Legacy of White Plume Mountain

Yesterday we played Legacy of White Plume Mountain by Wyrin again. Our little gaming group of three started it last Tuesday but most of that 3 hour session was dedicated to creating our characters and strolling through the starting area, Soubar. Our party consists of a Female, Wild Elf Sorcerer/Arcane Scholar a Male, Human Ranger and a Female, Grey Orc Cleric. We also recruited a pre-created Rouge/Bard to help us open some locks and disable the traps.

The first impression of the starting area was. Ah, nice looking! Lots of details! Interesting NPC's! When starting to talk to the NPC's we realised that what's probably small talk for a single player is a bit frustrating in multiplayer. Everybody has to see all dialogue and when three people read together and decides what to answer together it takes LOTS of time. Going through all the conversation options with every NPC that had something interesting to say explains why we could spent 3 hours on leveling up to start level 7 and exploring that single area. The dialogue is well written and interesting, but way too long. In a writing course I once took ( I failed) they said the difference between a good writer and an excellent writer is the amount of words the excellent one doesn't need to write to tell the same story :)
Well, we spent all our gold on weapons, armor and trinkets and yesterday we left for adventure (with lots of side quests in our journal) and the main quest. I won't spill any spoilers here. The first side quests and encounters we had were well composed. Unique oppnents and good loot. Very well done, mr Wyrin! The encounters were challenging and I especially like the use of spellcasters I've missed from the BG-series. Hopefully we'll see more of them next session. I have to mention the encounter areas. In SoZ they were really boring, but from what I've seen in LoWPM, design has been giving some extra love.
The only negative thing so far is the battle music that doesn't give the feel of danger, heat and combat and the long, long conversations.

Another thing that isn't this modules fault was that some outdoor areas (including the overland map) was presented like this on one of the computers(image not from LoWPM, and this is not a snow area) :
Today I've tracked it down to a NVIDIA-driver problem. The solution may be downgrading the driver to an old version.... Hopefully we've solved it until next Tuesday.

Thanks for reading
/A