The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Winterhawk99]

The Harrowport Persistent World.

Howdy everyone. Hope you are all doing well. I have been spending quite a few months now on the Harrowport NWN server. This server has been a breath of fresh air compared to The Dragon’s Neck. It’s a general server: Meaning you will find all types of players there including Role Play, Erotic Role Play, Hack and Slash, Power Gamers and all manner of players in between.

Did I say Erotic Roleplay. Why yes, yes, I did say Erotic Roleplay. I myself did not participate and was respected for that decision by everyone. Thank you all: players and dms. I did ask a whole lot of questions to make sure the kiddos could not participate and am satisfied that the dms keep up with things and make sure anyone under 18 does not participate in that avenue of the server.

Great job both players and Dm’s for not letting the kids fool around. If they are teens, well, they will probably be experimenting already if not soon, but they can do that real life not on an NWN server. Besides, someone has to pay for my social security when I get there in a week or two. Ok it will be longer than a week but well there you go.

This PW also has incorporated into it the PRC package. It is in fact the most popular NWN server that incorporates PRC. For those of you that do not know the PRC is a package that includes dozens of New Races, Classes, Feats, Skills, and other things. It’s ginormous and a lot of fun trying out new things though I stuck to my wheelhouse. I played Arelush, my review character who is a Ranger/Shadow dancer. I was impressed enough to create a main character by the name of Shinju. For those of you that read my stories Shinju is the daughter of Uesuki Tatsuo and an Ocean spirit. She is sea spirit folk. She is also the great granddaughter of Barasume Miwa: My intrepid Onna-bugeisha (female samurai for lack of a better term). Shinju is a Monk/Shamaness. Yes, I know I’ve been experimenting with the Shaman class for a while now. Shinju will most likely be the last shaman I create.

Playing on the Harrowport server is and has been a pleasurable experience. Even with that all servers in NWN could always use some fine tuning and I have found lots of things to talk about in this review. I’ll have several little chapters as I break down the server by technicalities and then the people factor. It will most likely take more than a week. So, shall we get to it then. Alright.

[Winterhawk99]

Terrain and General Build:

I will start off as always on Terrain and general build of the server. It’s my favorite thing being a Hall of Fame Tileset Maker and former member of the CTP team. Hey, a little self-promotion isn’t that bad. ‘smiles’

The general build of outside areas isn’t bad. It’s all very logical according to the grand map of toril. The areas represent the regions between the Moonsea and The Dragons Reach. The builders did a wonderful job to make sure their build was topographically correct. Which is impressive. The outside areas are very easy to navigate and very easy to understand within a short time because of this dedication to make sure everything is correct.

There is a single Persian flaw in this. There is a transition way to the north west side of the server near a place called Dagger falls that takes you way down to the south west side of the server near the Deserts mouth mountains. I went through this transition and then looked for the blue transition pad on the other side. There wasn’t one. The transition is one directional. I thought this over curiously then continued on.

Later on, I went on a quest called the Wing fling quest. Now this quest takes you end to end of the server. So, it’s a very long quest. ¼ way through this quest it takes you to dagger falls where you find out you have to walk all the to the Deserts mouth mountains for the next part of the quest. Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that one transition was set there on purpose to help players travel fast to the next part.

So, it wasn’t a mistake. Players probably complained about how many areas you had to trudge through on the quest, so the builders put that one transition in to help them out. I think that’s a pretty good idea actually. The staff heard the players’ complaints and found a decent answer to help them out. It’s good thinking.

Other than that, one flaw, everything is very well built. I highly compliment the builders on that part.

The second thing the builders really get right on Harrowport is the way they place their crafting materials around the areas. It’s all very naturally done and all throughout the areas. Even underdark. In fact, I believe I’ve never seen a server that better does this. You’ll find plants for alchemy, trees to cut of woodworking, fields near cities for planting even the rocks in dungeons to mine for gems and ore. All of it is done is such a natural way and not bunched up in a few areas. There is pretty much an equal number of things in going area to area and all according to proper terrain. I have to give the builders of Harrowport a high five on their attention to detail and understanding of terrain to pull that off. You taught me a lot just running around and observing it.

