Baldur's Gate: The Baldening

[FatuousTwat]

Really great stuff, looking forward to BG2!

Lex would later refer to this as "kinky" and ask if they touched in the middle.

Made me lol.

[Tebonas]

Better late to the party than never. Well done and thank you. That chipped off a few hours of my boring work in an extremely entertaining way. Looking foward to BG2.

Edit: vew =/= few

[Mosesandstick]

Thank you.  Almost makes me want to start playing evil characters in RPGs.

[McCow]

This should be required reading for anyone building an RPG. 

Attention developers: "Good" doesn't mean you are an angel.  "Evil" doesn't have to be dumb.

Can't wait for the BG2 write up.   

[WindupAtheist]

Final party disposition. Like I said, I'm going to be a shameless whore and carry my loot into BG2, because I love loot, I earned it, and I'm not letting the game railroad me out of it. (That guy in BG2 who steals the Drizzt crew's loot if you kill them? He's getting modded out pre-emptively!) That said, I will refrain from equipping duplicate items. There will never be two helms of Balduran or two Drizzt armors in the party or anything like that. I don't want to cheesily put everyone in cloned uber gear, I just want to keep the shit I played to get.

[WindupAtheist]

So most of the BG1 items just plain don't exist in BG2. When I imported my characters over (after escaping the cell at the start to avoid being stripped) the only items that came with them were a few things like the helm of Balduran and Drizzt's armor. So I backed up the SoA override folder, then copied all the Tutu *.ITM files into it.

It was a shot in the dark and it... sorta worked. The items were there, made sound when moved around, appeared on the avatar, but were invisible in the inventory, had no text descriptions, and certain potions and such were causing crashes. So not really. Going to keep experimenting. They'll pry my loot from my cold dead hands.

[Strazos]

As long as you can import your gold, just wait til you can go to the Adventurer's Mart and splurge.

[WindupAtheist]

Oh I can always just use a simple console command to get my gold back. I can even use the console to add back most of my gear, save for a few things. Debating whether I really want to do that now. If not, expect the entire thrust of the BG2 write-up to be getting revenge on the guy who stole my TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND MOTHER FUCKING GOLD.

[Goreschach]

That would probably be more fitting than the real story.

[Brogarn]

Oh I can always just use a simple console command to get my gold back. I can even use the console to add back most of my gear, save for a few things. Debating whether I really want to do that now. If not, expect the entire thrust of the BG2 write-up to be getting revenge on the guy who stole my TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND MOTHER FUCKING GOLD.

Oh, that could to all kinds of hilarity. 

[Koyasha]

Yeah, in addition to the ITM files you have references in those files to specific graphics (somewhere in the bifs) and to strings in the dialog file.  It is possible to extract items with Near Infinity (among others), but you'd have to go to every ITM file you want to transfer over, extract it, check the file itself for the .bam references, extract those, and copy all that shit.

And they'd still have incorrect dialog file references because the stringref to dialog.tlk would be incorrect, so if you actually wanted the descriptions, you'd further have to copy all those strings into new dialog.tlk references and renumber the reference for every item in order to match.

[WindupAtheist]

Yeah, not worth it. BG2 will be about getting my fucking money back from Irenicus and tracking down the undead Imoen.

[Strazos]

"HEEEEY-YA! It's me, IMOEN!"

[Flatfoot]

I've never managed to play evil in any RPG - I always pussy out when asked to murder the puppy. The best I can manage is a kind of chaotic/neutral guy who doesn't kiss ass, but refrains from actual puppy-murdering. That said this has been an awesome read and I look forward to reading about the Cool Kids' adventures in BG2.

[Hoax]

Thread still delivers, love it.

[The Beef]

This is a good thread. Looking forward to your antics in BG2.

[WindupAtheist]

It'll be coming soon. These games are like huge pieces of chocolate cake. Awesome, but you can only consume so much before you need to put it aside for a little while.

[squirrel]

Great stuff WUA. Made me look for my BG/II disks, but they're MIA. So I'm playing the Witcher instead and imagining your voice over.

Really good fun - keep it going.

