Neverwinter Nights

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The first RPG by BioWare to be made completely in 3D, and their first game based on the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

There are several things that Neverwinter Nights is known for. The first is the official campaign, which takes place in the Forgotten Realms universe, or, more precisely, the Sword Coast, in and around the titular city of Neverwinter.

When Neverwinter is struck by an unknown plague called the Wailing Death, four Waterdhavian creatures are brought to the Neverwinter Academy in the hopes of extracting components for a cure. Unfortunately, the Academy is suddenly attacked by unknown forces and the creatures are scattered across the city. Lady Aribeth, a paladin of Tyr who has been placed in charge of investigating the source of the plague, enlists the player character to retrieve the cure components and save a city in chaos.

The campaign was occasionally criticized for being dull and repetitive, as well as being a departure from the rich, detailed worlds of the Baldur's Gate series. The area where NWN really found its niche was third-party content: the Aurora Toolset, an unorthodox example of a development kit included in the basic game installation, allowed users to easily create their own modules and campaigns, eventually giving rise to a vast modding community with very ambitious projects.

Three expansion packs were released; Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark stepped away from the original campaign and focused on character development, roleplaying, and the intricate storylines Bioware is renowned for.

In addition, Bioware released a number of "premium modules" as paid DLC. Short self-contained, adventures, many of which were created by community members hired by Bioware, the premium modules became deeper and more complex as designers familiarized themselves with the engine and new tools were developed. The first three, Witch's Wake, Shadowguard and Kingmaker, were compiled into the third expansion, Kingmaker. Three more were made: Pirates of the Sword Coast, Infinite Dungeons and Wyvern Crown of Cormyr. While the modules themselves were well received, they required a constant connection to the internet as DRM; the modules in Kingmaker do not have this feature. When the premium module initiative ended, several projects were left hanging, though Darkness Over Daggerford and "Crimson Tides of Tethyr were released for free later. In 2009 Bioware stopped selling the premium modules.

The Aurora graphics engine, which debuted with NWN, proved to be successful and enduring, and various heavily modified versions of the engine continue to be used to this day, most notably the Odyssey engine in the Knights of the Old Republic series and the Electron engine in Neverwinter Nights 2. The main engine with modified graphics is also being used in The Witcher, though CD Projekt has revealed they were less than fond of the engine, claiming it responsible for many of the technical flaws present, leading to them developing their own engine from scratch for the sequel.

Tropes used in Neverwinter Nights include:

