Baldur's Gate: The Baldening

[dusematic]

MOTHERFUCK.  Now I guess I have to play Baldur's Gate.  I never played it. I only played BG2.  Does it run in XP or do I need to bust out some emulator-fu?  PM me any need to know deets on making this the best experience of my life.

[WindupAtheist]

I'll just post it here in case anyone else cares. If you want to play BG1 via the BG2 engine, you'll need full installs of both games and the mod found here. They give pretty idiot-proof instructions and explanations. All I did was follow what's on that page, so I have no greater personal insight to offer.

[Strazos]

And you haven't even touched the expansion stuff yet, or done all the side shit?

Anyone remember the caps for TotSC?

[WindupAtheist]

Oh no, I've hammered the shit outta the sidequests. It's just that I've only written about the ones I thought made for amusing stories. There were lots of mundane "fight a bandit/wizard/whatever and take his shit" encounters that I've left out completely. Though really, in the context of the entire BG+TOTSC+BG2+TOB epic-length saga, I may as well barely be out of Candlekeep anyway.

 

As an aside, I haven't been bitching about the game's mistakes since I'm having fun, and since it's a million years old and Bioware long since learned from and evolved away from almost all of them anyway. But there are two encounters so far that have been just so screamingly ill-considered that I can't keep myself quiet and honestly wonder how they ever made it into the game.

One is Shoal the Nereid. She's standing there non-hostile in the middle of the wilderness, and if you talk to her you die. That's it. No combat, no saving throw, no matter which dialogue responses you pick she will simply insta-kill you. Since it's your main character that talks to NPCs by default, clicking on her may as well just reload your saved game for you and skip all the shit in the middle. What you're supposed to do is select one of your other party members, let her kill them, fight her a bit, and then she'll raise them and the story will progress to some bit with an ogre. But even with all the times I've played this game, I didn't learn about the ogre until I hit Google just now. I've always just reloaded my saved game and immediately hacked her to death without conversing.

The other is Phandalyn the paladin. You walk into the tavern where he's located, and if you're evil he says some bullshit and then immediately attacks. Fair enough, but he doesn't flag red when he attacks. So even though he's stabbing you in the face, you're considered the aggressor when you defend yourself, and every peasant in the bar goes red. So not only do you lose reputation when you kill the paladin, which I could handle, you have to turn off party AI before your guys slaughter the entire tavern and drop your reputation to nothing. At best, you have a bar full of perma-aggressive villagers you must remember to never enter, and at worst you end up being ganked into oblivion by the Flaming Fist while trying to run across town and make a temple donation.

I just blew the guy up via the insta-kill cheat with no consequences. Fuck it.

Yes I know it's like bitching about the uncomfortable ride in a Model T at this point. Yes I love the game despite these things. But still. God damn. Anyway, I have lots to write about for the next update tomorrow. There was this great little sidequest complete with a heist, a doublecross, and a ludicrous number of dead bodies.

[Le0]

awesome stories. Keep going :)

I'm going to have to play BG1 now tho! Any advice for someone who never played it?

[WindupAtheist]

So the only way into Baldur's Gate is this motherfucking HUGE bridge that's like a hundred yards long and wide enough to march an army across. I don't know who the hell tipped these assholes off, but we're not even past the drawbridge when the Flamer on duty is telling us to wait because he needs to get his boss. Oh shit, they recognize us. This can't be good.

The boss comes out and introduces himself as Commander Scar. I hang out with an assassin whose name is a homonym for something you strangle people with and a berzerker with the word "grim" in his name, and even I think this is a pretty stupid moniker. I wonder if he has a sister, and what she thinks about the name. Little Janey Scar.

Turns out the guy wanted to ask for our help. Fucking figures. These guys are constantly either giving me hell or begging me to clean up bullshit they can't handle. He tells me about a bunch of bullshit that's supposedly afoot within something called the Seven Suns merchant guild. He wants me to investigate this for him, because I have no connections to anyone in the city.

Well actually I'm friends with a rich merchant whose hunting expedition I saved from marauding druids. Oh and I've come to the city specifically to advance a long-standing personal war against one of it's major trading cartels, a personal war thus far so catastrophically violent as to have put my name on the lips of every commoner in every tavern the region. But sure, I'm not connected to anyone. I'm a total mystery man. Whatever, he's offering to pay.

