CHAPTER 2 Swordflight: Calimport (Part VII)

Part VII of the Swordflight Walkthrough. Continuing from Part VI: Buried Ruins 4. Swordflight (2008-2022) is a NWN Module for Neverwinter Nights 1 (2002).

Chapter 2 Swordflight

After your adventures in the Calim Desert, you have returned to Calimport, ready to assume your new duties as one of a noble's personal guards. Your new employer has assured you that he expects more from you than routine guard duty, and will be assigning tasks appropriate for someone with your varied talents and experience. What's more, there is no knowing what may happen if you find yourself even peripherally involved in all the courtly intrigues of Calimshan. There is little doubt that your time in Calimport will be full of adventure. - DM Rogueknight.

In my Swordflight Review I summarized the second chapter as follows:

Released in 2012 Chapter 2 of Swordflight is widely regarded as the best Chapter in the series. This is primarily due to its massive size and scope along with its non-linear questing and open-ended exploration of the city of Calimport, the dungeons beneath it, and its varied wilderness outskirts. 

Reminiscent of Baldur's Gate city Chapter Two sports 50 reactive quests, 200 areas, 200,000 words of text, several companions and an approximate level range of 5-17. This massive adventure takes about 80 hours to beat, depending on playstyle. Chapter Two is the best NWN module on the Aurora platform, and one of the best cRPG campaigns ever.

It is a masterpiece of cRPG campaign design.

And in my interview with Rogueknight 333, he expressed amazement that Chapter II, as it stands, actually came to be:

I am amazed that I was ever able to make something as massive and complex as Ch.2 all by myself, and in just several years. I am still kind of amazed that actually happened.

The front courtyard of the Galhadr Estate in the Noble & Wealthy Estates precinct:

Calimport Swordflight

Swordflight Chapter Two takes place in, under and around the famous and ancient Forgotten Realms city of Calimport. Realmslore on Calimport has been extensively fleshed out by, for example, Calimport TSR 9589 (1998), and also by R.A Salvatore's The Halfling's Gem (1990), but Calimport and its surrounds had not been represented on Infinity or Aurora until the advent of Swordflight.

In Chapter I, the player adventured mostly in and beneath the Calim Desert, and the opportunity to explore the city of Calimport was limited to the sewers beneath, as well as the immediate streets surrounding, the Shifting Sands Inn (the first chapter is clearly an introductory adventure with a different focus). But, in Chapter II, Rogueknight's representation of Calimport is such that it invites comparisons with BioWare's Athkatla [pic] of Baldur's Gate II (2000) in that both involve non-linear questing in, and exploration of, not only a multi-district city but also of its subterranean zones and wilderness outskirts [pic] [pic].

If it isn't clear from what I have written and quoted thus far, Chapter II of Swordflight is huge. Huge, I say! - even though Calimport's size and complexity has been reduced from TSR 9589, and is largely an abstraction (computer role-playing games have their limitations). One or two complete playthroughs along with several partial ones just isn't enough, and that's why I'm conducting another and recording my observations as I go, raw and rough around the edges as they are. Also, it isn't enough to write a quick review especially as, back when I wrote that, I was new to Swordflight and its design principles.

One thing that I have neglected to mention in Parts I to VI of this series of posts is that, due to its comparitive difficulty and emphasis on old school design principles such as resource management, Swordflight encourages the player to become more familiar with specific mechanics of NWN. When players face off against non-trivial combat encounters, and their budgets are limited, they tend to dig deeper into the options available to them, and experiment. A specific example would be finding out exactly what a spell, item, skill or feat does. Basically, I have learned more about NWN (and the capabilities of its engine, Aurora) by playing Swordflight than I have by playing comparitively easy modules.

We don't learn much by playing modules that are doddles.

As already stated, Chapter II's exploration and questing are largely open and non-linear. Chapter II isn't completely open and non-linear because certain zones are gated by quest acquisition and plot progression. Still, the districts unlock early in the going, and sidequests accumulate rapidly in our journal as we explore and engage with NPCs. In the first 10 minutes of play I had no fewer than eight quests in my journal. And, as I progressed through the first 30 minutes, I had many more and also felt a satisfying amount of freedom in regard to when and how to undertake them. For example, I decided to scope out zones and quests that I remembered to be "a step up" in difficulty knowing that, while they are more difficult, they are also more rewarding. (An example of this is given in Part VIII.)

Yes, there is another way in which Swordflight quests and zones may be "gated": difficulty. This is a design choice that, ever since I first experienced it in Fallout (1997), I have always valued in cRPGs, and praised. One should, in my opinion, potentially run into difficult, extremely difficult or even impossibly difficult encounters through exploration. There is no shame in backing out if we bite off more than we can chew and get in over our head. Then, once we have gained sufficient items and power, we can return to those enemies that formerly gave us trouble and rip them new assholes! So satisfying. On the flip-side, I have always snorted in contempt and scorned cRPGs that focused on scaling combat encounters and itemization to PC/party level; they pose no challenge and feel stale.

