Continuing after the ending of Shadows of Amn/Delaying the start of Throne of Bhaal

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For my first time playing BGII, I'm looking for a mod (Or advice on how to make a mod) that will let me keep playing Shadows of Amn after the final battle instead of jumping straight into Throne of Bhaal. This is mostly a roleplaying thing- I'm playing a Cavalier, so I'm probably going to miss a ton of sidequests due to the pressure in Chapters 2 and 6, and I'd actually be able to do them once Irenicus is dealt with.

Ulb

I can't tell you whether there already is a mod like this but it sure sounds like a great mod idea.

It has always bothered me that there really isn't a good point in the story to do all the side quests and Watcher's Keep. First you need to rescue Imoen then you should probably really focus on getting your freaking soul back and after that, stopping a Bhaal-Spawn made genocide might be a little higher on the agenda than investigating some random ruin in the middle of nowhere.

As for making the mod yourself, you would probably have to modify the last cut-scene to not transition you to ToB, then you would also have to add a way to start ToB once you are ready. Adding some dialogue to Ellesime might be the best way to do that.
So, I would think the basic modding skills you need are:
writing/editing scripts
writing/editing dialogue files
writing the actual weidu mod

To get you started you can check out some tutorials on one of the various modding sites, for example:

http://www.shsforums.net
http://gibberlings3.net

You can also take a look at existing mods and check out their .tp2 (weidu coding), .baf (those files contain the in-game code you want to add/modify) and .d (contains dialogue) files to see how it works.

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Starting ToB seems easy enough- just load an appropriate save game. I tested things, and you technically don't even have to beat SoA to import a party. I'll check out those tutorials, and if I do get something that works, I'll share it here.