NWN - Tyrants of the Moonsea Review

The RPG Codex reviewed the expansion pack Tyrants of the Moonsea for Neverwinter Nights:

RPG Codex Review: Neverwinter Nights – Tyrants of the Moonsea

For a couple of years now, I've been plugging Tyrants of the Moonsea as the best piece of official content for Neverwinter Nights, and yet I've begun to suspect few of you have hearkened to my sage advice. So I thought to myself, this one's never had a proper official review around here, why not put that front page to good use?​

Authored by Luke Scull under Ossian Studios, 2019’s Tyrants of the Moonsea is arguably the flagship expansion pack for Beamdog’s Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition 2018 re-release. Like the first NWN:EE expansion, Darkness over Daggerford (Enhanced Edition), it was born of Atari’s Premium Modules program for the original BioWare release of Neverwinter Nights and similarly scuttled when the publisher suddenly cancelled that initiative, but DoD was nearing completion and Alan Miranda’s Ossian decided to share it on the Neverwinter Vault, whereas TotM was still in the early stages of development. When Beamdog acquired the NWN license, Ossian finally got the opportunity to polish up and make DoD:EE available as paid DLC, but the adventure's content is still the same that was (and continues to be) available for free on the Vault. The Vault version of TotM, however, was just a demo and the module was only completed for the EE, pretty much tripling the content and taking the plot to its conclusion.

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Looking back to the Infinity Engine and even many of its contemporary peers, Baldur’s Gate 2 is king (no matter how much that might make some of the local fauna seethe), but why? Icewind Dale had better combat, the first Baldur’s Gate had better exploration, Planescape: Torment had better writing etc. – all of that is true, but Baldur’s Gate 2 was pretty darn good at all of it. That's what gets it top billing and the same qualities apply to Tyrants of the Moonsea for NWN – you should easily find other modules, official or fan-made, that do better in various individual respects, but Ossian's title scores high on all counts and if you enjoy NWN at all (if you don't, you should never admit it!), passing on TotM would be a big mistake.

Now, if the byzantine brandings and histories have left you confused, allow me to make it simple – Tyrants of the Moonsea is for sale on GOG, Steam and the Beamdog Client. If you also want to check out its prior episodes in the Alazander series, they're free on the Neverwinter Vault as Siege of Shadowdale Enhanced Edition and Crimson Tides of Tethyr Enhanced Edition or in NWN:EE's integrated content browser. For historic purposes, links to the Diamond Edition distributions of those two modules are on their respective Vault pages under Related Projects.

So there you have it, I've led you to the water, I've even forced your snout in, the rest is up to you. Drink and you'll get the full flavour of competent writing and design, solid production values and artistic direction, fun combat and exploration… To put it simply, Tyrants of the Moonsea is, at this time, the definitive single-player NWN experience.

Thanks Couchpotato!