Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

Yeah, I know this has been a gap of several hours. What can I say? I take sandwich making very seriously.

Now why is it that Lilarcor speaks perfect, formal English when you’re talking to him here, but when you actually start using him it’s all “Yeah, uh, I was like, A MOONBLADE once. Totally, dude. Cowabunga.” I don’t know. Maybe the “mysterious presence” isn’t actually Lilarcor. We never do find out, really.

Come to think of it, there’s very little explanation for any of this quest at all. Who’s Vallah? How’d he get his hand cut off? What does he have to do with those two skeletons, and why does “The blood of a true friend” enter into the equation? Did someone murder Vallah's friend? Perhaps it was Vallah himself, in a foolish act of betrayal that he came to regret? Moreover, how did Lilarcor or the mysterious presence or whoever’s pulling the strings on this one manage to take possession of Quallo?

It’s a shame, really. It almost seems as though Lilarcor was originally going to be one of those legendary, must-get weapons with an elaborate and interesting background, but for whatever reason the idea was nixed halfway through and they just made it into the annoying, comic relief talking sword that we know and would despise but for that delicious mind shield it offers.

Nevertheless, the mystery behind Lilarcor might be an interesting avenue for the creators of custom BGII content to explore. Hint hint, modders.

We’ve already got three of the components we need, so now we just have to head back and get the staff.

Heading back to an earlier tunnel, we come across another group of kobolds. This one, however, does not immediately start launching arrows at us, and instead their representative on diplomatic matters demands that we leave the sewer because it’s “theirs”. The nice pipe told us that one of these things has a staff we’re looking for, though, so we inquire about it and then offer to buy it for 2000 gold.

The kobold shaman quickly snaps up the offer after but a moment’s hesitation and goes to leave with his newly acquired fortune…upon which all the other kobolds declare him a traitor and execute him, allowing me to leave, unmolested, with both the stick and the gold that I paid.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why kobolds are incapable of squeezing their way out of the ranks of the downtrodden and improving their miserable lot in life. Not only does it seem that they do not know a good offer when they see it, but they also spit in the face of evolution and its demand for the survival of the fittest by ganging up on and murdering the only one among them with any sense.

If we went back in time, made all kobolds like this kobold shaman and worked from there, then by the time we reached the era in which this game is taking place, kobolds would have reached the status of “Playable race“, without a doubt. What’s more, they’d be the one that everybody picked. Yeah, they’d be able to do crazy stuff like dual-class INTO a multi-class, allowing for such combinations as a Kensai/Mage-Thief.

But no. Instead we have these kobolds, the kobolds who don’t understand that a stick that can create a handful of berries once a day isn’t even close to being worth the 2000 gold we offered for it

Seriously, what the hell is the point of the Goodberry spell? It might be worthwhile if their curative properties actually carried some clout, but 1 hit point each? If you’ve reached a stage at which one hit point will actually make a difference, you’ve obviously made a mess of the battle you’re in and you’re probably going to die anyway, so you might as well not bother. We should have been able to follow the suggestion in the title of this update and make a pie out of them. That would be worth the trouble.

Goodberry Pie. Did I just create a Strawberry Shortcake character?

Yes, I can see that. She'd be one of those "zero tolerance" druids, riding into the countryside on a dire wolf and warning all the other kids to cease their vile desecration of the land with their incessant and disrespectful berry plucking. In retaliation, they'd all band together and try to overcome their difficulties with the power of friendship or mindless optimism or something, and then they'd get their asses kicked when they realised that this method of problem solving tends to fail when one comes up against a real obstacle, like, say, a fire elemental.

I like it. Make it happen.

Still, I suppose that since we’ve now got an item that’ll make them without us having to waste a spell slot, there’s no reason not to keep a supply of goodberries on hand unless we start running low on inventory space.

Yes, that’s right. We’re going to be holding on to the staff for a little while. We don’t want to finish this quest just yet. Why? Because it offers Quest XP.

The thing about Quest XP is that, unlike normal XP, it is not a "portion" of XP that is shared evenly between the party members. You do not get a bigger share if your party is smaller, and conversely, you do not get a smaller share if your party is bigger. In other words, if you don’t have all six slots filled, some of that XP will be going to waste, and I, being the obsessive harvester that I am, do not want this to happen.

We’ll pick Lilarcor up once we recruit Keldorn, which, conveniently, will be exactly when we’ll want to start using it. In the meantime, we’re going to leave this quest unfinished for now and head to the Bridge district to solve the murder “mystery”. Tune in next time, folks.

This is Lorph Halys, and you’ve been reading Baldur’s Gate: The Zero Reload Saga. Thank you, and goodnight.

Hostile kobolds around the corner…

You have to wonder. How did all this shit get down here in the first place?

(BUT LORPH IT IS A SEWER SO IT IS NOT AT ALL UNUSUAL THAT THERE SHOULD BE SHIT IN IT HAR HAR. You know what I meant. Shut up.)

Do all these monstrous humanoids come down here in the hopes that they can finally make a name for themselves and strike it rich in the refuse conduits of the big city? Why would they want to live in a sewer instead of, say, staying out in the wilderness, where the air is fresh and the land is bountiful, with food that one can eat without having to receive several castings of Cure Disease afterwards?

The Otuygh made sense because Otyughs actually feed exclusively on sewage and filth, but HOW DID IT GET THERE? Perhaps some bright spark put it there on purpose so that it’d help clean the place up a bit, but if they were going to do that, you’d think they’d have had the sense to train it not to attack everyone it comes across.

Presumably the sewer has to undergo maintenance from time to time. How is anyone supposed to do that with all these angry hobgoblins and kobolds running rampant?

Wait. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why they’re down here. Maybe they *are* maintenance workers under the employ of the city, and the only reason they attacked was because we were getting in the way and fouling up their efforts. Maybe the “monsters” that we’ve been mercilessly slaughtering have simply been concerned citizens trying to do their part to keep Athkatla’s streets free of crap.

Of course, either way, they’re still easy experience that nobody complains about us taking, so we don’t really care. It’s just something to consider.

Kobolds are even less of a threat than hobgoblins, so there really wasn’t much of a strategy here. We just charged right in and hoped that we could kill those shamans before they managed to cast Entangle…

Nope. Well, that means we’ve got to wait about an hour for it to disperse so that I can save the game. I’m going to get a sandwich.

Perhaps someone would care to give me a few ideas as to how a pair of smooching skeletons might have ended up embedded upright in the wall of a sewer. My imagination isn’t quite powerful enough to handle this one.

I decided to insert a little roleplaying here and simply spend a few seconds doing nothing when I came across this. You know, to represent everyone staring at it bemusedly, wondering how exactly it happened. See? It’s not all cheap strategies and powergaming, folks. Vespero has a soul too.