Now for the things the builders didn’t quite get right. As I said the building of the world is generally excellent, however with a very, very few exceptions to which I will mention there is a sort of lack of artistry. Where is the Pizazz, The Pittsburgh effects, the bling. I want to step into an area and look out over it saying… WoW! And it’s just not there.

As I walk around from area to area, I find myself saying. Ok, I’m in a forest… Ok I’m in the mountains, a dungeon, a deserts. Hey grasslands and it’s completely flat! Ok. Visually it can be a very boring server. I’m not even sure that the builders know about all the hidden buttons they can use like ambient background color and floor tile lights. It’s just not there and makes most areas, as I said visually boring.

There are a few exceptions. About 2 months into my investigation of the server I went into this place in Hillsfar called the Dragon and Eel. It’s a sushi bar. I stepped in the area and said, “YES! YES! THERE IT IS THE PIZAZZ!” Whoever built this place knew what he or she was doing. Kudos to you. Now teach everyone else how to build like that. This area has a giant fish tank with fish swimming around. It’s arranged and lit perfectly. There are even plates with chopsticks on the bar. The only one of two places that Wowed me on the server.

The other place is Silverymoon. There is a portal to Silverymoon on the server. I have to say not half bad on the city build. The builder of those areas also took a whole lot of time to make the areas interesting and someplace you want to visit. So, kudos go to that builder too.

The one thing I would suggest to the builders would be to go through some of these areas, especially the outside areas, and see if you can add some artistic flair to many of them. They are good as they are, but you can do better than that.

I wanted to also mention items in this post but it’s getting long so I’ll save it for another. That concludes my review on the general build of the server. I will say as far as artistry the inside areas are better in general than the outside areas but they could mostly be redone better with some tweaks and lighting too.

[Winterhawk99]

Modeling and Scripting

I will take modeling first. Harrowport has no modelers. They get all their custom content from packages on the vault and that’s ok. You work with what you have and there are some very nice packages on the vault to fill out a builder’s NWN wishes. It is what you do with what you have that is important and the builders of Harrowport generally build well with what they have.

Scripting is a bit iffy on the server but that’s somewhat understandable. Most of my right-side panel when an error occurred was PRC related. There is a new version of the PRC out and it does have some bugs. One persistent bug is that melee weapons sometimes lose all their properties when the On_Equip_Item script comes into play. So, sometimes when you equip your sword from inventory it permanently loses all its properties. As far as I know the scripters are working on that and the staff replaces items that get broken, by the script. Big kudos there to both Dms and staff.

As far as I know Harrowport was an old dead server and someone brought it back to life about a year ago. So, it is understandable with this set up: Bugs from the old server combined with a slightly buggy new version of PRC that the Harrowport scripters have a whole lot of fixing on their hands.

Other than that, the server has run fairly smoothly. I have not encountered an outrageous about of TMI’s. The server has broken down a few times once on a campaign that I was involved in. That also comes with the territory sometimes. I believe that situation involved about 30 players fighting a battle with so many mods it overwhelmed the engine.

I do expect the server to get better and better as time goes on with less disruptions as the scripters fix the bugs and something not often talked about. In NWN different scripting packages overlap in the use of functions and scripting and sometimes there is a break in one script within one package and a whole different package is affected by it. So Harrowport scripters keep an eye out for that too.

NPC/Monster Ai is ok. It’s fairly standard and predictable for an NWN server. I don’t have too much to say about that.

The scripting on the crafting of items is remarkable. They have a very, very good system there that’s solidly scripted and done well. They also have a vault and banking system that is done simply and well. Though as a player I do not see the individual scripts I do see their effects across the server in various areas and can tell from experience and bug fixing myself what’s going on.

The scripters seem to think keep it simple as possible especially dealing with PRC and it does work rather well overall. So, when I say iffy it’s not the scripters themselves but the situation they find themselves in with the old bugs and combining it with the new PRC. It will take some time, but I think they are competent enough to work it all out and seem enthusiastic about going after it as I have been observing on their discord server.

[Winterhawk99]

Items:

I want to make a special note on items. As I found items in the game and I will especially note the various book items. I read them. I think whoever makes items in the world does an outstanding job. Many, many items have very good and complex stories behind them. That sets a good tone when you have someone creative creating item descriptions. I get pretty impressed with that because so many persistent worlds don’t take the time to put stories behind them. Harrowport does. It adds so much flavor to a world: A simple thing like that and I often get impressed by these seemingly little things that the builders have done in Harrowport.

