I'm making a Montaron Mod for BG2 and I'd appreciate some input
jnwee
Member Posts: 5
I am currently working on a Montaron Mod for BG2 (you just resurrect his corpse at a temple) and content-wise I'm quite set on making it "minimalistic" but I'd still appreciate ideas on characters / dialogues he can interact with or banters with companions.
I am also planning to make two routes the player can take in this mod, which are both rather evil or at least not good, but one would make Montaron work in a "lawful" party.
Thanks in advance to anyone bothering giving me input.
Edit:
I have taken the time to make a summary of my progress and ideas this far and a GitHub repository
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fwzCXzlm-aYRCAm6KZeWEVBU293cv8vJX91xHoME3og/edit?usp=sharing
If you have too much free time and are interested in helping me out, feel free to comment on the docs.
I am also planning to make two routes the player can take in this mod, which are both rather evil or at least not good, but one would make Montaron work in a "lawful" party.
Thanks in advance to anyone bothering giving me input.
Edit:
I have taken the time to make a summary of my progress and ideas this far and a GitHub repository
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fwzCXzlm-aYRCAm6KZeWEVBU293cv8vJX91xHoME3og/edit?usp=sharing
If you have too much free time and are interested in helping me out, feel free to comment on the docs.
Post edited by jnwee on
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Comments
The voiceovers there use phrases from BG1, which roughly match the meaning of the new phrases.
Also Montaron is in the "The Darkest Day" mod, but he has almost no texts there.
In any case, I wish you success in your project!
But in regards to Montaron and your request for ideas: here is the wiki page
https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Montaron#Background
(This is just meant as a "starter" for all of us, not confined to the mod idea here only. That is, background
info about Montaron as such.)
As halfling he can perhaps have some interesting banter with the little races, such as Jan or Mazzy, perhaps
all dwarves too. Perhaps even a romance with Mazzy and he tries to impress her in whatever ways possible.
I also recommend Dvaradime's mod from Lava. It's his best NPC, in my opinion, and also comes with at
the least one primary quest. Now I am not saying you should copy that 1:1, but perhaps Montaron also
has some background story that can make it into a quest. You wrote that you don't want to make it
too overly long and complex, so perhaps something simple. Perhaps Montaron is trying to find some
special object. That may have gone through different merchants or so before it ends up somewhere.
As a reward Montaron may find a special item (like Dwaradime is keeping the wax, although perhaps
Montaron can get something more interesting than a wax. Could be something fitting to his style,
such as a knife or so that can be poisoned once per day with a medium strength of poison or so,
or anything else that may fit here. Or if it should be a non-weapon, perhaps a gold bar that is
hollow on in inside and can keep a few items, like a container; and perhaps a love letter too or
whatever drives Montaron. I don't know the character that well; I played mostly BG2)
I would not worry too much about an older, existing mod, although perhaps you can integrate some
of the ideas here, so that people can think "ok, this mod is SPECIFICALLY tailored to make Montaron
more interesting, so we will use that mod instead of the older mod". This happens to quite a few
older mods, e. g. the stronghold NPC mod that was, I think, replaced by another larger mod eventually.
Also don't forget some reactions with other NPCs if you can, like the new ones such as Dwaradime or
some of the female NPCs (but non-little races) in general.
On my own todo list ... if I ever get to go through ... is a mod for the gnomeys, a bit similiar to the idea
behind "all things mazzy", but specifically for all gnomes. I was actually thinking of starting with the
main NPC as a gnome here, starting from Dwaradime and adapting it; the gnomey would be
Fizzleban (a bit inspired by Fizban and Tasslehoff from the original Dragonlance, where the NPC
is initially always drunk and when drunk the magic has wild-magic like effects or just fails; and
eventually the player will end up with a stronger mage gnome; it's quite hard to find useful
documentation on all the commands in use - only the gibberlings seem to have carried together
useful documentation, and I just hate sifting through weidu ... I don't get why people love weidu
so much. At any rate, enough off-topic, best luck! Keep us updated and if you ever publish it
on github, perhaps you can also add a .md markdown file as you go, for things you learned
and ideas, so that other people can learn from it without having to read the source code as-is).
I'm quite new to this forum (I have not written a post before on here, so excuse me if my formatting sucks or I mess up the quotes
If I get to a presentable early version of the mod I will make a github repo and post it here for people interested.
The Mazzy idea I thought about, but I don't want to make him "Korgan 2" just for the jokes, also he is pretty cold blooded and violent so most banters would probably involve either him threatening people and being abrasive or respecting their martial prowess.
This then resulting either in conflicts with people like Keldorn or Aerie or in people not taking him seriously (like Jan or Haer'Dalis) annoying him. Though some of the NPCs (Cernd, Valygar and probably some more - the EE Companions I probably will do as an update later on since I haven't ever played with them) I don't have too much experience with so I'll see what people suggest and if not research a bit when I'm done with the other stuff.
Dvaradime I installed once I think, but never played through the game with him. Maybe I'll check him out in one of my next playthroughs.
