Archived Site News - January 2001

Sorry guys, apparently Interplay US was not happy of Interplay France when they have learned that some infos about upcoming BGII expansion, Throne Of Baal have been given on an official press release. Therefore, Interplay France has asked us to delete all details about it. BTW my english is better than your french, so spare me :p

Even though it recently disappeared from the Top-10 of sells in the USA, our little "chouchou" (and our favorite game of 2000), BG2 has finally reached one million of boxes sold in the world. A big success, even in France, where the game has been sold at 30,000 copies in 4 weeks. It seems few but it's enormous...

BG2 is nothing but the sequel of the "best 1999 RPG". Considered like one of the biggest success in terms of number of copies sold of the whole gaming industry, BG1 sold more than 1,000,000 copies and BG2 seems to have started well enough to go past that number.

As soon as it was released, November 10th 2000 [in France], BG2has immediately reached position 1 of sells and became in 10 days the best sell of the month. It represented 2.3% of the market at the end of november, which should be compared to the 1.7% and 1.5% of Fifa 2001 and Tomb Raider 5 at the same moment.

Today, two months after its release, BG2 is still among the top 5 of CD-ROMs in France and has already exceeded the 1,000,000 copies sold in the world.

With a budget for the marketing of US$250,000 [just in France or in the world?] Virgin Interactive has organized a huge advertizing campaign in all fields of the paper magazines. The ad that appeared in them was no less than 4 double pages. Virgin had also prepared special versions of the game with many gifts (ie. the world map, cards representing some elements of the game, real AD&D action figures, set of cards Magic, the paper game guide and a Bonus CD, etc).

Other magazines that has nothing to do with video games have also talked about BG2 with quotes such as "Baldur's so long, so good..." or "The music and the scenery are sumptuous..." or even "It's fascinating and magnificient..." and finally "Dont's miss it!".

GA-RPG is proud to present yet another column from one of the leading design houses of computer role-playing games at this time, BioWare. The column will be known as The BioFiles, and it is going to be written primarily by James Ohlen on a weekly basis intially. James is the director of BioWare’s writing and design department. He also just so happens to be the lead designer for BioWare’s upcoming Star Wars RPG. This column will focus on design philosophies, game ideas, and behind the scenes stories from the Baldur’s Gate series, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars and any future projects.

Vous connaissez ce jeu? Vous l'attendiez avec impatience depuis très longtemps et enfin il est parmi nous!

Translation: "You know this game? You were waiting for it for a very long time and finally it is among us!"

• When we relaunch all pages not directly related to the games will have been ported to the new design, this includes the homepage ofcourse.
• 
  
• The Planescape, Icewind Dale and BG2 pages will be converted shortly after that. Untill the entire game is converted you will access these pages from the current design.
• 
  
• The new game Divinty will be added in parallel with the conversion of the games pages.
• 
  
• When Heart of Winter hits the street I will drop everything and start playing that and add any info on it in the new design.

We're in need of a few good extra artists. If you're interested in working on Divinity, mail your resumes to .

HOW has good dialogue, as I've come to expect from Black Isle. Some people don't enjoy a lot of talk in their games; they're probably not reading this review anyway. I look at it like this: if you're going to put it in your game, make sure it's worthwhile. That is, fairly complicated trees, where branches are closed off by your responses, and a real range of choices. If all I ever get are two responses to choose from, then I start to wonder what kind of fool my character really is.

Rest assured that the IWD gameplay you loved is back, with some little interface enhancements and loads of new items and spells. HOW is combat-heavy, like IWD, and I haven't had any FedEx quests yet (i.e. take this shoe over to that guy). So far, HOW's story is about preventing a war.

"Black Isle has created a cohesive team of talented individuals who work very well together, Deiley said. "It sounds kind of cliché, but we really are a family who shares in the responsibilities of creating great titles. We often do not limit ourselves to a single project, but instead provide support and advice where it is needed. Game wise, I think our greatest accomplishment is Planescape: Torment. It was a revolutionary idea rather than just more of the same high fantasy. It had beauty, scope, and story. It was a wonderful project to work on and help bring to life. It was "art."

Find more here.