Screencaps of its main districts may best showcase the size of Calimport as represented in Swordflight. As per Realmslore, the 7,000 year old Calimport has always been on par with Waterdeep in terms of size and legend, but, while some commercial cRPGs have been set in Waterdeep the focus has always been on subterranean Undermountain rather than on the city itself and its outskirts.

Eventually, I intend to annotate all of the following maps. It requires several playthroughs to know where everything notable is, so, for now, this will have to do.

Noble & Wealthy Estates:

Overhead:

[cf. BG2 Government District, PS:T Upper Ward]

Note how the above terrain is tiered. The Babylon tileset (a masterpiece of tileset design) also employs exteriors for second-storey buildings:

Merchant/Market District:

[cf. BG2 Waukeen's Promenade, PS:T Hive Marketplace, PS:T Lower Ward Marketplace]

In-game:

The Slums:

Slums by night:

[cf. BG2 Slums, PS:T Alley of Dangerous Angles, PS:T Ragpicker's Square]

Temple District:

The Temple District by nightfall:

[cf. BG2 Temple District]

The Docks:

I remember a quest here that takes us undersea [recap pic].

[cf. BG2 Docks]

Scholar's Corner:

The City Gates:

Another angle:

Vicinity of the Watch Headquarters (this is just the approach; the interiors are large):

Artistically, there is no comparison: pre-rendered 2d backdrops are superior to 3d tile-based ones, but that's not the point. The point is that the size is comparable. It is also important to note that tile-based area design facilitates easy area-creation. Without it, there would probably be no Swordflight. Look around: where are the user-made campaigns for the Infinity Engine that approach even mid-tier Aurora modules in size, scope and complexity? There almost are none because there is no toolset and no easy way to create the areas, let alone the 2d artwork for them.

To be clear, by "easy" I mean comparitively easy. It certainly is not easy - even in the Aurora toolset - to build an area and populate it with NPCs, quests, dialogues, items, triggers, scripts and combat encounters. It is also time-consuming.

The above pics do not show the interiors of buildings but these are also comparable to Athkatla and Sigil in number and size:

Galhadr Estate interior (main level):

Temple of Tyr interior:

Khachar Estate interior:

One thing to also bear in mind is that a sewer system logically runs beneath Swordflight's Calimport districts whereas Sigil does not have a sewer system (per se), and Athkatla only has one: beneath the Temple District. Thus, only the religious take dumps. Anyway, Baldur's Gate city in Baldur's Gate (1998) features multiple sewer zones beneath the city, but not its sequel [pic of BG city].

Sewer system zone example:

This is massive:

Athkatla and Sigil do feature subterranean zones as well as other, extra-planar zones. For example, Athkatla has Bodhi's vampire lair [pic], a cultist lair descending to a beholder one [pic] and planar zones [pic, pic]. And PS:T has the multi-level catacombs (which are huge and complex), the Modron Maze, the necro lair and Under Sigil, too. But Calimport has 17 separate sewer system zones (some sections of which are multi-leveled) some of which grant access to the Undercity of Dark Calimport (30 separate areas, not including the randomized ones that one can potentially get lost in).

A few of the larger zones of Dark Calimport, aka the Muzad:

Dark Calimport is sort of like Waterdeep's Undermountain in that they are both sprawling subterranean regions, but the latter is a mega-dungeon whereas the former is basically a second city, haphazardly formed over centuries by the city's destruction and the consequent rearrangement of what remained.

***

The object of this comparison was simply to show that Calimport's size is comparable to similar quest-dense hubs such as Athkatla and Sigil. It is both the ambition of the builder as well as the ease-of-use, flexibility and power of the Aurora toolset (e.g, tilesets) that make such a comparison possible.

Of course, what makes the likes of Baldur's Gate, Athkatla, Sigil and Tarant so impressive is not just their size and number of independent areas, but also the way in which numerous, sometimes quite complex, quests weave their way through them. We become intimately familiar with such hubs because we move back and forth through them over the course of a campaign in order to satisfy quest parameters and deal with merchants, healers and guilds. In regard to number and complexity of quests, there is also comparibility between Calimport and these classic cRPG hubs. But more on that later.

Take me to Part VIII: Zataroth.

Neverwinter Nights	Swordflight Chapter 3	Buried Ruins 2	Thieves' Guild	Mazar's Golems
Swordflight	Swordflight Alignment	Buried Ruins 3	Goblinoid Army	Precious Metals
Rogueknight Interview	Swordflight Walkthrough	Buried Ruins 4	Orc Army	Hammer & Anvil
Swordflight Chapter 1	Shifting Sands Inn	Calimport	Dragon Cult	Bloody Blades
Swordflight Chapter 2	Buried Ruins 1	Zataroth	Aranea Base	Zagash the Terrible