Video Game / Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir

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The game starts with a new party hired by Gentleman Adventurer Volothamp Geddarm to escort him on a journey to the southern reaches of Faerûn sometime after the Shadow War and the events of Mask of the Betrayer. Their ship Vigilant is sabotaged and runs aground in a storm on the coast of the southern nation of Samarach; after withstanding an attack by local jungle goblins and making it to the capital, they join up with the recipient of the Vigilant's cargo, a Merchant Princess named Sa'Sani, and begin working to unravel the conspiracy against her.

Unlike its heavily story-driven predecessors, Storm of Zehir hearkens back more to the Icewind Dale dungeon-crawler model of gameplay. The four-character Player Party is fully customizable (you can instead collect an assortment of premade "cohorts", with up to two allowed to join the party at any time), and the game features an Overworld Not to Scale travel map with Random Encounters and much shorter dungeons. The game also adds yuan-ti purebloods and gray orcs as playable races and the swashbuckler, hellfire warlock, and doomguide as playable classes.

In addition to many tropes used in Neverwinter Nights 2, Storm of Zehir provides examples of the following tropes:

• Amazon Brigade: As with the OC, it's possible to establish an all-female party using Lastri, Inshula, Soraevora, Chir and Belueth, and any combination of player characters.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Compared to the OC, crafting is much simpler and easier. The recipe books indicate either you have all the requirements or not with colors. All you need are the components and the correct spell levels. No longer do you need to put the ingredients in the benches, you just need to click on the recipe book. Crafting also combine all of you party members' crafting skills.
• Apocalyptic Log: The former owner(s) of the tower Tempest's Fury in Samarach were experimenting on a djinn. (No points for guessing what happened.) There's a journal in one of the rooms; the second-to-last entry is, "I'm certain the wards on my room can keep him out." The last entry reads, "I was wrong about the wards."
• The Bad Guy Wins: One of the Multiple Endings if you choose to retire before defeating the Big Bad.
• Big Bad: The yuan-ti House Se'sehen, led by an avatar of Zehir, the yuan-ti god of poison. They want to Take Over the World.
• Call-Forward: The events you see in the scrying pool is the start of a calamity that will shatter this version of the Forgotten Realms setting. The whole area around Neverwinter will be destroyed by the Spellplague in a few years.
• Can't Catch Up: Unlike the OC and Mask of The Betrayer, there's no Leaked Experience for companions that aren't part of your party. You can however take them to the adventurers' guildmaster who will bring them up to your level. The fee depends on the gap between their level and yours.
• Canon Immigrant: Zehir was introduced in Storm of Zehir, then made canon as a subservient deity of Bane by the 4E Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, though 5E retconned him to be an aspect of the Mulhorandi deity Sebek, who had been thought a casualty of the Spellplague.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Several companions were mentioned in previous campaigns — Septimund is the Doomguide whom Nya from Port Llast fell in love with, while Finch, a bard known for losing his best hats, finally shows up. Ribsmasher also appeared in the Original Campaign.
  • And Skullcrusher from all the way back in the Pool of Radiance games.
  • When the player enters the Blacklake district of Neverwinter, a couple, both named Romantic Sightseer, can be seen on the platform looking over the city. Closer inspection reveals them to bear a striking resemblance (that is, the faces of) Marshal Cormick and Moire, the player character's main contacts in the City Watch and the Thieves Guild factions, respectively, from the Original Campaign.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Fated Winds merchant cartel is so very much this.
• Crossover: One sidequest in Neverwinter features a quest giver who traveled to the Realms from the city of Sigil in the Planescape setting. It helps that many of the people who worked on NWN2 were also part of the Planescape: Torment team.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: The Red Wizards of Thay are best known for having aspirations of world conquest, but there's a Red Wizard enclave in Neverwinter that acts as a magic shop. The proprietor says he's of the opinion that making money selling magic items is a better use of his associates' time than plotting to take over the world.
• The Dragonslayer: A completionist player can slay up to four dragons, and your first dragon kill grants the history feat "Dragon Slayer". Unlike in the original campaign, the feat adds +2 to attack and damage rolls versus dragons (whereas it was pure flavor in the original).
• Easter Egg: One possible encounter is a man trapped in a beartrap. You can free him or kill him (standard stuff), but if you have a cleric of an evil deity, you can sacrifice him, with unique dialogue for each deity. Annie Carlson notes that she found writing this to be fun.
• The Extremist Was Right: If the player calls out the The Chessmaster for her manipulations at the end of the game, she points out that humanity was given plenty of chances to lead the Sword Coast responsibly and botched every single one. If the player agrees with her reasoning, the epilogue reveals that the yuan-ti do an excellent job guiding humanity from the shadows, and a new age of prosperity is born. Of course, those who get too curious have a way of disappearing...
• Fowl-Mouthed Parrot: An early Fetch Quest has Volo send you to find him a parrot. Turns out the parrot's previous owner taught it a wide variety of handy Dwarven expletives. Cue Volo making the trope naming "fowl language" pun, and the player characters calling him on it.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • The initial version had an infamous one that made MOTB literally unplayable if installed after it (it deleted all of the dialog and narration audio).
  • One of the later patches introduced a nasty rubberbanding bug into character movement across the game. That remains in effect in the original release because a licensing dispute between game publisher Atari and Dungeons & Dragons owner Hasbro led to the publisher cutting off bugfixing funding to Obsidian before they could fix it, so it stayed in the game until the Enhanced Edition.
• Genie in a Bottle: You can provoke the djinn in Tempest's Fury into attacking, whereupon you can bind him to a ring found in the dungeon. You can then summon him into battle once a day.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: The 3 merchant cartels' rooms are colored blue, green, and red. Guess which ones are good, neutral, and evil?
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Crossed with a Continuity Nod. An NPC illithid in the Underdark Market apparently read the mind of a seer who foresaw the deicide that shepherded in 4th edition in the Forgotten Realms. His brain couldn't process it and now he's stuck repeating the prophecy over and over.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Zehir, yuan-ti god of poison. You fight an avatar of Zehir in the epilogue but this doesn't kill him: he's Saved by Canon due to being an exarch of Bane in 4th Edition.
• Hellfire: Storm of Zehir adds on the Hellfire Warlock class, which simply lives off this trope.
• Hero of Another Story: While the Knight-Captain was busy dealing with Akachi, the SoZ protagonist was busy saving the world from an evil god.
• Honest Corporate Executive: The merchants cartel called the Circle of Friends. They strongly believe that ethical business practices, well-paid workers and happy citizens will generate more profits.
• Interactive Narrator: After the ending narration you can yell at Volo until he gives you another version (allowing you to see every variation of the ending), and he also exists in the story himself.
• Lighter and Softer: Zehir swings strongly back toward the "Slayers-esque" kind of D&D play similar to the NWN2 original campaign, after how deep and dark MotB was. Granted, the guys at Obsidian were upfront about it from the start this time and deliberately set out to make a game that was, at times, aggressively silly.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Sabotage of a trade ship so it sinks -> yuan-ti plot to take over the world.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Herald of Zehir has six of them.
• Multiple Endings: It has the same kind of structure as the previous entries, with the wrinkle that you can Bluff or Intimidate the narrator into showing you the other variations.
• New Resource Midgame: Trade bars, as part of the trade management system, are unlocked in Act 2 after Sa'Sani's trading company relocates to the Sword Coast.
• Non-Combat EXP: XP for opening locks and disabling traps.
• Opening Narration: Volo explains over a brief montage why the party is traveling to Samarach with him, then tells of the storm that shipwrecked everybody.
• Optional Party Member: You're not required to recruit any of the possible cohorts, and in fact it's mechanically possible to not create any additional party members besides your "main" character in the first place. It's not a good idea unless you've minmaxed out the wazoo, but it's mechanically possible.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Chult's batiri are jungle goblins that serve the role of primitive native tribes. They use stone tools and weapons, paint their bodies, and eat people.
• Our Liches Are Different: There's an alhoon as a Superboss — a mind flayer lich. It is meant to be an encounter for epic-level characters and is about the only reason to keep grinding after you beat The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, which is doable at level 18.
• The Overworld: The game got one here. Previously the game had you fast travel between locations.
• Overworld Not to Scale: Random encounters and the party were modeled very much out of scale with the map and the locations, though at the start of an encounter the action would shift to a smaller map of correct scale.
• Pardon My Klingon: An early Fetch Quest has Volo send you to find him a parrot because he's curious about how a bird can speak human languages. The first words out of the parrot's mouth are "Dumtharak barmathar!", apparently a Dwarven Cluster F-Bomb.
• Rage Against the Author: The story is as told by Volo, and if you don't like the ending you can yell at him (or bluff him) until he changes how things went.
• Random Encounters: Many, many varieties on the overworld map, ranging from run-of-the-mill monster battles to item-gathering opportunities to a few scripted encounters.
• Raptor Attack: The Chult sections of the campaign have featherless Deinonychus as possible encounters. There's also Megaraptor, which surprisingly are portrayed as not dromaeosaurids but large carnivorous dinosaurs with the big claws on their hands.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The enemy in this game, both to the xenophobic Samarachans and to the player, are the snakelike yuan-ti. Not played completely straight, seeing as how the player can create a yuan-ti and make them non-evil.
  
