In Greece we have a traddition of wishing ‘Good X’ or ‘Happy X’ for nearly every occasion – Happy 1st day of the month, Happy journey, Good appetite, Happy Winter etc. Since Leap years don’t come up often (for Gregorian calendar users, every 4 years except when it lands on the turn of the century that is not divisible by 400) – we thought we’d take the opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Leap Year!

…oh and by the way, it’s already the 29th where I’m writing this…

The Vault has posted information for this year’s NWN and NWN2 MotY competitions, for which voting starts on the 3rd of March. The MotY is a popular contest that allows all members of the community to vote on their favourite module. This prestigious award has been running for several years, and it was to supplement this award that the Golden Dragons were conceived and endorsed by NWVault.

There are plenty of great mods in both competitions – you can check out the shortlists here: NWN and NWN2.

Note: the MotY is totally seperate from the Golden Dragon Awards and neither effects the other in any way.

Today we have an interview with Eric “Berra” Karlsson, whose module Surviving Horror 2 won the Golden Dragon Most Replayable Module Award for 2006. We learn a bit more about his ‘horrific’ tastes, as well as what he’s up to now…

Read and discuss it here.

Aristan, Golden Dragon winner for Best Roleplaying Module category for 2006, gives some insights into what’s happening with the sequel, thoughts on the Golden Dragons and other work in progress…

You can read the full interview and comment here…

In one of our longest and most heated debates, we finally resolved what to do with work that has been sitting in beta for a long time. Some time ago we published an announcement that all work in the 2007 cycle needs to be out of beta by the 31st of January 2008 in order to be considered for the 2007 awards.

All well and good, but what do we do with work that was left in beta? Originally it was our intention to roll this over to the following year, but this presented us with two problems; i) how to track it down and ii) we actually wanted to discourage ‘endless betas’. Nevertheless, we still want to award the best, so we wanted to allow room to ensure we could, without setting unreasonable restrictions that cut into testing time once a submission went public.

So the final solution we decided upon was: all submissions released in year 1 that are still in beta when the year 1 award cycle starts, will be viable for year 2 but no longer. In year 2, they will be considered as final even if they are unfinished.

Whilst it is unlikely that a submission in this state would get nominated, it is possible, so we wanted to make it clear how it would be handled.

Tonight we have an interview with Savant, who won the 2006 Veteran Author Golden Dragon Award for NWN. His Aielund Saga has been highly recommended by many, and we find out what he’s going to do now he’s finished it…

Read it here and discuss…

This is to announce that there will likely be only a single merged award for NWN and NWN2 for the Best Sound/Music award. This is because there is no simple way to distinguish which game the majority of sound and music files uploaded to the Vault belong to. In the event that the finalists can clearly be differentiated by game (such as module nominees), we may reconsider and award one for each game.

Discuss.

We have our second in the series of Golden Dragon winner interviews tonight, with Hugie, winner of the NWN 2006 award for Best Action Module. Hugie likes to divide his time between building for himself and Ossian Studios, and chasing down those elusive awards…

Read and discuss the interview here.