium]

If the village is sufficiently far away from the Keep itself, perhaps some kind of bandit raids (ala Seven Samurai) could provide a quest that lasts over multiple encounters.
The party turns up, the Halflings offer a pitiful amount of gold if the party will defend them against the raiders, who then make a series of attacks over a course of two or three days.

In fact; it could tie in rather neatly with the iron crisis. Bear with me, because this is going to be a bit of a stream of consciousness rather than a well thought out plan;
As of Chapter 1 the Nashkel Mines are infested with who knows what (I bet it's a Tarrasque) and seemingly more than a few miners have quit working there for fear of beaing OM NOM NOM'd by whatever lurks in the dark. Perhaps these people could have turned to banditry to feed themselves - preying on your small halfling village for food, or extorting money from them with threats of violence.

CHARNAME and co. turn up, the villagers ask for help, which could potentially lead to a number of solutions. One being the wholesale slaughter of the bandits, or alternatively, if it can be contrived so that CHARNAME has the opportunity to speak to the leader of said bandits, s/he could hear their pathetic tale of woe about how they couldn't work in the mines because they were too dangerous, and how they had to survive somehow yadda yadda etc etc... Possibly leading to a peaceful solution, perhaps with the bandits themselves offering to protect the village from the other bandits on the Sword Coast (those under the employ of the Iron Throne).
Althought we as players know that the Chill and Black Talon are interested only in Iron, the average peasant scum perhaps wouldn't, and would only be aware that there are huge numbers of bandits around who've been attacking people all over the place.

This idea kind of hinges on a few important points though:

1. Thatthe halfling village is sufficiently far away from Candlekeep that the keep guards wouldn't be able to help, or perhaps wouldn't even know. I think you mentioned you wanted this farm to be a place that sends food to Candlekeep, so I don't know how far away you want to have it.
If there's space on the map, perhaps it can be put 4-8 hours (1 - 2 areas) travelling away - near the main path of the Coast Way.

2. It would probably have to be somewhere that the party would naturally come across at some point in chapter 1. Before they first arrive at Nashkel, and certainly before they've cleared the mines.
Bioware may have seen fit to have every ex-miner in the game bitching and moaning about how dangerous the mines are even in chapter 6, but learned men should not imitate their laziness.

3. Something else that I forgot.

Well. This is an awfully long post for something which basically amounts to BANDITS! But I'll be damned if I'm not going to post it now after spending ten minutes typing it.

[Big Poppa]

-

Edited by Big Poppa, 12 January 2008 - 01:54 PM.

[Big Poppa]

-

Edited by Big Poppa, 16 January 2008 - 05:55 AM.

[Big Poppa]

Added a timber/saw mill. Just have to add a fishing yard and some fishing peers and racks and we're done here

[Miloch]

Nice work. Looking forward to see what you do with interiors etc. to get a functioning area.

Then of course, you'll have to populate the place, stash the mythical fishing rod +1 somewhere, but eh... first things first .

[Big Poppa]

Don't forget the +4 rake and the deadly dragon's bane shovel.
Anyway, I'm satisfied with this now. On and upwards...... by the way, this isn't actually meant to be a hobbit village, meant for humans but it could well pass as a village like gullykin.

This is a 50% scale so the file is about .75 of a meg.

Edited by Big Poppa, 16 January 2008 - 06:07 AM.

[Miloch]

What's the spidery-looking thing you added in the NW corner? Too bad you're deleting your history, as it's interesting to see how it's developed, but there's space constraints and all I suppose...

[Big Poppa]

Those are simple goal post like racks with fish hanging from them via bits of rope and a hook. It's clear at 100

[Big Poppa]

Took some pissing about but I have the animations working.

[Miloch]

That looks great. Did you also make a bakery/brewery for something to do with all that flour, barley, whatever?

Edited by Miloch, 18 January 2008 - 01:34 AM.