  Oddly, local Yuan-ti hunters won't notice unless you're dumb enough to explain it, because the player-usable yuan-ti form, the "pureblood," is meant to be able to blend in with standard humanoids.
• Shipwreck Start: The expansion begins with the player's adventuring party on a merchant ship, which wrecks off the coast of Chult during a storm. Waking up in the wreck to find the site being surveyed by hostile goblins, they send the travelling scribe Volo to parley and buy time while they scavenge supplies and build improvised weapons to fend off the imminent goblin attack.
• Shout-Out: Umoja the druid has a dinosaur named Yushai.
• Stereotype Flip: Besides the various stereotypes flipped by your cohorts (see the character sheet), Neverwinter has a Red Wizard enclave whose head hangs a lampshade on this. He's a member of a Red Wizard faction that thinks making lots of money selling magic items is a better use of their time than trying to take over the world.
• Uneven Hybrid:
  • Character creation in SoZ borrows a couple of "heritage feats" from the Planar Handbook. Non-lawful characters can take "Fey Heritage" at 1st Level, giving them a touch of fairy blood, while non-good characters can take "Fiendish Heritage". Turns into Heinz Hybrid if you take both and/or put them on a half-elf, half-orc, or planetouched.
  • One sidequest has the party investigating the theft of the Hammer of Ironfist by a group of fire genasi bards. Another has a fire genasi from Sigil who is gathering items for a museum there.
• Tightrope Walking: Discussed in a dialogue option. When investigating the wreck of the trade ship Vigilant, if your party contains a rogue they can observe that they've stood on ropes thinner than the one that snapped in the storm. It broke because it had been partly cut through by a saboteur.
• 20 Bear Asses: Several of this sort of sidequest are found.