Ossian Studios Interview
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Q: Could you give us some background on how you initially got involved with the BioWare Premium Module program? When and how did that happen exactly?
A: Darkness over Daggerford is the first product released by Ossian Studios and by the look of it, it's made quite a splash in not just the core NWN community but in the game community in general. It's been a long road in getting to this point, however.
I originally approached Greg Zeschuk about the idea of Ossian doing a premium mod for BioWare back at GDC '05. My thought was to do an RPG side project, and NWN was the best candidate for that because of its toolset. Since I had been a producer at BioWare on NWN and BG, I already knew many people there from the Live Team, so I felt the setup had a lot of potential. Greg really liked the idea and immediately introduced me to their External Producer, Diarmid Clarke.
Over the next few weeks, I began work on the mod concept. If you can believe in extreme coincidences (and this is no joke), my original idea had been to set the mod in the Nelanther Isles and call it Pirates of the Sword Coast! Diarmid then informed me that that was actually the mod they were creating internally, and we both had a good laugh. Hearing about the feedback from WotC (Wizards of the Coast) on the earlier premium mods, I then chose perhaps the most classic Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms setting: the Western Heartlands along the Sword Coast. As I was scanning up and down the map, the small town of Daggerford caught my eye. It was right in between the major cities of Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, and had some great (i.e., dangerous) areas around it. I thought it would serve as the perfect backdrop for an adventure involving some dark mysteries and intrigue. I proceeded to write and refine several drafts of Daggerford's core story, after which it was approved by BioWare and WotC.
During that time, we began our search for some talented members of the NWN modding community to become a part of the Daggerford team. To be honest, it got off to a bit of a rocky start as we tried to find the "right" team members with the best fit, and there were a few false starts from designers that didn't work out. But by August 2005, we had most of our team in place, with Alan (Tarrant) and Anya coming aboard a couple of months later. When all those talented people began pouring their creative passion into the game is when the magic began to happen...