And I figure, why not get some use out these Flamer mooks for once? So I just lay it all out for him. The Iron Throne, the Nashkel mines, the Cloakwood slave camp, the whole thing. That's the sort of shit these guys are supposed to want to deal with, right? The guy just gives me "I don't know what I can do about that, I'll look into it." Yeah, apparently I'm not the only one who knows how to pay bribes, and the Throne has deep pockets. Fucking shill, what are you going to do when this Seven Suns bullshit turns out to be their fault too?

So fine, we're in the city proper, and the kids are just running all over the place retarded, not sure what to buy or who to rob first. Garrette was composed, and Vaere at least managed not to scream "SQUEE!" like Lex, but basically we looked like a bunch of rubes who'd never seen a town bigger than Beregost. Sigh.

All we're doing for now is taking a walk around the city, getting the lay of the land, figuring out where everything is. We're walking through one of the poorer areas when this guy comes up and hands us fifty gold, and tells us it's for us to listen to a proposal on the part of his boss. This isn't the sort of neighborhood where just anyone can afford to drop fifty for a chat, so I figure maybe it's something serious. Guy gives us a password and tells us to follow him into a nearby house.

Thieves guild. Boss is a guy named Ravenscar. Lots of bullshit posturing about how incredibly deadly they all are, but I'm not really sweating this crap from a bunch of guys in leather armor and shortswords. It seems someone is soon to sell the plans and components needed to construct a "Halruaan Skyship" to the government of Baldur's Gate, and Halruaa doesn't want to see their monopoly broken. One of their mages is there in the thieves guild. So I'm supposed to bust into the house of a nobleman named Oberon and liberate these components.

I'm about to execute my sporadically-enforced "name an exact payment or piss off" clause and tell this guy to get stuffed, but then I see Alexia practically hopping up and down and giving me this look that says volumes. This isn't just some pickpocketing, or some random bullshit burglary of common homes, no. This is an actual HEIST and she REALLY wants to do it. Fine. I've violated my little "exact payment" rule often enough already and it really hasn't bitten us too hard, what's one more time?

We get there, we bust in and blow past the servants, and everything is going fine until we get upstairs. The noble's three daughters are all mages, have their bodyguards with them, and refuse to give up the skyship components without a fight. I suppose we could have let Garrette sneak up there and pinch them out from under the bitches noses, but if he slipped up he'd be cut off from us by three mages and some guards.

So fuck it, we charge in there and slaughter the lot of them. One of them got a lightning bolt off while we were dealing with her guards, but it didn't do much more than fuck up our hair, and that was pretty much the high point of the fight for them. We grabbed the shit, and killed Oberon himself on our way out for good measure.

We got back to the guild and handed the stuff over (a spellbook, a statue, a little crystal) only to have the Halruaan wizard attack us. Ostensibly this was for our lack of discretion, but I get the feeling this was the plan all along. Anyway, classic doink scenario where the mage doesn't realize casting spells is hard to do while having a longsword crammed into your spleen.

Ravenscar was long on noise about how he couldn't stop the guy, but short on payment, so I figured "Fuck it!" and gave the signal for a general sack. I sliced into the asshole and he called for the rest of his men. Except we're not god damned idiots. I had mindfucked a couple of his thieves and left them in the main chamber behind us in anticipation of SOME kinda bullshit, and they bought us plenty enough time fighting their comrades to let us finish off their boss unimpeded. Then we dealt with the rest.

Baldur's Gate doesn't really have a thieves guild anymore. We took the skyship components back off Ravenscar's bloody corpse, carried them just up the road a bit, and hocked the lot of them off to Sorcerous Sundries for like five or six hundred gold. Fuck it, it's more than anyone else was paying.

