Posts on the Sanctum Blog have been fairly sparse recently, though I hope to be able to start changing that again soon. The main reason for the dearth of updates is that I’ve temporarily had to set aside work on the saga (especially on Chapter 3) for a couple of other priorities. The main one was professional: my career was badly in need of a reboot, and I needed some time this year to work that out. The good news is that I have a new position now, with better prospects and in a better area. I’ll be moving over the course of the next month, and hope to be able to get back to modding again in a more serious way once that’s done.
One thing that I have been working on, though, is a final remake to the first two chapters to implement a lot of the design changes I’ve made to the series for Chapter 3. I mentioned this in a recent blog post, and the changes are actually quite major. Part of my motive in doing the update was that I wanted to get some of the good work I’ve done for the third chapter out there. Some of it is custom content related, such as integrating Project Q and CEP 3.4, using the fabulous Sanctum Flying Skyscape tileset that Estelindis built for me to remake the flying areas at the end of Sanctum 2, revamping the score with some of the new tracks from the expanded Sanctum 3 soundtrack, and so on. The technical base of haks used by the v4 update will be the same one used by Sanctum 3 when it’s released, which will make integrating the third chapter with the first two a much easier task.
Some of the changes, though, are to start removing some of the unnecessary D&D references included in the modules. I originally did a lot of that for convenience, and to help make the setting feel a little less unfamiliar to NWN players. When I first built the modules my ability to do things like create new races and appearances was limited, and using player-familiar ones from the toolset was much easier. Most of these elements really don’t fit well with the non-D&D story world of the Sanctum novels that I’m working on, though, and on which the modules are based. Some examples of this are the Drow and the Deep Gnomes, which don’t even exist in them at all.
I’m reworking a lot of that now, and including a lot more of the lore from the original world of the novels — including things like history, religion, custom races, and the like. (For a spoiler hint about what will replace the Drow, and the new face of General Y’Thra, see here and here.) I expect to have the v4 update out before the end of this year, and be back on track building Sanctum 3 for release sometime next year.