[gryeyes]

It'll be coming soon. These games are like huge pieces of chocolate cake. Awesome, but you can only consume so much before you need to put it aside for a little while.

I cant even recall how many times I have started one of these games to quit 5 hours in.

[Aliexia]

Great job!  You should SO be a writer!  Had me laughing. Gar too, in his silent way.

[WindupAtheist]

I tried to give Gar some of his namesake's not-talkativeness, but that conflicts with the need to... you know... have him do stuff and remind people that he exists. So I mostly had him express himself by way of shooting people in the face. Anyway, BG2: Electric Boogaloo should be underway within the next day or two.

[Strazos]

Wow, you even got someone to register, steal the name and portrait of a character from you campaign, and POST with it, all with your playthrough commentary/journal.

Nicely Done. 

[Rizzen]

Well, I might as well stop lurking for a few minutes...

Hell of a thread here man, god damn entertaining.  Like others here, I'm in the middle of a new playthrough of the series again now thanks to Nythrax and his party's adventures.

Keep it up, definitely looking forward to how Nythrax will handle some events in BGII and ToB.

[WindupAtheist]

Wow, you even got someone to register, steal the name and portrait of a character from you campaign, and POST with it, all with your playthrough commentary/journal.

Nicely Done. 

Actually, the Aliexia who just posted is the original. I stole her WoW character's name, and removed a letter so I could call her Lex. When I told her about this little story, she sent me that portrait and I used it to replace the generic Safana portrait you see in the first couple screenshots.

Come to think of it, everyone in the party has at least some ancestry in the form of a UO or WoW character to one degree or another. Except for Mordak. Mostly I just used the names, though I did nick bits of personality here and there.

[Ingmar]

For future reference, via experimentation I've done, if you do the Baldur's Gate Trilogy (BGT) way of playing BG1 in the BG2 engine, rather than the TuTu one, all items from both games work in both games, as it works off of a single dialog.tlk file etc. It actually just merges all of BG1 into the BG2 directory, you can delete BG1 afterwards.

[WindupAtheist]

Baldur's Gate 2: Electric Boogaloo, aka Revenge of the Cool Kids

So things haven't exactly gone as I planned. Surprise.

After we sacked Nashkel and slaughtered all those useless hillbillies, we packed everything worth eating or drinking into a little donkey cart and bolted south before anyone serious could notice or come to investigate. We got away clean enough, or so I thought, and after a day's march we pulled off the road to make camp and enjoy our spoils.

Obviously we should have left a watch, but we were all feeling pretty damn invincible right about then, so we all got loaded as hell. A fucking demigod backed by major money and power had tried to take us down, and gotten a faceful of sword for his trouble, so what could possibly threaten us out in the middle of nowhere? I know, I know.

Kor threw an entire barrel of hundred-plus-proof something into the fire just to see what would happen and almost killed us. Mordak started jabbering something about attacking the darkness and started shooting magic missiles up into the night air. Yeah, it was kind of a party. Vaere landed in my lap again without even being pushed, gave me this real dirty "Guess what I'm thinking!" smile, then her eyes crossed and she threw up on the front of my armor. She always tries to keep up with me and Kor when it comes to booze, except she's like half our size. She passed out, and I just knew this was somehow going to be my fault in the morning.

Except it didn't work out that way. I'd like to say we gave our captors a hell of a fight, but the truth is I'm not sure there was a fight at all. For all I know they walked up while we were passed out and loaded us into a wagon like sacks of flour. Oops. So much for being invincible. I didn't even wake up at all until we were... wherever we are.

This really snobbish-looking schmuck of a wizard had the whole lot of us hanging from the ceiling in what amounted to giant birdcages. At first I thought this was some sort of law and order thing about killing everyone in Nashkel, but this guy clearly didn't give a damn about any of that. He kept jabbering about "unlocking my potential" and shooting me with lightning bolts and shit. So this guy knows I'm half-god and is bent on getting me to do... something. But he CAN'T be trying to bring about my apotheosis, because the first thing an angry god of murder would do is vivisect the dipshit who had spent the last week fireballing him in the name of science. I don't know, I don't claim to know anything about exactly what he wants, except that I'm not about to give him jack shit on his own terms.

