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—Douglas Adams (1980) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
NWN:EE Custom Class Guide — Introduction
I recently started dabbling once more in creating custom content for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition (NWN:EE), the 2018 redux of the classic 2002 BioWare CRPG Neverwinter Nights (NWN). I have been a fan of the series ever since I was a kid—where the original NWN, alongside a friend's much-beaten monster book, served as my first introductions to the world of Dungeons and Dragons, and RPGs in general. I have many wonderful memories of sharing these games with family and friends, and discovering the Beamdog Enhanced Edition a few years ago was like a joyful but unexpected reunion with an old friend. For all the distance that CRPGs have come— this is no Baldur's Gate 3, that's for sure!—the games still hold up surprisingly well, and it has been a great joy to be able to share this special part of my youth with my partner.
One of the very great strengths of the NWN series, especially the first game, was its incredible accessibility for modding and third-party content. The game came packaged with the Aurora Toolset, a surprisingly robust and intuitive tool that allowed the user to create fully developed adventure and campaign 'modules' for the game, seen, for example, in the famous Aielund Saga, an entirely fan-made campaign that rivaled the main campaign of the games themselves in complexity, depth, and scale. Beyond merely facilitating the creation of original adventures and campaigns, however, NWN also supported and facilitated the creation and use of custom content through its 'hakpack' system. This allowed intrepid modders willing to grapple with the at-times janky game engine the ability to add more or less anything they could imagine to the game—from new spells, feats, and even classes, through to tilesets, audio, and models. This remarkably modder-friendly design naturally grew a community of avid modders around it, perhaps best exemplified through the simply insanely vast project known as the Player Resource Consortium (PRC), a vast module introducing an order of magnitude more new classes than were included in the original game, alongside over 1000 new spells, over 1000 new feats, and more, all in an attempt to lift as much as possible of Pen-and-Paper Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition into the NWN engine. I should also note, here, that this was back in the early-to-mid 2000s, long before Skyrim would set the gold standard for modding in modern RPGs—and still, I am not sure I have ever encountered a game since with such an active and expansive modding and custom content community, especially one that is still very much engaged and breaking new barriers nearly two decades after the game's original release.
It will come as no surprise, I'm sure, given my proclivity for 5th edition homebrew, that my brain always itched to try my hand at creating my own modules and custom content. And indeed I did try, several times, and arguably have never stopped trying—more or less every couple of years, something will remind me of this gem of a game, and the itch will return. As it was a couple of days ago, when I found myself once more typing the fateful words 'NWN custom classes' into DuckDuckGo.
A lot has changed since my last major bout of attempted modding—the continuing reworks and updates introduced by Beamdog have gone a long way towards opening up the NWN game engine to custom content that would've been impossible six or seven years ago, and the community has continued to develop new tools and resources to support the creation and sharing of custom content. At the same time, some things have not changed much—the game engine itself remains as clunky and opaque as ever; there is still quite a dearth of (up-to-date) guides and tutorials to walk new would-be creators through the custom content creation process; and I am only a little better at coding and computing than I was then.
That's where this guide comes in. Well, perhaps 'guide' is too strong a word—unfortunately, 'NWN:EE Custom Class autobiographical ramble as I learn with you how to make custom content hopefully perhaps' doesn't have quite the same ring to it. So let's stick with 'guide' for now.
The purpose of this guide is twofold. Firstly, it gives me a record of my process as I try, once more, to make an NWN custom content thing. This will hopefully mean that if/when I inevitably lose interest, lose the time to continue working on the project, or just get distracted, I will have a clear sense of where I left off and how I can pick it up again. And if I get stuck, this will hopefully give me a good sense of where and how I went wrong.
Secondly, I am hopeful that once it is finished, this guide will prove useful to the community. As I said before, there is something of a dearth of good instructional materials on how to make your own custom content, especially those targetted at more-or-less complete beginners. Some guides are partial or unfinished. Some are outdated, as newer tools or resources have circumvented the need for the methods originally detailed. Some have been lost over the years. And some topics were never properly covered in any guides, or only covered in highly technical discussions that were entirely impenetrable to me, at least. My hope is that by making a record of my own process and progress—as someone who is not, all things considered, especially 'techy'—this guide will be able to serve as a more-or-less useful resource for new creators who want to take their first steps into Neverwinter Nights custom content.
I make no claims that the methods outlined here will be especially neat, elegant, or 'state of the art'—I'll be learning as I go, and I am inviting you to learn with me. If I later discover a better or more efficient way of doing something I have already done in this or successive guides, I will add an appropriate addendum, but otherwise you'll get whatever fix I worked out as I was working on it. For this reason, I also don't have a prepared list of resources that will be used throughout this guide—I'll introduce them as I use them. With that said...
What you'll need
In order to follow this 'guide', you're going to need your own copy of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition—you can pick it up on Steam or GOG for around £16, or for much less if you manage to catch a sale. (At time of writing, the NWN:EE standard edition is going for a little over £2.30 on GOG, until 26th April.)
I'm also going to assume that the reader is familiar with NWN as a game—I won't be taking the time to explain concepts like 'multiclass XP penalty', 'BAB', or what a 'feat' is. If you haven't played the game yet, I would strongly recommend that you play through all three of the official campaigns to get to grips with it— either single-player, multiplayer with a few friends, or heck, why not both? Take some time to poke around and get used to the system before you start trying to open up the hood and add your own changes.
Other than that, you probably want to have a reasonably robust text editor—not a word processor, mind, a text editor—that can handle .2da files. I'd recommend the GNU Project's Notepad++. Given some of the awesome resources developed by the NWN modding community, I'm expecting this to be much less necessary than it used to be six years ago, but it's always worth having as a backup. On a similar note, it's probably worth having a .tlk editor on hand as well. I don't know what the gold standard for this in the modern NWN modding scene is, but back in my day it was—*sighs*— Axe Murderer's Killer TLK Editor. Look, if you can look past the edgier-than-thou name, it's a .tlk editor that has been specifically designed with editing the .tlk files used by NWN in mind, and it's really good at it. If you don't know what '.2da' and '.tlk' files are—don't worry! We'll get to that! These are just two of the main file types that you can't edit either through the Aurora Toolset or through standard software you're likely to have installed already, so it's worth having something to handle them on hand.
(You may notice a fairly consistent theme of NWN using some... unusual file types, and the various hoops we need to jump through to actually do anything with them. Unfortunately, that's just what it's like to mod for a game that was developed around the turn of the millenium. )
Chapter Index
Use the links below or the navigation bar on the left to skip to a particular part of the guide.
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