Legends of Aranna Diary #1

RPGVault has begun a new Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna developer diary feature, with the first installment going up yesterday. In it, Mad Doc's Tara Teich and Ian Lane Davis introduce the expansion's main elements and talk about its progress. Check it out:
The Legends of Aranna & The Dungeon Siege World

Our first and biggest challenge in creating Legends of Aranna was to fit a brand new adventure in the world created by Chris Taylor and the Gas Powered Games team. It helped tremendously that the world of Dungeon Siege is gigantic and includes a rich and detailed backstory. The original Dungeon Siege game - big as it was - still only scratched the surface of the mythology of the lands of Aranna.

We immersed ourselves in this mythology, and found it exciting to work in such a deeply textured RPG world that was largely untainted by standard RPG cliche creatures. With help from GPG, we came to understand not just the events in their original adventure, but also the underlying forces that move the Dungeon Siege world. Both Mad Doc and GPG felt the best way to reveal more of the world was to create an entirely new adventure with a new hero that takes place some time after the events of the original game. This way, we could expose novel regions and characters, and we could still make the player feel that they were part of the continuously unfolding events on the continent or Aranna.