The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Winterhawk99]

Sigil – Planar Legends

Part 1 Terrain and general build.

Ok, before I get into this review I have to make a disclaimer. Though I spent about 5 months on the world I used the very worst possible character I could. It was Brath. Our loveable High Ogre Beatnik and son of Fawn from her valin. Brath is a lot of things but not the greatest adventurer. He has a con of 8, a strength of 10 and a dex of 14. He’s also a split class sorcerer/mage. He’s pretty much useless in a fight. So, he doesn’t get out that much. Which he didn’t. So, I probably didn’t see more than a ¼ or the areas or monsters available in the module.

What I will go over is what I did see, what I liked and what I did not as always adding both advice and as much elderly wisdom as I can muster. One thing you all know is I’m honest about what I think of each world I review, and I spent 5 months on the server so got a good view of a few things.


The first thing I’ll go over is tilesets and terrain builds. I did not notice any custom made tilesets or modeling. What I did see is they chose many of their models and terrain quite wisely. Overall, they did a very good job. I give the builders and file Muppets (2das, TLK, database geeks) kudos for that. I saw several worms, and 666 tilesets along with others I know. The terrain was built very well and very realistically in the areas that I went too. About 90% of the time. I was on the plane of water, and they did absolutely marvelous work there. While the plane of earth and limbo could have been much better. The plane of earth was one of the few places I found aesthetically boring.

They matched rather well society with the build though. One of the best I have found among servers. The Oni village had Japanese like homes. Glorium had Scandinavian like homes. It all fit very well, along with the people that populated areas.

The interiors were very well done but also sometimes looked cluttered and tight. We’ve all been to servers where the tables at an inn were each a football field away: way too open. This was the opposite in some interiors where things were so tight they looked a bit cluttered, and it was hard to move around. What they did get right thankfully is the positioning of seats always worked. I never found a seat I could not sit in because the chair was too close to the table.

What they did get absolutely perfect is the feel of the city of doors with its portals everywhere. The builders put them in puddles of water, pictures, going through doors and under archers at the ends of alleys and along brick walls. Each with its own key. Sigil has a special place in the heart of the D&D universe, and it’s been described countless times. Sigil- planar Legends does get this description and feel of the city perfectly.

[Winterhawk99]

Part 2 Scripting:

What Sigil doesn’t have in custom model builders they do make up for in custom scripters and custom system scripters. Just about all scripting packages you can get from the vault they seem to have done themselves and they did it better than the vault content.

By doing things this way they can see what has already been made, and make it better as I and Mermut of the DLA did in Harvest Moon with silicon scouts treasure system and turned it into an obcd data base system. We had 18,000 items you could draw from in treasure chests and that was only up to 15 level items. That’s because we moved the treasure system into an out-game database.

Their language system is a bit superior to the vault package. Their player command system is vastly superior to the any of the vault packages. Though it is a bit unwieldy at first to work. I like their job system attached to skills and getting skill points as you go, not on every level. They have incorporated a great number of scholar skills similar to Corymr and the Dalelands. They have warehouses that a person can buy to store consumable ore, lumber, gems and herbs. Again, the system is vastly superior to just about everything I have seen among the servers I’ve been on. Being that the warehouse is extraplanar and does not add weight to you.

The downside to this is some of these scripting ventures remain incomplete. They have the skill Profession Fishing, and I did not find one place to fish. They also have the profession Apothecary, yet they have no means to get skill points yet for it. And I brought Brath in who would have fished all day every day until he was a master fisherman. He’s also an apothecary. So, two of the professional skills in the game he chose have not been incorporated yet. Some of the others are incorporated and done well from what I have observed in others doing it. Things like enchanting, armoring and such.

Also, consumables remains incomplete in that you can store herbs in your warehouse, but you cant box them up and sell or use them. Thus, you have the herbs but can’t use them yet.

I did not see any problems with their Ai work. They seem to have gotten that system down whether Jaspers, Tony’s or custom homemade scripting. Very little lag on the server from running nesting loops. I did see quite a few broken loops but as I checked the tags of the scripts, they were not Ai scripts. They were other custom systems scripts that were put into the world and also voice scripts.

I’m not sure if they have a voice wandering around areas or if someone invented a new system to get rid of the dmfi voice. It’s been a long time since I dmed an NWN world.

So, they need to close up all these open ends but generally the scripters of Sigil are doing very well. They are imaginative and precise. They do have to find those scripts that are breaking on a regular basis and close up all these open ends they left that leave players holding now useless skills and professions. They do that and They would ace the scripting.