There is one bug up my ass about this though. When I first came to Harrowport I asked my standard question. Can I play my Irda on this server. I got the standard answer. It was No. I’m used to it. It’s very difficult to play and Irda because they are pacifists and have a whole lot of customs to consider when playing them and moreover, they are a Krynn race, so I absolutely expect it.

However. One of the first amulets my character Arelush found was something called a Black Hearts amulet. In the description it’s +3 ac with +2 regeneration. I looked up the description, and it said something like. This is a steel amulet of Irda construction. That’s when I silently said to the staff, … Well, I won’t say but there were many 4 letter words involved. My DI Staff Sgt. Barnes I think would have been proud of me. They won't allow Irda on the server but put in items made by Irda. That is a bit screwed up.

I’m over it now but it still pisses me off on occasion. Still again the staffs' attention to detail on item descriptions is outstanding.

There is quite a bit of redundancy with items. It is very hard to piece together a sort of perfect selection of gear at very high levels, 35-40. And the very best items in the game seem to be made by other players. Which does help with some economic balance. I’ll go over that when I talk about the Harrowport economy.

[Winterhawk99]

Economy:

The economy in Harrowport is quite high. You will have no trouble making coin. Most items you buy at stores are bought at a fair markup. Thankfully it's not like The Dragon’s Neck where Paladins turn to banditry to steal the last pair of copper pieces you're rubbing together so they can buy shoddy plate mail. So, you will make lots of money and spend it. The stores don’t have a level limit per say but there is a limit until other adventurers sell high value items themselves that you can turn around and buy.

I think Shinju my monk/shamaness has about 3 ½ million in the bank and Arelush my ranger has a ½ million or so. I’ve gone over the banking system so no need for that. Being that Harrowport does have one of the higher economies that I have seen, I did worry about money sinks and such.

Thankfully Harrowport does provide enough money sinks, that a player still has to decide upon options. Certain crafts require a great deal of money to invest in. Especially Cartography. As you gain experience in cartography by making maps of the areas around you. Why would you want to do that. The reason is that Harrowport has treasure maps and the more experience you have in cartography the harder the map you can read and the greater treasure you require. Cartography takes a whole lot of time and money to make maps until you are proficient in reading all the maps.

Also, the very best items on the server are made by other player characters. Things like +6 swords, 100% bags of holding and the like. And if you really want super epic items you have to negotiate prices with another player character.

There is another break the makers of the world put in. There are special coins around called Queen’s Marks. If you want to buy property on the server. Say a home or build a temple you will need a lot of these Queen’s marks. You can acquire them from other players. Turn in rare books to a traveling merchant who gives you one Queen’s mark for every three books you turn in. (It’s not as easy as it sounds. He specifies what book he wants from you which is 1 in 100 or 200 books.) You can also get one occasionally in a boss chest, a buried treasure chest, or as a reward for certain quests. Also, sometimes during a dm event the dm will give you a queen’s mark for participation.

They are fairly valuable if you want to re-level your character, buy property, build a special place. I myself am working on building a monastery and a number of other things I can’t remember. Sometimes a player will want one for making a special item for you or several depending upon the item. Being these coins are fairly hard to find they are quite valuable.

All in all, the economy at Harrowport works. It’s a good system that is fairly balanced even though on the high end. There are plenty of money sinks to keep players from obtaining ludicrous sums of money at least until they are a very established character on the server. It’s not the best system I have encountered but it’s also far from the worst. I would put it up there in the top 10% if servers I’ve been to, so I give the staff a thumbs up for creating a good system.

[Winterhawk99]

Quests:

Quests are one of the more disappointing things on this server. There are quests. They are renewable at reset so no persistent integers. I have found about a dozen quests on the server. Most of them I took up, some I did not.

Most of the quests are very simple fetch or assassin quests. They are very simple and easy to do. There is some that have good dialog. There is one with a very simple puzzle. But with only a dozen quests spread out among several towns it’s pretty skimpy and they are for the most part very simple and not entertaining after the first run through.

For those that come to servers to do quests and figure out puzzles. It just isn’t the Persistent world for you. Will there be more in the future? Maybe. You can never tell and if that happens, I’ll make a note here on this thread.

