Critical Hit
Welcome to Critical Hit (formerly known as Soundtrack Sunday), where I celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.
I love Neverwinter Nights. I would count myself among the top 100, maybe even top 50 fans in the world of this joint BioWare-Obsidian, Forgotten Realms and D&D-based CRPG series. While not super obscure—we’re not talking Brigand: Oaxaca or The Sum: Nous Aurons—NwN 1 and 2 aren’t RPG A-listers. They’re not sexy. They don’t sit at the cool kids table with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium.
Neverwinter Nights 2’s first expansion is a quiet all-timer, a realheads know CRPG with a surprisingly mature take on the Forgotten Realms and a uniquely haunting atmosphere—it’s like the Heat to Planescape: Torment’s Manhunter. A big part of MotB’s unforgettable atmosphere is its music, a particularly underrated aspect of this already-underrated RPG.
The track above, “Death God’s Vault,” is killer on its own, but one of the scenes it accompanies still floors me all these years later. I think the dialogue writing and Fred Tatasciore’s (Saren in Mass Effect, among many other roles) delivery lands even if you don’t know what the hell’s going on.
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When PCG senior editor Wes Fenlon told me he’d be speaking to its composer, Alexander Brandon, who’s much better known for the techno Y2K banger OSTs of Deus Ex and Unreal, I begged him to deliver a question from me on behalf of all CRPG goblins.
Unfortunately, the best I could come up with was, “Hey, remember Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer?” But even this elicited some in-depth recollections from Brandon. And I’d never clocked before that MotB’s soundtrack was a collaboration between Brandon and another all-time great videogame composer.
Dark turn
“Alpha Protocol was in development, and, at the time, Obsidian’s model was one and a half projects or two and a half projects [at a time],” Brandon told Wes. “It was like, we have a full-on game in development with either a DLC add-on pack or the start of another full-on project.”
Brandon was full-time audio director at Obsidian at the end of the 2000s, and his credits with the studio include MotB, Neverwinter Nights 2’s other expansion, Storm of Zehir, and the killer spy RPG, Alpha Protocol.
He fondly recalled the Obsidian team at the time, including one of his hires, Scott Lawlor, who is now audio lead on Overwatch. Brandon had strong praise for MotB creative lead George Ziets, who is credited with the expansion’s singular story—Ziets founded his own studio, Digimancy Entertainment, in 2019.
I hadn’t realized until now that Brandon also worked on the soundtrack with Womb Music, the prolific audio duo of Rik Schaffer and Margaret Tang who, among many other projects, were behind the performance direction and unforgettable soundtrack of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. The range on display here is particularly impressive to me: VtMB’s dreamy ’90s grunge is about as far removed from MotB’s atmospheric dark fantasy as the synthy beats of Unreal and Deus Ex.
Womb Music was already contracted for MotB’s soundtrack before Brandon was hired in-house at Obsidian, but he described a fruitful collaboration with Schaffer on the music.
“If you’re gonna audio direct a project, and you’re a composer, you selfishly write some tracks yourself,” said Brandon. “And I was just like, ‘I would like to do this.’ And I did. So there was the track from the original Neverwinter Nights 2 which was done by [Heavy Melody Music]. We took that, we took the theme that Rik Schaffer originally wrote, and then I added to that for what ended up in the game.”
Base Game NwN2 mostly reused the first game’s soundtrack, but it also had a few new tracks provided by David Fraser and Neil Goldberg of Heavy Melody. The main theme is great in its own right: Mysterious, yet stirringly epic. Schaffer and Brandon’s spin on it for the DLC is a darker, more foreboding reprise that turns frantic and propulsive. It really sets the mood: “This ain’t your daddy’s Neverwinter Nights 2.”
“Rik did not say, ‘Oh, you ruined my track,’ which is great,” recalled Brandon. “And the [Heavy Melody] people didn’t care. I wrote another couple of themes that I really liked, like Mulsantir, one of the central cities.”
Those were the magic words for me: Mulsantir’s theme might be my favorite in the whole soundtrack. This small city is an entrepôt for The Forgotten Realms’ distant Rashemen (where Minsc from Baldur’s Gate hails from), and Mulsantir is a distinctive place, full of tension and contradiction.
It’s both cosmopolitan and reclusive. Urbane merchants rub shoulders with masked witches, and the city boasts a theater, a berserker lodge, a temple for the god of death, and a second, secret temple for the dead god of death. Mulsantir is a welcome reminder of civilization after MotB’s creepy dungeon crawl intro, weirdly cozy yet also deeply sinister.
That’s a tough tangle of vibes to get across in a single, looping, ambient audio track, yet Brandon nailed it. The Mulsantir theme is comforting and nostalgic, with a touch of sophistication, but it also has this dark undercurrent. It sounds mournful and defeated to me, reflecting the town’s grim history, and the opening notes in particular speak to Mulsantir’s mysteries and secrets.
“I was like, Okay, what is a quintessential sounding, D&D medieval-ish thing? I know that the styles have gone in many different directions,” recalled Brandon. “Baldur’s Gate does its own thing. But [MotB] was fun. It was great working in a fairly antiquated Bioware tool and the story was really fun.
“Man, like that weird thing that just attaches to your back and whips its tentacles out. It had some really neat ideas that set sort of a darker D&D mood. And I enjoyed that.”
Hey, so did I, man.