• Abandoned Mine
• Aborted Arc: In the original campaign, there's a character named Yari the Knife right before the final battle in Act 1. He's locked in a cell in the basement of the Disc One Final Dungeon. If you release him, he immediately runs away (without any means of stopping him) while shouting very cryptic things. He's never brought up in the game ever again. Can be seen here at 3:38.
• Artificial Stupidity: The game was notorious for the Henchmen bad AI. Tanks not attacking, spellcasters using the wrong spells, rogues not flanking and the list goes on.
• Chainmail Bikini: If you have opposite-gendered henchmen in the expansions, you can move the same suit of armor between your inventories and watch its icon change to reflect the gender of the person currently holding it--female armor is usually more revealing, and occasionally includes Absolute Cleavage.
• Color-Coded Elements: Fire, electricity, cold, acid, sonic, magic, divine, negative energy, positive energy (white colored).
• Chekhov's Gun: Aribeth's ring, which you need to hold onto for the entire game to turn her back to good in the end of the first game. Unless you have a female PC, in which case you can never get the ring and can therefore turn her through dialogue alone.
• Clown Car Grave
• Continuity Nod: One weapon refers to the Cult of the Unseeing Eye in Amn and the player character meets a relative of Jan Jansen, both in the Baldur's Gate games.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Many dungeon bosses have extreme resistance to magic, just to keep from being an Anticlimax Boss whenever a sorcerer casts Charm Person on them. However, the waves of reptilian Abusive Precursors in the final dungeon of the original campaign seem to be resistant to every freaking spell except some spells that were added in later expansion packs.
• Cute Clumsy Girl: Linu from the original campaign, if her dialogue is to be believed.
• Deceptive Disciple
• Designated Villain: A rare in-universe example. Seemingly subverted by Fenthick, as it is clearly established that he was not at fault in his unwitting involvement in Desther's plot, and the government only had him executed because it was the only way to quell the riots after the Plague. Then the sequel comes along, and his spirit makes a cameo in an area specifically stated to be populated by the souls of Faerun's worst traitors...
• Disc One Final Dungeon
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: In The Bastard of Kosigan, the real mastermind behind the whole plot happens to be Alexandra de Velan, your childhood sweetheart, who also happens to appear to die near the end of the second module.
• Evil Laugh: A lot of villains have a lot of very cruel, lengthy laughs. Including one a player voice-set does upon death.
• Face Heel Turn: Aribeth.
• Familiar: Wizards and sorcerers can choose a familiar as a permanent summonable companion.
• Fishing for Mooks: Works great--Hide or Move Silently works against every enemy separately, and mooks who noticed PC pursue on their own, leaving their pals idle. Thus sneaking closer until detected and then luring the pursuers so far away that others will not hear attack and death sounds makes slaughtering them much easier, up to long No Damage Run.
• Friendly Fireproof: Optional.
• Game Mod: Pretty much the whole point- the game was marketed as a tool for creating and running your own adventures, with the toolset and DM mode major selling points.
• Gargle Blaster: Scurrd. Not to mention the Dark Elven Tek'eela. Yes, it's a lame pun.
• Grave Humor
• Grey and Gray Morality: The Charwood subquest, full stop. Do you blame the younger brother for slaughtering children, the older brother who told him to do it to become an immortal so he could protect the village, or the demon who told them they had to do it when they didn't just because he thought it would be funny? After that, do you bind all three of them and the ghosts of the villagers to be trapped in limbo, or do you release them and let them rest peacefully but in doing so let the demon that was also trapped return to Hell?
• Half-Human Hybrid: Every Half-Elf and Half-Orc, of course; beyond the obvious though, Shadows of the Undrentide's J'Nah is a Half-Sun Elf, Half-Demon, and Hordes of the Underdark's Valen is a Tiefling, a human with demonic blood.
• Hey, It's That Voice!: Aribeth is Faye Valentine.
  • And Daelan is Spike Spiegel.
• Heroic Albino: Celestial-blooded characters in the disputably-canon Neverwinter Nights games and the definitely non-canon fan modules almost always show up with white or silver hair, very pale skin, and golden eyes.
• Hollywood Torches
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Aribeth.
• In Name Only: The game's version of Obould differs rather from Forgotten Realms canon. The change is not to his benefit.
• Infant Immortality: Horribly averted. Especially in the Charwood.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Literally.
• Inventory Management Puzzle
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Leading to some Moral Dissonance considering you can effectively steal from the poor and desperate--in the original game this caused no penalty, in the expansions unlocking the doors and chests of towns shifts your alignment towards Chaotic.
  • However, these poor and desperate people have the same level of wealth lying around as do archiwizards and dragons.
• Large Ham: Haedraline, who combines a cheesy Gypsy accent with Snake Talk
  • Also, some of the generic NPC voice acting. "HAIIIL TA' YEE!"
  • Actually, some of the player voices too, making this a World of Ham.
• Light and Mirrors Puzzle
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: An extreme example. Allowing wizards to spent a few seconds resting to restore all their spells shatters any trace of the Dungeons & Dragons balance, and after a few levels wizards consistently deal more damage, have many more combat options, and can use their spells to become more durable than fighters anyway.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Morag, although her lair IS a pocket dimension held up by her vast magic, being used as a glorified bomb shelter.
• Load-Bearing Hero: The various modules based on this system love this trope.
• Loading Screen: With gameplay tips to look at, even!
• Locked Door: The lock on this door is too complex to pick, and is warded against simple spells. You will have to find the proper key.
• Lotus Eater Machine: A rather obvious one, which soon leads to a Battle in the Center of the Mind.
• Love Makes You Evil Aribeth.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Fenthick and Aribeth, the "Scales and Sword of Tyr" respectively. Both have cleric levels, but armor-clad Aribeth is the one who engages in melee combat unlike Fenthick who relies on his crossbow.
• The Mole: Desther.
• Most Definitely Not a Villain: Desther.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Haedraline. And Daelan. And Deekin. And arguably Xanos and Dorna. Bioware likes these. Grimgnaw doesn't have any angst, but is about as far from the stock representation of fantasy dwarves as you can get.
• No Hero Discount: The merchants who you're trying to save will still charge you. Some will charge you a lot.
• Obvious Beta: The original campaign is very cookie cutter, with many elements obviously rushed. For instance, the alignment system is so poorly slapped together it's possible to play a Lawful Good character and murder quite a few neutral/good characters with no alignment change or penalty
• Obviously Evil: Desther's status as The Mole was kinda obvious from the start. Amusingly, though, said character doesn't count as evil for the purposes of things such as Smite Evil.
• Old Save Bonus
• Only Six Helmets: While there's still plenty of helmet designs to pick and choose from, it still covers your even-more-customized head completely.
• Pardon My Klingon: "Takasi! Oh, excuse my Elven!"
• Platonic Prostitution: It's a T-rated game, so Madam Ophelia's women (and men, and Halfling) get to take a break.
• Please Wake Up: One of the repeating sounds in the city, along with screaming and messages of doom.
• Plot Coupon: Heaps of them. In the original campaign and the expansions, most of the Chapters boil down to you being set down in a town with the vague direction to pick a compass point, look for a Plot Coupon somewhere in that direction, and bring it back to whoever's in charge.
• Precursors: The Ancients in the original game.
• Protagonist Without a Past: The player character is given no backstory prior to coming to Neverwinter. This is in contrast with the sequel (and almost all other Bioware games), in which the protagonist's past is notably significant to the plot.
• Real Time with Pause: Can be turned off during multiplayer by the DM.
• Shout-Out: A gnome quest-giver in the original campaign is a member of the turnip-loving Jansen clan.
• Statistically Speaking
• The Dragon: Maugrim to Morag in the original campaign.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Aribeth in the original campaign, who despite being a heroic paladin until halfway through, never actually does anything, well, heroic. While she was promoted from a field-work position to a management position, it's still...well. Jarring.
• Title Drop
• Two-Part Trilogy: The two expansions are written with the assumption that the protagonist is the same character in both, and that they are not the same person who was the hero in the base campaign (since base game and Shadows take place at the same time).
• Unwitting Pawn: Poor Fenthick...
• Violation of Common Sense: In the first game you're encouraged to stab yourself in the heart in one place. Sure, the game drops some heavy hints that it will take you to the spirit world, but you're still stabbing yourself in the goddamn heart!
  • This gets particularly bad if you take a close look at the altar. There's a skeleton on it, almost certainly belonging to that crazy dwarf you encounter in there.
• Warp Whistle: The Stone of Recall in the original campaign, which made hit-and-run tactics possible for any character. Later campaigns gave you limited uses of their respective whistles.
• We Cannot Go on Without You: The monsters continue to fight your henchmen, though.
• What the Hell, Player?: Try taking off all your armor and talking to the NPCs in public areas.
  • NPCs also get annoyed if you walk around with your weapon drawn.
• With This Herring: You get more money from random looting than you do from Aribeth for saving the freakin' city.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Once the Wailing Death has run its course, Desther is promptly abandoned by Maugrim.

