Today we are publishing the first in a series of interviews from Golden Dragon Award winners. lord_rosenkrantz won the 2006 NWN award for Best Hak – Tileset, with his Immersive Swamps contribution. Find out how lord_rosenkrantz got into the tileset scene, his influences and his view on receiving a Golden Dragon!

Read the interview and discuss it here.

Just a quick heads-up for some of the things we have coming at AME over the next few days. First of all, we hope to soon have posted our first Golden Dragon Award Winner interview. It is our aim (no pun intended) to have an interview with each of 2006’s winners, assuming we can track them all down!

We’ll also be posting some rule clarifications on what happens when judging works that have been submitted to the Vault, yet remained in beta for a long time.

Lastly, there’ll be some news on the Community Contribution and Sound Award categories, so track back here!

Noticed that little Blogroll list on the right that is currently empty and inactive? Well, we’re thinking of opening it up, not just for AME member blogs, but also for community bloggers. If you’d like to get a link to your blog posted in the roll, you need to:

• Spend at least half of your blogging time talking about relevant NWN or NWN2 stuff – be it building your own module, latest news or whatever. We want to make sure the blogs listed here are relevant.
• Be a registered member of our forums, plus include a link to AME on your blog site. This is to ensure you are a bone fide community member.
• Write a non-defamatory, non-racist, non-sexist, etc (you get the rest) blog. We will be reading them from time to time, and we ask everyone to notify us of unsuitable blogs that are linked to from the AME site.

We’re also considering link swaps with relevant sites. For those that are interested in either option, please PM BenWH on the forums.

The Academy for Modding Excellence will be handling the author recognition awards for NWN2 slightly differently this year, as it is the first year. Normally, we have a veteran award for those who have also produced work in previous years, and a debut award available for all other authors. In order to ensure everyone is eligible for an award, but to help level the playing field, we have split these two awards for NWN2 as follows:

The Veteran Author Award will be given to authors who have produced a work in NWN2 in the current cycle, but have also produced work in NWN1 in previous years. (Submissions for Bioware’s original Writer’s competition do not count, due to the highly restrictive rules of that competition, but all other modules do)

The Debut Author Award will be given to authors who have produced their first work for NWN2 in this cycle, and did not author anything for NWN1.

This will be an exception only for this year.

To find out why we decided to do this, head over to the forums.

The Academy for Modding Excellence is frantically trawling through the 2007 submissions looking for worthy works for the nominations phase of the 2007 Golden Dragon Awards. This year, for the first time, there will be awards for NWN2 as well as NWN. Any work that was submitted to the Vault in 2007 (or works that were submitted earlier but remained in beta until that time) are eligible for the awards. In addition, for NWN2 only, in order to catch all works submitted to date, we are also considering any work submitted from the game’s launch in 2006.

What do I need to do to be considered?
Nothing, unless your work is in beta. If so, in order to be considered, you should release the final version within January. It is worth notifying AME if you do so, so that they are aware you are eligible.

What if I don’t consider my work ready/completed?
In this case you should notify AME that your work is not complete and you would like it not to be considered for the current cycle. You must do this by the end of January. In some cases, if it is clear that your work has been considered final by the public for some time, you will not be able to withdraw.

To discuss this or any other questions related to the Golden Dragons, why not come over to our new forums.

As we kick off for the 2007 award cycle, we have now moved to our brand new home here, complete with our own set of forums. The site was designed for us by AME member Qkrch, with supporting artworks from Steve Goad and Michael Darkangel. We hope you like it! As a first step, we hope you’ll click on that forums link, get registered, and start sharing your views with us on everything NWN, NWN2 and Golden Dragon related!

We’re certainly glad to have a home of our own, though it’s a bittersweet farewell to the Reviewers Guild Forums, who have been so good as to host us for the last 8 months. Our thanks to you.