This project is an attempt to rework BioWare's 2002 D&D RPG with the more acclaimed 2000 D&D RPG. As a result, I don't recommend enjoying either game, but it is one of the strangest and most fascinating mod projects I've seen in a while.

I didn't see many screenshots or discussions of this mod, so my curiosity was only satisfied by experiencing it firsthand. However, getting there turned out to be an awkward odyssey into the funky mod ecosystem of Baldur's Gate 2 and the quirks of NWNForBG itself.

NWNForBG itself was relatively easy to install, but it also requires the BP-BGT Worldmap mod to function. This mod replaces Baldur's Gate 2's default worldmap with a zoomed-out map of the entire Forgotten Realms, allowing modders to add new fast-travel points on the map, such as the city of Neverwinter.

I ran into a personal Waterloo trying to find the .exe installer on the project's GitHub page. I felt like the guy in the Twilight Zone episode with a room full of books and broken reading glasses (spoiler alert).

Thankfully, I found that a quirk of Infinity Engine's basic mod tool WeiDU allowed me to rename the WeiDU-based mod installer to what I needed for a specific group of Infinity Engine mod files. I copied the WeiDU MOD install.exe I already had and renamed it to impersonate "setup-bgt-worldmap.exe."

However, it still isn't. I can't access Neverwinter Nights as a separate campaign from the menu; there is a guy who takes me to a whole new campaign added to Baldur's Gate 2 that is part of the original campaign, but he is at 1.35 million XP (level 13 or so). He only shows up when you reach 1,350,000 XP (level 13 or so). The cheat codes thankfully didn't cause too much trouble, but the opening of BG2, John Irenicus' dungeon, was an absolute slog.

Lowering the difficulty to story didn't help with the deadly traps in Baldur's Gate 2, so I didn't have enough Minsk and Jaheira to reach the surface. Still, within a minute of wandering around Athkatla, I ran into John Neverwinter (actually just "Messenger") who took me off to a completely different game.

Here was the crucial moment. Had this modder really succeeded in incorporating an entire game into another game, re-contextualizing 2002's Neverwinter Nights, a beloved relic of my childhood, on the genre-defining Infinity Engine, and starting to play it in a whole new way? Can we really do that?

The opening cutscene of "Neverwinter Nights" (with original audio) plays vaguely; the dialogue and audio of NwN's mascot character, Alibeth, seems to have been lifted directly from the original game. Curiously, the bad guy behind Act 1, Destar (oops, another spoiler), had no original conversational portrait, and a picture of Guernter Odim from The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone was reused.

And this is not the only borrowing from 2010s RPGs. My curiosity was motivated by how modders could replicate the fully 3D, modular, tile-based map of Neverwinter Nights on the Infinity Engine, which employs a 2.5D representation that relies on forced perspective and a custom pre-rendering environment. Now we know: Balabokhin chopped and screwed with the "Pillars of Eternity" map and ported it to the Infinity Engine, which was the catalyst for Obsidian's RPG revival.

I stepped into the Copperlane neighborhood of Defiance Bay in Pillars 1. I flipped it with the mirror tool in the image editor and substituted it for Neverwinter's city core. The other districts of the city are similarly zones that have been tweaked, flipped, or otherwise altered from Defiance Bay and Pillars 2's Neketaka.

A stop at the mercenary hub Trade of Blades (the entrance to the catacombs in Pillars) allowed me to try out NWNForBG's only, arguable upgrade to the original game. Not worth jumping ship for.

As a way to experience the largely decent campaign of OG NwN, this doesn't really work. Even if you do get past its odd structure, it doesn't seem right to start this 30 hour zero to hero adventure with a level 13 character. Being kicked out of "Baldur's Gate 2" by John Neverwinter did not completely free me from the game either: every time I took a nap, I kept seeing cut scenes of important dream sequences from the original story.

But this CRPG turducken is a very compelling piece of Internet art. A mishmash of three games I've spent hundreds of hours on, remixed in ways I never would have thought of myself, NWNForBG evokes a surreal feeling, as if the people in my dream life are playing as completely different characters. It reminds me of outstanding ROM hacks like Toby Fox's pre-Undertale Earthbound. [I simply cannot recommend NWNForBG as an RPG experience, but that's why I like it. The original campaign for Neverwinter Nights, while occasionally brilliant, was underwhelming for the most part and doomed from the start."

There is a mythical absurdity in trying to recreate an okay campaign released with the best and easiest-to-use RPG maker tool ever, in a game where creating new levels is much more difficult. In fact, there was a long-running mod project that attempted to remake Baldur's Gate 2 with the mod tools of Neverwinter Nights 2. [I can't personally attest to how playable the NeverwinterNights campaign is by reimplementing things like the NeverwinterNights companion and side quests, but Balabokhin's patch notes have references to later actions, suggests that the entire 30+ hour RPG was put into this format. So, while I will never play NWNForBG for fun, this fever dream mashup is the defining game of my youth and early adulthood and will stay with me for a long time.