Who knows what monstrous creatures lurk in Darkwood Forest?

“Only the foolhardy would risk an encounter with the unknown perils that lurk in the murky depths of Darkwood Forest. Yet there is no alternative, for your quest is a desperate race against time. Do you dare venture into the sinister Darkwood Forest to help the Dwarves of the village of Stonebridge?”

Introduction

This module is adapted from the book "The Forest of Doom" © 1983 . It is intended for characters of levels 1–3. Good or Neutral alignments only. Multiplay is possible, though the original gamebook was intended for solo play.

This module has expanded on the original gamebook by the addition of many Titan-based monsters, characters and other miscellaneous material found in Out of the Pit, Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World, and other Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

Details

Current Module Version 1.01 Changes from Version 1.0 to 1.01: Trigger redrawn in Throg quest; Broken line of code in Throg cutscene fixed; 10% chance of Rain added to Darkwood Plain maps; Fog cut-off pushed back to 75m in Darkwood Plains maps; 20% chance of rain and Icy Exterior skybox added to Pagan Plains map. First Released: 3rd October 2004 Version 1.01 Release: 6th October 2004

Requirements

This game requires the Neverwinter Nights game by Bioware, and also requires the expansions:

Shadows of Undrentide Hordes of the Community Expansion Pack v1.01

If you do not have all of the expansions installed, the game will not work.

Level / Scope of Module

This module is intended for a character of 1st–3rd level, though many of the encounters should scale in difficulty. If thoroughly explored, the module can take a character from 1st to 5th level. Playing time will vary greatly depending on the style of play. Average time to complete the module is probably around 6–10 hours, though it could take longer.

Installation

Copy the file “FF3 - The Forest of Doom.mod” to the Neverwinter\modules directory. Copy the two HAK files “Rural_Tower.hak” and “TowerInterior.hak” to your Neverwinter\hak directory. The game is now installed.

Gameplay Issues

In keeping with the spirit of the original books, Healing Potions are much more rare than in normal Neverwinter Nights modules. Instead, you can buy Provisions (which may be familiar to those who have played the original Fighting Fantasy books), which restore a number of HPs determined by your level. The higher your level, the more you get back from eating food.

Additionally, you can create your own Provisions during the adventure. To enable you to do this are two important game items: a Flint and Steel and a Fishing Rod.

Flint and Steel. You begin the game with this item. It can be used to create a campfire over which you may cook many kinds of food ingredients that you can find in the forest (mushrooms, salt, meat, etc.), or buy from a friendly food salesman. Certain foods, however, require the use of an oven and may not be cooked over a campfire. Successfully cooking food creates Provisions. Of course, meat does not grow on trees, so you will have to hunt the wild creatures of the forest, some of which may also decide to hunt you!

Fishing Rod. This item can be bought from many of the stores in the game. It may be used in certain areas to catch fish. These areas (obviously always near water) are highlighted during the game by pressing the TAB key. They show up as ‘fish’ on riverbanks. Here you can try to catch fish, though it is trickier than you might think, and you will not always be successful. Rangers, Druids and Barbarians have a higher chance of successfully fishing, and of finding food during the adventure.

In an attempt to balance gameplay a little, we have gone ahead and placed small mini-quests into the game to give experience bonuses to non-Fighter classes. Be on the lookout for them.

As a final note in this section, we have also made use of the Appraise skill which was introduced in Hordes of the Underdark. This affects how a Store owner feels towards a PC, whether favourable or unfavourable. Please see the Hordes of the Underdark manual, page 23 for more information.

Copyright

The crafters of this module are indebted to the following authors for their contributions to the world of Titan:

Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, Peter Darvill-Evans, Marc Gascoigne, Keith Martin, Paul Mason, Keith P Phillips, Luke Sharp, Marc Smith, Pete Tamlyn, , Robin Waterfield and others.

The authors retain © on their respective creations.

In particular, this module contains text taken from the book Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World © 1986 Marc Gascoigne, and we are much indebted to Mr Gascoigne for his work on creating the world of Titan from the disparate authors’ writings.