Black Isle Studios took everything we loved about Baldur's Gate and streamlined the action, made the story linear, and set the level cap as high as possible in the space of a single adventure. The result was Icewind Dale, an epic action RPG that had you create six wimpy level-one adventurers and watch them grow into bona fide superheroes. It was a truly fantastic adventure perhaps overshadowed by a release date that coincided with another action RPG you may have heard of called Diablo II. Black Isle is about to release Heart of Winter, an expansion pack to Icewind Dale that continues your adventure in the "spine of the world," and ups the ante on the devastating magic items and horrible beasties D&D fans crave.

Go read it.

Listen to some of the music of lonelywood and download . this file.

Check out the white dragon and the new Icewind Dale poster.

We're close to going gold on Heart of Winter, and we'd like to do some "real world" testing on your save games and character files. If you'd like to participate in our QA's event of the year, here are instructions for sending them in:

1) Open Windows Explorer and locate the game's directory on your machine. If you did not change the directory during installation, this path is C:\Program Files\Black Isle\Icewind Dale.

2) Using your favorite ZIP utility (like WinZip or WinRAR), compress your "Characters" directory and/or your "MPSAVE" directory into a new .ZIP file.

3) E-mail the .ZIP file(s) to .

NOTE: This e-mail address will only be available through January 29th, 2001, so don't delay, mail them today!

We're giving away 10 copies of the Icewind Dale Soundtrack. Send your saved games in today, and we'll pick the lucky winners on February 2, 2001. (Open only to residents of the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France).

More of an add-on pack than anything else, Heart of Winter still looks set to be a must-buy for fans of the popular Icewind Dale. The pack adds about 30 hours of gameplay to the original and has quests specifically designed for high-level characters. It also features many of the modifications made to the interface of Baldur's Gate that should make the action much clearer and intuitive.

All in all, Heart of Winter adds around an extra thirty hours of gameplay to the original Icewind Dale. It's due for release by February this year, and there's no reason to doubt that it will comfortably make this date. Heart of Winter looks set to be an essential purchase for all fans of the Infinity engine, although with the release of Baldur's Gate 2, there's a good chance that many people will have had more than their fill of role-playing for the time being, and with NeverWinter Nights due for release this year, it might not be wise to stuff yourself before the crème de la crème comes along. On the other hand, that doesn't stop Heart of Winter from being life-absorbing stuff, either.

The game itself is amazing, using the bioware infinity engine, we see some pretty impressive graphical wonderment. The audio is absolutely amazing, as you walk through the towns exploring different places, and talk to different people. It has a very "Braveheart" feel to it.

What else do I have planned...bet you're just waiting in suspense. Well I plan to create a new section for Fantasy Art. It will have art from some great professional artists, like Michael Whelan, Luis Royo, Larry Elmore, Chris Archilleos, and many others. It will have many images that I did not use as portraits, for one reason or another, and the images I did create portraits out of. That will be a while from now.

Great, these are some of my favourites :-)

Thankfully, we have a bit of breathing room for fine-tuning and adding a few extra things here and there along the way. Multiplayer testing has been underway for roughly two weeks now. No matter how well our single-player testing goes, we always run into plenty of problems when multiplayer comes around. The most commonly encountered bugs have to do with the networking code not handling new spells and game effects properly. People wind up with cloaks of fear that never disappear, invisible monsters following everyone around -- stuff like that. The programmers are also working on latency issues. Every once in a while, multiplayer games get so out of synch that two characters appear in totally different locations on the maps. We believe that eliminating those problems will greatly enhance players' co-op experiences.

This is the end, my friend...

Pretty much.

Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter is extremely close to being finished. It's so close to being finished that a lot of us are waiting idly for the off chance that a random bug will float our way. Steve Bokkes (aka "Stevey-Steve Bok-Bok") has been getting in some good Matrix-watching while he waits for new builds. John Deiley's still tweaking away and I, thankfully, have been able to work more on my new project now that the Burial Isle and Barrows are reasonably balanced.

It's interesting to see the flood of new and "magical" bugs that appear in the last few weeks before a game goes gold. Just when you believe you've made an area screw-up-proof, some smarty tester comes along and pulls the Ace of Spades out from the bottom of the card house. Boy, they really did a number on the Burial Isle. They figured out the exact circumstances under which you could covertly slaughter a number of characters and prevent the game from progressing forward. It's always fun to find those clever little loopholes.