Of course, it’s a black and twisted soul, which is why it doesn’t take him long at all to stop pondering the mystery and swipe the pretty ring that practically screams “Sentimental value!” from the corpses. It also screams “I’m important!” since, unlike the severed hand, we receive a direct hint that it would probably be worth holding on to. If nothing else, most shopkeepers would be more inclined to buy a gold ring than a piece of someone’s dead body.

Why can’t I put the ring on the hand? It’d save me some inventory space.

Heading further down, we soon come across Quallo, the man behind the weirdness down here, or at least the man acting as the puppet of the entity behind the weirdness down here, which is just as good. We’re going to do everything he tells us to, of course, rather than making what is probably the more reasonable assumption that this is simply some lunatic in the sewer that we shouldn’t make eye contact with. He’s being cryptic, you see, and speaking in riddles, and he refuses to give a straight, concise answer to anything. In a roleplaying game, this is cruise control for authenticity. If he’d been speaking plainly and frankly then we’d know it was a load of bull.

How has this guy survived down here with all the monsters running around? Why don’t they bother him? OK, the hobgoblins would probably leave him alone since he’s obviously not a threat and they wouldn’t gain anything from killing him, but oozes aren’t so discerning. He’s got his carrion crawler friend, sure, but that’s only going to keep so much away.

I use the present tense erroneously in the previous paragraph, however. I should say “He had his carrion crawler friend," because we just went ahead and killed it now to save ourselves a return trip to collect its blood. Of course, given that we haven’t actually heard any of the riddles for the Lilarcor puzzle yet, we didn’t know that we were supposed to do this, which I suppose means that we just put some of its blood into this vial (that we’ve apparently been carrying around all this time) on a random impulse.

Mind you, given Vespero’s track record, this isn’t really anything out of the ordinary.

Checking the descrption for the blood "item", we are told that we cannot help but feel guilty for having killed Quallo’s true friend. How nice of them to tell us that. Certainly it’s not our prerogative to choose how we may feel afterwards about the act of wiping a disgusting aberration from the face of the world; we need the game to decide this sort of thing for us, and the game’s decided that Vespero is going soft. So there.

Carefully stepping around the carcass of one recently dispatched Otyugh, we come to our second obstacle in this room; the Mustard Jelly. Like the Ogre Mage, these enemies were pretty lethal in the first game, particularly when the magical weapons that you needed to harm them were not readily available, but now, like their friend Otis, all they can really do is annoy you with a long-lasting Slow effect.

I’ve often wondered who came up with the name “Mustard Jelly”. Why “mustard“? Because it’s yellow? OK, so why not “Yellow Jelly”? Is there anything wrong with that? You’ve got “Green Slime”, haven’t you? You didn’t call them “Wasabi Slimes”…although if you had I don’t think it would irritate me so much. At least things would have been consistent. Why not just go all the way and call them “Lemon Jellies“?

It’s not just those, either. There’s another type of ooze creature that doesn’t appear in BGII called the Black Pudding, which doesn’t just sound like a type of food; it is a type of food. A black pudding is a sausage made with blood. Seriously, look it up. I’ve eaten them before and they’re delicious. Was Gary Gygax hungry when he came up with these things or something?

It’s still annoying that so much of our arsenal is incapable of damaging the damn thing, but nevertheless, we manage to dispatch it without taking a hit, thereby saving Vespero a shot of his Slow Poison innate ability.

Ooh, look, there’s a grating in the ground that we can click on. Upon doing so, the game suggests that we could reach into the murky, slimy water.

That’s it. It doesn’t tell you that there’s anything down there aside from murky, slimy water or provide even the slightest hint as to why you might wish to take this course of action. All it says is “Hey, you can put your hand down here if you feel like it,” which could be equally true of every grating in the game.

Of course, as the external, controlling force behind the characters’ actions, we know full well that this option would not be available to us if it didn’t serve some purpose, so of course we’re going to have someone feel around in the pool of filth just on the off chance of something useful being down there.

Well, what do you know? We’re in luck. It’s an old, severed hand. Just what I always wanted. Naturally we’re going to keep this in our inventory until we find some use for it, because as the external, controlling force behind the characters’ actions…

Whatever. Let’s just move on.

I never quite realised just how terrible Jan is at hiding until just now. I mean, I knew he had very little skill in it, but I wasn’t expecting it to take TWENTY ATTEMPTS before he managed to conceal himself.

How exactly were you supposed to function as a low-level thief in an actual AD&D game? Even if you pumped all your points into the sneaking skills you’d still be pretty bad at them, and you’d be absolutely hopeless at spotting traps and all the other things that thieves are supposed to be able to do. Furthermore, one would imagine that in a real game, you’d actually have to play out the act of hiding rather than just rolling the dice over and over again until you manage to get into a sort of all-encompassing “stealth mode”, so there’d be nowhere NEAR as much margin for error.

No wonder thieves level up more quickly than everyone else. The first few months of their lives are a desperate race against time, a terrified scrambling to escape from the realms of abysmal feebleness before someone steps on them.

Why are we hiding Jan? Well, there’s an Otyugh just down the corridor to the west, and I’m going to draw it out and soften it up with crossbow bolts and assorted missiles.

At least, that was my plan. Shortly after setting things in motion I discovered an interesting tidbit about Otyughs that I’d somehow managed to miss, even after all this time, and that is that for some reason, they are completely immune to piercing damage.

Well hell.

I’m guessing I didn’t notice this because normally, when a character’s weapon isn’t inflicting any damage, they have the courtesy to alert you to the fact. Alas, for whatever reason, Otyughs appear to be a special case. Perhaps everyone’s afraid to open their mouths, given that Otyughs are basically diseases on legs. Well…appendages, anyway. But why the hell does a throwing axe inflict PIERCING DAMAGE?

It’s not a big deal, of course. The dreaded Otyugh lurgie is far from lethal; it’s just irritating to have to wait for that Slow effect to wear off. In fact, I don’t actually think it does anything aside from a tiny amount of damage, which rather makes one wonder what the point is beyond allowing them to feel like the Cure Disease spell wasn’t a waste of time. It might as well just be poison, but that would mean compounding the status effects and their respective cures so that we’d actually have a single spell that would be kind of useful (Slow Poison) instead of three spells that are fairly worthless (Slow Poison, Cure Disease, Neutralise Poison.) That would be convenient. That would be a favour to you. Do you deserve any favours from BioWare? What have you done for them lately?