[Winterhawk99]

Part three Quests:

Quests is a hard one and I don’t have all the answers here because Brath is of course a pacifist and doesn’t do quests unless he thinks it doesn’t involve killing. He did find one and it was pure luck.

The quest he got was in a forested area. There was a paladin with a wounded unicorn or Pegasus. I forgot. He needed some flower to heal it. Brath shrugged and wondered off. He did find the flower on top of a waterfall in the same area. He gave it to the paladin and got some divine niceness or something. It was a little amulet that said you’re a good person. Nothing he could really use, and he couldn’t even wear it.

From what I saw from others is most quests are kill monster quests that you get from the Planeswalker guild master. You go off with a party and go kill monsters. Try to fill everyone’s ‘Writs’ or quests that say something like slay 25 epic beasts or werewolves. And that’s it.

It sounds to me after 5 months of play that Sigil is lacking in significant quests let alone something complex like interlaced or multi-level quests like I developed for the Age of Netheril. So, if you’re a quest person. Perhaps Sigil – Planar legends isn’t the best server to go on; however, if you are a hack and slash type, boy is this server right up your alley. You can hack and slash to your heart’s content and get writ points for it. What you get for writ points? I have no idea, but I figure the rewards are pretty good.

So, on quests I give the server a big thumbs down however you have to remember I was playing Brath so I may just be in the dark in this area.

[Winterhawk99]

Part 4 thoughts on some of the general systems.

Encounters: Unless you do a pure power gamer build for your character, you’re not going to do well alone on Sigil. All the areas I’ve seen are built for co-operative parties in regard to encounters. If you go somewhere you’ll need at least a few people to slug through encounters. There are a few epics that can walk around the server alone, but they are few and far between. So, if you go anywhere make sure to take a few friends.

Encounter trigger resets are slightly off in a few areas. At least twice I was in combat areas leaving when monsters spawned right in front of me after the party had killed them. And of course, Brath having no spells that physically harm and a whopping 80 hit points at 20th level. Dies really fast in those situations. In fact, I believe at least once he was one shot. Still, those were just a few areas. It is no where near the problem with trigger reset times that Amia has. I would suggest that the builders look at all their encounter resets and up some of them, perhaps 300 or 600 seconds.

Money easily comes by in Sigil. You will have millions of gold in time and can trade them in for tokens that are in sets of 1000 or 50,000 in gold. However, you will spend it just as quickly. One ring I bought cost me 28 50,000 tokens called Mobius and another 1.8 million in gold. It was a good ring. What it did was every minute you could throw a spell, and that spell would not count against your total spells. In other words, it was like you never threw the spell. The slot remained full.

I saw no banking system but if you convert gold to bars, glitter gems or Mobius when you die, they remain. Gold is taken but the other stuff stays on you. I think all in all better than a banking system. Kudos there.

They do have an incomplete crafting system. You can work with gems, wood, metal for the basic armoring, wood crafting and even clothier professions but as I said before You have yet to access some of the system in way of herbs.

Travel is mostly by gate and teleportation. You either need a wizard with you or have an item and there are plenty of items you can buy that have gate and teleportation for those who cant cast. Like I said you will make a lot of money but also spend a lot of money too. To get to different planes there are portals all around the city and you need to find both portal and key.

For this you need what is called a Tout. It is a pc profession. There are many PCs on the server that are Touts so it’s pretty easy to find one and they will show you both once you pay them a nominal fee.

Travel on average isn’t too bad. Still, you do need those spells either by casting or on an item.

I found no issues with pathfinding on the server and never got stuck on an unwalkable .Wok (walk mesh)
For those that don’t understand sometimes you can trap yourself by walking on an unwalkable part of the terrain whether because of a placeable with a funky walk mesh or a tile with a bad walk mesh. If you do it’s the modeler’s fault or how the builder laid the placeable on the tile.

That’s it for general technical stuff. I’ll move on to people.

[Winterhawk99]

Part 5 Players.

Let’s talk about the players of Sigil. I think by far the biggest asset to Sigil – Planar Legends is its player community. Everyone was wonderful. They practice cooperative role play and do it really well. Even the bad guys get along with the good guys to some extent. Players are divided up into factions and there is IC fighting among them occasionally but as far as I can tell it’s all in good sport.

The main thing, as I have observed, is how well the community at large gets along with each other as players. It brought quite a bit of nostalgia to me for the days back in the early 00’s when NWN was new and most persistent worlds were like this. I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with such warm and inviting individuals.

