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The Lands of Catara

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk

Nearly half the human population of Catara refuses the worship the gods. They acknowledge their presence and their power, but they do not pray to them, visit their temples, or do anything that amounts to worship. Instead, they cluster around nine empty altars, celebrating their independence from the gods.
- Excerpt from The Cult of the Nine

We have done profiles of established and veteran persistent worlds developed by fans of Neverwinter Nights to showcase gaming traditions that began years ago and continue to this day. This week, we take a look at the world of Catara, which has recently joined the Confederation of Planes and Planets, and speak with Catara spokesman, JollyOrc:

Where is your website for Catara?

JollyOrc: http://www.catara.org is the main site, and http://www.catara.org/forum/ is our board.

I hear you have this crazy dynamic map for your world - can I check that out?

JollyOrc: http://www.catara.org/map.

The idea was born when I was building areas for a new server for Avlis. I wanted to see how the areas connect to each other, so I grabbed screenshots from each area in the toolset, mashed them all together in an image editor, saved the biiiig file, and then shot myself when I edited three areas....

Then someone told me that there's the very nifty nwntool.exe, which can extract the minimaps of a module - all minimaps, of all areas, with one single click - named after the resref of the area.

You have added some custom Prestige Classes to your world. Can you give some details about them?

JollyOrc: The Academy of the Faithful Practitioners of the Mystical Arts trains a special breed of man. Sworn, and highly trained, these legendary figures stalk Catara in search of those who would endanger civilization itself with their dangerous and unsupervised tampering in magical forces. This is the Witch Hunter.

His mission: Seek out anything and anyone who uses weird and wild magical force without training and permission from the proper authorities, to bring them back for training if possible, and if not retrievable, to destroy them utterly: "Burn the Witch!"

"The Sun God Jaletar ordains holy warriors for his cause. These dedicated individuals are the Paladins of Jaletar. They fight evil in all its forms, but their field of specialization is fighting fiends. Demons and devils beware, Jaletar's Holy Light is coming for you."

"The good fight, the call of battle for righteousness, the drive to hunt down evil in its every form. This is the song that sounds in the veins of a true Paladin of Rilos, a chosen warrior of the lord of many battles. The sacred battle rituals of Rilos bring these holy warriors into balance with nature and their surroundings as well."

"To symbolize this balance, they ritually fight with two weapons, one of which is a battleaxe, the second usually a smaller hand axe or another battleaxe. Their most common enemy in and near the lands of Catara are the various evil giants."

The technical stuff is quite boring, but you can find all the details on our website.

You have been part of CoPaP for only a couple of months now. How has that experience been?

JollyOrc: A nice one. Especially since Themicles has taken up the administrative duties for CoPaP (to relieve the much overworked Orleron) as well as the CoPaP hak coordination. Things go very smooth.

CoPaP is a very diverse group of servers, including a lot of different styles and worlds. It is interesting to see how each approaches things differently. Then there is the added benefit of having a common deposit of already reviewed code. There are shared code bases for a CoPaP-wide common emote wand, for persistent locations and map pins, treasure and spawn code, etc.

Socially, the other world leaders of CoPaP are a fine bunch. There is the occasional disagreement, but so far, everything has been solved amiably.

If you are connected with one or more persistent worlds, how do you keep things balanced in your world?

JollyOrc: There are actually a bunch of different measures:

• We only link through the deathplane to worlds that have a higher "treasure level" than us. As the belongings of people are left with their death corpse on dying (except for plot items), this takes care of the influx of unwanted items.
• There is a CoPaP-wide currency exchange system in the works, which will eventually ensure that gold transfers from one world to the other can be controlled. Those that come from gold-rich servers will probably face a hefty conversion rate.
• Spellhooking ensures that clerics won't be able to have full powers off-world; their god simply isn't around to grant them their spells.
• Visiting mages will find it hard to get accepted on Catara. The general populace of the world is wary of magic, and tends to be hostile to "witches." An off-world mage will quickly find out that he will need to be careful of which spells to use and where.

To sum things up: We try to keep these measures IC, for the visitors as well as the local characters. Complete control won't be feasible anyway, but what is there should help a lot.

What can we expect from Catara in the future?

JollyOrc: Right now, only a part of the kingdom is built in-game. That will hopefully change soon, as we expand the areas. With this expansion, we will see more persistent quests that will help the players shape the world.

The background of Catara is full of different factions, none of them clearly evil or good. These will come into effect a lot more in the future. We have enough stories that we want to tell left to last us at least another year.

The current players don't know this yet, but the ancient empire of Cibola is stirring again, and it may very well be that they'll have to pick a side soon....

Related Links

• BioWare article on CoPaP
• NWN Aurora Toolset Help Guide - UPDATE
• Guide to persistent worlds
• Totally unrelated link because I am drunk with power

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