Hessa, the One-Day NPC* is released!

Inspired by the One-Day NPC concept introduced by Ghareth, Bons has created her own quick NPC project.

Hessa yr Nu'man will approach the party at the City Gates of Athkatla after Anomen has killed Surayah in the revenge path of his storyline. She will present herself as a source of information about the current location of Yusef Farrahd, which she will offer up at a price.

Hessa can be downloaded here.

Hessa includes:

- One neutral evil, half-elf thief, level 12, 13 or 15 depending on the party's experience at the first encounter.

- One small NPC-related quest

- One small, new quest-related area

- One new soundset of dubious entertainment value

- 12 banters and 20-something interjections

Hessa requires Throne of Bhaal to function, and requires that you have chosen to take revenge against Saerk and killed Surayah as part of Anomen's personal quest. Anomen's presence is not required after that.

* - Bons cheated and took one week.

Umm, you should put spoiler tags on this, and also it should be in the ToB forum. ;)

Spoiler tags, yes, but just requiring ToB to be installed doesn't automatically force it into the ToB forum.

I have so far neglected to offer my congratulations on the 1-day NPCs, so let me remedy that: Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah! Tell me, was the design work spread out over a period of weeks, with the actual coding all done in a day, or was it 16 hours from conception to .zip file?

About the NPCs themselves: Don't we get any teaser info? For instance, finally being able to have an Evil Thief is a great blessing, but a pure-classed, non-Dualable, vanilla Thief is....kinda bland. Will there be unique items and plot twists to sway us and ring the bell of our salivary glands?

Also, what levels is Ghareth? Does he have any interesting quirks? I ask because I've designed a recruitable Fighter->Necromancer, and I'm just hoping they aren't too similar.

You'd have to ask Bons how Hessa came about--it's a subset of her Surayah project so I suspect that her character concept has been around for a little while.

In the case of Ghareth, I think the Wednesday before the project date was when I said "Okay, I'm really going to do this thing" and I did a little brain-racking to see what I could come up with that I was interested in, and I came up with a low-level F/M Cowled Enforcer type. It was actually watching my Season 2 Babylon 5 DVD set that got me thinking about his situation.

So, yeah, Wednesday was the concept. Then on Thursday or Friday I prebuilt the CRE and came up with the name, and did just a little brainstorming for "what kind of guy will he be?" since I wanted to find the portrait. Didn't write anything down, though.

It wasn't until Sunday morning that I actually started writing out dialogue, though. Wrote and coded it all in one day.

Let's always hearken back to "it's a one-day NPC" when addressing that question. You're not curious what the new area is? You're not curious how she might affect the Saerk plot? Hints are already dropped.

I will also say that I consider Hessa's "in-forest" comment to be among the best lines I've seen/heard in a mod, ever.

3/4. Interesting quirks, I'll let others be the judge of, but if the answer turns out to be "no" I'll just hide behind "one-day" again. [img]smile.gif[/img] He has no spiffy powers or abilities or swag, if that's what you mean.

[ 02-23-2004, 12:00 AM: Message edited by: jcompton ]

Oh yeah, forgot about the new area, duh. But the problem is, once that's over with, you're stuck with a pure Thief whose increases in skills quickly become redundant (not like that was Bons's fault). To give a comparative example, the character design (of Jerr Conner's) that most closely matches is a NE Female Elven Asssassin (delaying the point at which more skill points become redundant) from Kara-Tur, who uses Nunchaku (proficiency: Flail) and can create her own Shurikens (proficiency: Darts) every day, with their level of enchantment determined by her level.

Ghareth is Levels 3/4? So, he's a Multiclassed Human? Okay... man, with levels that low, I don't know how he impressed the Cowls enough to let him into their arganization. His dad or someone must have bought him a commission. [img]smile.gif[/img]

FYI, at his lowest recruitable level, Gordon is 8->2.

All a matter of perspective. One person already has said "Finally a pureclass thief who doesn't leave at spell hold" and I know that others have crabbed about that perceived lack in the past.

No, he's a dualled human. An injury cut short his military career and he, slowly, worked his way up from handyman to Cowled Enforcer JG.