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In continuing the theme I started with Pillaging Your Games For D&D Material - Oblivion, I’m finally moving on to take a look at Neverwinter Nights. This will only be for the first game though, as I currently do not have Neverwinter Nights 2. However, I imagine that the methods I’ll show you here may be applicable to NWN2 as well as the original. This will apply to both expansions to Neverwinter Nights, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, as well. So, without further ado…

Music
This is very easy to do, just as it was for Oblivion. However, there is a minor trick to doing it. Looking into your Neverwinter Nights folder (which, by default, is C:\NeverwinterNights\NWN), you’ll find a Music folder which contains all these .bmu files. They are really nothing more than MP3 files with a bit of extra text at the beginning of the file data that Neverwinter Nights uses. You can very easily rename them to MP3, and they will play just fine in your favorite audio player. Additionally, you can associate the .bmu extension with your favorite audio player, so you can just double-click on them and have them play immediately, without having to rename them.

Sound Effects, Ambient Effects, and Voices
This too requires a 3rd party tool, much like with Oblivion. While there may be an Ambient folder in your Neverwinter Nights game folder, it’s only going to have a limited selection of the wide variety of sounds available in the game. There are a couple tools that are easily found that can help you access the sounds in Neverwinter Nights:

• NWN Viewer Version 1.01
• Modified NWN Explorer

While NWN Viewer may be decent for opening individual files, one at a time, I find the Modified NWN Explorer to be much more user friendly. Basically, once you’ve extracted it (preferably to the utils folder in your game folder) and run it, NWN Explorer finds all the game files for Neverwinter Nights and displays them in an easy to use tree that you can dig through to get at whatever you want.

Now, all you need to do is dig into the data that deals specifically with sounds. The obvious one would be anything with sounds in its name, such as sounds.bif in the NWN Main Data. However, you can find more stuff in convo.bif (which contains NPC voices) and voicesets.bif. And, as you’ll notice, you can access the music from here as well.

Whenever you click on an actual piece of audio, you can actually play it within NWN Explorer itself. However, this is hardly an ideal setup when you’ll want to easily find and play the right audio during a D&D session. So more than likely, you’ll want to export the stuff you want.

You can export files one-by-one by selecting the appropriate sound you want in the tree view, and then either selecting Export from the Resources menu, or right-clicking on the sound and selecting Export. However, if you want to get all the sounds from a data set, there’s no need to go one-by-one. You can instead do the same on the sound file’s parent directory (which will simply be Audio in all cases). Just right-click and select Export, and you’ll get a dialog asking for a folder to dump everything into.

Once it’s done exporting everything from that data set, you can go to the folder you had selected earlier, and browse through all the audio files. From there, you can pick and choose which ones you want to use for your adventure and/or campaign, move them around, rename them, and whatever else you wish.

Two Down, But More To Go!
I hope this helps all you DMs who want to add to your repertoire of gaming music and sounds. Next, I’ll be tackling Unreal Tournament 2004, which is suitable to sci-fi games. After that, I think I’ll take a look at something that involves outright war.

If you have any ideas of games with music and sounds you’d like me to discuss, particularly on how to pillage them for use in your own games, please leave a comment! I’ll do what I can to figure out how to get to the juicy bits that can easily be used for your D&D campaign.