Role play experience is a bit all over the place. You have the young power gamer hero types along with the older mature RPers. Politics, thank God, were never talked about. It was just a lot of IC with each player working on being a member of the community. Of course there were a lot of in game politics. When you have 14 factions that believe 14 different philosophies, you’re going to have that, but no one really broke the immersion with outside stuff. Big Kudos there. It is by far the best player community I’ve been in since Beamdog made EE. There were some of the original pws that may have been better. Anchorome and Harvest Moon to name 2. We’ll I may just be a little biased about Harvest Moon (Heh).

The player community has it down. If you want to see how a good player community works, I would come to Sigil just to check it out. It will lighten your heart and hopefully you will carry it to other communities when you explore other persistent worlds.

[Winterhawk99]

Part 6 Dms.

Dms are a bit of a mixed bag for me. So, let’s take the good stuff about the worlds dms first.

First of all, in the five months I played on the server I’ve been in about that many dm events. The Composer events come to mind. An event in the Eastern Celestial court and an event in a great desert world. I only get to play about 8 days every month, so I don’t get a lot of events in. It’s pretty much whenever I can catch one.

When the Dms do an event, they do a great job. They all seem to have at least a bit of PnP experience based on what I observed. Which is a good thing because of the pace of events and such. They make use of skills, feats and attributes of players. Always a good thing. I can’t really say all the events were super imaginative. I think the Composter events were. The other two did not lend themselves to creative outlining of a campaign.

In the desert event the Dm did get it right as adventurers met a very primitive culture. He played the various npcs very well and in line with what you would expect of a primitive lizardman like society. So very good there too.

The celestial court thing was not great but then again, every dm has a bad day or two. I know that well. I’ve had plenty of them in the last 40 years of playing and dming this game……….damn 41 years now. Damn, I’m old. I might want to make a pine box here at the shop for myself soon. Can’t take it home though my wife might push me in it and nail it shut, “Come on boys get the backhoe I got to bury something.”

She’s Italian and has 58 cousins that hate me. They give me no respect.

As far as campaigns The Dms on running adventures………Yea I’ll give them a B+

When not running campaigns I’m not sure Dms on Sigil even exist. The entire 5 months I played on Sigil I never saw one outside a campaign. So, if you’re looking for a more personal experience and Dm interaction with your character. You’re pretty much shit out of luck. I don’t think they are very personable to run individual things.

It’s not something I have encountered in NWN. Again, more like PnP campaigns and if that’s what the server is like that’s what it is like. So, don’t expect that kind of personal experience with a Dm here or personal quest stuff.

I did see something a bit alarming among Dms and administrators of the Pw and it’s a very common thing along many, many Pws. Some out of necessity, but here it is not, as large as the community on Sigil is.

Whenever you have player-based guilds, factions and organizations. They should be led by players that are not Dms or administrators. When I created and administrated Harvest Moon. I seriously considered banning Dm’s or administrators from playing at all. As I saw that the player based wasn’t going to be all that large I realized that it would be impossible to do that so I relinquished that idea.

If you have 12 to 20 regular players, you Dms and admins as players is a bit of a necessity. But then favoritism and dms giving other dms and admins choice items becomes a problem. It can easily become like a pw called Narfell where a small group of administrators and dms suck all the oxygen out of the world and the pure players get left out as just back ground noise and extras.

As I have said since starting to play NWN Pws. Players are a persistent world’s customers. The Dm’s and administrators work for them not the other way around. That is the responsibility of these two groups to the players. If you don’t want that. Password protect the player key to your world have your world just for your friends.

On Sigil there are maybe 50 regular players in a week, maybe more. There is plenty of room for the pure players to take over as the leaders of their factions and guilds. However, There does seem to be an inordinate number of Dms and admins that are leaders of these faction. I’m not saying that there is favoritism here, but it makes me a bit leery enough that I think there could be a lot of it.

I have never seen it, but the underlying make up is there right in front of me as I watch who is who on the world. I truly hope that it’s not this way. Hopefully it’s just my spidey sense tingling and there’s nothing to it.

And that’s it for Dms. Great at campaigns. Non-existent on other things except at being players.

[Winterhawk99]

Part 7 Administrators.

OH-boy. Wow. This will definitely be a teaching experience for me. Which is good. I like teaching and offering advice to those that want to administrate or dm an persistent world.

