NWVault have interviewed Lord Xyphus, the author of the Neverwinter Grimoire that has made it to NWVault's Hall of Fame. Here's a bit:

3) What was your inspiration for taking on this project?
Believe it or not, this project was done because of my 11 year old son. I would see him constantly thumbing through the manuals to decide what to do. I decided that I would just simply copy what he needed out of each .pdf manual and put it into one simple file. Ha!!! Little did I know what I was in for. After I was nearing completion of what would become the first version of it I decided that I would post it to the vault and maybe a few other people would get some use out of it. I really didn't expect it to get this much attention.
4) How long did it take for you to do?
That is a hard one. At one time I went back and tried to calculate it and decided that after 80+ hours I really didn't want to know exactly how long it took.

Read the whole thing (http://nwvault.ign.com/features/interviews/LordXyphus072904.shtml) at NWVault.