(No dings to report. Funny random thing I'll mention briefly: Alexia gets her name from a good friend of mine's WoW character. She didn't mind her alter-ego's namesake being portrayed as a slutty pickpocket, but she DID mind the "ugly" Safana pic I was using for her portrait. She went out of her way to send me the picture I eventually cut down into the current Alexia portrait. Also, advice for someone coming into the game cold as per the previous post: Diverse party with access to wizard spells, cleric spells, and thief skills. Detecting traps is the most important thief skill. Q is the quicksave button and it should be hit very very often.)

[WindupAtheist]

Addendum: Korgrim mooned Elminster. No I'm not kidding. He came up just as we were entering the city and started his usual "cryptic old wiseman" routine, and Kor just turned around, dropped trou, and mooned the hell out of him. There was this big pause, like he was confused. Because when you're motherfucking Elminster and you're trying to be all clever, what do you say when the response is just this big green ass?

Finally he was just like "I see how you want this to be!" and turned around and walked off. Mordak seemed to be in mortal terror there for a while, but I'm with Kor. Screw it. Whatever Elminster's interest in me may be, blasting me into dust clearly isn't it or he would have done it a few dozen innocent deaths ago. So as far as I'm concerned, he can take our shit.

[fatboy]

To say "You Rock" would be the understatement of the year.

You have brought back so many memories of game I haven't played for what, nearly 10 years now?  This makes me want to dig up those discs again.....

Great job.

[Riggswolfe]

awesome stories. Keep going :)

I'm going to have to play BG1 now tho! Any advice for someone who never played it?

If you want to powergame it use the multiplayer trick and make your own party.

If, like me, you find that boring because you might as well be playing Icewind Dale at that point there are certain recommended NPCs depending on your playstyle.

A major trick about Imoen: Dual class her to Mage asap. She can actually be the best mage in BG1 assuming you don't grab the evil dude or make your main a mage.

[WindupAtheist]

Yeah, playing with a party of all your own guys is fun to do when you've been through the game numerous times over the course of a decade, but if you're just starting out you should really just make a single guy and recruit people. Otherwise you're missing out. I mean I make up a lot of dialogue and such for my soulless little battlebots, but the pre-existing recruitable guys actually DO talk upon occasion, blabbing to each other, bickering, and reacting to their environment. They do it even moreso in BG2.

[Ingmar]

Yeah some of them are pretty entertaining. Its a shame that Tiax a) sucks a lot as an actual combat character and b) shows up way late in the game.

[WindupAtheist]

My favorite parties, with myself as some kind of fighter type, were always...

Good: Ajantis, Minsc, Branwen, Imoen, Dynaheir
Evil: Shar-Teel, Viconia, Montaron, Safana, Xzar

Neither are actually the peak of powergaming, but each represent a fun mix of personalities and are easy to assemble in chapter one. (I can't stand Khalid or Jaheira!) I like to get a full group as soon as possible, and upon doing so I can't bear to fire anyone. Someday I should play with all the obscure people like Eldoth and Faldorn, just to hear their dialogue.

[Riggswolfe]

I like Jaheira in BG2. I usually use her and Khalid in BG1 instead of Dynaheir and Ajantis.

I don't play evil parties because honestly, I suck at it. I try and start feeling creepy and so I end up rerolling a goody two shoes.

[Triforcer]

That is a big problem for me too.  I really want to play a Sith in SWTOR, but I know that when I get to the first choice I won't be able to go through with it.  Maybe I'd make it a few hours or so if all my killings were of equally bad people, but the first time I have to do something really bad I am out.

[WindupAtheist]

Sometimes I can't believe the shit we get away with.

Entar Silvershield is one of the four "Grand Dukes" of the city, and probably the richest guy in town. We could believe it, looking at the huge mansion the guy has in the rich part of the city. It's got it's own walls to keep riffraff (like us) off the grounds, and guards up the ass. We immediately decided to rob it.

At first it was all pretty routine. I had to be quick to mindfuck the guards as soon as they saw us, before they could ask us what the hell we were doing there and sound an alarm, but it wasn't anything I couldn't handle. We started cleaning the place out, and man, it was as good as advertised. Lex started picking the locks to everything while the guards stood there drooling, and pretty soon we were stuffing our packs with gold and jewels and potions and such.