X-Treme Gaming Radio has some screenshots of the Heart of Winter expansion of Icewind Dale. There are 3 exclusive ones and a bunch they made themselves when playing the preview version.

This game was one of the safest bets we made last year, and Interplay and BioWare did nothing to disappoint us when they released this magnificent sequel last September. Unlike so many RPG sequels that force you to start from scratch and develop a character all over again (Final Fantasy, anyone?), Baldur's Gate II let you import your old character from Baldur's Gate and continue your epic journey through the story-rich world of the Forgotten Realms. Along the way, we met new friends and made new enemies, and learned quite a bit more about ourselves as well. However, judging from the ominous ending, it's a safe bet that there's even more to be revealed about characters in a future game. We can hardly wait.

Read the full story.

Just as with Baldur's Gate before it, Icewind Dale is getting an expansion. If you're reading this, you've probably already read our preview for Heart of Winter, so what we decided to do was go in and brave the harsher environments of the expansion to provide you with the latest hands on impressions of the game before it ships.

Go read it.

Icewind Dale was one of the more curious members of Black Isle's much-vaunted RPG line up. The Black Isle team had been involved in a steady, if hardly meteoric progression, which saw its AD&D inspired titles -- i.e. Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II and Planescape Torment -- improving gradually in terms of content, narrative and general playability. They also tended to become substantially darker in tone and, particularly in the case of Planescape Torment, distinctly more adult-oriented.

Go read it.

Getting a second shot on one of my favorite games of all time is truly a dream come true. The journey in the icey regions of the Spine of the world mountains continues with this Heart of Winter expansion pack. After installing the game (which installs itself in your Icewind Dale directory) I was ready to pick up my sword and prepare myself once again for battle.

After starting the game I saw a nicely done intro movie that told me of a Barbarian shaman named Hjollder, This man saw visions of war and a party of heroes that would restore balance in the northern region of Faerun (Fay-ROON)

After that, I found my entire party on the shore of a tiny community called Lonelywood, A barbarian approached me which happened to be Hjollder himself. He told me of the upcoming war between the Barbarians and the people of the Ten towns, The visions he saw told him that a party of heroes would prevent this, This party happened to be mine:).

Can't get enough of Black Isle's old-school RPG mayhem? Us neither. Good job the frosty adventuring just keeps on coming.

Go *read* it.

Currently I'm working on a redesign of The Locus Inn. The result of it will be that you are able to navigate a lot easier through the inn to find what you need. And it looks better also :-).
Together with this redesign the Divinity section will be launched also.
And when will all of this be done? Well, I'm planning on getting this completed before the end of the month. So stay tuned for it!

Update by Hedek: does that mean I'll have to post more news? Ok, hopefully these reorganizations won't affect content. Don't forget to give our forums a little visit if you have a suggestion regarding the redesign...

Gamespy is organizing a multiplayer event through its online gaming software called GS Arcade.
It will take place [Wednesday afternoon - 4:00PM Pacific time, 7:00 PM East Coast - Download GS Arcade]

Paligap: Will H.O.W.(Heart Of Winter) feature the same interface exchanges as BG2? (removable panels, etc.)

Josh: With Heart of Winter installed, players will be able to enjoy 800x600 resolution and drop away interface panels in all Icewind Dale and Heart of Winter areas. Heart of Winter will also feature a hotkey (alt) that allows players to highlight doors, containers, and treasure for easy location.

Will 3D acceleration be officially supported by H.O.W.?

Yes. Several programmers have worked on Heart of Winter's 3D acceleration. It can help a great deal in battles with a large number of monsters or many spell effects going off at once.

Will this story integrate with the IWD story as in TOSC or will it be separate?

The Heart of Winter story grows out of a small side quest in the original game. It is not directly tied into the central plot of Icewind Dale, but it touches upon the core storyline at several points. The expansion consists of one separate mini-plot.

Heart of Winter is almost finished, minus some gameplay balancing and bug fixing, and should be in the shops in February. Anyone wanting a nice, chilly fix of roleplaying would be advised to check it out.

Go read it.