With Lehtinan dead and Hendak having become the questionably legitimate owner of the Copper Coronet, it‘s time to head to the sewers. It’s just not a role-playing game unless you go into the sewers at some point. The act of traipsing through putrid pools of other people’s waste is the proverbial cherry atop the proverbial knickerbocker glory (that’s an ice cream sundae to you damned Yanks); you could certainly enjoy it even if it were absent, but the whole thing would feel somehow incomplete.

Still, at least we’re avoiding the cliché associated with this cliché; there aren’t any oversized rats down here that we have to fight. In fact, I don’t think there are any rats at all. Not a single one. Come on, BioWare. I understand the desire to do things differently, but a sewer without rats is like a sewer without sewage; it’s not really a sewer at all, just a series of tunnels.

In lieu of rodents, we mostly just have hobgoblins. Yeah, remember hobgoblins? They were such a nightmare to fight in the first game. Sure, they were only a couple of rungs above gibberlings on the “Sword Fodder” ladder, but they had those damned poison arrows, and no matter how efficiently you were able to dispatch them, they always managed to tag someone in your party with at least one of them, and you always seemed to be fresh out of antidotes. And of course the friggin’ arrows aren’t poisoned when you use them. Oh no. This poison only works for the cool kids. Are you one of the cool kids? No? Then they’re just arrows. Deal with it. Loser.

Of course, eventually you’d get access to Slow Poison and you didn’t have to worry about antidotes anymore, but the hobgoblins would always seem to end up hitting the people that had it memorised. I don’t know if this was intentionally programmed behaviour or just random chance, but it happened with suspicious regularity. As a result, you were stuck. Nobody could cast the spell because they kept getting “hit” by the poison and interrupted half way through.

I've never been poisoned and I've never met anyone who's been poisoned. I'm not an expert on the matter, so I have to ask; Is that how it happens? Because, you know, I always assumed that it inflicted a continuous state of debilitation, like an illness. You get a nasty swelling at the point of entry or become very sick or, if you’re unlucky, you die. I’m fairly sure that nobody suffering from poison has stood in place going “Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!” and repeatedly recoiling as if having been struck.

I like how it just goes away if you rest, though. That’s convenient. The first game didn’t screw around like that. If you were poisoned and you tried to rest, you woke up dead. The more likely outcome, perhaps, but it was still annoying as hell to have to lug all those antidotes around just to make sure it didn’t happen.

Yes, poison is much less of a menace in this game, which means that in terms of spells that are useful, “Neutralise Poison” is now sitting somewhere at the level of “Infravision.” Seriously, if anyone has come across a poison that was potent enough to actually only be slowed by “Slow Poison” (which is ostensibly what the spell is supposed to do) and required Neutralise Poison to get rid of entirely, please do tell me, because I have never, ever seen one. I’d like to discover that I hadn’t simply been wasting a spell slot all those times I kept it memorised just in case.

As for these hobgoblins, they aren’t a problem. They’re only really a threat if their shamans manage to nail you with Hold Person…which is precisely why we engage Korgan’s Enrage engines first. With this active, he’s immune to paralysis, and he is able to use his throwing axes to draw the hobgoblins over in metaphorical bite-size chunks, whereupon they are reduced into very literal bite-size chunks.

I know it’s been a while since the last update. Let me shed a little light on this matter.

First of all, I spent the last few days lying in bed, in pain, cursing the world at large in the manner of a grouchy old man for refusing to let me sleep. Insomnia is a bitch of a thing, and combined with illness it becomes all but intolerable. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those weirdoes that somehow manages to become more active and alert during bouts of sleep deprivation; all that happens to me is I get a mild headache and become extremely lethargic.

Secondly, I’m going to start winding the update schedule down a bit. As much as I’d like to, I simply don’t have the time to write an update batch every single day; it takes longer than you might think. Unless, through the direct and awe-inspiring intervention of a deity, I actually start getting paid (money) to write this crap, we’ll probably be working our way down to about one or two updates a week, with any additional ones being bonuses. This will also give me ample opportunity to start building up a backlog, so that if anything unfortunate happens again, I’ll have a pool of already written material to draw from.

Giving specific update days is not something I’m inclined to do, however. I realise it’s nice to know exactly when you should check back for new content, but I am a fickle creature with a chaotic schedule, and this is the Internet. Saying I will update every Saturday would practically be an invitation for people to start screaming “ITS SATURRDAY WHEN ARE U GOIN TO UPDATE U SUCK” when I inevitably miss one for whatever reason. And I do mean for whatever reason. Be it the sudden loss of my Internet connection, the sudden loss of my only child or the sudden loss of a major internal organ, you know someone would find it in their heart to complain.

In closing, this update has been fairly serious so far, so I leave you with this final note:

WHAT THE HELL WAS A MENTALLY IMPAIRED 14 XP BOUNCER DOING WITH A SCROLL OF SUMMON EFREET ON HIS PERSON GRAAAAH

Now that we’ve got the key, the first thing we do (because if I leave it until later then I always forget) is release the two children from the cells adjacent to Hendak’s, adding to the ever-growing list of abused kids in this game that we’ve had to help.

Only once these two are freed do we open Pandora’s Box and set Hendak and the other gladiators free. Somehow all the spoiled nobles in the adjoining room immediately realise what has happened and flee the building, robbing us of the satisfaction of spilling the contents of their bloated guts. That’s a terrible shame, because I really want one of those hats.

It says a lot about the overall competence of the Copper Coronet guards that they can be taken down by an unarmed, downtrodden, weary and probably malnourished ex-slave. Not that we allow that to happen here, of course; we’re jumping in and killing them for the experience.

Yes, going to the trouble of killing the guards ourselves for the 14 experience points that they yield. I really am that petty.

One of them has a +1 halberd on him. Strange. I don’t remember ever seeing them drop one of those before. Of course, this is far preferable to a smattering of gold coins or a low-value gem, so I’m certainly not going to complain.

Eventually, the chaos settles and we are left with but two; Hendak and Lehtinan. Since we’re scraping up all the XP we can get our hands on here, we dive into the fray and attack Lehtinan ourselves…and Hendak turns hostile.

What the fzark.

Is that supposed to happen? It’s been a few years since I last tried it, but I’m fairly sure I’ve killed Lehtinan myself before and it didn’t cause any adverse effects. Perhaps Hendak was just miffed because he wanted to be the one to do it, which would be understandable, but he did say “Assist me if you vish” when we freed him, so screw it. That’s probably a bug. Reload.

Going through this AGAIN, (I saved just before opening the door, so we didn’t really lose any progress) we stand back and let Hendak do his own thing this time, the temperamental bitch. Everything goes as it should and Lehtinan falls.

Hendak then declares that, as payment for his long years of slavery, he intends to lay claim to the inn.

