As I keep making new stuff for my mod, I realize what an investment of time and effort it has been. Searching, figuring out what works and what doesn't... Ideas have fallen by wayside, and it's still very far away from completion. There are going to be spells, and quests, and content. Had I stuck to known mechanics and the usual implementation, I would feel no need to consider charging money for a little hobby. A spell that does some damage or knocks people back, a storekeeper NPC with two lines of dialogue are not difficult to make. But my NPC have more lines, my spells rewind time or change class or bond minds. A few, still in production, include quests for demons and devils. All of them have individual casting sounds that I found or in many cases mixed up myself from unlikely sources. Most have original or semi-original visuals. The icons, too (sounds like a tiny detail) took a completely outsized amount of work to be on the level with those in the games. On and on the list goes, where it will stop, nobody knows.
I don't dispute that the engine belongs to Beamdog, but my work belongs to me (painting with borrowed brushes). It is a labor of love, true, just as digging up things about this engine or discussing them on these boards. I've done it because I wanted to. But the modding has taken more than a year of my life, rather jealously, too. Like every artist, I think I deserve some material returns from the mod, when at long last it comes out. Probably I will make a free demo, complete but limited, and direct people who want the whole thing to - I don't know, perhaps a Patreon page, or Kickstarter? Some way to pay. I've never done this sort of thing. My question here is, and probably the administrators should answer, is whether I would be allowed to include a link to a paid version with the demo?