So I'm hanging around in my cage trying to figure out a way to escape, when suddenly we hear a bunch of screaming and spells going off. The place is under attack. Who should choose this particular moment to suddenly turn up but... Imoen?! The first thing I think is "Oh no, not more of this doppleganger bullshit!" I'm really tired of my enemies thinking I can be mindfucked by shapeshifters turning into people I don't even like. She comes up and unlocks my cage, and starts spewing this huge nonsensical story about how the wizard in charge has been messing with my mind, and how in reality she and I have been best friends all along, and we need to escape together, and all sorts of silly shit. I answered this nonsense with a sweet left hook to the beak and she took off running.

You know, she only weighs like 90 pounds. If she were SOMEHOW on the up-and-up I should have at least decked her.

Anyway, with the undead shapeshifting Imoen momentarily fended off, I set about letting the rest of the cool kids out of their cages. Everyone was physcially all right, except then it hit me. We have no idea where our equipment is. What's even worse, we have no idea where all our loot and cash is. Let me restate this as bluntly as possible for emphasis.

THESE ASSHOLES TOOK OUR TWO. HUNDRED. THOUSAND. MOTHER. FUCKING. GOLD.

Do you have any god damned IDEA how much money that is? That's everything we'd made since we left Candlekeep. That's practically enough to buy a small kingdom. I can put up with being kidnapped. I can tolerate being tortured. But now this shit is fucking personal.

We ransacked a nearby guardroom that was mysteriously unguarded (except for a golem that wasn't even programmed to stop us) and came up with some weapons and armor. Swords, axes, daggers, splint armor, chainmail, all sorts of junk. Nothing like the arsenal of fabulous magical destruction that we WERE packing, but at least we wouldn't be left trying to punch our way out with bare fists.

As we left the guardroom we noticed two more prisoners sitting in cages. One was a rather bitchy-sounding elven woman whom we had never met before in our lives, but who knew my name and insisted we were old friends. The other was that face-painted maniac with the gerbil, the guy we put to death in Nashkel months and months ago.

Er, what the hell?

Is this supposed to be more shapeshifter crap? Because one of these people is some jackoff I killed in a streetfight and never gave a shit about, and the other is a complete fucking stranger. Whatever. We killed them both on the spot, without letting either of them out of their cages. Neither of them melted down into dopplegangers though. Hmm. This really wasn't adding up, but who has time to worry?

I'll figure this shit out another time. We're armed and ready, and it's time to slice our way out of this dump. We're going to find that ponce who locked us up, and start breaking bones until he coughs up our motherfucking 200,000 gold. I will have my revenge.

[Hoax]

Ahhhh yeah, glad this is starting up, going to show it to some gamer friends this weekend.

[Khac]

Keep up the good work. It is the most entertaining thing I've read all week. Can't wait to see what you'll do in BG2.

[The Beef]

I can't wait to see what you do when Irenicus turns your revenge-quest for money into a (major mid-game spoiler) Keep up the good work!

[WindupAtheist]

BG2 is being buggy as shit for me. I'm going to wipe out everything BG related except my character files, reinstall, and remod.

[WindupAtheist]

So the schmuck who stole our THTMFG while giving my asshole a magic missile enema every day for the last week is named Irenicus, and he has a pretty sweet pad if vaguely sewer-like dungeons are your cup of tea. The name was coughed up by the guy's dryad sex slaves before they all died, but I'll get back to that shortly.

Thus far the underground lair of a malevolent wizard is turning out to be just what you would expect. Namely lots of rooms and corridors laid out in totally idiotic and senseless fashion, protected by a random assortment of easily defeated monsters and needlessly complex magical machinery. Oh, and the guy has a huge fetish for preserving people alive in huge glass tubes full of liquid, apparently. There was a big room full of these things, but it all looked neglected and everyone in them was already dead. Except for this one sniveling dipshit, who somehow managed to gabble at us in a horrible nasal voice despite being underwater. Then somehow managed to drown after Lex yoinked the power cell from his tube because it was shiny. At least it got him to shut up.

