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Icewind Dale II (hereafter Dale II) is a Real-Time Role-Playing Game. Based on the same engine as Baldur’s Gate, Dale II is set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, in particular the Forgotten Realms. Playing a party of six adventurers, you travel through and around Icewind Dale itself, solving quests, slaying monsters, and so forth. Starting as a band of mercenaries looking for employment, you disembark from a riverboat to find the town you are visiting under attack from goblins. As the story unfolds, you wander through mountains, forests, the Underdark (the below-ground part of the world, complete with civilizations, for non-D&D fans), and several cities. As is usual for RPGs, the scale and scope of the game becomes progressively larger as you move on, and by the end of it, you feel like you are fighting for the fate of the world (or Icewind Dale, at least).

“Welcome to the D&D World”—Notes on Dale II’s Source Material

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D, (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/splash.asp?x=dnd/splash)) is the first, and most well known, Role-Playing Game (RPG) currently on the market. Currently on its 3rd edition, D&D is a fantasy game where players take on the roles of various characters (“Player Characters”, or PCs), while an extra player, the Dungeon Master (DM), narrates the events and arbitrates the result of PC actions. Functionally, in most PC RPGs, the computer takes the role of the DM.

D&D is a fantasy RPG, and has spawned a great many separate universes, including but not limited to Oerth, the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Darksun, and Planescape. Most of these universes have had separate RPG supplements, novels, and PC games produced for them. In fact, while some games are based directly off of D&D, most RPGs have been largely influenced by D&D—regardless of their separate stories.

Terminology like “Hit Points” and “Experience Points” trace their gaming uses back to D&D. The same holds true for concepts such as “character classes” as distinct professions with tightly defined skills (such as you find in the Diablo series). Nearly all RPGs owe a great deal to D&D—it is more a question of “how much” rather than “if”.