Deep in that corner of the Underdark, I come across a prostrate skeleton; some kind of trapped ghost, his presumed spirit a purplish skull floating in the silver surface of a mirror. Examining the body brings up a story: “Izlude the Sorcerer was actually a player character in the early days of Arelith. This is an example of how players can influence the world; if you’re lucky, you could end up in his position!” I’m told that if I zoom in close, I can hear him crying.

I walk among the mind flayers unseen. I get the odd thrill of walking somewhere you’re not supposed to. Were I there as a player, this is one of the most hostile areas I could be at. But I’m there as a DM, wearing the silly default avatar for dungeon masters in Neverwinter Nights, and as such the monsters placidly ignore me as they go about their inscrutable business.

Throughout the nineties, western role-playing games were trying to replicate the tabletop RPG experience; Bioware had the D&D license and tried to build direct digital translations of that game, but everyone was chasing this particular dragon in some form or another.

Neverwinter Nights built the tabletop experience into a digital game in a way that really worked. It did this with a “DM client” that let players join as dungeon masters in multiplayer sessions, able to take control of NPCs and change the game world on the fly to adapt to an emerging story with the players. Neverwinter Nights was not the only game doing this; but it combined that feature with powerful level-creation tools that allowed for fully custom scenarios, and more accessible online play than was possible even a few years before. But it was the digital tabletop built for the dawn of the online gaming era, carrying the weight (and the familiar ruleset) of the most popular tabletop RPG of all time.

While games like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout were successful and critically acclaimed, they only delivered pre-scripted (if branching) narratives. However surprising the plot twist, however complex the world-building, they never really replicated the actual experience of sitting down at a table with a DM and three other players to build a story together. That feeling would stay on tabletops, and eventually studios would move on to focus on other strengths of the digital RPG with titles like Mass Effect and The Witcher.

On the eve of Beamdog’s Enhanced Edition re-release of the game, I went back to look at what community remains playing that game, and at its persistent worlds—multiplayer servers that run continuously and accommodate multiple playgroups, miniature MMOs in themselves. That landed me on Arelith, NWN’s longest-lived and largest persistent world. Having run since 2003, it exemplifies Bioware's hopes for its toolset. Daniel “Irongron” Morris, the server’s current owner, agreed to show me around.

Morris got involved with Neverwinter Nights around its 2002 launch, after playing isometric RPGs all through the nineties. NWN was, at the time, full of promise, and he credits this replication of the pen-and-paper player-DM relationship. “All those other games had the mechanics and setting of an RPG, but weren’t able to offer the full experience.”

A whirlwind tour of Arelith, led by Morris and his fellow dungeon masters, takes up the better part of two hours, and I’m sure I haven’t seen even a tenth of what’s in there. All the way through, I pick his brain about level design in this game (building areas to make player traffic work out is crucial), about his player base (he tries to cater to a mix of all four Bartle types ), about the history and geography of the world he tends.

Persistent worlds like Arelith are neither of these. They’re story-focused, but with a story that emerges from interactions between players rather than pre-scripted quests. All one has to do to create a persistent world is run the server software on any computer continuously; maybe you rent a server on a rack somewhere, or nowadays use a virtual private server rented from Amazon or Google or a smaller provider. Or, as was the case with Arelith for a while, your PW can just be a dedicated computer that lives in your basement. Independent from any one company’s services, persistent worlds exist outside of the “platforms” of today’s internet—a bit like "multi-user dungeons" that are the common ancestor to both multiplayer RPGs and MMOs. They belong to the world of independent sites of yesteryear—and, I hope, of tomorrow.

Arelith is both a treasure and a road not taken. After Neverwinter Nights, the genre forked: Bioware, CD Projekt Red, and others focused on building carefully authored single-player experiences, while Blizzard and others (well, mainly Blizzard) built the great Western MMO: Vast worlds with complex mechanics, interlocking systems, and huge numbers of concurrent players.

The Neverwinter Nights series was the last hurrah for single-player (and non-MMO multiplayer) licensed D&D games. Obsidian, rather than Bioware, released Neverwinter Nights 2 in 2009, with less success than its predecessor. After that, D&D became the domain of action-RPG licensed games with little to recommend them, and the little-loved MMO Neverwinter. Between Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2, the style of game that NWN stood for—isometric, mouse-driven, D&D-influenced, single-player or small-scale multiplayer—would become a niche, and not the default, as games like Mass Effect and World of Warcraft broke out of that mould.

“With enough dressing, and careful lighting, you’ll see the original NWN tilesets can really shine,” Irongron tells me. Dead branches lie on stream beds; rocks just out from the edge of a waterfall; a country road curves around a boulder. It’s a curiously organic world, for a place that I know is underpinned by a grid.