We're feeling pretty good about ourselves as we head upstairs. I use the cloak to bend the brains of Silvershield's wife, and have her stand in the corner while we help ourselves to her jewelry. No guards have come up to challenge us for a while, so I don't bother to rein the others in when they start to spread out, emptying bookshelves and such to look for more loot.

Yeah, mistake on my part.

I hear a girl's scream come from the other side of the building, so I immediately rush over there thinking Mordak or maybe Kor is up to some shit. But no, they get there right after me. Turns out the Duke's teenage daughter is screaming her head off at Garrette and Vaere. They apparently blundered into this chick's bedroom and she immediately flipped shit. There was no bullshitting this kid either. Garrette's a walking arsenal in black leather armor, and Vaere's a heavily armed drow elf. It's not like they could claim to be the new butler and maid.

I go to give her a dose of the mindfuck cloak to shut her up, but lo and behold, for once it's not working. It happens now and then, sometimes people manage to resist, especially if they're excited. Usually I can just refocus, try again, and get them under control after a little while. They don't even normally realize that I'm doing anything to them, so it's not like they turn on me or run away.

But we're standing in the bedroom of the teenage daughter of the richest and most powerful man anywhere on the Sword Coast, and the bitch just won't stop SCREAMING. Even with the guards in the immediate vicinity pacified, this shit can't go on another second. Already we'll be lucky if the gardener doesn't have the Flaming Fist waiting for us when we go to leave. So I look at Gar and tap my nose, and he puts a bolt right into her fat stupid screaming mouth.

Now we're really fucked, and we need a plan. I take a piece of parchment and scrawl "NOBODY TOUCHES THE THIEVES GUILD, NOBODY!" Then I drop it on top of her twitching carcass. We mindfucked everyone in the household on the way out, and made sure they would remember a bunch of thieves and a Halruaan mage (similar to the one we killed, but just different enough to be an associate of his) busting in through the front door.

Hopefully the Duke and the Fisters think the thieves misplaced blame for the attack on their compound onto Silvershield, and chose to retaliate by killing his daughter. It's a decent red herring, at least, and anyone who could really deny it is dead.

It's been a little while now and the law hasn't come after us, so I think we're in the clear. Like I said, I can't believe the shit we get away with sometimes.

(All characters now level 7, Lex and Gar very close to 8. Again I'm leaving out lots of mundane little sidequests, lest this either read like a dull laundry list of quests, or get ridiculously fucking long.)

[apocrypha]

Best thread ever WUA, just awesome 

I think the phrase "filthy, badger-fucking druids" will echo through my head every time I teleport to Moonglade for ever more.

[WindupAtheist]

So Baldur's Gate is apparently full of crabby asshole mages.

There were these two feuding necromancers that one of the regulars at Sorcerous Sundries had me yoink a few bits of magic jewelry from for a nice bit of coin. Alexia insisted we let her lift them by way of thiefly skill instead of just chopping them up and taking the items by force. So we let her, and she pulled it off admirably. Then we chopped each of them up anyway, because nobody misses a necromancer and doinking lone mages is always a nice source of loot. Mordak gave me a dirty look when I said the line about necromancers out loud, but he's the one who got to keep all their mage stuff once they were dead, so he got over it.

Then there was this one really crazy asshole who lived in a house full of monsters. We poke our faces in, planning on a bit of routine larceny, and suddenly we're up to our collective neck in battle horrors. That was rather a bit of a fight, but we got through it okay. We find the mage in charge in back, and he's all like "Well since you guys are so useful, why don't you go get me the helm of Balduran? I sent some guys to steal it, but they all got turned into stone, so take these scrolls and unstone them and find out where it is!" I mean he used a lot more words than that, but that was the long and the short of it.

Every single one of us has the exact same thought at the exact same time. Namely, thanks for the tip gramps, but assuming we find it, why the fuck would we bring it back to you? Sure he was offering to pay, but ever since we robbed the Duke we've got more cash than we can spend. (And oh how we've tried!) Nobody even said anything, we all just rushed forward to bash the guy's brains out simultaneously.

