I’m happy to report that Sanctum of the Archmage I – The Sight is a contestant in the Neverwinter Vault’s annual Module of the Year Contest for 2006. Voting is open to anyone who had an active Neverwinter Vault account as of March 1, 2007.

Unfortunately, the contest had to be re-started with some additional software safeguards due to some suspicious voting in the original poll (which has now been scrapped). So if you haven’t voted yet, or if you voted in the original poll and haven’t yet re-cast your vote in the current one, here’s the link to do so:

2006 Module of the Year Contest

You can see the current standings here. I’d like to encourage Vault members who haven’t yet voted (or re-voted in the new poll) to do so, even if you’re not voting for Sanctum :). There are some really excellent works in the contest this year, and a strong vote turnout for it will be a real morale boost to the module building community.

(Warning: the following may contain spoilers for Sanctum of the Archmage I – The Sight.)

Continued from Balancing Romance Plots – Part I.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I had a ready-made solution to my problem: Orion, the character I’d had to remove from the saga to make room for the player to begin with. His personality was already well defined; all he needed was a new background and a way to add him to the story. His thoughtful personality made inventing a new background for him as a philosopher-scholar easy and natural. And there was also a ready-made place to insert him into the module: taking the place of Handol’s original companion, an elven ranger named Ferna Galen. Ferna was a relatively minor character who didn’t have an important role in the plot (although she might still make an appearance in the sequel). Replacing her with Orion tightened up and improved the story significantly, and enabled me to add back some of the plot and interpersonal dynamics that his character had originally made possible.

With this rework, I now I had both male and female romance characters and plots. And although they were written and designed as straight romances, I decided not to code gender checks on the PC to enable them — instead giving the player conversation options to choose which romance(s) interested him. Comfortable that I had now written a reasonably flexible romance plot for it, that was how I released Sanctum I.

After a while, though, I realized that I still wasn’t satisfied. By this time my thinking had fully evolved to the point where I had embraced writing a flexible and balanced romance as a module-building design goal. And while adding Orion to the story improved it in many ways, his romance plot was still a secondary one compared to Robin’s. Orion is encountered at the earliest halfway through the module, and by the end, the player has known him for a week or two at most. Although I have very ambitious plans for his romance in the sequels, in The Sight I had to limit it to flirting, since anything more would have been unconvincing.

This lack of balance in Sanctum’s romance plot became the subject of a very interesting correspondence that I had with one of the module’s players. We also discussed the fact that while there seemed to be a number of mods out there with “Romance the Princess” plots, that neither of us had ever seen a “Romance the Prince” mod. And perhaps not surprisingly, this got me to thinking about whether I could create a version of Sanctum I in which Robin was a romanceable male character — and whether I could sustain this option in the sequels.

After a lot of thought, I decided that I could. That decision led to my final update to The Sight in January 2007: version 2.1M. And with that update, I had finally balanced the romance plot in Chapter I to my satisfaction — while also setting the stage for an even more ambitious romance plot in Chapter II.

(To be continued)

(Warning: the following may contain spoilers for Sanctum of the Archmage I – The Sight.)

As some of you may know, I’m a sucker for a good romance.

Building Sanctum of the Archmage I – The Sight was an educational experience for me in many ways. Being a hopeless romantic, that had to include learning how to develop an effective romance plot for a Fantasy Role-Playing Game (FRPG). There’s a lot more to this than I realized at first. And the evolution of my thoughts on this topic ended up having a significant influence on the development of the first module, as well as on my plans for the rest of the series.

A key part of the “Sanctum” saga as I originally conceived it is the love story between Robin and The Miracle Worker — whose name in the novels, it may surprise some of you to learn, is Orion. One of the first things I realized when I started trying to adapt the story for Neverwinter Nights, though, was that simply importing the characters and the plot from the novel would not create the kind of FRPG experience that I wanted. I wanted to create an interactive story, one that the player would feel fully immersed into, and in as personal a way as possible. I was comfortable specifying the player’s background, since I’ve never thought that background defines who a person really is. But dictating the player’s name, personality, gender, and so on — in short, their identity — didn’t quite sit right with me.

I know that other (and some quite successful) builders have done this, and I did consider it. But one of the things I learned from my years as a Dungeon Master is the fine line that you have to walk between defining the story on the one hand, and giving the players freedom to contribute to and feel that they are a part of it on the other. This is something that a novelist doesn’t have to consider at all, because a novel is not interactive in the way that an FRPG is. As with any other kind of storytelling, a good FRPG needs to have a strong and tightly developed plot. But that plot also has to be flexible enough to make the player feel that they are a participant, rather than a spectator, in the events they are playing. So when I started building the Sanctum modules, I reluctantly decided that the personality of one of my most beloved characters (Orion) would have to be set aside — to allow the player to put himself into the story (and into his romance) instead.

As time went by, though, I realized that I still wasn’t satisfied with this. In keeping with the plot of the novels, Sanctum I initially only had a possible romance between a male player and Robin. But women play FRPGs, too. And as I came to realize, they not only make up a sizable part of the player community, but are often some of its most discerning members — particularly when it comes to romance plots. A Bioware forum discussion that I participated in last year really brought this point home to me, along with the fact that I was ignoring many of the players who might best be able to appreciate a module romance. So even though Sanctum I was already largely written and plotted out, I resolved to try to think of a way to introduce a male romance into it as well.

(Continued in Balancing Romance Plots – Part II)