Tropes specific to individual expansions include:

Shadows of Undrentide

• Executive Meddling: Originally, the game would have allowed you to sell a kidnapped baby into slavery. You can still kidnap the baby, now you just can't do anything with it.

"I'm keeping the baby for myself."

• Lost Technology: The Netherese technology.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Double Subverted. He dies, but not by the poison.
• Morph Weapon: Desert's Fury always appears as a weapon your character class is proficient in. Thoughtful, but odd when your Monk finds a Kama in an Egyptian desert tomb.
• Precursors: The Netheril.
• Shout-Out: In a somewhat Meta case, Shadows of Undrentide includes an NPC named Torias, after one of the more active moderators on the Bioware forums at the time.
• Shmuck Bait: One can find a beautiful set of golden armor on a rack, right in the middle of a suspiciously large, empty room with plenty upon plenty of skeletons surrounding it. Even if you can't equip full plate armor, you will probably steal it anyways just to see what the trap looks like...
• Sword of Plot Advancement: Desert's Fury in Shadows of the Undrentide is a rare optional example; while it is not completely necessary for the following dungeon, it certainly helps.
• Taken for Granite: The Big Bad is a Medusa after all.
• The Dragon: J'Nah to Heurodis in Shadows of the Undrentide. Somewhat notable for being killed off almost as soon as she's introduced.