We did find the helm. I'm wearing it right now, actually. Turns out the petrified thieves were being kept as statues by some fop of a noble. We broke in, I turned them back to normal, and the fuckers wouldn't tell us where the god damned helmet is. So we cut them all to pieces. Fuck it, let the owner of the house figure it out when he comes down in the morning and finds his art collection converted into bloody corpses. The leader had a note under his hat though, which strongly hinted that the thing was hidden at the Helm & Cloak tavern. Haw haw haw. How clever.

I'm going so fast because this story just keeps getting layers of bullshit piled onto it. Okay, so we hit the tavern and there's this other band of adventurers all sitting at the bar. We have a seat too while we just sorta case the joint, trying to figure out where the helmet is. Turns out they're a group called the Merry Fools, and they're way too fucking infatuated with their own... adventurerness. "OH HALE AND HEARTY FELLOWS, LET US SHARE TALES OF OUR EXPLOITS!" Yeah, okay, whatever. So we sit there getting loaded and swapping bullshit stories a bit. Well, we share some of our more legal stories, at least. No rousing tale of how we pillaged and burned a comfy little village of halflings, or anything.

Vaere's being weird and emo as shit, by the way. She's coming back to sit down after getting up a while ago to... I dunno, take a piss or something, and Lex gives her a bump and knocks her square into my lap. She jumps up like I just simultaneously honked her tit and shit my pants (Neither of which I did!) and then starts screaming at ME about it. I'm like "Chill the fuck out, I'm not the one who pushed you over!"

That's as far as that argument got though, because just then this pack of huge flaming douchebags walks into the bar, announces themselves as the "Maulers of Undermountain" and starts stinking the place out with their assholishness. I don't even remember who said what to who, because by now we had like fifteen heavily-armed mercenaries in various states of intoxication all crammed into one place. I think I might have called them Modelers of Undergarments and told them to go choke on a gnoll dick and die. Or something. Anyway, point is, pretty soon us and the Merry Fools guys are jumping up from our stools to go after these guys.

Except the Merry Fools guys are WAY out of their league, and the Mauler guys rip through them in the opening stages of the fight. This is one of those adventurer barfights that normal people all hate, too. I mean in a normal barfight, fists get thrown and maybe a few chairs broken. In an adventurer barfight heads get cut off and you're lucky if the building is still standing at the end. Anyway yeah, the Fools all die. I'm not making coy reference to us betraying them or something, either. They just weren't up to the challenge. But we were, and we pounded those dipshits into oblivion. We collected all their shit, too, which is one of the nice things about these giant adventurer barfights.

Nobody called the guards, either. They just started hauling the meat away like it was nothing. Oh well, that suited us more than fine, so we rented out some rooms and headed upstairs. We tore the place absofuckinglutely to pieces looking for the helmet, and eventually we found it, stashed away behind a painting. Man, it's ugly as shit, but it's a powerful artifact so I slapped it on my head. We played musical helmets for a bit, since I was already wearing a lesser magical one, and Vaere ended up with my old helmet of infravision. She's just like "The fuck do I need this for? I already have infravision!" So we put it in the pile of shit to be sold, and she's still wearing her Flaming Fist souvenir. Thank god the Flamers haven't taken note of it. It must be a common design.

All right, I'm way the hell off track. Where was I? Yeah, Baldur's Gate is full of crazy dipshit mages. There are these two named Ragefast and Ramazith who apparently hate each others guts. Ragefast, according to all the gossip, has himself a pet dryad he somehow captured and is currently fucking the living hell out of. Ramazith, on the other hand, wants to pay us a couple thousand gold to go snatch the bitch and bring her to him. Fair enough.

These guys are pretty out in the open and not terribly hard to track down, so pretty soon we're kicking in Ragefast's front door. Sure enough, he's right there on his laboratory floor just pounding the living hell outta this dryad. I won't be too graphic, but if she wanted to wipe her nose it woulda had to have been on her kneecap.

Well this guy sees us, jumps up, pulls his wizard robe back down, screams something about how he and this little dryad are "destined to be together" and engages us in the prototypical "I will take all six of you on because I have MAGI-- ow ow ow!" doink scenario. Idiot. The dryad stands up and is all like "Oh thank god, I'm rescued!"

