Tales of Taliesin

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Skibbles
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Tales of Taliesin

Post by Skibbles » Sun Feb 26, 2023 4:41 am

This post is for posterity, tossing it into Google's algorithm should someone search for it, and doesn't actually directly apply to Arelith but I can think of nowhere else to put it. Maybe someone that used to play there is active here, now, on Arelith! Speak up if you are!

Anyway. In 2003 or 04 or so there was a server called Tales of Taliesin, and this was how I got into Neverwinter Nights (or even the concept of role-playing in general) in the first place.

I noticed, a small while ago, that the servers are up but I couldn't figure out how to log in because it was just a generic Hak error.

From my digging around in dark and dusty corners of the internets it seems they tried to reboot it in 2017 for NWN's 15th anniversary and for some reason the servers are still up!

It does not appear anyone has played there, but you can indeed log in by dusting off the old haks it used to use - in this case it seems this version of CEP worked this time. On mobile, anyway.

It was quite a fun few minutes to run about areas I haven't seen for like 15+ years or so.

Here's a screenshot of Auberon's Square, which is sort of like Cordor's Plaza or maybe more like Andunor's hub because there was a portal right there:

Image

Anyway if you're reading this for minor amusement here's some random factoids about Tales of Taliesin:

  • It was very popular for its time, and maybe one of the very first servers to have discovered the need for second servers to distribute the population.

  • XP gain was super slow, in the single or low double digits per kill, but on death you lost an entire level and a half.

  • As a result most characters hovered around level 12-14. Only one character ever made it to 20, with another getting to 19. Nobody ever got to 21 even when HOTU came out.

  • It used the Greyhawk campaign setting.

  • Mechanics were far less understood, and even now the game is broken in all those classic ways we know and love. You can do a 1 level monk dip. Clerics are completely overpowered.

  • Extremely low magic world. Most characters had a +1 or maybe +2 sword at best.

I'm not sure how Tales of Taliesin ever drifted away and lost its base. I think there was hype and expectation that it would quickly move to NWN2, but we all know how that turned out, and it may have lost its traction there.

Either way a dive like this does leave one thankful that servers like Arelith, Ravenloft, Cormyr, Forgotten Realms, and more, are still standing and more popular than ever.

So I guess in that sense it does apply to Arelith in that I'm appreciative and well aware of the fact there is no platform that truly compares to this one, that I have seen anyway.

Irongron wrote: [...] the super-secret Arelith development roadmap is a post apocalyptic wasteland populated with competing tribes of hand-bombard wielding techno-giants, and strewn with the bones of long dead elves.

So we're very much on track.

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