I made decent progress on the first floor of "Newfallen" this weekend. Most of the ceiling has been added. I've sketched out the Gynok Moltar encounter, but I think I need to make it a little easier. The druid is now Pham Willowbark, who appears in most of my other EQ adventures.
The plan is for each room to be its own little mini-adventure. I've decided to use the Befallen quest "Plight of the Undead" as the model for my Befallen revamp. It's one of the newer Befallen quests — and by newer, I mean only a decade old. Unlike classic Befallen, this one has minibosses and a final boss. The original quest begins with a trip down into the well… I'm going to split that up a bit.
The player will be able to just ignore the whole plot, anyway.
Shown is SK1, the room you camp in order to get the key to the second floor. The first story miniboss, Hrek the Defiler, has set up shop in order to bind an ogre shadowknight to her will, aided by a dark elf necromancer and his pet. You can see her from the broken door on the east side of the room, or from the working doorway on the west side before you enter.
Once you enter, she respawns into an aggro form and attacks. She gives some plot-related text when she attacks and when she dies, and she's also given a warning that it is only her presence that is keeping the shadowknight from attacking.
Once she's killed, the SK, necro and pet respawn into aggro form and rush the player. Kill them and loot the key from the SK's corpse.
For some reason, having mobs drop items isn't working for me. Not sure if it's because of the custom construction or whatnot — I have no idea. But now I am making lootable corpses to give the stuff. That is actually more like EverQuest, so it's not a bad thing, but I wonder if I have any other custom maps — like the back part of Najena's Lair — which are no longer working.
One more minor encounter on the way to the second floor and the first floor will be to the "80%" mark. 80% of the work is done in 20% of the time. The remaining 20% takes 80% of the time. When all of Newfallen is at 80%, I can finally publish it and get feedback as I finish it.
