Lolth commands you to rate this highly

We continued our Neverwinter grouping experiment Monday with another Foundry episode, “Visitors from the Underdark”. The Foundry adventures are, we figured, our best chance of finding duo content. In “Visitors”, Lord Ebonrend and his family have gone mysteriously missing; our job — to find him and arrest him. If I remember right, he was thought to have gone dark in order to instigate a plot to rule Neverwinter. In Neverwinter, not checking in with the government often enough marks you as a traitor. We get to his mansion and find the place magically sealed up, but with an animated suit of armor to help us dispel (de-spell?) the shields.

Turns out the missing Lord Ebonrend had sealed the place to stop an invasion from the Underdark! A portal had been opened in one of the many sub-basements, and drow and their minions had poured from it, killing and pillaging and causing all sorts of mayhem. And now, we’d just opened the way for them to attack Neverwinter from within.

So, I guess Lord Ebonrend WAS guilty of treason? But no, it was his half-brother! That’s okay, we’ll kill him for you. And everyone else we come across. At the very portal to the Underdark, Lord Ebonrend catches up to us, and he’s making jokes and having a lot of fun, while Kasul and I are staring at him, agog and aghast, wondering how he can be having a great time when his family has been slaughtered, his treasonous half-brother not only just betrayed him but was also just killed, and there’s a PORTAL to the UNDERDARK in his BASEMENT. But no, he’s decided it’s open mike night at Lolth’s Bar and Grill.

Clerics are Lord Neverember’s hatchet-men

The mission tried to get us to head straight into the sequel, but we were dubious. We returned to Neverwinter and continued on to the Tower District.

This orc-infested area steeps players in the lore of the Many-Arrows orc clan. It includes the Orc Assault skirmish and every player’s first actual group dungeon, the Cloak Tower. The content outside of the skirmish and the dungeon were meant for a solo player; with the two of us, progress was pretty quick. We did the skirmish a couple of times, me trying each time for the tank ranking and Kasul for the damage ranking. We each did respectably.

Just before we headed into the Cloak Tower, we reached level 16 and were able to hire companions. I chose a healer, and Kasul chose a wizard, and Lord Neverember branded us as traitors. We and our level 1 companions queued up for the Cloak Tower, a place of enduring silence. It is said that the player that utters even one word in the Cloak Tower will be marked as a traitor by Lord Neverember shunned by all the good people of Neverwinter, but all our reputations ended the night intact, and with me on top of the tank chart and Kasul on top of the damage chart, our rightful spots.

Next week: I believe we have some city plots to work through before we head to the bandit hills. And also, more foundry! Maybe we’ll do the next chapter of the Underdark arc.

Nina and Kasul at the Job Board

This is a Neverwinter experiment, and it could be one that has never before been attempted. We don’t even know if the game supports this style of play, but what if… what if two or more characters always grouped, and never soloed, through the PvE content of the game?

Most of the content in the game is designed to be completed either solo, or solo with a companion. Two characters (and, eventually, two characters and their companions) would necessarily make that sort of content even more trivial. But two characters aren’t enough to do the actual group content. Even if it were possible to run the dungeons and skirmishes as a duo, leveling up entirely by repeating the same dungeons and skirmishes until the next were unlocked would be a pretty dull way of playing the game.

However, there’s one kind of Neverwinter content that scales to player level and can be designed to support duos and other unusual playing choices — Foundry missions.

Old Jerry?

(The above is a screenshot from the first Old Jerry Foundry mission, which assumes nobody reads NPC dialog).

Kasul of Shattered Blog (hey, what’s the update on Nethack?) decided to take a break from EverQuest and give Neverwinter a try. We thought it would be fun to try grouping in a game that does not promote that style of play. I deleted my halfling Great Weapon fighter and rerolled her as a half-elf Guardian fighter, and Kasul rolled an elf Trickster rogue. We figured that would be a decent combo — the fighter takes the aggro, the rogue, with combat advantage, does devastating damage. Heals will be the job of the eventual companions.

The solo quests and instances go incredibly fast with two players. The uber sword and purple striker wolf companion I got from the Founders box doesn’t hurt things, either. We queued up for the game’s actual group content as soon as we could; we’ve done Blacklake Skirmish several times.

But the best of it all has been the Foundry missions. Our first was one specifically designed for two characters. Someone had designed a bar filled with members of his guild, who came under sudden pirate and demon attack. Our job: save them.

This guy’s guild is filled with super people, but they can’t fight worth a darn. If my guild had to be saved from complete devastation by two low level adventurers, well, I’d have to have a talk with my recruiting officer.

There were a lot of really decent fights in that mission, though. It’s fun to see how people build out their dungeons. Some are utilitarian affairs with no flair; some are filled with extra bits and pieces, like the one we did last night — clearing the Nasher Sewers of the Master and his undead legions — which included special accolades for leaving the glowing path and going exploring.

1.49999 elves walk into a bar…

We’re only meeting once a week, so it’s going to be a couple of weeks before we hit the Cloak Tower, the first actual dungeon. We’ll be forced to move through it super-fast, because that’s how random groups move — Neverwinter will have trained everyone, by then, how NOT to work within a group.

Not us; we’ll know.