The levels of Yaztromo’s Tower are based on an illustration by Russ Nicholson found in the book Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World. We have tried to faithfully recreate his evocative two- dimensional drawing into three-dimensions via the Aurora Toolset. We hope fans of the books will enjoy exploring Yaztromo’s Tower.

This module is not intended for profit and may not be distributed in exchange for money. It is intended as homage to the original gamebook, and to the rest of the Fighting Fantasy world of Titan. We have tried to keep as close as possible to the book, though we had to deviate slightly in a few places due to the limitations of the Toolkit. We hope any Titan fanatics won't be too disappointed.

A list of books referenced in this module:

Fighting Fantasy 3: The Forest of Doom (plot/gameplay) Fighting Fantasy 14: Temple of Terror (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 20: Sword of the Samurai (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 23: Masks of Mayhem (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 26: Crypt of the Sorcerer (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 28: Phantoms of Fear (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 31: Battleblade Warrior (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 35: Daggers of Darkness (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 37: Portal of Evil (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 38: Vault of the Vampire (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 39: Fangs of Fury (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 40: Dead of Night (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 43: Keep of the Lich-lord (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 44: Legend of the Shadow Warriors (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 45: Spectral Stalkers (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 48: Moonrunner (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 49: Siege of Sardath (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 50: Return to Firetop Mountain (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 56: Knights of Doom (monsters) Fighting Fantasy 57: Magehunter (monsters) Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World (world sourcebook) Out of the Pit (monster sourcebook) Dungeoneer (plot/gameplay) Blacksand! (world sourcebook) Sorcery 2: Khare—Cityport of Traps (monsters)

Thank You

Credit belongs to the writer of the two main HAKs we utilise in this module.

Velmar’s wonderful Rural with Tower and Tower Interior HAKs certainly provide an exterior tower of sufficient imposing height to stand high above the rest of the placeables, and his round tower interior both looks very good and works very well in conjunction with the tower exterior. For more information on Velmar’s HAKs used in this module visit:

http://nwvault.ign.com/Files/hakpacks/data/1036856678633.shtml

http://nwvault.ign.com/Files/hakpacks/data/1036858536785.shtml

Our humble thanks go to Velmar for making his HAKs freely useable by the community. Our module would be poorer without them. Thank you.

It should also be noted that this module would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the wonderful CEP team, and all those creative and talented individuals whose work appears in the CEP. We don’t know all your names, but we are grateful that you have all allowed those of us who are less knowledgeable and talented in such areas to create something unique and worthwhile. Thank you all.

On the scripting side of things, we would also like to thank the “Script Sage” on the Neverwinter Nights Scripting Forum (http://cgi.nwvault.ign.com/yabb/YaBB.cgi) with the somewhat dubious moniker Axe_Murderer. His help has been invaluable over the previous months as we slowly got to grips with writing scripts that actually worked and did what we intended them to. Thank you, Axe_Murderer, wherever you are.

Our sincerest thanks are also extended to our intrepid Beta tester Robert Bartelli for his extremely useful comments and suggestions. His advice and remarks encouraged us to tweak certain aspects of the module here and there, definitely improving it—even if his suggestions caused not a few headaches when it came to working out just how we were going to implement them! We also thank him for his wonderfully detailed and professional reports—we sincerely appreciate your pointing out mistakes, errors, typos, and the like, rather than them being made available for the whole community to see. Thank you.

In Closing

We hope you enjoy this module, and that you find playing it less frustrating than we found writing it! Sleep deprivation aside, the last few weeks of getting this ready for our Beta tester were sheer torment: discovering problems, fixing problems, discovering more problems, re- writing and re-re-writing this Readme file . . . We hope you agree that it has all been worth it. We’re rather proud of this module; we hope you enjoy it too.

If you have any comments or queries, please address them to:

ravensblade(at)ntlworld(dot)com – replace the bracketed words with the proper symbols

Please also mark the Subject as “FF3” or “Neverwinter Module” or similar to avoid being processed by the overworked spam filters.

And to anyone who’s actually managed to read this far: Kudos, fun gaming, and farewell.

Team “FF3 Mod” Alistair Davis Simon Osborne