The HoW should support 800x600 (and unofficially even higher resolutions). It will use the redesigned Boware's Infinity engine, which we had an opportunity to see in Baldur's Gate II, wrapped up in even better artwork from Black Isle's artists. Pre-rendered backgrounds will use 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit palette. There will also be support for 3D acceleration, which should make the new flashy spells look much better. Another interesting feature is the possibility to hide all the toolbars and panel (by pressing "H"). The new locations like the Burial Island and some strange dungeons look much darker than most locations in the original game. This will present a nice contrast to the bright areas like the Lonelywood camp and frosty caves…

Spotted at RPGDot.

We're happy to say that Baldur's Gate II is a great exception. The game improved in almost every single respect. Graphics are updated with the addition of higher resolutions (official and otherwise) as well as better background and character art. Sounds are mostly stock BG but still don't let us down. The gameplay is improved through the addition of several new rules and options. BioWare also gave us 3 new character classes, 3 kits per class (excluding the new classes) and a new race.

The game is an intricate tale of one powerful being in a land full of them. Unique even by Planescape standards, the Nameless One goes through the game and learns or, rather, re-learns about himself. For one, it quickly becomes obvious that he's been, at various times in his life, a wizard, a thief and a warrior of some renown. Also, he soon discovers that in his last life he was very, very powerful. The suspense is thickened by the addition of the knowledge that the more dramatic a death that Nameless dies, the more likely he'll lose some memories or skills. Whatever killed him last time did some major damage.

The publisher of "Divinity: Sword of Lies" wants to change the name to Devine Divinity. Fans of the game, like this webmaster, that do not like the name have presented their views on the RPGSites forum and the Divinity forum. Go there and give your opinion as well.

We're back from the Holidays and fixing the last of the bugs. We've been spending quite some time recently balancing the new levels to make sure they are adequately tough, as well as retrofitting some of the original fights in the later half of the original Icewind Dale. We've also made the difficulty levels more meaningful - the higher the difficulty, not only do the baddies hit harder, there are typically a lot more of them to fight. We're doing what we can to ensure that players of all skill levels find the game challenging, so the difficulty levels will really make a difference in the expansion.

Bioware gets our nod for developer of the year because it has released two fantastic and wildly different games, made steady progress on Neverwinter Nights, and started the ball rolling on a Star Wars game all in one year. It seems pretty clear to us, the Force is strong with these guys.

Find more here.

Gamespy wrote an interesting editorial called "The Art of Gaming" which is a kind of interview with the artists from different developers. This week, Gamespy focused on Bioware's Marc Holmes who is currently working on Neverwinter Nights. There are also some (pretty) piece of arts and finally, an art gallery.

Your eyes want a gift?

RPGVault has a selection of 14 screenshots with different spells. It's just a bit unclear which spells they are :-).

Larian Studios has come to an agreement with CDV to publish Divinity.

Recently, we updated the links page, adding a great site: Baldur's Gate Legacy and renaming the "Dragon's Breath Tavern" to the "Dragon's Breath Forge".

Some great looking wallpapers can be found at The Treasures of Baldur's Gate

Spotted at Planet Baldur's Gate

Dan Clarke on Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn: This was a tough choice. Personally I liked Icewind Dale better, but like the electoral college, I was outvoted. Don't get me wrong, BG 2 is a very good game. You really can't go wrong with either game.

You can expect the game to take an estimated 20-30 hours to play. Combined with the Heart of Fury setting, this is a lot of gameplay for an RPG expansion. After a party has finished the game, it's possible to start over and battle enhanced monsters. "You can restart with your buff party, and take on the buffed out level 15 equivalent goblins in EastHaven," Monahan explains. Furthermore, the experience cap was expanded to a whopping level 30, well beyond even the offerings of BGII.

Once I have a general impression or idea in my head of what I want to create I will usually hunt around for resource that might help me (swords, armor, or any inspirational images and paintings that help to inspire me). I spend some time looking at what I have found and try to picture what I want in my head. It is usually at this time that I get an idea on what kinds of colors will be in the piece, what mood, what lighting and light direction, and what type of character or area. Once have an impression or impulse of what I want to make based on what I need to make for the job at hand, I am ready to paint.