We're just like "Yeah right bitch, you've already been bought and paid for, so come quietly!" She just moaned something about how even Ragefast was really upset at the idea of Ramazith getting hold of her, and just collapsed all spirit-broken. Which was nice because it made our job a lot easier. We threw a blanket over her and Kor picked her up with a grumble of "I get any wizard spooge on my armor, I'm dropping you on your head." Then we carted her across town like a sack of flour while people stared.

We dump her at Ramazith's feet, and he's just delighted. I figured he was just bent on stealing Ragefast's toy for himself, but no. He tells us gleefully how he's going to butcher her like a hog and make her into spell components. Mordak was all like "Oh, neat! What kind?" and they started to talk shop until I broke it up and told them we needed to go.

There were a few other things we took care of, but nothing important, and I decided it was time for us to get down to the real work. First we'd look into some of this bullshit with the trading cartels, and then we'd take a chunk out of the Iron Throne's ass.

[WindupAtheist]

BTW, I am now deeply regretful that I never thought to call this Baldur's Gate: Unhinged. Because a gate has hinges, you see. And unhinged can also mean insane. Fuck, it would have been PERFECT.

[Koyasha]

Your story has inspired me to start playing all over again, and I finally got things working with the BGT mega-mod, with a whole metric fuckton of added mod content (The Darkest Day, Dark Side of the Sword Coast, and a dozen others I can't recall).  I'm going to keep a journal like this too, and if it sounds half as cool as Nythrax's adventures I might post it.

And keep up the story, awesomest playthrough story I've read...like, ever.

[Azazel]

It's done the opposite for me. I know that playing through BG could never be as awesome as reading this thing, so it would just be a dissapointment.

[Riggswolfe]

Your story has inspired me to start playing all over again, and I finally got things working with the BGT mega-mod, with a whole metric fuckton of added mod content (The Darkest Day, Dark Side of the Sword Coast, and a dozen others I can't recall).  I'm going to keep a journal like this too, and if it sounds half as cool as Nythrax's adventures I might post it.

And keep up the story, awesomest playthrough story I've read...like, ever.

I might replay the BG saga for the ummm...4th time? But first I've got to finish Gothic 3 (highly playable with the community patch and quite fun if rather large) and then give Drakensang a try. Oh, and GalCiv2. Oh, and finish a couple of PS2 jrpgs (Rogue Galaxy and Ars Tonelico 2.)

By that time Dragon Age will be out, then Mass Effect 2. So, I'll let you guys know when I get around to this in mid-2010.

[Le0]

I'm in the process of installing tutu atm. Thanks for the party advice I guess I'm going to follow the good route.
Also wondering if you guys use the widescreen mod or do you play at old school resolution?

[Murgos]

I'm in the process of installing tutu atm. Thanks for the party advice I guess I'm going to follow the good route.
Also wondering if you guys use the widescreen mod or do you play at old school resolution?

Yes, I too am sheeple.  I went to Amazon and got the Baldurs gate pack and the Icewind Dale pack, should be delivered today.

I never played the Icewind Dale stuff originally because everyone shit all over it at release for being all mindless hack-n-slash.  Come to find out 10 years later what I really want to play is some mindless hack-n-slash.

[Salizar]

The widescreen mod is great. You should also try the BG1 NPC MOD here :

http://www.gibberlings3.net/bg1npc/index.php

It basically gives to the BG1 party member the same depth as the BG2 characters. Banter, chit-chat, even romance.

About the romances...I'm not really in that sort of stuff...but they added one to Dynaheir, and it's actually very well written.

BG1 spoiler ahead :

The best thing about these new dialogs, is that you can define your role-playing with a lot of different tone, for example, with Dynaheir, you can be a charming scholar, the funny guy who make her destress, the guy who gets the job done, et caetera.

The best mod for me, it really blend into the game. (Don't mind my bad english :) )

[Ingmar]

The widescreen mod is great. You should also try the BG1 NPC MOD here :

http://www.gibberlings3.net/bg1npc/index.php

It basically gives to the BG1 party member the same depth as the BG2 characters. Banter, chit-chat, even romance.

Its a nice idea in theory but unfortunately last time I checked into this a lot of the added dialogue was kinda lame in a fan-fic-y sort of way. Also it had a lot of bad spelling and grammar problems that drove me nuts. It could be that's all been fixed by now, though.

