NWN2 cut content: Red Fallow's Watch
A cut location. At some point, you don’t go straight to find the Circle of the Mere in Elanee’s big Act 3 quest. After she hears from Daeghun that the Circle are alive and Bishop butts in (this conversation is still in the game, though is actually setting up a missing scene):
Bishop: {Slight surprise} I suspected that might be one of the places... as for the incursions, it wasn't just orcs. That's near an area the King of Shadows isn't likely to have claimed... yet. Might be a good staging area to look for your dead druid friends.
Elanee: {Defensive} Daeghun says they're alive.
Bishop: Maybe for now. Still, if you want to go, I can guide you to a safe port on the edge of the marsh.
Bishop's "safe port" is the ruined Red Fallow's Watch, the village where he spent his childhood.
Entering the abandoned village.
SCRIPTER: Camera shows the village, the ruined houses, the burnt bones and the grayeyard.
|{AUDIO: Desolate music stinger plays}
Elanee: {Apprehensive, they've just walked into a ruined village} What happened here... you can almost hear the screams coming from the ground. Why would someone have razed this place?
Bishop: {Trying to downplay it's his home village} It was a village... Redfallow’s Watch, I believe. It's the closest place I could think of close to the lands the King of Shadows holds.
Elanee: {Firm} As much as the King of Shadows feeds on the land, it may be possible for a Circle to protect an area from its influence... another reason to try and find them as soon as possible.
Bishop: {Snorts, walking away} Well, if wishes were horses... look, you go on ahead, I'm staying here. If you're not back soon, then don't expect to find me here when you return.
The PC can explore the ruins, finding bits of evidence – an unlooted chest, graves, the burnt remains of soldiers – that go on a counter. Neeshka suggests doing some pilfering, which Bishop for once objects to, and siding with one or the other results in influence gain/loss. The other companions also comment on the things they notice.
Grobnar: {Noticing an untouched chest in the middle of a village} My, it looks as if whoever left here left in a hurry. They didn't even take their things and whatchamacallits.
[These graves all appear to have been dug at the same time, and they bear similar, makeshift markers.]
Casavir (?): The villagers, it seems. I wonder who buried them, and with such care?
It wasn’t included in the chunk of content I looked at, but this scene (once you find enough evidence) would probably have led into Bishop talking about Red Fallow’s Watch and the Luskans, as he does in the endgame if you pass an influence check. (I think he might also tell a PC with high influence about RFW before the endgame, but I’d need to check and the toolset is a whole three clicks away…)
All the time, Bishop is pressing the PC to either go ahead to the Circle of the Mere (he refuses to join you himself, and waits for you in the ruins), then, once you get back, presses the PC to leave.
Elanee: {Suspicious, feels something's off} This village feels different... like a trace of the Claimed Lands has touched this place.
Bishop: {Shrugs, dismissive} Just the wind in the trees and the dead in the ground... but I'll bet we're bound to have visitors if we stay here too long.
I think this episode could have worked well, though it’s perhaps too close to the visit to Ember in Act 2. Given that by this point you’ve had to wander through Ember and the corpse-filled remains of West Harbour (twice! – well, twice once you’ve visited again with the shards), the devs may have decided that yet another destroyed village was too much of a good thing. Even if, of course, the reason that Bishop has his own destroyed village is because he’s intended to parallel the protagonist.
Left in, the message would have been a bit: “It doesn’t matter what sort of person you are, you still end up with everyone dead and your home burnt to the ground.” And given that this was the game that gave us Rocks Fall Everyone Dies as the ending, that might have been the intention! But it could have looked a bit different if cut content #1 was still left in, and the PC was allowed to rescue various West Harbour people, who are already plotting their return and rebuilding of the village in Act 3. In that case, the PC and their background could have provided a more hopeful contrast to Bishop and whatever it was that made him into him.
Visually, it would have been interesting to see the remains of Red Fallow’s Watch to contrast it with West Harbour. It’s the only other named village in the Mere; I imagine it being even more Swamp Gothic than our PC’s hometown.