…OK, fair enough from a moral standpoint, but legally I’m not convinced that this would fly. What exactly are you going to say when the guards start making inquiries? “Oh, vell, uh, I vas beink kept as a slave here for a vhile so I thought it might be OK eef I take zee inn for zee payment. Ja.”

Mind you, if the guards in the city are anything like the ones that were in here, they’d probably just accept this as the truth without further question and leave it at that.

Imagine if you tried something like that today. Imagine if someone kidnapped you and, after you were rescued and the culprit arrested, you went over to their house, declared it yours and moved in. You wouldn’t even get past the front doorstep before you had a lawsuit shoved up your ass.



This is going to be my last update for tonight. Alas, I am but one man and I simply have not the endurance to keep this thing chugging along 24/7. Tune in next time, though, when we’ll be grabbing ourselves an annoying, talking sword and proving the ineptitude of the city watch by following an almost laughably incriminating trail of evidence to its painfully obvious conclusion and discovering just who’s been flaying hobos in the bridge district.

This is Lorph Halys, and you’ve been reading Baldur’s Gate: The Zero Reload Saga. Thank you, and goodnight.

The beast master battle is one of those fights where, provided you cast a few good buffing spells beforehand, you can just wade right in and be almost certain of a smooth victory.

Still, that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to shamelessly exploit every advantage we can get, so we once again use the trick of saying that we’ll leave quietly and then attacking while our “enemies” still haven’t gone hostile…which, once again, actually works, showing that someone really needs to give these people a few lessons in basic guarding routines.

Tip: If a group of people tells you that they will peacefully comply with your order to depart the premises but don’t actually leave, and instead start carefully positioning themselves around you in what appear to be ideal locations from which to commence an assault, it’s probably safe to assume that they were lying and that you should start cracking some heads.

I wonder if the beast master here is an actual Beastmaster, as in the Ranger kit. If so, I don’t think that keeping animals in cages and occasionally tossing them into a pit for them to tear apart innocent slaves could be considered morally sound behaviour, so it’s likely that he’d be a fallen Ranger. That would certainly explain why he puts up such a woefully inadequate fight.

Looting his body earns us the key we were looking for, as well as a Wolfskin Bag, which is the all-purpose container I referred to previously. We also get his snazzy +1 attack bow, not that anyone in the party can use it.

I’m barely even exaggerating there. EVERYONE in the party except Jan is either prohibited from using ranged weapons altogether or prohibited from using bows, because apparently Clerics are only allowed to inflict bludgeoning damage.

Oh yeah, I said I’d take a few jabs at that, didn’t I?

I honestly don’t know what this was about. I kind of understand what they were going for, since it just seems more fitting somehow that a holy man would wield a hammer or a mace rather than a gigantic sword, (although this is something that might have been perpetuated by the rule we're talking about, which means that I've just started thinking in circles) but in practice it just doesn’t work. I could almost understand it if they just weren’t allowed to be proficient with sharp weapons, but they can’t even hold the damn things in their hands. What’s the idea? Are we supposed to believe that EVERY GOD IN THE REALMS arbitrarily decided to forbid their worshippers the use of anything with an edge or a point, even though many of them are traditionally viewed as using a sword or a spear? Is it more spiritual somehow to bash someone's brains in instead of decapitating them? What do Clerics cut their food up with? How do they shave? Is it considered pushing one’s luck to use a flail or a morning star when they have spikes?

Ah well. I suppose they had to give people some reason not to just sell all those enchanted maces.

We’ve just about drunk dry the well of quests that we can finish without leaving the city or having to engage in any combat, so it’s time now for us to hesitantly poke our heads out of our cowardly hidey-holes and start doing the ones with minimal, easy combat.

Our major choices here would be the quest to free Hendak, or the quest to solve the skinner murders. We’re going to opt for the former, since it will also lead nicely into another easy quest; finding Lilarcor.

Let’s start a war.

START A NUCLEAR WAR.

AT THE SLAAAVE BAR

SLAAAVE BAR

SLAVE BAR

That was terrible. I’m sorry.

We’ve already convinced Lehtinan to give us access to the back rooms, so we don’t need to go through that rigmarole now. Instead, we just head straight down the corridor into an off-limits room that is not in any way marked as such and are immediately accosted by a guard, who demands that we take a hike.

We tell him that we’ll leave quietly, which he foolishly seems to take our word for, then leap upon him and rip him apart in frenzied bloodlust while his guard is down.

Of course, such “subterfuge” was hardly necessary since he’s pitifully weak (14 experience points? Whatever animal we killed for dinner last night would have been worth more than that) and the mages in here don’t quite seem to understand what their role within a combat situation is, and therefore spend the entire time casting minor buffs on themselves and trying to dispel magical effects on the party when there aren’t any to dispel.

Also, Korgan appears to be hearing voices, because immediately after the battle ended, he started conversing with some invisible gnome, telling him that his tale was excellent and then insulting him for having an oversized nose.

I suppose he might have been talking to Jan, but Jan didn’t actually say anything, so what was the “tale” that Korgan referred to? Maybe Jan is secretly a telepath. Or maybe we really do have invisible gnomes following us that only Korgan can hear.

In any event, Hendak somehow sees us through his door of solid wood and starts asking us to free him. We agree to do so, of course, since that’s what we came here for…although I suppose we could have told him we weren’t going to and then done it anyway just to confuse him, but we’re not doppelgangers here.

We have two choices here. We can either go back and tell Lehtinan that Hendak is planning an escape and, apparently without regard to the fact that the only way you’d know this is by breaking into the slave chambers and killing his guards, he gives you the key to the cell and requests that you punish Hendak for his insolence.

The other option involves the screaming berserker route of killing the beast master and all his pets, then rummaging through the bloody remains to find the key.

I have to say, from a general, or, dare I say it, “role-playing” standpoint, I much prefer the former option. It’s so much simpler, cleverer and more elegant, and therefore much more befitting of my protagonists who tend to be of the smart persuasion. The problem is that if you do it this way, the beast master abruptly vanishes, robbing you of both the experience you’d get for killing him and his loot, which includes an all-purpose, bag-of-holding-style container that we WANT, because as I have mentioned before, I am an obsessive packrat.

Sadly, therefore, mindless violence wins the day. Let’s go kick some dumb animals’ heads in.

(Yes, I know there aren't any paladins in the party. Shut up.)

As expected, up pops a genie with a wish to offer us.

Just one wish? Yep. Apparently Kalah’s already used the other two wishes. One of them was for the power to influence people, in response to which the genie gave him the Ring of Human influence (a-ha). However, despite being able to boost his Charisma to 18 whenever he wanted, he still somehow managed to make a colossal mess of any and all social interaction and get ridiculed by everyone he came across, so he then made his second wish for the magical power of an ogre mage.