[Flatfoot]

This thing made me drag my ass from beneath the stone under which I've been lurking - freaking awesome stuff WUA. I've never played BG (1 or 2) but this makes me want to try it out.

[K9]

This thread warms the cockles of my heart.

[Zane0]

The widescreen mod is great. You should also try the BG1 NPC MOD here :

http://www.gibberlings3.net/bg1npc/index.php

It basically gives to the BG1 party member the same depth as the BG2 characters. Banter, chit-chat, even romance.

Its a nice idea in theory but unfortunately last time I checked into this a lot of the added dialogue was kinda lame in a fan-fic-y sort of way. Also it had a lot of bad spelling and grammar problems that drove me nuts. It could be that's all been fixed by now, though.

I would not recommend the NPC mod.

[Basil]

I've registered just to tell you that you sir, are awesome. 

This is making me giggle with every post.

Baldur's Gate Unhinged

[NowhereMan]

Something I've noticed about quests, if they require the return of multiple items they only register them one at a time. I thought the spider quest just had a crappy reward but it turned out I need to talk to the woman once for every item she wanted back. I've since dumped the spider bodies somewhere and so can never finish the quest which is a bit annoying. Still the game is more fun than I remembered, I'll just see if I get as stuck as I used to and give up or not in the next few days. Keep up the story though, I need to know if you get sick of anyone important enough to kill them.

(Also, being accosted by Lord Foreshadow telling me about the likelihood of adventurers being fashionable again in Neverwinter sometime in the future=awesome)

[WindupAtheist]

(I'll put this up front: Comments about how I'm awesome and this made you play BG for the first/third/twelfth time? I totally feed off that shit and it keeps me writing, so thanks to everyone who posts.)

So I gave it some thought, and decided that the logical place to start was by looking up our old pal Aldeth Sashenstar, the merchant we rescued from angry druids. See, everywhere we went we were hearing about the various merchant cartels mysteriously running themselves into the ground. Debts going uncollected, money being thrown away on idiotic projects, things like that. Except for the Iron Throne, they were doing great.

Clearly the Throne has something on these guys, and it must be something HUGE. I figure if we're gonna start asking questions, it may as well be of someone who owes us a favor. So we schlep over to his Merchant League's headquarters, and boy is he glad to see us. Tells us everyone seems to be losing their minds, and asks us to investigate.

So we start poking around, chatting up the employees, and behaving in a generally sane and adult fashion for once. I mean we stole everything we could carry away that wasn't guarded, sure, but fuck it. We had to rifle through everything anyway, to look for clues. But wouldn't you know, behaving like a retarded gibberling turned out to be the course of action that made the day.

Mordak is 'interviewing' this middle manager, this fat guy in a ridiculous hat, only the interview consists of nothing but Mordak saying "Fecophiliac says what?" over and over again really fast while the guy just gets more and more pissed off.

"Fecophiliacsezwut?"
"What did you say?"
"Haha, shit eater! Fecophiliacsezwut?!"
"I don't know what kind of game you're--"
"Wow you must love eating shit! Fecophiliacsezwut!"
"What sort of nonsense mammal stupidity is--"
"God you're gonna choke on all that shit! Wait, mammal what?"
"AHA, NOW YOU ARE THE ONE WHO EATS THE DROPPINGS, HUMAN! DIEEE!"

And shazam, the illusion drops and the fat shit-eating merchant is actually a motherfucking doppleganger. One bent upon clawing Mordak's face off. He starts running away, screaming in hilarious fashion, with this thing chasing him. I tackled it about a half second after Lex's arrow hit it, and we butchered it right there on the floor. I stand up and I'm about to tell the onlookers that we have this shit under control, when I see that pretty much EVERYONE IN THE MOTHER FUCKING BUILDING IS A DOPPLEGANGER.

Except these guys are really overconfident about their own fighting ability, and now that they've dropped their disguises in order to attack us, we are to put it mildly fucking their shit up hardcore. We strode all through the building, hewing through dopplegangers like scaly sacks of ground beef. Only Aldeth and his captain of the guard were still human, and after we'd exterminated everyone else, they were quite grateful. We got some loot and a spiffy magic sword for our trouble.