Oh, and there was some royal twat of a genie who really wanted to be all cryptic and mysterious and knowing for the foolish mortals. Except if this guy knew the first damn thing about us, he'd know that if Elminster can't get away with that routine on our watch, what chance does he have? Kor was too crabby and pissed off to even moon him, and we told him to fuck off. He seemed quite taken aback. We'd have sliced his ass if he hadn't disappeared in a hurry.

Where was I? Dryad sex slaves, right. Well we found ourselves ransacking what was plainly this guy's bedroom. And let me ask you, who the bloody hell boobytraps their own bedroom? Their nightstand? It wasn't anything Garrette couldn't handle disarming, but I mean... really! My helmet, the erstwhile Helm of Balduran, was among the goodies we looted. Let me just tell you, I have never been this pissed off at someone without being able to kill them right away. Sarevok and his endless stream of embarassingly inept assassins never made me half as mad as this poncy douchebag making off with all our hard-stolen loot. We trashed the room out of spite, and in the cave connected to it we found...

...trees. Yeah, a cave full of trees. Okay. Why should anything around here make any damned sense at all, right? One wonders how they survive without sunlight, but there's probably a spell nobody has ever heard of that takes care of that. See, they're the magical dryad trees of these three dryads, all standing there in their wispy green bikini things. They tell us that the guy is named Irenicus, that he's keeping them there as sex slaves, and that he's apparently trying to recapture something he lost when his dear beloved wife died. Aww, isn't that sweet? Sure he's a prick, but he has a lost love. Balls! These dryads went on about how they wanted us to find some magic acorns that the dryad king can use to free them and... blah blah blah. I told them to shut the fuck up, and then asked Mordak if he wanted to make some spell components.

He just grinned, and we hewed the three of them into bloody chunks on the spot. They didn't really have any loot, except for what looked like a totally sweet bong, which Garrette snapped right up. Mordak apparently took me seriously on the "spell components" thing though. I mean I was just making a blackly humorous reference to that job we did in Baldur's Gate a while back, but sure enough he starts going through the leftovers, so to speak. Except he doesn't really know which parts are valuable, so he just starts filling a sack with random hunks of dryad. Whatever.

But get this, the very next room we walked into? His dead wife's bedroom. His dead wife's perfectly preserved bedroom. Oh man. Everything that wasn't worth stealing, we set on fire. Everything that wouldn't catch fire, we pissed on or otherwise defiled. I thought about how this Irenicus would feel when he discovered the mess we'd made of his bedroom, his sex slaves, and the little shrine to his wife, and I started to feel a bit better.

Vaere said it was a good thing, too, because she wasn't sure the healing spells given to her by Talos would cover rage-induced hemorrhoids. I know she was trying to lighten the mood, but I didn't laugh until Garrette nudged Kor and said "Hear that? You're gonna have to change your whole lifestyle!"

I threw my hands up as if to say fine, my little tantrum was over. The wife-shrine was a dead end, so we turned around and headed back into the dungeon proper.

[Brogarn]

 

[WindupAtheist]

So we're out. We didn't get to kill the prick in charge yet, and we certainly didn't find our loot, but we're out. It was a weird trip though.

We ran into another genie. Not the one who tried to do the two-bit Elminster routine, another one completely. This one said he had something of mine, but he couldn't give it to me or even tell me what it was until he was free. I immediately started to calculate whether we could murder a genie with our shabby stolen weapons, but then he told us that all he needed to be free was his lamp. Which, as it turns out, was the sweet bong Garrette stole from the dead sex slaves. He didn't want to give it up, not until Korgrim made a crack about weed tasting like genie ass. Then he forked it over, and hey, the genie was as good as his word. Sort of.

He coughed up Sarevok's old sword. Where he got it, or why he thought it was mine, I don't precisely know. I'm not complaining though, because it's a decent weapon and what's more it has a cool name. I'm no longer Nythrax, bearer of Spider's Bane. No, I'm Nythrax, he who wields THE SWORD OF CHAOS. I'll admit the sword probably isn't powerful enough to merit a name quite that pretentious, but I don't mind. I went into my sword-flapping routine on the spot. The genie looked at me real odd and everyone just said "Don't ask." Then he shrugged and disappeared.