Yeah. Out of everything he could have picked, he opted for an ogre mage. Suddenly “misguided fool” is no longer sufficient; he has now transcended into the realms of “botched lobotomy victim”.

Still, we’ve got ourselves one wish, and that’s better than nothing.

Here’s how this works. You are offered a variety of wishes that are specific to this quest, (some of which are just there to tease you; you can try wishing for Imoen to be returned to you or for Irenicus to die, but it doesn’t work) or, if you don’t want any of those, you can decide to “choose a wish for yourself”, after which it functions exactly as if you had cast Limited Wish.

While taking the Limited Wish route would probably be more profitable overall, we do want to get some closure on the quest and we'll eventually be able to cast that anyway, so let’s take a look at our options.

As I mentioned, the wishes for Imoen’s return and Irenicus’ death don’t work, so those are out of the question. You can also wish to make yourself the new owner of the lamp and get as many wishes as you want; essentially “wishing for more wishes”, as the genie puts it. However, according to some arbitrary genie rule, you’re not allowed to do this. Damn it.

You can also wish to resurrect Kalah, wish to set the genie free, wish to imprison Kalah’s soul or wish for Jafir to die painfully. All of these ones actually work. However, the latter two would be stooping to Jafir’s level and being an arsehead just for the sake of it.

More importantly, we don’t get any reward for either of them.

Therefore, it seems that the only worthwhile choices consist of giving Kalah a second chance or releasing this genie from its endless wish-granting monotony. Both options give you a reputation boost and a small amount of experience, so it largely comes down to personal preference.

Hmm. Let’s see now. Who was it that tried to kill me and pissed me off by conjuring up a horde of fake werewolves that I had to pointedly ignore?

Yeah. Enjoy your freedom, genie.

We were able to get through the fight with Jafir largely unscathed. He would normally be quite a challenging opponent as far as solo, unprotected mages go, because he can take a lot of hits and it doesn’t seem to be possible to interrupt his spells no matter how furiously you whack him.

For some reason, however, he didn’t seem to want to cast anything. Instead, he just went straight for Vespero and started attacking him physically.

Odd.

In light of this, the battle basically became a matter of “Who’s going to run out of hit points first?” Since Vespero got all of his from levels in Fighter and a constitution of 19, and since he had five party members backing him up by wildly swinging their enchanted weaponry, you can probably hazard a guess as to whom it turned out to be.

Sadly you can’t actually kill Jafir, as he teleports away once his hit points get too low. Luckily, however, he does surrender the command word to you before leaving. God only knows why, though; if he was able to escape so easily then he could have just done so without telling you anything and left you gnashing your teeth in frustration, which appears to be exactly the sort of thing that Rakshasa have to do in order to GET AN ERECTION.

With the command word planted firmly in our heads, we are now advised that we can use the lamp via a quick slot. I think you know what’s next.

And now, the answer to the question that I’m sure has been plaguing your mind for days; what the hell are we doing here?

Well, we’re certainly not here to fight the lich, as you might have expected. At this early stage and with our woeful shortage of magical power, he’d turn us inside-out, wring us like wet flannels and hang us from the walls to spruce up his otherwise drab crypt before we could say “Inappropriately high encounter level.”

(Note: A few minutes after I wrote the paragraph above, the little corner of my brain allocated to “nagging doubts” started insisting that something very similar to it had been done before by Order of the Stick, which incidentally is an excellent D&D based web comic that you should check out. But hell, I’m using it anyway. It felt like I came up with it at the time, and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then subconscious imitation is unabashed metaphorical fellatio.)

So what’s the story? Well, I’m going to need to take a step back in time here, as there is an important detail that I forgot to note earlier on.

When we’d killed Kalah and left the circus tent, we were approached by a little girl named Myara who, surprisingly, had not been abused or abandoned or murdered or subjected to any form of mistreatment whatsoever. Vespero, reeling from the shock of this, temporarily forgot his curmudgeonly hatred of children and politely asked what she wanted.

She told us that shortly prior to his becoming a delusional megalomaniac, Kalah had purchased a magical lamp from an extremely shifty merchant by the name of Jafir. Owing to the fact that we are not braindead, we were inclined to suspect that the two events were somehow linked, and since kids have no eye for value, we were easily able to persuade her to hand over the priceless magical item.

However, because things are never simple, merely rubbing the lamp did nothing aside from making it slightly shinier, (it's interesting to note that we were never actually instructed to try rubbing the lamp; seems that this is a cliché even in Faerun) so obviously the kid stiffed us and we were morally obligated wreak bloody vengeance upon her. Unfortunately, she was one of those NPCs that simply disappears forever once their usefulness has been expended, so we were left unfulfilled.

In any event, she told us that Jafir is in the habit of staying in the Crooked Crane inn. Sure enough, here we are now on the first floor of that very building, and here he is before us.

As it turns out, he was indeed behind Kalah’s descent into madness (if this surprises you then I question how you have the mental faculties to read this) and, furthermore, he immediately senses that we have the lamp on our person.

At this point he throws subtlety to the wind and reveals his true identity to us; Jafir is a Rakshasa, a race of mysterious, sinister, shapeshifting beings that seem to take pleasure only in being as much of a malignant arsehead to other people as possible.

In other words, they’re doppelgangers with fur. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually are doppelgangers that are just playing up the whole Rakshasa thing for shits and giggles.

He explains to us his motivations for weaving the web that would lead to Kalah’s downfall, (being an arsehead) and he also explains why the lamp won’t work. Apparently we need to speak a command word, which he is offering to tell us for the bargain price of 500 gold pieces. He has no need for the money, he boasts, but it will please him to know what an arsehead he’s been in making us part with it.

To hell with that. Let’s kick his ass.

In spite of setbacks upon setbacks, we finally manage to make it to the city gates and the Crooked Crane inn, as intended.

As soon as we set foot inside, some berk starts yelling about a couple of kids breaking up. We’re not given the option to ignore him, so we ask him about the two people he’s referring to. However, unlike most NPCs, who will happily spill their full wealth of knowledge, their life stories and their darkest, innermost secrets provided they are talking to a protagonist, (AS IT SHOULD BE) this one’s decided to go against the grain and stubbornly refuses to cough up the meat no matter how enthusiastically you Heimlich him.

Oh sure, he’ll drop hints and talk about the topic as vaguely as possible if you press him, just to be obnoxious, but it’s nowhere near enough to piece the whole story together, so we aren‘t going to stand for that kind of crap. We tell him we don’t care and he leaves the inn in a huff. Good riddance, you cagey bastard.

