Three Towns



The Three Towns is a server vault persistent world.

Introduction
The Three Towns takes its name from three small settlements that have entered into a mutual trade and protection pact in the turbulent years following a Cataclysm: Wheaton, Fer and Arakan. These towns lie in a somewhat triangular formation at the eastern end of a landmass, blocked by impassable mountains to the north, inhospitable forests to the south, and the enemy pressing in from the west. Each town has its own strength and resources; Wheaton its grain and sheltered position, Fer its access to what little iron is left in the mountains, and the skills of the dwarves who make them their home, and Arakan its closely guarded magical secrets. Together, this fragile alliance has thus far managed to hold the enemy in the central fields, known commonly as the Contested Areas. What limited manpower the towns possess is dedicated to holding their lines at the passes into Fer and Arakan, but they lack the sheer forces required to drive them from the Contested Areas.

There are more settlements than just the Three Towns, but these are relatively isolated, by circumstance and sometimes by choice. These small settlements are poorer than the Three Towns, generally speaking, but usually have they provide an alternate base of operations for adventurers seeking to stay closer to the enemy's deeper holdings.

First Steps
The first thing a player needs to understand about Three Towns is that it may be more difficult than other modules or persistent worlds. The enemies are custom-designed to be challenging but not stupidly overpowered, many changes have been made to otherwise buggy and unbalanced spells and systems, and the difficulty in getting metal-based gear can be daunting, especially at the start of your career. Encounters are not scaled to the level and number of the adventurers who may come across them; they simply exist where they exist, and if your new character winds up in over his head, it's probably because he stumbled into an area where overpowering enemies were present, not because of a fault with a spawner. Chalk it up to experience and make a note to return later, or with a larger group, or both.

Monsters in Three Towns are all custom-created, and with the exception of certain very weak or very strong monsters, all have character classes and intelligently chosen skills and feats and 75% to 100% of their maximum possible hit points, as opposed to the NWN standard of 50%.

Three Towns runs using the D&D Hardcore Rules difficulty setting, and a custom created AI system. This means that monsters and NPC's can and will critical hit, use talents like knockdown and disarm, and generally defend themselves to the best of their ability. Three Towns is primarily full PvP, which means that not only might you want to keep an eye out on other players who may not have your best interests in mind, but you should be careful about where you toss that fireball, unless you don't mind crisping your teammates along with the enemy.

Because of the difficulty in Three Towns, it will be greatly to your benefit as a player to have a solid handle on "strong" character design. This means that while your halfling bard with base 13 in all attributes may have done fine in the single-player game, your experience in Three Towns may be somewhat unpleasant. The idea of min-maxing, or optimizing your character design, may be an anathema to many members of the roleplaying community, it is nevertheless valid and, due to its very existence, governs the path a module design may take. A world designed for so-called average characters will be a joke to min-maxed characters when it comes to combat, and unlike in a real pen and paper game, there are almost no counterbalances to this optimization.

Systems and Features
The Three Towns uses many specially coded systems and features to enhance the world. Over the years Three Towns has been running, these systems have been designed, implemented, tweaked and improved. Some of the systems used are:


 * Custom AI: The Three Towns uses an artificial intelligence system coded in-house.  This system makes full use of spells, feats, creature abilities and tactics, while limiting the impact on performance.  By assigning different sub-sets of the AI system to different creatures, a good balance between combat performance and impact on module performance can be achieved.  For example, a simple NPC melee fighter doesn't need code to check for spells and abilities, they just have to fight.  The more complex the creature, the more complex the AI it uses.
 * World Manager: In a standard single player module (or single run-though multiplayer module), creatures can be placed into areas, ready to encounter the players when they arrive.  However, for persistent worlds, like Three Towns, creating creatures becomes more problematic.  Firstly, if all the creatures in all the areas come into existence when the module is loaded, the strain of creating and maintaining all of them will be huge, and module performance will degrade.  Also, once the creature has been killed, you want it to come back after a while (respawn) for the next player who comes through the area.  In Three Towns, we use a system called the World Manager.  This system monitors all the areas in the world, and when a player enters the area for the first time, it will spawn the creatures for that area.  The World Manager also handles despawning of creatures (if a player leaves an area, it waits a while, then removes any remaining alive creatures so they are not a drain on resources) and cleanup of areas (if the area is empty for a while, it cleans up any left over loot, items or other objects on the ground to free up resources).
 * Guild System: To help players get involved with the module, to feel a real part of the world and to build up communities, the Three Towns includes a six guild system.  The guilds are coded systems with headquarters, merchants, guards and inter-guild relationships.  They are split into two good aligned guilds, two neutral guilds and two evil guilds, and equipped with the tools needed to let players join, leave, change relationships to other guilds, buy more guards for defense and so on.  After being set up and coded, the guilds were turned over to the players.  They are player run, player organized and player defended.  This helps bring players together into communities around the guilds, and promotes team based PvP as the guilds role play against each other.
 * Full Database Support: The Three Towns uses NWNX to store module, player and creature data.  This means that instead of having to use item 'tokens' to record quest status, it can be recorded in the database and leave players inventories free.  It means that we can store all the information we need about players to ensure that unauthorized players cannot access other players accounts.  It means that we can easily and efficiently ban and player causing major problems in the world.  It means so much more, but listing all the things you can do with NWNX would be dull!
 * Dual Servers: Over the last several months, Three Towns has had more players than it can support.  With a 55 player limit, the server was usually completely full, with multiple players waiting for a slot to free up.  So, through generous donations, we obtained a second server, which was installed next to the first in a Data Centre in London (UK).  This means we have doubled our player capacity, but brings with it a few new features. Firstly, persistent locations - when a player logs into the server, they will be moved directly to the location they were in when they logged out, even if the server has reset in the meantime.  No more restarting at town and having to run back to the dungeon you were exploring, now you can log in and continue from exactly where you were! Also, with two servers, we added support for portalling between the two machines.  Both servers share a single server vault and database, allowing players to use either server without having to create a new character to play on server B.  Players are able to portal to the other server at bind locations and major towns, allowing them to choose which server they play on.

Wheaton
Wheaton is a town of grain and farms, it is the starting town for new players and it located between the other two towns in a pocket of safe, easy areas.

Arakan
Arakan is a town of mages situated south of Wheaton in the forest. Arakan is the home of the Templars of the Arcane.

Fer
Fer is the main town, one of dwarves and iron, and as such it is the biggest. In addition to being the home of the Guardian Guild it is the usual meeting place townside with the expanse of Fer Territory outside of its gates, also the usual site for PvP action.

Guild Mechanics
The Guild are player run organizations that are based around a Guildhouse and Guild wands. The Guildhouse houses a guild-only area containing a merchant selling special equipment based on the amount of reputation the player had with the guild (to ensure it remains a low magic world, based on level). Various ranks are available for players allowing for a command structure to work, promotions are made through the use of Guild wants which can also remove people from the guild forcefully. Each guildhouse has guards to protect it from enemies and who's death costs the Guild reputation.

Ranks
The available ranks descend as follows:
 * Guild Leader
 * Lieutenant
 * Officer
 * Member

Diplomacy
Although the diplomacy fluctuates with shifting alliances, generally the two good guilds and two evil guilds are allied together and at war with the opposite alignment.

Guardian Guild
Based at Fer, the Guardian Guild is the largest of the good guilds and probably the largest guild on the server. The GG takes most classes but generally consists of fighter orientated characters.

Church of Donblas
The Church, based at Wheaton, is the smaller of the good aligned guilds and is less involved with PvP, instead concentrating more on RP. The guild is mainly based around clerics with a few paladins.

Templars of the Arcane
The Templars are a guild dominated by mages, whilst they are neutral their members participate on both sides of the good/evil war. The leadership is run by a council instead of a single player and on occasion they have declared war on one of the other guilds.

Cult of Exiles
The Outlaws from V6 turned into the Exiles, based around their own town they are the main Evil guild.

