Tales of the Black Hand

delthanin

Author: @delthanin
Quest: NW-DTET2QLF4 (The Black Hand in Blacklake)
Campaign: NWS-DELIZS3VA (Tales of the Black Hand Inn)
Now qualifies for the Daily Foundry quest!

# of Players: Solo
Duration: 15-20 minutes

QUEST SUMMARY: The Black Hand in Blacklake
The proprietor of the Black Hand Inn, Xasj Duskblade, has put out a notice on job boards around the city for assistance. Some people have gone missing in Blacklake, and she needs those people found.

Why would an inn be involved with such matters? Perhaps there is more to this woman than what's on the surface.

NOTES:
A short introduction quest to get players familiar with the NPCs of the Black Hand Inn, and to set things in motion for the player to be a part of future events.

Lots of dialogue options, to hopefully help players feel more immersed via suitable responses for their character.

Everything is firmly rooted in the Forgotten Realms setting and respects that. Dedicated to making sure quests and events make sense within the official setting.

Loosely ties into events happening in the main Neverwinter storyline.

"Conditional" enemy encounters depending on actions taken earlier on in certain areas.

delthanin

Quest has been fixed and republished.

pure711

delthanin wrote: »

Quest has been fixed and republished.

I gave the first quest whirl (sorry the review box closed out on me by accident). It was pretty good, there were lots of options for dialogue, but I must have went too fast through the dialogue because I don't know how the ending was supposed to be easier/more difficult. I must have stumbled into it on difficult mode because I died 3-4 or times before I realized I had to split the two hard groups. Only problem was that the first hard group patrols towards the back into the other group but doesn't come back. So I had to die, quickly run over to the end and tag the first group before they walked into the second one. Not splitting the groups makes the last fight overly hard imo. Overall I liked it.

delthanin

pure711 wrote: »

I gave the first quest whirl (sorry the review box closed out on me by accident). It was pretty good, there were lots of options for dialogue, but I must have went too fast through the dialogue because I don't know how the ending was supposed to be easier/more difficult. I must have stumbled into it on difficult mode because I died 3-4 or times before I realized I had to split the two hard groups. Only problem was that the first hard group patrols towards the back into the other group but doesn't come back. So I had to die, quickly run over to the end and tag the first group before they walked into the second one. Not splitting the groups makes the last fight overly hard imo. Overall I liked it.

Yeah, that sounds like you had the difficult version. I was afraid it might have been a bit too much, but wanted someone else to give it a go in case I was overestimating it. Dying 3-4 times was definitely not the intent.

I'll make some tweaks tomorrow morning after I'm done with work.

Thanks for the feedback!

delthanin

v1.01:
Fixed issue with minions sometimes attacking through walls in house.
Moved location of and toned down conditional encounters in cave.

seanc84

Just ran though and I really enjoyed it! The fight by the campfire in the cave was the only tough spot... probably due to one of the mobs reading a buff scroll and the melee mobs making quick work of my healer companion.

One tiny issue - when talking with Xasj at the end, if you go the "where's my reward" route, the dialog doesn't complete the quest and I have to talk with her again.

delthanin

Thanks for the feedback!

seanc84 wrote: »

One tiny issue - when talking with Xasj at the end, if you go the "where's my reward" route, the dialog doesn't complete the quest and I have to talk with her again.

Hmm. I think I'll go ahead and do another pass through of all the dialogue, to make sure there aren't any other errors like this. Thought I squashed them all. Thanks for pointing this out!


EDIT: Odd. Turns out that if you later delete a dialogue box that other ones point to, those other ones will still try to point to the now deleted dialogue box (but without showing it in the dialogue tree). Getting rid of that small bit of dialogue was pretty recent. Guess I should probably report that to Cryptic, or is that a known bug?

In any case, fixed it by creating and immediately deleting a new dialogue box underneath the problematic options.

delthanin

v 1.05:
Added a new area
Encounter rebalancing
More context provided for certain interactable objects
More variety in NPC/enemy appearances

delthanin

v 1.07:
Added difficulty prompt for cave, to account for high-level scaling
Encounter balancing and placement changes

zovya

I'm a fan of Tsumoro's foundry plays and I already saw yours played by him. I played it myself to try out some other dialogue choices. It was fun, and well written. You must have spent a long time writing everything. Great story and fun quest!