NWVault has posted a Hall of Fame interview with Rick Burton, whose all modules have made it into NWVault's Hall of Fame. One of those, entitled Guild War has scored over 30000 downloads. Currently, he's working on the third part of the Paladin Trilogy. Here's an excerpt:

6) What was the inspiration behind this series?
There were several. I wanted to focus the mod on a single class again and I thought that the paladin is about as different a class from the rogue as I could get. And besides, paladins have always been my favorite class. I also wanted to make something larger than Guild War, so making a multi-chapter mod seemed the way to go.
Another inspiration was to make more of a story based adventure. Guild War had a story but its main purpose was to string together all of the challenges that I had planned for the player's rogue. The story was created to suit the challenges. In the Paladin Trilogy, most of the challenges were created to suit the story. This does cause the game play to be more linear, but it makes telling the story a lot easier.

But ultimately, the primary inspiration for the trilogy is a personal one. Only after players have completed all three parts of the trilogy, will they understand the real point of the trilogy.

Sounds quite spirited and makes me want to survey the personal inspiration Rick had for creating a paladin trilogy. No surprise here, I bet. The Guild War one, I believe, appeals to a more general public, though, and probably some of you have already played it.

Read the whole thing (http://nwvault.ign.com/features/interviews/Burton112204.shtml) at NWVault.