After that we ran into a bounty hunter named Yoshimo, a little wise-ass from Ja-- er-- parts unknown, who seemed to think we ought to have heard of him, and who furthermore wanted to accompany us in our escape. Claimed he was a fellow kidnapping victim. We weren't about to trust anyone in this madhouse though, muchless some random armed stranger, and told him to get stuffed. Then he got all smug, and was like "Fine, I'll just follow you out anyway, after you disarm all the traps for me." Well I mean OBVIOUSLY, but I chopped his head off with THE SWORD OF CHAOS just for being the sort of dick who'd feel compelled to say that to our faces. Fucker.

Anyway yeah, we had to disarm a bunch of traps to get out. I won't go into the mechanics of exactly how we had to turn the crank and snap the plank, to boot the marble right down the chute, to turn off the hellmachine that was spewing out mephits, or whatever. Suffice it to say we made our way through traps that would have rendered the place completely non-functional as anything but a gauntlet for adventurers. Funny how that works.

Oh, it's the Shadow Thieves who were attacking this place. We had to kill a few on our way through. I have no idea why they're mad at this Irenicus, but I figure I may as well make note of it.

So we're kicking through the place, all the usual dreary tunnels and hallways, and we find a bunch more of those glass tubes. Only looking at these ones, it's plain that the schmuck is trying to clone his dear departed wife. I'm sensing a theme here. Bet you fifty gold he wanted to suck out my god powers to revive her. Well one of the clones had broken loose and was quite irate, as well as able to cast spells, so rather than attempt to explain this entire ridiculous situation while catching chromatic orbs with our faces, we just killed her. Then we smashed up all the tubes for good measure. I hope he cries big fat tears when he finds her.

We got out without further major incident, only to have the tunnel explode behind us as we came up... in the middle of a god damned bustling city. With Irenicus right out in front tearing up a bunch of Shadow Thieves while zombie/clone/whatever Imoen watched. The dude had skills, I have to admit. Well after he finished with the thieves, he and Imoen started shit-talking each other, until she zapped him with a magic missile. I didn't know she could do that.

Well instantly a bunch of guard wizards (or something) turn up screaming about the illegal use of magic. Irenicus is all like "Haha, whatever bitches!" and blows them all into chunks, but these guys just keep teleporting in to merrily shower him with their screaming giblets. Finally Irenicus decides he's had enough and tells them to take him in, but only if they bring Imoen too. Which they do, even though she's really not happy about it. I'm all like "HOLD THE HELL UP, HE OWES ME MONEY!" but nobody is listening. Five seconds later they're all teleported out and we're standing there in this crater in the middle of town by ourselves.

Fuck.

Looks like getting our money back is going to be harder than expected. Well, no reason not to take our financial woes out on the peasantry. We're apparently in the city of Athkatla in the nation of Amn, which is of no special concern to me. It's as good as anywhere else, I guess. Looks pretty prosperous. Should be plenty to steal on our way to wringing our loot out of Irenicus.

We're already set to it. Mordak was REALLY pissed off that using magic in public is illegal here, so Lex snuck off to this little open air stand selling mage scrolls and stole him a whole set while I was writing this, along with a neat little case to carry them in. That cheered him right up. One wonders how many scrolls really sell in a city where casting spells is illegal anyway.

(Vaere dings 9, Gar and Lex ding 11. For the record, I'm playing with a mod that restores the BG1 weapon proficiency system with the addition of the BG2 weapon skills like two-handed and dual-wielding. The notion of a long sword, bastard sword, katana, scimitar, and two-handed sword all being as different from one another as a crossbow is from a halberd just rubbed me wrong. For that matter, I doubt anyone would ever go "Gosh I'm a grandmaster with a mace, but this club is mystifying to me!" So yeah. Also a bunch of inventory management mods that make life a lot simpler.)

[Segoris]

BG1 playthrough/baldening was solid as hell, and I'm glad to see that the BG2 playthrough is continuing in the trend of being awesome. Keep it up man!

[Flatfoot]