Hordes of the Underdark

• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Somewhat inverted, actually. The best magical items you find will only be worth pennies at first, but what the game doesn't tell you is that there's a cap to how much merchants will pay for any item no matter how valuable. The more you progress in the game the higher the cap raises, and in Chapter 3 you can get tens of thousands of gold for items that merchants in Chapter 1 only offered you a couple thousand for.
  • Played straight with Volkarion, the djinn merchant. He horribly rips you off on the items you sell to him, and if you comparison shop with other merchants you can usually get one and a half times what he offers for the same item, if not much more.
• Bag of Spilling: At the beginning of Hordes, you wake up to find a drow assassin stealing all your stuff. Fortunately, you can get it back later... if you can find the right treasure chest.
• Brick Joke: The "Pearl of Bashing".
• Bottomless Bladder: Lampshaded. There are two conversations where Deekin talks about how he needs to go.
• But Thou Must!: Invoked in the most non-subtle way possible in Hordes of the Underdark. After the first chapter, the mage you freed in the final battle places you under a geas that forces you to track down and kill the Valsharess, or die.
• Chekhov's Gun: Also The Relic of the Reaper, which is present as being the equivalent of the Stone of Recall for Hordes of the Underdark, and ends up being used to trap you in Cania and release an arch-devil to the mortal planes.
• Clingy MacGuffin: The Relic of the Reaper in Hordes of the Underdark cannot be sold or discarded.
• Deadpan Snarker: Numerous NPCs and henchmen, especially Enserric. The player has the option to be one too, of course.

Mephistopheles: Last I knew, I thought I had trapped you for all eternity in an icy little place called Cania. Player Character: Sorry, Hell froze over. Mephistopheles: How very witty.

• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The final boss of Hordes of the Underdark, Mephistopheles the second most powerful Devil in the multiverse. Compare to Baldur's Gate, where in TOB you get to punch out the multiverse's number one Demon as a Bonus Boss.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom?: Deekin sings this trope. This song is also a major reason why people love him, or alternatively, hate him.)
• Estrogen Brigade Bait: Valen Shadowbreath, the Tiefling warrior in Hordes of the Underdark. It's even lampshaded in-game, when he gets catcalled by Drow priestesses asking about his tail.
• Executive Meddling: There is a lot in Hordes of the Underdark. If you poke about in the Dialogue Trees of your party members in the toolset, you can see several dialogue options Dummied Out "at the request of WoTC." Justified, because some of the options can allow you to use the True Names to force your party members to love you. They also got rid of the best True Name option ever, though - making the Final Boss, Mephistopheles, into a Chambermaid.
  • There was also the ability to use a baby you picked up in Shadows of Undrentide for a Beholder's bridge machine. You'd get a spinning top.
• Face Heel Turn: Mephistopheles attempts to invoke this against your allies, with the results depending on how nice you were to them.
• Face Heel Revolving Door: Aribeth again, though the severity depends on what you do. Between the original game and Hordes of the Underdark, Aribeth can be a Paladin who turns evil, turns back to good, seemingly turns evil again in Cania (Hell), turns good again, then sides with Mephistopheles in the final battle until you use her True Name to sway her back to your side.
• Geas: As a way of avoiding the But Thou Must! faux-choice, the player character gets a geas to kill the evil sorceress Valsharess.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck: The guardian of the quarry in Hordes of the Underdark tells you to "pike off."
  • "Coal-black pimple on a glabrezu!"
• Hailfire Peaks: The deepest areas of Cania include lava rivers flowing down solid glacial ice.
• I Know Your True Name: The climax centers on this concept. If you pay enough money, you can skip the final boss by learning his true name, which can be used to command him.
• Lampshade Hanging: Deekin sure likes to do this. Among other things he wonders why dragons have wings if they can't fly, and comments that Aribeth's armour isn't practical at all.
• Like a Badass Out of Hell: Later on, you get to trek through the Hells. The player is a badass. Do the math.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Inverted when you get to epic levels. Wizards' Epic Spells are mostly terrible, with only the defensive ones being any good, while all their offensive magic loses with static damage against ever-advancing hitpoints. Meanwhile, Warriors not only get more and more damage and hit points, but also some incredibly powerful abilities, such as making your criticals save-or-die and making some class powers incredibly strong. Popular builds will force a save-or-die every third hit, or can get attacks with a damage of over 2k as a bare minimum, without even resorting to magic items.
• Literary Agent Hypothesis: Invoked in Hordes of the Underdark to explain the first two games. There's even a possible conversation about it if you have Deekin and Sharwyn in your party.
  • When Deekin asks you what you thought of his book — i.e., the Shadows of Undrentide expansion — all but one of the available responses are fairly critical, including "it was better than that other story about a plague in Neverwinter." Deekin seems quite happy to hear your opinion.
• Love Redeems: In Hordes of the Underdark you can use your love for Nathyrra and Aribeth to convince them to side with you over the final boss.
• Love Triangle: Hoo boy.
  • You can make one between yourself, Nathyrra and Aribeth. You can flirt shamelessly with both of them if you take them as your henchmen, and at one point when they stop to talk to each other the conversation briefly switches to their feelings for you. The endings for the two actually don't conflict at all if you try to get both of them to fall in love with you, which would seem to imply you end up with both of them. A particularly racy dialogue option with both of them in the party actually has you trying to convince them to "share" you...and potentially succeeding!
  • If you have a female character, you can also do the same between you, Valen and the Sleeping Man. If you got your character to be those two men's true love from the Knower of Names, you're pretty much set that all 3 of you will fight Mephistopheles side by side in the final battle. OT3 indeed!
  • And then there's the fact that the name of your true love, and the name of the Sleeping Man's true love, are both chosen at random when you ask the Knower of Names who they are. There's the possibility that your henchman (or henchwomen, if you're a male with the two females) is in love with you and you with them, but the Knower of names reveals your true love to be someone else, and this same person is also the true love of the Sleeping Man, who is loved by the Knower of Places. The Knower of Names herself could also be someone's true love and she's in love with Mephistopheles. Ultimately, almost every conceivable permutation of Triang Relations can be achieved by some combination of characters, or even multiple combinations at once, all thanks to the Random Number God.
• Mirror Match: Literally. Early on, you find a mirror. It spawns a duplicate of you, sans your weapon.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Nathyrra and all the other Eilistraee-worshiping drow.
• No Hero Discount: Lampshaded. One such merchant says he plans to teleport to safety if the upcoming siege goes poorly, and so if he doesn't charge you and you lose in spite of his generosity he'll be out of a lot of money.
  • White Thesta she still charges you, but she says she's lowering her prices to only cover the base cost of the items since you are fighting to save the city. They're still
• Precursors: The pre-devil Baatezu.
• Schrödinger's Gun: When you recruit Aribeth as a henchman, you can either turn her good or evil. If you turn her good she's loyal to you right up to the end and will try to resist the final boss's attempts to convince her to betray you. If you turn her evil, she'll betray you on her own and claim they had planned it this way all along. Rather inconsequential though, since you can still turn her back to your side with a Persaude check.
• Sealed Badass in a Can: You, after Mephistopheles banishes you to Cania.
• Shmuck Bait: That golden armor trap in Shadows of Undrentide returns. With even more skeletons surrounding it.
• Talking the Monster to Death: If you learn his True Name, you can order the final boss of Hordes of the Underdark to die on the spot.
• The Dragon: Mephistopheles is set up as this to the Valsharess, but thanks to The Plan he becomes a Dragon Ascendant.
• The Power of Love: If you take her as a romance option, Nathyrra and Aribeth can be convinced to resist the Big Bad's attempts to sway her to his side by reminding her of your love.
• To Hell and Back: There's even a line for it in the endgame - "I've been to the hells and back, Durnan..."
• Unwitting Pawn: Both the Valsharess and the player character.
• We Can Rule Together: Play your cards right in the Hordes of the Underdark expansion, and you can use the True Name of Mephistopheles to bind him to your command, and choose to either rule the Eighth Circle of Hell together, or you rule it yourself with him as your lackey.
• With This Herring: Averted. At the beginning of the game you have your items and equipment stolen by a thief, and the innkeeper gives you free access to the inn's armory to re-equip yourself before you set out. The stuff in there isn't great, but he does have a fairly wide selection of equipment so most any class will be ready to go after a visit. As well, though you sadly don't get to collect on it in-game, the reward he put up for the quest you signed up for is 100,000 gold pieces--not a huge fortune but it's still a considerable amount.