I would really like to see some more complex quests like branching quests or quests that are integrated into a grand finally like I made for Netheril the age of discovery, but it hasn’t happened as of yet here on Harrowport.

Their two best quests are the Wing flinger where you fight Elementals and travel around the server, but it only has one middle step where you talk to the quest giver’s brother. The other involves going to a place where there is a race called Vipers and finding a forgotten temple. It has a little simple puzzle to get into the temple. There is something like a cut scene that takes place in the temple as you acquire what you need for the quest giver.

During my exploration of the server, I found a dungeon near a town called Hillsfar. It starts in a sewer system and there are ladders and places where you go up into an old ruin that looks like a grand school or library. I backed out of it and started to ask around if there was a quest involved with the dungeon. Why? Well, the place just begs for a bad ass quest to be put in there. I found out the answer was indeed no, there was no quest associated with the dungeon. And that’s too bad because like I said someone could come up with a really awesome quest for that place maybe even 2 or 3 quests.

Harrowport, and especially some areas, are just begging for some nice quests. I do hope they put some more in the module in the future.

[Winterhawk99]

Crafting:

Ok, everyone knows I hate crafting. I almost but not quite hate it with a passion mainly because I’m a gunsmith and work with most of the same materials as most NWN crafting systems every day in real life. I don’t get off from work just to go back to work inside a damn game. However, I have found that the Harrowport crafting system is one of the best I have ever seen. I of course had to tinker with it for the review and found it tolerable to do for myself.

There are a whole lot of crafts to do. It does take some time and sometimes a lot of money in the case of alchemy in bottles and sometimes essences and cartography where ink and paper are required. You go up in fairly steady levels up to 100% making you a grand master or something. I have not achieved a 100% in anything yet but have gotten to 80% in digging. You need that to dig for treasure and it’s the same as cartography in that the harder the map is the better your skill needs to be to dig it up.

And that is the very best thing about the Harrowport crafting system. It’s integrated into the server so well that to do certain things like treasure hunting you need levels in certain crafting skills. Also, if you are a tailor and you get up to 100% in tailoring you can make full bags of holding. That’s the only way I know you can get full bags of holding on the server. You want an epic weapon or bow? Well, you have to find another pc to make it for you.

So, crafting really matters on the server. The better you craft the more money you can make, and you can make the very best items for other players. It weighs in the economy too in that it provides a money sink for players that do not have crafting skills on that level.

Thus, I give the crafting system an absolute A+ both for versatility of the many crafts and for the way it is so integrated into many other facets of the game and server. Great Job to the staff of Harrowport and from the maker of the system who I am told has the handle of Midsummer.

If you are considering a server and are insane enough to love crafting. You might just want to check out Harrowport. You will probably love it.

[Winterhawk99]

General dungeons:

There are a huge amount of dungeons on the server. More than most persistent worlds I have seen. Harrowport doesn’t have a huge amount of outside areas, but they make them count. You can fight just about every humanoid race there and several kinds of undead. Most are different enough for people to really enjoy the hack and slash part of the game. In fact, I would call it a hack and slasher’s heaven.

At the end of each dungeon is a boss figure. Once you defeat the boss a chest lights up called an ironbound chest. You can’t pick this chest and none of them have traps. Once you have defeated the boss you can open it for a special reward. It’s usually a gem but sometimes you can pick up an outstanding item from one of them or a queen’s mark. The items include +5 ac defection helms, robes that are immune to 3rd circle spells and below, belts that give you a combined +6 to attributes. Some really good stuff in there.

There were two chests recently that did not open for us after defeating the boss. One was on a ghost pirate ship. This is the first ironbound chest where a key needed to be used. I picked up the key and tried to use it, and it didn’t work. There was another dungeon in the same swamp where the ironbound chest did not light up, and we could not open it after defeating the boss. It was around the same area within the server’s swamp. Those are the only two times the chests did not fork over the loot out of the hundreds of times I defeated bosses with or without a group.

I asked about them in discord, and someone told me that those two chests were a bit wonky, and they had thought they had fixed them. They also told me that they would check it out. I still have the ghost pirate ship key and will try it out again when I get back.

All and all it’s a great server if you just want to sit back and kill monsters. In fact, because of PRC you can try various new custom classes and races to do your hack and slash with, so it makes it so much better.

