[Mod] Restored Rhynn Lanthorn Quest 2023-11-19

The beta version of Baldur's Gate II contained a mechanic to expand Chapter 6 (the one where you are looking for the Rhynn Lanthorn). As well as the Lanthorn itself, the thief would have stolen several lenses and hidden them in areas around the game. The player would be given clues to where the lenses were, and would have to retrieve them before the Lanthorn could be used to enter Chapter 7. The lenses were actually placed in several of the stronghold quests that the player can explore in Chapter 2 (and if the player had already done all of those quests, no lenses would be placed). The idea, presumably, was to introduce a mechanic to bind the stronghold quests into the main plot of Chapter 6, just as the need to gather gold binds them into the main plot of Chapter 2.

This expanded Rhynn Lanthorn quest was removed from Baldur's Gate II before release (at a guess, because the clues leading to the lenses were a bit too gnomic for casual players, and there wasn't time to fill in the details.) But almost all the machinery of the quest is still present in the game - the scripts that place the lenses, the lenses themselves, and even the dialog lines that give the clues to where the lenses were. That makes it possible to reconstruct almost exactly how the quest worked.

This mod simply restores the quest. There are two options. The first ('classic') is almost an exact restoration of how the original version of the quest would have gone. The second ('expanded') increases the number of locations in which lenses may be found, to include four extra side-quest regions in the original game not tied to a stronghold quest. You can also customise the installation (via the 'dw_lanthorn.ini' file in the mod folder) to deselect any possible lens location you don't want to use