Dasaria

Dasaria is a Dungeons & Dragons based roleplaying setting invented for the eponymous fan-created persistent world in the Neverwinter Nights series. The original Dasaria was implemented as a server for the first Neverwinter Nights; the modern incarnation, Dasaria II, is based on Neverwinter Nights 2.

Dasaria features an original universe not connected to the Forgotten Realms or any other existing D&D settings. As the story goes, fifty years ago, a dynastic marriage of Emperor Marcus IV and Queen Nelina ended a long struggle between the good kingdom of Dasaria and The Empire of Varana. Now Dasaria is an occupied imperial province, in the process of assimilation under its peaceful, if oppressive, rule.

New players start their adventures in Cear, a sprawling port city on a peninsula on the edge of the imperial province of Dasaria. It is about the size of Neverwinter in the NWN2 official campaign, with a comparable number of quests. However, the playable world is much larger than that, containing many areas of wild plains and mountains, and other towns and cities such as Lendose, Ravenswatch and Tristan.

The Dasaria II server features all of the playable races and classes from the original Neverwinter Nights 2, minus the expansions, but their in-universe origins are often vastly different. It also expands the original mechanics with a few lore-related feats and improvements to the UI for easier roleplaying interactions, and adds some D&D mechanics not implemented in the base NWN2, such as languages and the Sense Motive skill. Most of the unfolding story is driven by player-created factions.


 * Ancient Conspiracy: The Canite Heresy, and more specifically Canas' Knights of the Fist.
 * Bread and Circuses: Much like many emperors in the Trope Namer, Marcus knows how to be a genuinely popular ruler.
 * Character Alignment: As expected from a Dungeons and Dragons setting, but actually offers a lot of challenges to good aligned characters.
 * Crazy Cat Lady: Dorothea. She refers to her cats as her babies.
 * Elves Versus Dwarves: Zigzagged. Among the player factions, the Stormbeard dwarves are distrustful of "tree-huggers" but not so much as to shun them, and while they are alarmed by the growth of the nature grove near their clan stronghold and the elves frequenting it, it was actually started by one of their own, a dwarf druid.
 * The Empire: Varana, natch. It is evidently inspired by the Roman Empire, with Latin-ish names, legionnaires, and a gladiator arena. However, since this is NWN2 after all, the architecture is typical for Medieval European Fantasy.
 * Evil Overlord: Canas, the founder of Varana and its ruling dynasty, was brought back as undead by loyal cultists and became this. He now leads an army of orcs and undead in opposition to the Empire.
 * Evil Versus Evil: The Lawful Evil Empire of Varana vs the Chaotic Evil Cult of Canas. This can really leave Good characters in a bind, and there have been major splits among them if they should side with the Lesser of Two Evils and hope to defeat the Canites, or should they work on their own even if it risks losing the war.
 * First Town: Cear. Also the largest town in-game. Lore-wise Dasar is the center of the Dasarian province, but it is off the playable map.
 * In Dasaria 1, the first town was Daris, which was destroyed between campaigns.
 * Ghibli Hills: The first two zones just outside Cear. Beyond that, however...
 * Guide Dang It: There actually is no questing guide, but that makes some quests frustrating nonetheless. Some are ridiculously easy for their rewards in gold and XP, but others have a very broad level range and there is no indication for the intended level for soloing. At lower levels the penalty from death and respawning is not even worth the quest rewards.
 * La Résistance: The short-lived Kingseeker Rebellion, and now the Daybreak Alliance.
 * Legacy Character: The server has special rules for characters who have connections to Dasaria 1. It hasn't stopped plenty of characters from cropping up who have strong ties back to the old campaign.
 * Our Elves Are Better: Dasaria supports the Forgotten Realms-based elf subraces from NWN2 for gameplay reasons, but canonically there is no distinction between them. Instead the elves are split by their origin: Rian (your typical nature-loving wood elves, who also happen to be Immortal), Iryrod (aristocratic city elves, now annexed by The Empire), and the outcast Tel'gothrim, the dark elves.
 * Perpetually Static: Subverted, averted, taken out back behind the shed and shot. While making changes to the game world is not easy, it is perfectly feasible for a player to initiate and effort to rebuild a destroyed town, or perhaps destroy a town. To the point where players can get their name on the map (literally). The ongoing story changes the world also ends up with changes to the game world.
 * Recently averted big time with the DM-driven event where it was pronounced that the Western Empire fell to the Evil Overlord Canas, forcing the surviving royal family to take concessions to reconcile the rebels and imperial loyalists within Dasaria in an Enemy Mine scenario. Changes to the game world to reflect the new balance of powers will happen gradually over time.
 * Public Domain Character: Many of the old gods of Dasaria, renamed after Varanite takeover, are taken from Babylonian mythology.
 * These also provide examples of both in-universe and out of universe Retcon: Some of the Dasarian pantheon was actually changed between games to help reduce the number of gods and clarify their portfolios. And then the Varanites changed their names, and some of their positions in the pantheon.
 * Written by the Winners: Most in-universe historical documents, including the campaign lore of the official website, are written from a Varanite-biased perspective by imperial scribes.

Considering that the core gameplay and interface is unchanged, most Neverwinter Nights 2 gameplay tropes not related to its setting still apply, as well as the traditional problems inherent in the NWN2 engine:
 * Copy and Paste Environments: To be fair, the toolset does include a large variety of props to decorate environments with, and most of them are used here, but it still gets obvious after a while. It also reuses some character models and loading screens from the official campaign, especially in the oldest areas that were designed first before NWN2 was even properly released.
 * Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence
 * Invisible Wall: NWN2 was better at hiding these, mostly by virtue of most of its outdoor environments being long winding paths enclosed by barriers at all sides. Dasaria has more open zones on average, and map borders act as invisible walls.
 * Loads and Loads of Loading: The game world consists of small zones mostly connected by teeny-tiny markers that need to be clicked to trigger a zone transition.
 * Twenty Bear Asses and its cousin, the Fetch Quest.