Ok, So I’m spending 5 months on this world and looking for things to test out the administration arm of Sigil. The problem is (And this is also a testament to the server itself) I could not find anything to bug them about. The people are so nice. I never got stuck in a walkmesh. The scripting is so clean I had no scripting farts that required administrative action. Damn, what the hell am I going to do here.

I have an ace in the hole. Always do. So, I’m almost done with Brath’s big project on the factions of Sigil. I make up a good test for the admins. I get on to discord. And I’m purposely a little wishy washy in making a request. Now Brath is an Irda (a high ogre) But I’ve been playing him in human form on the server. Meanwhile in his journal entries from the very beginning I definitely make it clear he's a high ogre.

So I do one of their request tickets. Had some help. I said something like Hey. You know Braths really a high ogre. I assume they know that. And I told them I’m not really interested in the big stats or him shape changing into 20 forms. I just want the ability to show he’s a high ogre maybe letting him change to his natural skin color. I made it that way to give the admins plenty of wiggle room to see what they say.

Now While I’m waiting, I’m trying like a madman to get this project done. I got 4 factions to do and get 2 of them done. So, I do that and go to work.

The first guy that really answered with a go/no go said. Ah, no we can’t do that and explained the decision. And I thought to myself great, they passed my test and stuck to their guns. Perfect answer.

But I still had a problem. I had two factions to go to complete my essay on the factions, damn what do I do.

I said something like. Well, I can play him incognito like I’ve done. While I was thinking That way, I could finish the faction thing and pull him off the server.

In the morning another admin said something. He said something like you could always play him as human that thinks he's an Irda …….

I blinked. Thinking to myself He really didn’t type that did he. And then I had a good belly laugh. That’s a mortal sin for a Dm or admin to do. This admin is either a dumbass or had a momentary lapse of reason.

So, what is the problem with what he said. One major problem and one minor problem.

The major problem is this: When a player makes a character, that character is their intellectual property. It’s not a Dm’s intellectual property. It’s not an admins intellectual property. The character belongs to the player and how they want to make it.

In saying what he said he was trying to make me change something that was my own intellectual property. You can’t do that as a dm or admin. And 99 out of 100 times this starts a fight. Because the player instinctively knows that that character belongs to him, and he or she will fight it out to the end for the control over their own character, which they should.

It’s always better to just say. Hey, let's take your character off the server. It’s not acceptable. That a player can take. I’ve been told several times that myself and said, ok. I go on to the next server. But then I do set up these situations also for taking a look on how admin handles these types of situations.

I also know that this guy was just trying to be a good mediator and that’s why I laughed.

The second problem is. I have written stories and books about Brath and previous generations of his family for 20 years now. Somewhere between 300,000 and ½ million people have read those stories and books. So, Brath and his family are probably the most famous Irda that have ever existed in print.

So, telling me that Brath can be a human that thinks his and Irda is so laughable I almost fell down laughing when I saw it. But the story gets better.

So, it’s morning when I read this. All day I’m working on an exit story for Brath in my head. I come back after work to see what more if anything else. 3 more admins commented. So, I read the next comment and almost fell out of my chair laughing.

It turns out the others figured out that the one admin said a really dumb thing and they fucked up really badly. They had circled the wagons around him and were getting ready for a fight.

I wanted to wrap up the whole package and put it in a psychology 101 book on classic group behavior. The group behavior was so classic it was beautiful.

So, before anything could escalate, I simply put that I’m going to take Brath out of the world. Offered them anything they wanted from my site. Basically, I said all is good I won't be bothering with this anymore.

It’s a little sad because there are so few servers that would even accept Brath as an Irda. However, I’ll still be writing about him later in novels where he will be relegated to.

As far as the admins themselves. They did pass the test I presented to them with a few bumps in the road. That’s ok.

I’ll do my overall view here on this last part. Sigil – Planar legends. It’s a generally good server. They have some things they need to work on as all servers do but I had fun. And you just can't beat the player community there. They are awesome. Kudos guys. And I am on to the next server. Cheers.

[Winterhawk99]

I do have an update on this review.

It seems as though Sigil Planar Legends has booted me from their discord channel.

They didn't say anything nor even notified me. Which is strange. But then again, I was moving on to the next server.

It's part of being a reviewer to be sometimes hated by those you review. I thought I gave the server a fairly good review but then again perhaps some did not think so.

[Winterhawk99]

I have a second update about Sigil.

I have been Banned. I am guessing they do not like reviewers or my review. It's too bad. It's not a bad world but there are many other NWN worlds to play on.