Back of the Envelope

Well, I've just reached a fun new minigame in Neverwinter Nights 2. I've been given a ruined keep, along with instructions to rebuild it and garrison it. To that end I've been given command of fifty soldiers and 70000 gold. This is all a rather involved minigame. The first order of business, as I saw it, was starting up a steady revenue stream, in this case money I can tithe from merchants using the road. In order to do that, first I need to attract merchants to the road, which I can do by sending my soldiers to patrol it. But my soldiers aren't effective until they're trained, for which I need to recruit a sargeant, and equipped, which requires recruiting an armorer and a weaponsmith and paying them to produce the goods. But I can't recruit either of those until I build a smithy, which requires gold. You see? Fortunately, the seed money is enough to build the smithy and begin repair on the walls and the roads, but only just. It's not enough to rebuild the keep or buy the best equipment for my troops yet. Part of the fun is recruiting. Rather than just being given a list of people to select from, I need to go out and talk to the NPCs I've dealt with over the course of the game so far, and convince them to join me at my keep. I also got a visit from some adventurers looking to follow in my footsteps, and asking if I have any quests for them. Unfortunately, adventurers are notoriously unreliable. You ask them to look into reports of spies in a town and they get sidetracked rescuing a farmer's daughter from goblins, or you tell them to clear out the bandits in an area and halfway there they stumble on a long forgotten tomb and start searching it for lost treasures. Still, usually they do a decent job once they get around to it, except that these seem to be even less competent than most.

Overall, it's an interesting and fun game in itself. Of course, it's a sideplot and there's more to be done in the main plot, but it was enough to keep me up way late a night or two.