Wheel of Time: The Third Age

Persistent World started by Iraq War Veteran and Eduction Software Programmer Sowens and Portuguese citizen Ox-Espatato. It is based on Robert Jordan's bestselling Wheel of Time book series and it is one of the oldest PWs still active in NWN. It is also consistently the most popular server based on the series. It is sometimes referred to as 3A, WoT:3A or (more recently) TA for short.

The Beginning
Sowens and Ox were players on RobD's original Wheel of Time PW which started sometime around June of 2002. During one of its long downtimes, Sowens began developing areas where Ox dropped in. He liked the build and contributed some areas for it. When RobD visited their build an agreement was made to link it as a second server. However, when RobD brought his server up again he had a dispute with Sowens and Ox and banned them.

The Mod
After a month's worth of work Sowens and Ox launched 1 week early in September 2002 with 80+ areas. It was built with the HCR. Sowens gave a lot of freedom to players emphasizing very few rules and also allowed multiple characters, something RobD's server did not do.

He also made a point to not use haks to allow easy entry for new players to NWN. To keep the mod small in size he used as many prebuilt characters and items as possible. This proved very effective and kept the mod extremely stable and somewhat "patch proof".

Ox built dungeon crawls that were mainly two levels with a boss at each end. There were no journal quests of any sort due to lack of a database at the time and in order to prevent exploits. This was also meant to encourage Role Play through player interaction. Hunting areas were developed and there was a distinct effort to encourage group play instead of solo.

The mod started in the city of Four Kings, a key trading area in the books and a neutral site for all the factions. Initially the conflict was designed as a Good (the White Tower) vs Evil (Darkfriends) but actually found its best dynamic in the White Tower vs Whitecloaks faction conflict. What proved to me the most popular were the scheduled DM events every Saturday

From the start, the Third Age proved a huge success and its predecessor was forced to change its name to prevent bleeding. It eventually folded but before that happened RobD uploaded a version of his mod to the Vault found here:

Due to a military obligation Sowens had to give the mod to Rolks to run as a backup for about a month. Rolks and Ox instituted some additions to the mod including dividing Caemlyn into four separate areas. In the meantime Sowens was compiling player contributions to expand the mod.

On Sowens return he wasn't pleased with the changes or the size of the mod he was working on; the one with the player contributions. He then announced the end of current mod and the start of a new one as soon as Rolks was finished hosting. A Tarmon Gaidon event was run by Praetor Augustus, BGZuila and others and the first instance of what would come to be called The Third Age was over.