"The course of Avlissian history has ever been shaped by clashes between light and dark, and between chaos and order."
- Taken from Of Gods and Mortals on Avlis, Volume 1: Creation, The Hand of the Supreme by N'uquerni-Delothion

Avlis was one of the first persistent worlds to open its doors to the public mere weeks after the release of Neverwinter Nights. The world has grown and expanded to include over 2500 areas to explore and exceptional roleplaying to experience. New players can read through over one hundred pages of history and details about this very mature world. Josh Simon, Team Leader, found the time to respond to some our questions about Blackdagger: The World of Avlis.

1. Where can I find out more about this world?

Josh: http://www.avlis.org

2. How much has Avlis grown since you first began??

Josh: When Avlis first went live, we had three city exterior areas: a temple area, a dock, and a marketplace. That was it. Today, there are roughly 2500 areas spread out among 6 servers, and in order to get the entire world online, we'll have to triple that at least.

3. Did you expect to see this sort of success when you started?

Josh: I would say we hoped rather than expected. When NWN first came out, the only experiences people had with multiplayer were things like Ultima Online or Diablo, both of which had some specific shortcomings. Namely, these games were populated largely by people intent on getting as much "stuff" for their characters as they could, or ruining the gaming experience for others. When we conceived the Avlis server, we had a belief that there were a large amount of people in the community who were tired of this, and who wanted to play on a server where the biggest high was character development, and not eye-candy, or monster slaughter. Luckily, BioWare gave us sufficient tools to make something like that, where we could control the environment and shape it to be what we envisioned. In the end, it turned out to be a good thing, but it was mostly done as a gamble at first.

4. What sets Avlis apart from some of the other persistent worlds?

Josh: Avlis is its own campaign world. It is not Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, or any of the other previously released campaign settings. Most PWs out there are comprised on a whim. A player gets the urge to create a server because it's a cool thing to do. They then go about making either a pre-generated world, or a spontaneously created setting. Avlis is different. Before there was even a NWN, there was an Avlis. This world has been in development as a pen and paper campaign setting for roughly 17 years now. Consequently, Avlis has an extremely rich history rivaling many of the worlds created by official gaming companies.

As a NWN PW, Avlis is different because of the extremely high quality of its staff. We have at least five professional programmers on our team, and at least ten DM's who each have at least 5 to 10 years experience of pnp game mastering. Such a combination produces a world that is both fun to play, and fun to interact in.

5. How long has the gang at Avlis been working on this world? When did it open for business?

Josh: The NWN version of this world went into production the very same day that NWN went gold. The team started out with two people, Silk and I, and the world opened for business about a week later.

6. As a new player what does Avlis provide to help me get started? Are there any guides, instructions or some kind of process to help me get rolling?

Josh: Avlis has a VERY extensive information depot on its forums at http://www.avlis.org. Many new players will spend hours engrossing themselves in the history of the world, just for fun. We also have a downloadable player's guide, compiled by various staff members and players. The player's guide project was led by our staff member named Deider. Within both the guide and the forums, there are tips and tricks to getting started as a 1st level character both from a mechanical and roleplaying perspective. Both the guide and the forum are updated regularly.

7. Why should experienced players come and play in Avlis?

Josh: For experienced roleplayers, Avlis is a place where one can go to get that old nostalgic feeling of pen and paper play. This is not a server where you can level up in three minutes and then get bored. Leveling takes time, and that time is spent not by killing endless spawns of monsters, but by interacting with the world itself, and with other players. For people who value social interaction in their game play, Avlis is the place to be.

8. Can you tell us about the backstory to your world?

Josh: The entire written history of Avlis to date is contained in well over 100 pages of text. I won't place it all here, but it can be read in our player's guide and on our boards.

The general gist of it is that there are nine major gods on Avlis. Each of them represents one of the major alignments in D&D, and each god created their own race. Thus, there are nine major races on Avlis as well, and they in turn represent the nine alignments *on average*. Later on in the history of Avlis, more races popped up, and more gods were created.

You would think that alignments are static things, and that old stereotypes are cut in stone. However, on Avlis that is not the case. Beings of good are often put into situations where they must work together with beings of evil or neutrality to reach a common goal. Good does not always kill evil by default on Avlis. Big moral dilemmas are constantly posed to the players because the line between good and evil is not always clear... an action that is good for one may be evil to another, and vice versa. For an evil being, helping the good may be the road to power. For a good being, it may be the road to overcoming an evil greater than the one they are siding with.

Avlis has an extremely extensive player base and a large number of player-run groups that range over the whole spectrum of good, evil, and neutrality. Each has its own agenda, and each has a specific place where it fits into the world. Some are groups that support one of the deities of Avlis. Some are mercenaries. Some are rogue's guilds, and some exist purely for the purpose of trade. Others only care about one aspect or another of magic. When many groups like this exist, there is always potential for tension, and the DM's of Avlis play upon that in order to spin a web of interrelations and intrigue like no other world has.

9. What are your plans for the future for Avlis?

Josh: The main goal behind the Avlis servers is to create the entire world setting online. Doing this with one module is not feasible, so we are doing it with as many modules as it takes to get the entire planet online.

So far, we have six connected servers, and that only covers a small portion of the main continent. In the future we plan to put up more servers, usually at the rate of two to four per year.

On a larger scale, Avlis aims to bring other PWs of like-minded theories on balance and game play together to form an even larger base of connected servers. Instead of producing only one planet, we intend to create as much of the entire D&D setting as possible... every plane, every official campaign setting, every area of wildspace, and every homemade world. The Confederation of Planes & Planets (CoPaP) at http://www.copap.org was born as an extension of the Avlis Project, and we are already on our way to the goal with 6 independent PWs linked up through the NWNX plugin technology of VaultSTER. The main purpose behind everything is to make it so a player logging into our servers can literally go anyplace they imagine.