[Big Poppa]

Well the bakery is within then candlekeep walls. I guess the windmill just drives the mill for grinding the flour etc which gets sent to the bakery. I'll also animate that in action later. The watermill will run a cider press or something similar. That could be where it's made and then sent on to the pub over the road and within the tavern withing the candlekeep walls I think, again animated. Should be pretty cool animating all the cogs moving n stuff. Never really done that before but it should be easy enough.

[Big Poppa]

Just finished the most annoying search map too. When areas have alot going on, these things are so damn annoying to get working 100%

Edited by Big Poppa, 18 January 2008 - 03:53 AM.

[Big Poppa]

Area is working 100% now. All maps and walls working correctly. All ambients and animations in place and all links that currently exist are up and running. I'm really happy with how they have panned out.

The 2 areas are next to each other as these overheads show




Both these areas, all candlekeep interiors, audio and grapic files etc compress to 55 megs. That will be about 75 when the interiors for the lionscrag area are done.

Edited by Big Poppa, 19 January 2008 - 11:35 AM.

[Miloch]

That is some quick work. Just ignore everyone who PMs you for custom areas until you finish this .

You may need/want to use tisunpack to keep the mod size down. I don't know much about it, and there isn't a whole lot in the way of tutorials that I know of, but you can check out other mods that add areas to see how they use it.

[Big Poppa]

I just checked out that tispack. I wouldn't wanna compress at any quality loss so I get a 21.2 meg tis turned to a 10.1 TIZ.

I can get almost identical compression with rars or zips. I know that you can tispack with greater compression with a quality loss but that kinda goes against my quality over quantity principle here heh. I'll try it with a greater compression some other time and see if the quality loss is visible.

[Miloch]

I just checked out that tispack. I wouldn't wanna compress at any quality loss so I get a 21.2 meg tis turned to a 10.1 TIZ.

I didn't know it was lossy. I thought it just disassembled and compressed .are files as tilesets or something, but shows you how much I know about it (i.e. bugger all).

I've been reading some stuff about ancient cheesemaking for a medieval history course, heh. Irish monks had creameries where they'd mix cow's milk with other stuff like butterwort and carrageen moss, then press it in a mould to make a hard cheese called tanag. They would age this underground in artificial caves called souterrains for storing banbid (white foods).

I'm thinking the monks of Candlekeep probably did the same. A logical place for it would be near the cows in the north of the existing map. There's a cellar door near Phlydia that goes nowhere - I always though someone should do something with it. Or maybe that one is just an alternate door to the inn cellar, in which case the north central tower could have a souterrain.

The monks also had limekilns for making mortar and pottery. Maybe you could squeeze one in somewhere, either in the keep or the village.

Edited by Miloch, 27 January 2008 - 06:12 AM.

[Yovaneth]

They would age this underground in artificial caves called souterrains for storing banbid (white foods).

Got quite a few of those around here; at one time I also had a large bruise on the forehead that just matched the height of the entrance lintel of the nearest one Drumena Cashel.... Just FYI, many souterrains were also used for shelter from raiding parties. This one, Binder's Cove, has a really low lintel about thirty feet in (knee height) - ideal for chopping off heads of unsuspecting invaders. It's about six miles from here.

-Y-

Edited by Yovaneth, 30 January 2008 - 08:36 AM.

[Miloch]

Just FYI, many souterrains were also used for shelter from raiding parties.

True, that became more important once the Vikings started arriving. FYI, I got that info from Jonathan Bardon's A History of Ulster. He probably got some of his from Donncha O'Corrain's Ireland Before the Normans. Bardon does go on to say that:

...some with double chambers, such as that running off the Shaneen Park rath on the slopes of the Cave Hill, may have served as a secret refuge in time of attack. Most souterrains were lined with stone or cut from rock but one large souterrain excavated at Coolcran, near Tempo in Co. Fermanagh, in 1983 had been lined with wattlework and forty-eight sawn oak timbers. Grain was stored in strawrope graneries; oats were eaten as porridge, and barley, when not eaten as bread, was malted and brewed into ale...

Ah, the good old days.