Harrows port is a great place for dungeoneering and hack and slash. Dungeons have enough variation to keep you entertained. The builders really aced it here with their builds.

I have a few minor notes on leveling and magic. Which I will put here to wrap up the tech side of the server.

Leveling and Experience:

It’s very easy to get experience on Harrowsport even for support characters as players are generally friendly and will almost always include you in a group if you ask. The level variation for a party is +/- 10 levels. More than that and your experience points for kills starts to drop.

The level limit is 40. After you achieve 35th level experience starts to drop anyway, and it takes you a little bit more time to achieve those last 5 levels. Still, I get to play 4 out of ever 14 days because of work. I first got to the server in September I think one of my characters is 35th level and the other 33rd level. It doesn’t take you 8 months to reach max level so you can see how much easier it is to level than many of the heavy RP servers.

Magic:

Harrowsport incorporates PRC in it. Thus, by default it is a high magic server. There are over a dozen new spell caster classes to explore and most likely over 100 new spells and spell-like abilities you may explore as you try out these various classes.

This concludes the technical side of my review the next part will be People related things about the server.

[Winterhawk99]

Administration and Dm’s:

Dms and administrators look to be all in the same group, so I’ll take them all at once. For the most part I am pretty impressed with the Dms at Harrowsport. They are very mature and laid back for the most part. When I first came into the world there was nothing going on. Almost no Dm activity.

It took a month or two and I started to be able to get into some one shot dm sessions. One involving an aboleth and another involving some mad jack-o-lanterns. The dm that did the aboleth event incorporated some of my own character’s abilities. It was Shinju my sea spirit folk. She can breathe water, so She went down to a portal under a small lake where the monster came out and reported to all the other pcs. That was pretty much her entire involvement in the event and it was pretty cool, pretty creative.

The jack-o-lantern event was pretty cute too. Next there were some social events and events I could not attend then the shadow events. As time went on, I saw more and more events. So, the dms were slow to start but now they are picking up the pace. The last event changed the world on the server so the dm’s do add consequences to the world by how the players play campaigns. Also, a very good and mature form of dming.

There was also one event meant for a group that my pc Arelush just ran into. That one was slightly suspicious in that it was an event for a group or guild. I think the other players were slightly pissed at me because I basically broke the event up with my character. At this point I wondered about favoritism.

Favoritism has killed help killed a majority of servers in NWN. My own was victim of that and several other circumstances in 2012 as Bioware stopped supporting NWN in the same year.

The Dm’s were quick to explain on Discord that they were setting up the main campaign events by doing sub events for player guilds like the Grey Riders and Adventurers guild. I saw no other sign of favoritism on the server. And I do mean sign as in I see what happened in the event and my spider senses started tingling.

If it is like they said that’s pretty damn good dming and since I really could not sniff out any other signs of favoritism. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt. I believe that is was exactly like they said. The reason is that even though my character disrupted and redirected the event the Dm that was doing the event incorporated it. They went with what happened and did not try to recon the whole thing.

The Dm’s and staff are doing a whole lot of good things on Harrowport. They don’t have big heads. They don’t think they are gods. They get on top of bugs like the weapon bug and try to get players new weapons in a timely manner, I do not think their own characters play major roles in their world. That’s also important because that’s a major avenue to dissuade regular players from playing in the world for a long time. They are generally helpful when things go wrong.

I would normally say they need more events, however as time goes by and I play on the server they seem to be amping up and beginning have events as a pretty steady pace so I am not so concerned at the moment.

One of the things I noticed is the Dms don’t do any personal events. In that I’ve played now several months and no dm has thrown anything at me at all as a personal event or even thrown any monsters or anything at me or any NPC to get to know now my playing, fighting or RP style. So, if you are looking for something more personal this world may not be for you.

The dms run events and quests for their player groups and campaigns but not for any individual. Now that may be because it’s a popular server and many players come in for various reasons based on their general player type. It might also be because they are worried about showing any favoritism to any individual. Both would be valid reasons for not doing personal quests. So do not figure on getting any personal attention from Dm’s if you come on to the world other than something like bugfixes like your weapon losing its properties or you get caught or pushed into an unwalkable part of the walkmesh.