Baldur's Gate II won not only the award for best RPG but also the overall game of the year award
It’s rare for a sequel to be good let alone better than the original but Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (BG2) has done just that. Luring us back into the Forgotten Realms with the promise of increased experience, new monsters, new spells, new areas to explore and a story to tease and envelope us. If losing yourself in a game for a few hours is the mark of a true classic then the 100’s of hours fans have spent in BG2 is surly a sign of greatness. BG2 did exactly what it was supposed to - entertain, challenge and excite us. Best of all it has left us wanting more. For the story, the intrigue, the gameplay and the fun we had playing, we present Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn our Game Of the Year award.

Planescape Torment, although released in 1999, still was awarded 3th place as RPG of the year.
An early 2000 release, Planescape: Torment has never been far from our hearts and minds. Boasting some of the finest voice acting to come along in years, and a memorable story populated with unique, interesting, and sometimes hilarious NPCs, Planescape never failed to keep us interested. Planescape gave us a look at a world we are all eager to reenter - ‘Ahem,’ Bioware, you listening?

Icewind Dale was among the titles that made 2000 a fine year for the RPG genre. It showed that a focused, fast-paced, fun adventure with lots of combat and rapid character advancement could win the same type of critical and fan approval as games with much more epic scope. Heart of Winter looks set to do what any good expansion pack will do by expanding the original game and returning players to the type of feeling they had previously. It also looks like it might do what only a few exceptional expansion packs do by also incorporating new features and gameplay elements that noticeably improve upon the original playing experience. We most certainly look forward to its imminent release.

Larian Studios is hiring. If you want to be a level editor for Divinity:Sword of Lies then head over to their site and send them an e-mail.

Soon The Locus Inn will start with a section on the upcomming game Divinity:Sword of Lies, which is being created by Larian Studios.
If you share any interest in this game and would like to become a member and contribute in giving this game a prominent spot in the inn, then send me an .
You can alse send me a mail if you would like to do something for any of the other games we support.

If you live in North America and watched the Black Scorpion on january 5th, it's not to late to enter the contest on Gamezone to win a copy of BG2.
If you don't live there, like me, than you're out of luck as usual, but then again I already have a copy :-).

Much like Baldur's Gate: Tales Of The Sword Coast, the expansion pack for Baldur's Gate, the Heart Of Winter expands on the original Icewind Dale not so much with technical advances, but simply by adding more of what made the original game so great. Heart Of Winter installs right into its parent game, and you can start over from the beginning, making for a huge cohesive and expansive single game, or just start your characters off only where Heart Of Winter begins.

Thomas French has been putting in his typically excessive amount of hours to get as many scripts working in the game as he can. It's a grueling process, involving typically at least three or four e-mail messages and fixes between designer and scriptor before one problem is solved. Despite this, Thomas has gone beyond what is required, suggesting that we retrofit older areas from the core game with new scripts. These new scripts spawn in additional monsters if your difficulty is set to a certain level or if you have beaten the expansion. The boss encounters now feature backup critters and sidekicks that help out if the difficulty is high enough. He also asked me to write up some player scripts for the expansion. After I wrote up about ten, he gleefully went to work.

Fights are numerous and well placed, though your computer might buckle somewhat under the strain of showing a few spellcasters and about 20 characters fighting each other. A good addition to the information displayed during battle is the TYPE of damage you do to your foes, and how much of it they resist. Good for improving tactics of veterans and novices alike, especially when faced with foes that respond rather merrily to the attacks who do little damage to them.

BG II features a plot which has depth, and which is cleverly integrated with gameplay, particularly when compared to the skeletal plot of its predecessor. Other RPGs such as last year's best RPG, Planescape Torment, have featured even better plots, but few previous games of the genre have offered such a compelling combination of features. BG II has both tremendous replayability and, surprisingly, accessibility. A lot of fans of the genre criticized the original Baldur's Gate for largely requiring players to play virtuous characters in order to advance the plot of the game; BG II provides more varied gameplay and additional opportunities to role-play more sinister characters, although both the Fallout games and Planescape Torment, still remain the champs of the genre in that aspect. But BG II is more accessible than those titles and has broader appeal: its interface has been refined, its multiplayer mode has been polished, its graphics have been significantly improved from its predecessor and players are given plenty of opportunities (perhaps too many) to complete simple quests early in the game, abetting their soon to be irresistible addiction to this title.

Icewind Dale has got the "Best Music" and "Most Surprising" awards.

Find more here.

Interplay has sent 5 new screenshots of Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter to Gaming Age...





Go admire them.

