Dungeon Master
Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer’s regular RPG column, where Online Editor Fraser Brown delves into PC gaming’s most beloved and enduring genre. Grab a seat in our badly-lit tavern and please ignore the goblin puke.
It’s 4 am and I am sitting in front of my PC, the monitor perched on a makeshift desk in my bedroom. The lights are off but the room is illuminated by my desktop. In the bed, my girlfriend is sound asleep. I told her I wouldn’t stay up all night playing Neverwinter Nights, but I am a liar.
The early ’00s found me broke, lost and trying to figure out what to do once I’d received a useless degree. Though I wasn’t putting much thought into it. Writing, maybe? My sanctuary from terrifying adult questions about my future was BioWare’s first post-Infinity Engine game. I flung myself into Neverwinter Nights and then everything was OK.
But it was not BioWare’s adventures that I was playing. I was bouncing between new worlds and creating my own—thriving in Neverwinter Nights’ vibrant modding scene. For a flatmate’s birthday, knowing I couldn’t afford a gift, I built him an adventure with the game’s versatile Aurora Toolset. That got me hooked.
I quickly moved on from singleplayer adventures and into the arms of roleplaying-heavy Persistent Worlds. In the real world I was a bad student and a crap boyfriend, but I had a second life as a wise-cracking bard and mercenary adventurer trying to overcome an infernal family curse.
NWN’s Persistent Worlds were effectively miniature MMOs that came in all sorts of flavours, but it was the roleplaying ones I became smitten with. Tabletop roleplaying is full of logistics and schedules, but now I could just fire up the game and get that same kick whenever I wanted. Even at 4 am.
I made an eclectic group of buds—wildly different ages, careers, locations, but we all loved RPGs. And we wanted to build one ourselves. So we left our Persistent World and fashioned our own. We created thousands of years of history, warring nations, squabbling pantheons, curses and heroes. And then we brought it to life with the Aurora Toolset.
This was my first time GMing, and I made some mistakes. Like the time the Big Bad I’d spent a week teasing appeared and, mid-monologue, was cut down by a player in two sword strokes. I tried to style it out, explaining that he’d merely killed an illusion. My players were lovely and just went with it.
And yeah there were maybe times where I went a bit mad with power. When one player was in a rush, I tried to slow their adventure down a bit with an obstinate shopkeeper, which I definitely didn’t expect him to attack. “Well, I’m not having that,” I thought. So for the rest of the evening all the players and GMs ended up in a courtroom. It was like detention, but someone loses a hand at the end.
But it’s hard not to go mad with power when you have so much of it. I had the same flexible authority as a tabletop GM, but I could turn all the things I conjured out of my imagination into tangible things. The rowdy tavern, the snake-infested swamp, the frozen domain of a megalomaniacal lich—nobody needed to suspend their disbelief, because they were walking around these places and interacting with NPCs who I could immediately possess.
NWN’s modding scene had already been around for years at this point, so we had all the tools, documentation and assets that we could ever need to make stories and adventures forever. And nothing ever really replaced it. Sure, games like Roblox and Fortnite let players create their own experiences, and RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 blessed us with potent GM and editing tools, but NWN’s Persistent Worlds were like lightning in a bottle.
The scale, the freedom and the focus on roleplaying—sometimes we get attempts to replicate this to a degree, but never successful ones. I’ve gone hands-on with a few over the years, and they always seem to vanish. I’d hoped Baldur’s Gate 3 would change that, but Larian decided not to build on its previous editors. It would have been a lot of work for little return, it said. Of course, modders still found a way to rectify this, and diligently started creating modules and campaigns. But nothing like NWN’s Persistent Worlds.
It strikes me as absurd, though, that no other games really carried this torch. The RPG genre is vast and tends to lead the pack. Our Top 100 has been dominated by them for years, and it’s probably the genre with the most PCG GOTY wins under its belt. TTRPGs have been enjoying a decade-long resurgence, too, and the best videogame RPGs have been taking notes. On paper, 2026 should be far more welcoming to the kind of NWN-style Persistent Worlds I enjoyed 20 years ago.
I am, as I often do, going to blame capitalism. The studios with the resources to do something like this aren’t going to give players the ability to effectively make their own completely free live service games. And I certainly don’t want an RPG equivalent of Roblox’s heavily-monetised viral slop.
Instead, I’m left with nostalgia. The late-night lore sessions, the arguments with my fellow GMs regarding my overreliance on a penguin-loving god of chaos, the friendships and messy drama. I’d never been so invested in anything before. God, I miss it.
Neverwinter Nights was a good but not great RPG, but as a platform? As a doorway through which you could find worlds of impossible variety? It was second to none. The good news is that the community is still very much alive. My world might be dead, but others have kept on trucking. Maybe it’s time to revisit them.
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