I did find one glaring weakness in the Harrowport dm core. For most servers it would normally be a minor weakness but because Harrowport incorporates PRC it’s upgraded to a moderate weakness.

Now as I have written time and time again. I am not a cannon lawyer. In fact, I have discussed what I think of cannon lawyers on multiple occasions. I’ve also discussed in tutorials generally how I treat lore in the game as a dm. Cannon and lore is there in articles, books and other things. When you create your world everything behind the year you pick to start your world of campaign should be generally recognized but after you start it’s up to you and your players: at least wherever you campaign.

If you have a world or campaign on toril and say you are just using vanilla NWN with no custom classes and races, then you are ok with not knowing a whole lot of lore outside the little patch of ground you play on. However, if you add races and regional classes you should know so basic lore about the countries these classes and races come from. You don’t need to know everything. Just general basic lore from those areas.

PRC incorporates races and classes based all over the world of Toril and even some from Eberron, The planes and all over the place. If you are going to put PRC in the game, then you should bone up on your general basic lore of all these places.

So, I had a lore question about my character Shinju: who is Kozakuran. Everyone knows she is Kozakuran both from RP and on her thread. I sauntered over to discord and asked a question about her. A dm came on and said Your character isn’t even from this world. I almost wrote… “Here’s Your Sign.” I didn’t, of course. I was very polite and explained to this Dm, yes. She comes from a country in the world of Toril called Kozakura, etc. It was such a simple, basic piece of lore I was sort of stunned this dm did not know that.

The other dm’s came to the dm’s rescue of course (classic game theory herd mentality) They were polite as well. But I noted it.

You damn well know I’m going to test them again after that. So, after about 2 weeks/ a month I was researching something completely unrelated around a place I did not know much about within the world of Toril. Hey, why don’t I try on Harrowsport discord and see what they say.

So, I asked the question, and I got pounded almost to the point of rudeness basically the dms telling me I should not ask questions like that. That tells me that most if not all of them are really bad with Torilian lore except for their little patch of ground near the Moonsea.

And like I said. I do not expect them to be experts on every nook and cranny of Toril. In fact, they are very good on lore about the land they play on. That’s good, but because they incorporate the PRC that’s not enough and they should be able to answer questions on general lore not only about Toril but on planes races like githyanki who live on the astral plane.

The good thing is they can learn lore pretty quickly and make up for this deficit. They can also talk to players especially heavy rp players about their characters and the lore of from where they’re characters come from. Good players often study up on their character’s backgrounds and the lands they come from and know much about the lore of those lands. Not knowing that Kozakura is a country in the world of Toril as a Dm is frankly embarrassing.

All in all, If I created another NWN world I would love to have any one of these dms on my staff. They are mature, thoughtful and creative. They also don’t have big heads and seem to be so far wonderful people who wish to share their vision of the Moonsea area of Toril. They need to bone up on their lore but that is only a moderate problem. The most important attributes about being a Dm or Admin on an NWN world they do well. Kudos to you Staff of Harrowport.

[Winterhawk99]

The community at Large:

The community as a whole is a mixed bag of every type of gamer you could mention. There are role players, Hak & Slashers killing things in dungeons, Power gamers testing builds, People that just do erotic role playing and everything in between.

With this general a server you have to be a little careful. There are groups and individuals that don’t play well with others. Now 90% of the people are actually wonderful people and I roleplay without any issues. However, there is about 10% I’m very cautious about. So, what I do when I do not know someone is if they are at a campfire or any other rp scene like an inn I wait for their character to speak to me. Then I kind of feel them out while doing some rp banter to see if they are ok to rp with me or not.

I also know of at least one person on the server that I called out for meta-gaming me on another server. If I know he’s in and know what character he is playing I try to stay as far away from him as I can so there is no reoccurrence or friction. So far it has worked.

Overall, I find the community a pretty good community. You can get some pretty good build advice from many of the players. They report fairly regularly on bugs. There’s also some damn good role players around. One of my friends I found on the server describes the community as a bunch of drunken degenerates. It’s a joke of course but he’s right that it has a light hearted feeling.

In fact, if I could write out a motto for the community it would be, “It’s just a game. Lighten up and have some fun with us.” Good crew that plays on Harrowsport. Just be careful of the few that are there to play by themselves or with their little cliché.