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He fondly recalled the Obsidian team at the time, including one of his hires, Scott Lawlor, who is now audio lead on Overwatch. Brandon had strong praise for MotB creative lead George Ziets, who is credited with the expansion's singular story—Ziets founded his own studio, Digimancy Entertainment, in 2019.
I hadn't realized until now that Brandon also worked on the soundtrack with Womb Music, the prolific audio duo of Rik Schaffer and Margaret Tang who, among many other projects, were behind the performance direction and unforgettable soundtrack of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. The range on display here is particularly impressive to me: VtMB's dreamy '90s grunge is about as far removed from MotB's atmospheric dark fantasy as the synthy beats of Unreal and Deus Ex.
Womb Music was already contracted for MotB's soundtrack before Brandon was hired in-house at Obsidian, but he described a fruitful collaboration with Schaffer on the music.
"If you're gonna audio direct a project, and you're a composer, you selfishly write some tracks yourself," said Brandon. "And I was just like, 'I would like to do this.' And I did. So there was the track from the original Neverwinter Nights 2 which was done by [Heavy Melody Music]. We took that, we took the theme that Rik Schaffer originally wrote, and then I added to that for what ended up in the game."
Base game NwN2 mostly reused the first game's soundtrack, but it also had a few new tracks provided by David Fraser and Neil Goldberg of Heavy Melody. The main theme is great in its own right: Mysterious, yet stirringly epic. Schaffer and Brandon's spin on it for the DLC is a darker, more foreboding reprise that turns frantic and propulsive. It really sets the mood: "This ain't your daddy's Neverwinter Nights 2."
"Rik did not say, 'Oh, you ruined my track,' which is great," recalled Brandon. "And the [Heavy Melody] people didn't care. I wrote another couple of themes that I really liked, like Mulsantir, one of the central cities."
Those were the magic words for me: Mulsantir's theme might be my favorite in the whole soundtrack. This small city is an entrepôt for The Forgotten Realms' distant Rashemen (where Minsc from Baldur's Gate hails from), and Mulsantir is a distinctive place, full of tension and contradiction.
It's both cosmopolitan and reclusive. Urbane merchants rub shoulders with masked witches, and the city boasts a theater, a berserker lodge, a temple for the god of death, and a second, secret temple for the dead god of death. Mulsantir is a welcome reminder of civilization after MotB's creepy dungeon crawl intro, weirdly cozy yet also deeply sinister.
That's a tough tangle of vibes to get across in a single, looping, ambient audio track, yet Brandon nailed it. The Mulsantir theme is comforting and nostalgic, with a touch of sophistication, but it also has this dark undercurrent. It sounds mournful and defeated to me, reflecting the town's grim history, and the opening notes in particular speak to Mulsantir's mysteries and secrets.
"I was like, Okay, what is a quintessential sounding, D&D medieval-ish thing? I know that the styles have gone in many different directions," recalled Brandon. "Baldur's Gate does its own thing. But [MotB] was fun. It was great working in a fairly antiquated BioWare tool and the story was really fun.
"Man, like that weird thing that just attaches to your back and whips its tentacles out. It had some really neat ideas that set sort of a darker D&D mood. And I enjoyed that."
Hey, so did I, man.
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