It was pretty much the same story over at the Seven Suns. These guys might be subtle when it comes to blending in, but they can't resist a good scrap. We charged in with weapons drawn and basically announced ourselves with "We know the score, cocksuckers, so let's do this!" and they all unmasked to come right at us. Not very clever, but it sure made our job easier. The leader of the Seven Suns was being kept alive in the basement, to be tortured for information, so we turned him loose. Not so much out of the goodness of our hearts, but out of a realization that the more friendly witnesses the better when it comes to this sort of bullshit.

We stepped over to the Flaming Fisters HQ to talk to Scar, and collect our pay for ransacking... er... investigating the Seven Suns. He coughed up five grand for our trouble, and everyone behind me starts high-fiving on the spot. (We already have more than we know what to do with, but we also know we'll figure it out sooner or later.) I just turn around and give them a look that says "Knock that shit off, morons, we don't want them to think we come cheap!" Trust me, they got the message.

So Scar makes some noises about how he'll look into this and that, blah blah blah. I think he wants to deal with this, but he's getting shit from some other quarter about it. So he's not doing much besides pointing us at the guys he doesn't like and letting nature take it's course. As long as he pays, I don't give a shit. These guys we're killing all work for the Throne, and I'd slice THEIR heads off for free.

Oh, he also had another little job for us. Seems people were disappearing in the night, and the clues led back to the sewers, and would we please look into it? Now you might think it would be a cold day in Hell before Nythrax and the cool kids go slopping around in shit on behalf of a Flamer, but let me clarify. He offered us 300 gold up front, and another 1000 once we dealt with it.

Forget the amount in itself for a moment. The guy actually SPECIFIED PAYMENT. Not only that, but he offered us an ADVANCE. After months of doing all sorts of crazy dangerous bullshit for nothing more than vague promises of "some gold" or "a magic weapon" once it was over, this was pure heaven. I immediately decided that this Scar guy was okay after all, and said yes.

The investigation itself wasn't interesting enough for me to describe at length. Ogre mage in the sewers, pack of trained carrion crawlers, Vaere bitch-bitch-bitching about the smell the entire time. We killed everything we needed to kill easily enough, washed ourselves thoroughly, and were paid in full.

After that was out of the way though, I decided it was time. We were going to march down to the huge Iron Throne headquarters at the docks, and wipe out every motherfucker in the building. We'd danced around it long enough, crippled enough of their outlying operations. It was time to invade their home turf and make them bleed where they live.

(Lex and Gar ding 8. I haven't seen Biff and haven't been able to kill anyone really important. I'm actually much further ahead in the game than the story and Duke Eltan, for example, was quite invincible. Also, general tip, don't sweat the sidequests too much. Not having that spider corpse can be made up for by killing an extra bear or whatever. Half the time I hold onto the quest items for the hell of it. Vaere is STILL toting that bottle of wine around, and Lex will only take off Joia's Flamedance ring when she finds a magic one to replace it with.)

[koro]

I've been loving this whole read so far. I lost track of time for hours last night just laughing my ass off at this. It's especially grand considering I'm going through an evil playthrough of BG2 myself, though only with four people.

[Le0]

awesome report :)

[Triforcer]

You seriously should have sold this shit to some magazine. 

[Koyasha]

Behaving like a retarded gibberling.  *Snicker.*  And I agree, I have the same hangup as Nythrax about specified payment.  I hate quests that send you off for vague promises of vague rewards.

Sidenote: The Nythraxian Cloak of Mind-Bending is without a doubt the most powerful bloody magical item in the game.    And I keep thinking of it by that name, too.  Heh.

I have also discovered that my attempt at making a writeup is boring.  While you have the writing ability to cut through the shit straight to the awesome, I have page after page of detailed journals talking about every fucking detail of what my characters did each day of the trip, only they're not detailed enough or well written enough to be a novel.  It really reads like somebody's boring diary that they constantly babble into.  I'm on page 10 (of Times New Roman single-spaced 12 point font) and I haven't even finished the mines yet.