Spotted at RPG Dot.

Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is not as beautiful or artful as Planescape: Torment. It’s not as revolutionary to the genre as the original Baldur’s Gate. Though, truly revolutionary titles are so rarely polished and well groomed that I can count the few that come to mind on a single hand, and artful, well-written games aren’t always as fun or long. In many ways, Baldur's Gate II is the culmination of the powerful RPG renaissance that’s been driving the genre over the last several years– a rebirth that originally started with its predecessor, Baldur’s Gate. It redefines attention to detail, game balance, longevity, and spit and polish. It’s not overbearing in its creativity, and it’s not paper thin. In the end, it’s simply a superb role-playing experience--one of the best. There’s not much you can compare it to. Baldur's Gate II has no peers. It commands your attention and will command your life for months.

* * * * * * * *

Once in a while, a game comes along that completely takes over your life. StarCraft, Baldur’s Gate, and EverQuest were all like that, and now Icewind Dale arrives to flush productivity right down the toilet. Despite the somewhat cookie-cutter story, the game will have you playing long into the night the whole time saying to yourself, “Just one more dungeon, just one more dungeon!” It’s an exciting dungeon crawl that I recommend to any true RPG fan that is looking for a meaty quest to hold them over until the epic Baldur’s Gate II is released.

Find more here.

IntelGamer opened a poll called "Game Of The Year" (no need to explain), BG2: Shadows of Amn is in the list and Deux Ex is for the moment first, you can make the difference!

Dear Minsc,
I don ’t know what to get my partner-in-love for Christmas. Can you help? Signed,Not A Theresa
Dear Not a Theresa,
Hmm...does he already own a hamster? Hamsters make wonderful gifts,and hamster-related accessories are excellent as a followup.The little wheel is especially fun; I have heard nothing but good things about the little wheel.

This game is awesome, it has to be one of my top 5 games of the year for sure. I didn't think i would get into the game as much as i have because im generally not accustomed to RPGs, but now im hooked.
This game is literally huge. The game world, the dialog, the install size (max install is the only way i will play a game) and the hours of game play. This is a long game, but that's what makes it so great. You can play it for hours and still find something new, its just that vast.
If your into RPGs get this game. If you have never played one, get this game. You'll be glad you did.
Now I'm heading back for some ale and recreational dwarf tossing.

Baldur's Gate II was second as game of the year and achiefment in writing, right after Deus Ex. It won the achiefment in graphics award however.
Icewind Dale won the achiefment in music award with Baldur's gate II following closely.
Black Isle Studios was awarded as developer/publisher of the year.

If you are any sort of fan of role-playing games, you should know about these people. They are ... well ... how to put this in an appropriately dramatic way. They are to role-playing games at the dawn of the new millennium what Lord British and the folks at Origin were in the eighties. This is the highest compliment I can bestow. We don't often sufficiently appreciate our geniuses while they are around. Van Gogh. Tesla. Looking Glass Studios. Benny Hill. Only after death is their true brilliance clear to us.
But, fortunately, the people at Black Isle are properly appreciated while they are still at the peak of their game (or, dare I dream, still ascending to the peak). So I want to give them a big, sloppy, wet kiss and spend a few columns trying to deconstruct what makes their games so cool. This is for the benefit of those poor aspirant designers who have to put out games in their wake.

In Heart of Winter, the heroes while in tree-nestled Kuldahar are summoned to Lonelywood, the northernmost of the Ten Towns in the frigid Icewind Dale, by a shaman who begs them for aid. He claims they are the heroes foreseen in a vision, and that only they can help his barbarian tribe. However, rumours abound of a barbarian horde just outside Lonelywood, which has the town's citizens justifiably concerned. The Ten Towns have clashed more than once with the fiercely independent, nomadic barbarian tribes. A change in the barbarian mindset has brought this about, and certainly not a good one, for there's a sinister force at work in Icewind Dale. It's up to the player and his party to discover why the barbarians of the Dale have suddenly begun forming an army. The shaman's desperate plea, and the likelihood of the barbarians attacking the Ten Towns when they mass will propel your party into the barbarian camp, to their burial isle, and far into the northernmost regions of Icewind Dale in search of answers. You can bet there'll be a great deal of dungeon crawling involved in the process.

Go read the rest.

Check it out here.