Small Village Woes

How nice!  A quaint little church in the middle of
the village!

This is an oldie but a goodie.  Small Village Woes was released early in Neverwinter Nights 1's tenure, and arrived to a very positive reception.  This included a glowing review from my old pal Alazander (side-note: I still need read Luke's book!).  After a long time away, its author, Bort Son of Bort, returned to give his module an update.  He posted a beta of his update on the Bioware forums, and I decided to give it a go!

Summary opinion: it's a really fun, low-level adventure.  There's a touch of whimsy here to keep things fun, and it begins in fairly prescribed fashion as a romp through hordes of fairly easy to kill monsters.  Nevertheless, through a few good plot twists, the story manages to be have some depth to it.  If you look closely, you could even see a bit of social commentary in there.  Furthermore, the ending sequences are spectacular, with a number of fun surprises in addition to some great pyrotechnics.

You green scum!  This ends now!

There is a lot of action in the module, and I found it to be a well-balanced for my druid.  In this beta, the druid got a bump to level 2 at the module's start, and that is going away.  Nevertheless, even without that bump, I think the module would still have been pretty approachable.  Combat is initially pretty easy (on par with the starting sequences of NWN1's OC--lots of foes, but they're all easy), but ramps up to a pretty solid challenge by mid-module.  Between my character's companions, summons, and spells, he was pretty well protected most of the module as he moved between ranged and melee combat.  It's also a pretty low-power module, with just a handful of magic items even in existence.  I managed to buy a +1 armor, but that's about all I could afford.

All in all, this was a great three evenings of play.  Thanks to the author for making this module, and then taking the time to update it!