You may be aware that this prevents me from going through the Aulava and Tiiro dialogue upstairs, and if you were to assume that I had chosen this set of dialogue options deliberately in order to avoid the encounter, you’d be right.

Why would I want to do that? It’s to do with one of the mods I installed, which restores a small amount of content that was missing from the Crooked Crane. When I played through with this mod installed the first time, I naturally assumed that it provided some closure on the aforementioned encounter, and I was right. Unfortunately, it was closure I could have done without.

You see, as it turned out, Aulava (that sounds like a Pokemon) and Tiiro are a tremendously bad influence on each other, and when they spend time together they invariably seem to find themselves running around town starting fires and mugging people and generally acting like a pair of bellicose twatbaskets. Therefore, in contrast to a certain famous Shakespearian play, their parents are actually right to forbid them to see each other. Unfortunately, my character was left oblivious to this fact thanks to the obstinate tight-lippedness of the man downstairs, and foolishly convinced them to damn the folks and stay together regardless, being the well-meaning Chaotic Good individual that he was.

A few days later, when I next returned to the Crooked Crane to kill the lich lurking within, the same man (Rilmi) was back to give me a thorough tongue-lashing for my actions, telling me that now the two of them had completely lost themselves in a life of reckless, unadulterated criminal madness that would put a GTA protagonist to shame. I was then hit with a reputation drop, of all things.

Well how in the name of Bhaal’s testes was I supposed to know that was going to happen? What kind of side-quest goes and kicks you in the crotch for doing what looks like the right thing and the only way to get a resolution to the story? I was so infuriated by this that I killed everyone in the bar before reloading.

Long story short, I don’t want to get smacked in the face with a needless and cruel reputation drop as a result of this “quest” a second time, so I’m just going to avoid it altogether.

We appear to be back in business. I'm not sure what made the difference, but reloading from a slightly earlier save seemed to do the trick, and the dream sequence is now playing as it should.

My theory is that I've been making fun of the game too much and this was its way of getting back at me for the relentless mockery. I suppose I'll just have to exit the game completely before writing any updates from now on, rather than just switching windows.

That way it won't see them.

Speaking of updates, we're all set for another batch, so watch this space.

Let's cut a long story short here. After I went to the Copper Coronet to do what I had intended to do, I found it necessary for me to rest. I do so, up comes the first dream sequence, no problem.

And then, halfway through the sequence, everything stops. Imoen and I are supposed to walk off and cause the scene to advance, but nothing happens and we just stand there staring slackjawed at each other. Obviously, I can't progress past this point since there's no way to skip the sequence, and no matter how long I wait, Imoen and Vespero refuse to budge or say anything; the only way I can even exit the game is by Alt+F4-ing it.

As you can imagine, this is a bit of a showstopper. There's no way in hell I'm going to be able to get through the game without ever resting, let alone without resting or reloading. (There's one for all you hardcore players out there to try.) Furthermore, if this has happened here, there's a distinct possibility that other such game-breaking bugs will rear their ugly heads in the future even if I do manage to find a way around this one.

I can only assume that this was caused by an obscure mod incompatibility or some form of minor slip-up I made when installing everything. Perhaps I didn't properly restore my clean install. I don't know.

As for the blog, I'll probably just try to retrace my steps as closely as possible and work my way back to where I was from a new game. This is going to take a while, though, not least because I don't think I can handle going through Irenicus' dungeon again so soon after the last time, but also because I'll have to track down which mods (if any) caused the problem in the first place and make sure it won't happen a second time.

Sorry about this, folks. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

One of the thugs we just killed had a scroll of Haste on him. Hot diggity.

After scribing this (successfully this time) and a few other scrolls, Jan levels up in Illusionist, earning himself 1 extra level 1-2 spell and two extra level 3-4 spells. Nice. That gives us room for one Greater Malison and one Improved Invisibility, on top of Stoneskin.

When we're done fiddling with our spellbooks, we head on down and hand this guy (who, incidentally, only weighs 50 pounds; that must be one hell of a poison) to the man standing in front of the orange building, as instructed.

But here's where he screwed up. There are two orange buildings in the Docks district. One of them is the Harper compound, or "Galvarey's Estate", which is the one he wanted to be taken to.

The other is the Shadow Thief guildhall.

Now, Mr. Renfeld, let's assume that we're "in-character" here and we don't have the ability to psychically determine everyone's name by letting our finger hover over them for a few seconds. What if we'd chosen the wrong building? Here's how it would have happened:

"Excuse me, I'm looking for someone. This guy's been poisoned and he asked me to take him to an orange building in the Docks district. Are you Rylock?"

"Why yes. Yes I am. Thank you for bringing him here. I'll take good care of him."

And then you would have been taken inside, stripped of all your possessions, trussed up in a sack and dumped into the ocean to die.

So, would it have killed you to be a little more specific? No. I think you'll find that the exact opposite is true.

We were one step away from this actually happening the first time I played the game, too, because I did choose the wrong building, and then I ended up wandering all over the guildhall looking for this "Rylock" person like an idiot, before I realised that there was another orange building that I could go to. You're lucky that none of the Shadow Thieves' dialogue takes you into account, you son of a bitch.

Anyway, with that out of the way, Xzar appears from out of nowhere, hence the title of this post.

The reason "Friend" is in quotes is that I didn't actually play through the first game as Vespero, so I can't actually say if he ever travelled with Xzar or not. He probably didn't, though. Xzar is OK, but he's part of a package deal with Montaron, who isn't OK. If you're playing a power game then you can maybe get away with having one average/mediocre NPC, but not two.

Plus I don't like either of them.

Incidentally, I also don't remember Xzar being as crotchety and condescending as he is here. In the first game he was a complete lunatic and barely coherent at the best of times, but in a strange kind of way, he was also fairly mellow. In this game he's basically just a watered-down version of Edwin. What happened?

In any event, it turns out that Montaron has been taken captive by the Harpers we just spoke to, and Xzar wants us to go and get him back. Never mind how he knows they're Harpers or how he knows we were talking to them. He's a non-party NPC, which means he gets to "just know" whatever he damn well pleases.

We agree to find him, which, for some reason, Jaheira doesn't seem to mind. And she really should.

More D&D history: The Zhentarim are a criminal organization that are involved in all kinds of eeeeevil doings. This puts them at serious odds with the Harpers, who, despite their sometimes questionable methods, are basically concerned with doing the right thing and acting as a force of good in the world.

Xzar is with the Zhentarim. Jaheira is with the Harpers. You are being asked to perform a task that will aid the Zhentarim and hinder the Harpers. All she has to say about this is "Be careful", and then she happily aids you in committing an act that will compromise the security of her allies.

Loyalty is a fine thing.