Content-wise I already have a rough layout for minor quests / encounters which will need some refining but I'll just give a little summary here and people interested can tell me what you think (or what I could change / add):
So after completing Xzar's Quest you can find his body in some crate on the docks behind the harper building since they don't have any use for it anymore and just wanted to dump it (not inside the harper compound like in vanilla since you can't reach it without Jaheira pretty late in the game). You can then resurrect him with the corpse and enough money at a temple, on which he joins you (if you let him).
He always hated Xzar so he wants to see his corpse to make sure he is really dead (he was only working with Xzar because his Boss at the Zhentarim ordered him to, he expresses his hate quite a bit in BG1). Once you bring him to Xzar's place of death he offers to join you for good and leave his old employer (The Zhentarim), since he has nowhere else to go and his boss will not be happy with Xzar's death suspecting Montaron for it.
You then go retrieve his dagger (a magic dagger with poison effect) from his and Xzars old base in the docks were you stumble upon a Zhentarim thief looting the place since he thought Xzar and Monty are dead.
You can spare or kill the thief with Montaron clearly preferring the latter, but anyway you will get Montaron's Dagger.
This is about how far I am right now with the programming of the mod, though I have quite some time currently and try to make daily progress at the moment.
Later on you will definitely encounter Montaron's old boss who wants to know what happened to Xzar which will probably just be a combat encounter which drops some magical assassin cloak or something similar.
Banter and talk wise I want him to be "in tune" with the vanilla companions of BG2 with like ~4 player talks + one or two small quests / encounters + 1 - 3 Banters with most companions and about half of that for ToB. I want an NPC who feels like he's just along for the ride similar to Korgan, Edwin and most other non-romancable Vanilla Companions in BG2.
I know the older mod and for my taste it is just too much, I want a mod that just adds a little to vanilla and doesn't feel out of place by adding tons of new content. Also I haven't looked into how crossmod content works, but when I'm done with the vanilla game I might add crossmod content for some other companion-mods (if I get permission, which shouldn't be a problem I'd think).
Gnomes are always fun.. especially drunk ones
I just started modding a couple weeks back and was on vacation for a while so really I'm just starting for the last weeks maybe.
If you're actually looking for a start into modding BG I can recommend a couple of sources, if not ignore this
I can definitely recommend the Branwen for BG2 mod, besides it being a mod it also has great documentation and is a great tutorial on how to make a NPC Mod, it is probably my main used source on my modding journey.
https://github.com/Pocket-Plane-Group/Branwen_for_BGII
Also I had trouble to find the List of Script Triggers I can use in the .d and .baf files until someone helped me out
https://gibberlings3.github.io/iesdp/scripting/actions/bgeeactions.htm#20
I can also recommend this youtube channel that really helped me out at first who has a couple of simple video guides on different parts of modding the game.
https://www.youtube.com/@dnddetective
Earl Boen, voice of Montaron and many other fantastic characters over the years (LeChuck from Monkey Island comes to mind), passed away last year. You are free to do as you wish but I would find it in exceptionally poor taste to do this -- Montaron already has a voice set. Just use it.
Yeah I found out he passed not too long ago, the man did an excellent job on Montaron. It's sad that Montaron has very few lines in BG1 and not even a critical hit / critical miss sound. I'll likely just cut a couple of his voice files from BG1 to use for those two, so that isn't much of a problem and for all other standard sounds I was planning to use the original voiceset anyway.
Using another voice (like some other returning NPC mods) I don't really see as an option (since Montaron's voice to me is a big part of the character and not using it I might as well not make the mod). This will result in a mostly silent character then, since I don't want to exhaust his few lines through the game.
It doesn't bother me too much, though it feels a bit out of place if a companion is almost completely silent in dialogues.
I thought about cloning for that reason, but I ofc had my doubts and moral objections to cloning someones voice in general. I guess I kind of hoped for new insights. I'm pretty set on not cloning his voice though, so I'll just take that part out of my post since I think it unlikely, someone has a mind-blowing revelation on why it is okay to clone someones voice to share.
Yes, but important dialogue points and the initiation chunk of dialogues / banters is often voiced for the vanilla NPCs. And it feels a bit weird to me if the dialogue window just pops up without any sound.
I could of course try and repurpose Montaron's existing voice files to the start of his dialogues, but I don't want to "exhaust" them and also not limit myself to Montaron starting every dialogue with "a pox on ye" (for example).
But yeah, that's just me being petty so I'll just have to get over it.
Of course it's ok for a couple of mods to bring back an existing character, but I thought it would be in good tone to inform that I have such project on my list. No estimated release date, though.
I'm new to modding, but I have a lot of time currently and also the creative process of writing a mod is proving to be quite fun for me, so I'll still finish my mod and see it as practice for possible future mods. (I'll also make it publicly available)
You making a mod that fills the "Montaron gap" (no offense to the BG1NPCs to SoA authors, the mod just didn't click with me) is more than welcome to me since I then won't have to play my own mod or at least have more options.
Your mods are great btw, played through the game a lot with the Friendship mods for Cernd, Korgan, Valygar...
Thanks for all the kind words and good luck working on your mods! Not just this one
And here I was considering the idea for a Montaron BG2 NPC as well... oh well!