If Mass Effect is a film, and World of Warcraft is a theme park, then Neverwinter Nights is more like theater. Its world is a stage of blocky tiles laid out on a grid, each one the size of a tiny room; the smallest space the game can support. It’s a world straight out of a cardboard dungeon-building set, and careful placement of props is essential to break up the blockiness and unreality of those designs. Arelith in particular is built with a maniacal dedication to prop placement. Using only models and textures from the original game, it still looks much more vivid than the campaigns that shipped with the game. Part of this is a hobbyist’s attention to detail; part of this is getting to use many more polygons than BioWare could afford to include in a game meant for 2002 computers.

There’s a coherent, self-sufficient game world; but there’s also all those loose tools for players and DMs to pick up and play with, enriching their role-play with props and mechanics. I always knew what the NWN level design tools were capable of, and that there was such a thing as a “DM client,” but it’s something else to see all that technology in action. It’s like looking at a D&D table mid-game, miniatures and gridded terrain maps strewn about. Except you can move your mini off the edge and find yourself on a whole other table.

At one point during my tour, I’m taken to a map composed of a few ships at sea under a red sky. This is not really connected to the rest of the game world; instead, it’s a location that’s in place just waiting for a DM to use it, just in case a naval battle is called for at some point.

The word immersion gets used a bunch in this discussion. And here, it feels meaningful and precise. Arelith’s players sink themselves into a world that they’ve constructed for themselves, one where their actions feel consequential because it’s a shared story; because others have to contend with what they do. They stay in-character throughout their play, inhabiting the ongoing lives of identities they’ve built along with others on this server. I feel all the more like an interloper for breaking that magic circle to ask them questions.

Later on, I leap at the chance to talk to some of the server’s regulars. A small crowd forms on a sandy beach somewhere, and I gamely start pitching them questions. How long have they been playing? What are some of their favorite stories? (“That time I got a cat out of a tree.” “You mean that time I got a cat out of a tree.”). I get too many answers to quote, but it’s clear that this DM-player symbiosis is crucial to what makes this place special to them. Nobody’s here for the charming low-poly graphics or for the specifics of D&D’s rules; they’re here for a type of space newer games don’t provide for them.

Arelith is now much bigger than that original friend group, but a sense of conviviality persists. Seeing the players and DMs bounce off each other as they answer my questions reminds me of experiences I’ve had with MUDs; there’s an ongoing story here that everyone is very much invested in. But it doesn’t feel in-jokey in an impenetrable way; I think that if I wanted to make a character and join in, I’d find my bearings quickly.

Arelith started as just a way for a small group of friends to play together, but it eventually escalated into a large, long-lived community. “Originally, Arelith was started just because we wanted a place to play that was fun, but also fair,” Arelith’s founder Jeremy “Jjjerm” Martin told me. “I'd played on another server for a while, and saw it torn apart by partiality and DM favoritism.”

Izlude the Sorcerer, weeping at the bottom of a dungeon forever, is the endpoint of this idea. Arelith is a small passion project where players can make creative, long-lasting changes to the world; where they can build history. Changes to World of Warcraft’s Azeroth are born in a meeting room somewhere in Irvine. Changes to Arelith are born out of what players do in the game itself, from players directly placing props and objects into the world, to months-long storylines culminating in entire villages being permanently razed.

A year of real-world time is roughly equivalent to ten years of notional in-game time; at present, Arelith has some 120 in-universe years of recorded history, all of it made up of player-driven storylines spiralling out and becoming major historical events. Entire cities have been razed, their maps changed from bustling towns to broken ruins to reflect story events. In Arelith’s central city, a museum commemorates all kinds of in-world histories, art, and even fiction.

Arelith directly rewards role-playing, leading to stories outside the traditional D&D milieu—one player (going by “Vespidae”) tells me she’s been playing as a farmer, complete with “a pitchfork and a dog and everything.” Irongron picks up on this: “There’s a lot to be said for playing an ‘ordinary person’ because on Arelith you still get into extraordinary situations with them.” Achievement takes a backseat to inhabiting this world; that notion of immersion showing up again.

Arelith’s success stems largely from behind-the-scenes work. Getting buy-in from the growing community to make changes; successfully transitioning power to new owners. Arelith has passed through three different owners; the second one, James “Mithreas” Donnithorne-Tait, emphasized the significance of this: “Most servers that have died, have died because their original leaders stepped back, and the successor didn’t have the same faith from the player base; and that created friction that tore the whole server apart.”

Article continues below

All this to attract and retain players, a virtuous cycle where activity begets more activity. It’s drilled into me when I talk to the players: Players are the story; players are the content, players are the consequences. The job of DMs is to pick up on what’s going on and build on it, to help the improv along, and every so often to just make the players’ lives difficult. One player, using his in-game name “Stylo,” tells me of walking into a building wearing the same color cloak as another PC and becoming the fall guy for their crimes. A fortuitous event like that might spiral into a server-spanning storyline as different player groups intersect and collide.