It's getting late and I'm getting tired, so that's going to be all for tonight. Tomorrow we finish what we attempted to start, and the mystery of why I intend to go to the Crooked Crane will finally be solved.

This is Lorph Halys, and you've been reading Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga. Thank you, and goodnight.

That explanation I offered is going to have to wait, because we got ambushed again on our way to the city gates.

Well, I say “ambushed”. In truth we stumbled across a group of thugs standing around a man lying on the ground, and they shouted “THERE MUST BE NO WITNESSES KILL THEM ALL BLAAAAGH” and attacked.

This was a mistake for two reasons.

Firstly, even if you absolutely had to permanently silence anyone who happened to spot you here, rather than just playing it cool and making it look like you weren’t doing anything suspicious, would you really go bellowing something like “Kill them all for we must leave no witnesses!” Don’t you think that’s a bit likely to draw more attention from other people that you will also have to kill now? Why not just go out and slaughter the whole city?

I suppose it's possible that they panicked, but that excuse only carries you so far. I mean, if someone's seriously acting like they're on to you then fine, but we're just a bunch of people minding our own business, on our way to an inn. You aren't going to blurt out "I AM PREGNANT AND A HEROIN ADDICT AND I HAVE SYPHILLIS AND NOW I MUST KILL YOU BECAUSE NOBODY CAN EVER KNOW" just because your mother calls and asks how you're doing.

Man, that was a rough period of my life.

Secondly, they’re utter, utter wimps that don’t even carry any weapons. They’re so easy to kill it’s pathetic. I mean, I can literally just set everyone’s script to “Standard Attack” and turn Party AI on and go to the kitchen for a sandwich, then come back and find that they’re all dead and not a single one of my party members has been hit.

With that joke of a battle over and done with, the man lying on the ground addresses me, telling me that he’s been poisoned and needs me to take him to his friends…because in D&D, any poisoning that happens as part of a quest rather than in battle is almost invariably incurable by conventional means.

Now, think about this situation for a second. The man has been poisoned. It’s fairly safe to assume that the thugs we just killed were responsible for this. It’s also a lethal poison, so they obviously had murder on their minds.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

If you want someone dead and you’re in a position to pour poison down their throat or stab them with a poisoned dagger or however they planned to accomplish this, why the HELL would you bother with poison in the first place instead of just killing them then and there? He’s lying there, on the ground, in front of you, unable to fight back, and you want him dead. This is not rocket science, people. Stab him.

Oh wait, you can’t do that because you didn’t bring any weapons, can you? Well, that explains it. You aren’t succumbing to the evil mastermind’s weakness of dispatching one’s foes in needlessly elaborate ways; you’re just the most incompetent murderers ever.

I can just about see how this all went down.

“OK Jimmy, I got him! I got him! Quick, cut his throat!”
“OK, uh…who was supposed to bring the swords?”
“What’re you looking at me for? It was Carl’s turn this week.”
“The hell it was!”
“Crap. OK, I gotta run to the store and get some poison. Don’t let him go anywhere.”
"Hold on, hold on. If you're going to the store, get me some chips."
"OK, well..."
"Me too! I want some chips."
"Alright, I'll just get us one of the big bags and we can..."
"No, I want the hot and spicy flavour. You guys always get the cheesy ones."
"Screw you, Carl."
"Uh, do you guys want me to get dip, or...oh shit, someone's coming! KILL THEM ALL FOR YOU KNOW WE MUST LEAVE NO WITNESSES!"

Bottom line: Because of these people’s stupidity, we’ve now got to haul someone’s sorry carcass over to a building in the Docks. I assume that he dies if you take too long about this, (I’ve never actually tried it, but I’m not taking the chance now) so it’s time for a quick detour.

With the zombie gone, we now take the opportunity to loot the sarcophagus in here, which earns us a nice little item; the Staff of Curing. As you might expect, this offers a healing functionality, restoring 6-21 hit points a shot and also wiping away disease and poison. Unfortunately this isn't an "X times a day" deal; using the healing costs a charge, so we're going to have to use this sparingly.

In addition to that, it's also a pretty good weapon at this early stage. It's got a +2 enchantment and it also confers a bonus of 2 to AC while it's equipped. Unfortunately it can only be used by divine spellcasters, so we can't give it to Vespero; instead it's going to Jaheira for now.

With these quests out of the way, it's high time we got some rest. Korgan's still hurting and Viconia hasn't had the chance to memorise any spells yet, so 8 hours of shut-eye will be just what the doctor ordered.

But what's this? As soon as we set foot in the promenade, we come across some Shadow Thieves getting their asses kicked by a vampire.

As much as I'd like to jump in and kill the vampire, we literally only have one weapon that can harm it right now, and that's Arbane's Sword, which nobody can use properly except Jan. (The Staff of Curing is only +1, not +2 as I said in my earlier post.) Also, the Cowled Wizards will skin us alive if we cast any spells out here and Viconia's Turn Undead isn't going to do jack, so we just have to stand back and watch.

It's just a good thing we hadn't already amassed the 15000 gold and sided with the Shadow Thieves, because otherwise the vampire would have attacked us here and then we'd have been in real trouble.

It's not all bad, though. She hasn't grasped the concept of looting your dead enemies' bodies yet, so that means we get to take all the cool stuff they dropped; an assortment of fairly valuable gems and a scroll of Contingency; once again, magical scrolls being carried around by people that have no business owning them.

Speaking of scrolls, we had Vespero scribe a few more before we bedded down for the night, and he just barely scraped a level-up by a mere 17 experience points. Only three more to go before his amnesia vanishes, he remembers how to use a sword and becomes a useful party member again!

Stupid dual-class memory loss.

Anyway, with our party fully healed and a new day upon us, where shall we go to next?

Answer: To the city gates, and the Crooked Crane inn. Why? I'll explain when we get there.

"Mama?" asks the little halfling ghost as we approach. "Mama, is that you?"

I can only assume that his eyesight isn't that great.












Either that or he was going to grow up a very, very confused boy.

In any event, we return his bear to him and he WETURNS TO HIS GWAVE. In return, we receive a small amount of XP. Some other people may also get a warm, fuzzy feeling from this, but neither I nor Vespero are the type for such things.

Plus I've done this quest about a hundred time before. Any warm fuzziness it may have had to give has since been sucked dry.

And on the topic of an entirely different variety of warm fuzziness, we now return to the mouldy zombie's crypt to bear witness to the most laughably stomach-churning moment we're going to experience in this play-through. Yep, after a brief conversation, Baisera happily obliges and plants a big old wet one right on his decayed lips and he passes on, collapsing to the ground with a loud, protracted groan.

Must have been a good one.

