Neverwinter Nights 2 Walkthrough - Original Campaign - Part 8

Neverwinter Nights 2 - Original Campaign - Walkthrough Part 8 - Blacklake District pre-Trial

This is one of a series of walkthroughs/hints for Neverwinter Nights 2 (Original Campaign). Click here for a listing of all our guides for Neverwinter Nights 2.

• After the Githyanki Base is raided, the storyline moves on to Act II and some parts of the map will change. Most of the action here takes place in the Blacklake District, but there are a few events and changes outside of that.
• There are also a lot of big alignment shifts available, sometimes with single actions shifting you by 5 or more points in one go. So, if you temporarily need a change to pick up a Prestige Class before changing back, now is probably the best time. After the Trial, XP starts flowing quite quickly and you can jump to about level 15 by the end of the raid on Crossroad Keep.
• Around this time, Neeshka's Sneak Attacks will be strong enough to kill most of the minion encounters in one round or less (especially if she is using two-weapon combat). You can most easily take advantage of this by using Greater Invisibility or Darkness (if using Darkness, you will probably want to give her Blind-Fight as well). Remember that if anyone other than the main character is too far away from the group, they will earn NO XP for kills so you can't exploit this by having her go solo.

Neverwinter Docks District

• Sand joins your party as legal counsel and his store is now tended by a Leomund's Merchant Elemental. His original store content and price point are no longer available, so your last change to buy anything from Sand or sell anything to him and take advantage of his great price point would be before you finish up at the Githyanki Base in Act I.
• The halfling merchant Fibba appears at the docks, near the ruined building next to the Sunken Flagon.
• There is nothing really exciting here that you either need (especially if you have been doing your own item crafting) or can afford to buy (like the vorpal falchion Headsman).
• To access her special inventory, you need the Blessed of Waukeen feat (feat number 1765) which you can add to your character with the console.
• You might also want to ignore anything that has a DC of 18 because at this stage of the game even creatures with weak saving throws against the particular effect can probably make the saving throw. On the other hand, every creature has a flat 5% to be affected (by automatically failing a saving throw by rolling 1 checked by rolling a 20-sided die) unless they have an outright immunity against the effect.
• Despite saying that she is on her way out of Neverwinter, she won't actually leave once you finish dialogue with her.

Neverwinter Merchant Quarter

• You will need to come here to be accepted as a squire and be allowed to leave Neverwinter. You can delay this process if you like in order to wander around and do some quests. Whoever you were working for (whether the City Watch or the Thieves Guild) has an optional quest (City Watch Undercover) for you at this time although you are not prompted about this and you can pick up the quest even after the Trial and after the raid on Crossroad Keep.
• At the Vigil required for you to become a Squire, you must tell your sponsor to wait in order to search the bodies. Probably because of this, some players won't find the Luskan assassin's ring because they didn't loot the bodies. Whether you find it here or not, it seems it won't matter because the actual ring you need is located later in the Glowstone Caverns, even though both rings look identical.

Neverwinter Blacklake District - Exterior

• Cain Lethellon
• Whether you have and can equip a lute or other instrument or not, you will be given a lute by Cain.
• The musical sequences are:
• Round 1: 441 247 54
• Round 2: 234 451 122
• Round 3: 233 223 317 5
• Round 4: 353 452 727 25
• In the final round, you can choose only one of Sand, Qara, or Grobnar to do something and thereby gain Influence with them. Selecting Grobnar to do a duet with you is worth +3 Influence with Grobnar.
• Pepin Pollo - If you don't first ask Shandra if she'd like you to buy the painting, you won't lose influence with Elanee or Neeshka. Just buy it outright without asking anyone to gain influence with Shandra.
• Merchants who don't have buy/sell dialogue still have gold on them to pickpocket. One of them has a stack of 250 Gold Rings -- probably a developer's oversight, but great for financing Crossroad Keep later.
• Jenks:
• You can Influence either Qara or Elanee here, but not both. Qara's influence event has precedence over Elanee's.
• You can find Kiggo around a corner opposite the merchants. Helping Kiggo free the imps is worth a 10-point shift to Chaotic and can easily bump you out of Lawful if you need to (for example) multiclass your Monk into a Frenzied Berserker.

Neverwinter Blacklake District - Bryce Crypt

• Lord Nasher will make a reference to the document you will find here before sending you to Crossroad Keep, so at some point you should investigate this area in the Blacklake District, just north of the Collector's Mansion, and before you get sent to Crossroad Keep.
• You can rescue Savanna if you act swiftly enough to intercept her attackers. If you are having a hard time doing this, you might try having one character target her with some sort of healing as their first action instead of focussing all characters on attacks.
• The boss in this area is very strong against straight melee characters if they fail some saves and are blinded. Also, he can spontaneously convert his spells into melee touch Cause Wounds type spells, so he doesn't have to try very hard to hit anyone for quite a lot of damage. Try not to engage him through a doorway where you might not be able to bring spellpower to bear: The game engine / AI will not necessarily reposition a spellcasting character if they do not have the required line of sight to the target or target location; instead, it will simply drop the spell from the queue. If you are stuck, you can actually try shutting a door behind you and making a run for it until you can heal. Sometimes, he actually won't pursue.

Neverwinter Blacklake District - Collector's Mansion

• This place becomes accessible to you as the final chapter in Neeshka's sidequests involving Leldon.
• It is not hard to move with stealth on the ground floor here (especially if you equip Neeshka with the Cloak and Boots of Elvenkind), but certain actions automatically expose you. It's probably less stressful to arrange your party to handle all the guards at the lobby, a few at a time through the doorway, and then explore the rest of the floor.
• For example, if you open the door from the lobby area you start in, bad luck means a guard might be patrolling right outside at the time and you will immediately be engaged in combat by all the guards.
• Or, if you open the chest next to the Guard Captain, he will immediately sense you, although his ability to track you may be limited.
• If any character enters the Kitchen, they will immediately pull in the main character for dialogue and you will lose stealth or invisibility because you entered dialogue.
• If you attack Vania, she calls two guards who spawn in immediately even if you have killed all the guards in the building.
• You must kill the Collector prior to getting his key. Afterwards, he will not talk to you and you cannot therefore make him hostile so that you can attack him. He has a couple of nice weapons, but nothing spectacular by this stage of the game.
• Even if you have enough Damage Resistance against fire to take no damage from the fireplace, you still need the water from downstairs to put out the fireplace and get the vault key there.
• The Vault code is 513:
• "Nine are we when taken all three.": The sum of the three numbers is 9.
• "None survive our first less five.": The first number minus 5 is 0, so the first number must be 5.
• "Last one slain, then six remain.": The sum (9) minus the last digit is 6, so the last digit must be (9 - 6) = 3.
• Since the sum is 9 and the first and last digits are 5 and 3 respectively, the middle digit must be 1.
• Leldon can start with a paralyzing attack right at the end of dialogue with him and before your characters are "in combat" -- therefore he generally gets it in as a Sneak Attack if he is close enough to a character.

Neverwinter Blacklake District - Temple of Lathander

• You can get a quest to deliver a box to Brother Merring in West Harbour. Once in West Harbor:
• After delivering the box you can steal the box back from Brother Merring and then loot it. Disarming the trap on the box is worth 100 xp.
• Although the dialogue looks like is hasn't changed since you brought the Shards to Duncan, there are new interactions:
• Georg Redfell and Elanee, regarding the Swamp Elf.
• Retta Starling talking more about Lorne Starling.
• Daeghun will tell you about your mother, but will thereafter not offer any more dialogue.