Servants of Llolth
Starting as an unofficial guild in V6, the Servants of Lloth spawned from the Darksoul clan - a gathering of merciless halfings whom sought their own place in the world. To hear them tell it, they sought freedom from the oppressions of the "talk folk". Lead by Destra Darksoul, these halfings were some of the most feared, untamed elements during V6. They also had many non-halfing allies, mostly from The Outlaws who shunned the ways of the Three Towns alliance.

When V7 was released and the guilds were consolidated into what would become the six official guidls of 3T, the Darksouls were converted into the Servants of Lloth, to become a direct counterpart to the Church of Donblas, and one of the two available evil guilds. This also allowed members to be Halfings, Elves, and Half-Elves, increasing the character range. Though no official RP reasoning was given for the joining of the Darksouls to SoL (especially since the Darksouls had their own beliefs), most members agreed that the goals of the Darksouls and the dark elves who served Lloth were compatible, and joining forces against the Three Towns alliance was natural (non-RP reasons were probably due to the idea that enlarging the racial base for characters would make it easier to have more members).

SoL never enjoyed the same popularity as the other guilds, probably for several reasons, including the distance of the guild house from the main travel paths, the limits on race, and perhaps the difficulty of being out-numbered by the good guilds. As well, many evil characters chose to join the Cult of Exiles, given that the character backgrounds needn't be as complex (ie, lighter RP).

The Unseen
The Unseen are the assassins of 3T and although are neutral as a guild, their members fight on all sides of the war as paid mercenaries.

The Mu Years
The server was created by Musashi and Krynn as a difficult and different Neverwinter Nights server, made in Mu's characteristic style of making it as hard as possible for the players and ignoring what they wanted. This was a lawless period in 3T, arguably when it was most pure, there were few rules and if you could do it then it was allowed. The server was fairly basic and had a player cap of 20 and a level cap of 20 running on basic NWN. The towns themselves were there but the module was fairly small with the current core areas being fringe areas then. Eventually Mu got bored of NWN, annoyed at the players and gave the module over to D.S Clegg, otherwise known as DM Dave.

V6 and before, or "Old 3T"
During this period 3T was still a relatively small server but despite this it was full most of the time and, famously, required repeated clicking of the join button for periods sometimes exceeding 30 minutes to get in. The DM Team was fairly small in this period as well and so it retained many of the characteristics of the previous period, such as indiscriminate killing and exploiting in some areas. However this was slowly toned back and became less frequent. The server also upgraded to Hordes of the Underdark and raised the level cap to 25; the player cap also was raised to 25 as well during this period. Much of the server was created and the Guilds, DM Team and 'vet' players were formed during the pre-V7 era. The server also spectacularly exploded at one point bringing it down for weeks until it was rebuilt with player money. At the end of V6 the Team talked to players and together re-wrote many of the rules for 3T and added new content, before V7 was initialized a wipe of characters was occurred to remove many of the unbalenced features created by the previous years (the forge being of particular note).

V7, or "New 3T"
V7 was preceded by a server wipe and so was a fresh start upping the player limit, eventually, to 50 and the level cap to 40, it had been rebuilt from ground up and this version (which is still being updated) has a polish lacked by the previous versions. This version of the server has been going many years and has seen a change in the server as a whole: many people feel that the server has gone too soft and drifted away from the dangerous roots whereas others believe it has become more friendly to beginners and casual players. This, perhaps, has had the added effect of many of the longer standing players leaving, however, changes were made to the server with the introduction of a second server creating a more violent 'B' server and a more RP orientated 'A' server. With talk of bring back the Outlaw system 3T could well be moving back towards its roots. Also during this period 3T made the turbulent transition to two servers, paid for by the community.

I am interested to visit Three Towns, what now?
Three Towns can be found in PW Action room in GameSpy. No password is required, but you should try to check Official home page, especially FAQ and rules sections and lurk into the forums before connecting.

Some basic information:

Direct connect IP address: 217.158.246.33 / 217.158.246.63

Expansions: SoU + HotU

Patch: 1.67

Level limit: 40

Player limit: 55 (110 spread over two servers)

Game mode: Hardcore

Vault type: Server vault

Enforce Legal Character: Yes

Item level restriction: Yes

PvP mode: Full, some areas such as Towns and Territories are No PvP