Anyway, after this, Baisera talks to us again. We're given a number of dialogue options here and all of them effectively work as a "Yeah, OK, we're done here, goodbye, and just as a sidenote that was pretty goddamned gross" response...except one. We have the choice of giving her 500 gold pieces to help her get back on her feet, since apparently she sold her house and quit her job and blew all her cash on hookers and hallucinogens.

But here’s the thing. This does nothing. No matter what we say here, even if we call her an idiot and tell her she deserved it, we get a reputation boost and 10000 experience, so all this option does is deprive us of 500 gold. So, you know, no.

What exactly was the point of including it, then? Usually whenever you do something like this you get a little extra experience or a slightly better reward, which is fair enough; you're basically exchanging the money for something useful. But here, what? We're paying imaginary money for more warm fuzzies? No thanks. I'll just keep my imaginary money and use it to buy imaginary items, if it's all the same to you.

With the thief brought to harsh justice, it’s time for mission 2. Heading through the first secret door located in the downstairs corridor, we come to a carpeted room filled with brightly coloured pillows of all shapes and sizes. Its occupants include a man sitting slouched in a chair with his legs parted wide, and an exhausted dwarf lying flat on his back.

I don’t know what’s been going on in here and I don’t care to.

More importantly, this room contains the woman we’re looking for: Baisera. Before talking to her I once again have to take my headphones off because of awful voice acting.

I don’t quite know how to describe this one. Her first line is “Go away…leave me alone, I beg you,” and presumably she’s supposed to sound pained and depressed. However, the actor isn’t remotely convincing, so what you end up hearing is someone who’s trying to feign a pained and depressed voice and failing miserably.

Still, perhaps I’m making an assumption I should not be making here. Perhaps she was supposed to sound like she was trying to fake it. After all, she obviously wasn’t particularly upset about her husband’s death if she immediately took the opportunity to go and sample a high life of sex, slaves and drugs, so perhaps she’s trying to convince us otherwise so that we don’t judge her.

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention the drugs, did I? Apparently she’s become a black lotus junkie. For those who don’t know, black lotus is occasionally referred to and hinted at being a potent and highly illegal drug in this game…although interestingly, in later editions, its extract was made into a lethal poison. That would certainly explain the killer headache she seems to be having.

We have the opportunity to taunt her by rubbing the fact that her husband is now an accursed zombie in her face at this point, but as tempting as that is, she refuses to talk to you from that point on and you can’t finish the quest, so we won’t do that. Instead we tell her about his fate and agree to meet her at the graveyard, because lord knows I certainly wouldn’t want to go smooching a zombie without a shifty and mentally unstable stranger with me as a chaperone.

Before she goes, Vespero says “You’ll thank me for this later, you know.” Yes. Quite. I’m sure she’ll be just overflowing with gratitude after she contracts whatever variety of illnesses you can catch from French-kissing rotting meat.

As a parting note, she tells us not to take too long, since she isn’t going to wait around in the graveyard all day…which is fair enough, since we’re going straight there, but I’m pretty sure this is a lie and she is more than happy to wait there all day, all week, or even all month, because just like all NPCs she lacks any sort of initiative and requires the presence of a protagonist to accomplish anything. Know your place, woman.

We still doing this? We still doing this.

When we last left our at least marginally intrepid heroes, they were in the Coronet, and had just convinced Lehtinan to allow them to partake of the exclusive entertainments offered by his seedy tavern.

The bouncer, when we approach, tells us to “Be no trouble and I won’t have to break yer head.” Little does he know. We assure him that we are absolutely certain that he will not be breaking our heads in any way and move on, leaving him to mull over the double entendre.

One thing I always make a point of doing when I first gain access to the back rooms of the CC is to go and watch the pit fight that takes place. As far as I know, doing this doesn’t have any effect on the game, but I always go nevertheless. Why? Because in spite of my better judgement and all my past experience, I sitll hold out the hope that one day, through a sheer, one-in-a-billion stroke of luck, the dwarven gladiator will actually manage to beat the troll.

Alas, not this time. Once again I must go unfulfilled until my next play-through.

We’re going to get the bear first, so we go upstairs and start barging into other people’s rooms at random until we come across the one containing the gentleman we are looking for. Of course he has nothing to say about this apparently unwarranted intrusion until we actually choose to speak to him, which gives us plenty of time to hide Jan (after a couple of failed attempts) and position him behind the thief.

Jan, with his strength of 9 and relatively low thief level isn’t much of a backstabber, of course, but this guy really isn’t a problem to kill anyway, so I’m mostly just doing it for the fun.

As it turned out, though, once we’d told him we were here to avenge the murdered child (a blatant lie: we just wanted the bear back, but since we’re here we might as well kill him and take his stuff too) and the fight started, Jan actually ended up doing most of the damage. After the backstab, he hit several more times and scored a critical, with Jaheira only landing a single, glancing blow and Korgan doing little but demolishing the door frame with throwing axes.

We killed him for the experience and because I said I’d kill everything I could, of course, but also because he has an emerald in his desk, as well as a couple of scrolls.

And hey, as long as we’re stealing stuff, we might as well go and filch the Gloves of Pickpocketing (how very apt) from the room adjacent to this one. Once again, the room’s occupant doesn’t really seem to give a damn.

We won’t have occasion to use these gloves since Jan has a pair that do exactly the same thing and more, but we can make a bit of gold off selling them.

After spending some time poking at this, I decided to just leave well alone. My attempts to fix things only seemed to worsen the matter, so I'm not going to keep pulling at the thread until the whole shirt falls apart, so to speak.

All the posts are still there. There are a couple of instances of transposition, but I'm sure everyone's smart enough to know what order they're supposed to be read in. (HINT: CHRONOLOGICAL.) I'll just start adding titles from this point onwards.

Unfortunately I've gone and squandered the time I was supposed to spend playing the game on trying to iron out this annoying little oddity, so there aren't going to be any further updates today.

Tune in tomorrow, however, when we will be committing wanton acts of violence, performing an exorcism and subtly pushing broken, tormented maidens towards necrophilia. You cannot afford to miss it!

Literally. You can't afford it. I have your bank account details and I intend to dock you into overdraft if I don't see your IP address tomorrow.

This is Lorph Halys, and you've been reading Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga. Thank you, and goodnight.

This post has nothing to do with the game. I just want to inform everyone that the blog is behaving a bit strangely at the moment.

As you may have noticed, I've gone back and started adding titles to the entries I've made in addition to the timestamp from the game. However, when I did this, weird stuff started happening. Sometimes a post would duplicate itself. Other times it would end up getting thrown out of order, one place above the post that was supposed to come after it.

I have no idea what's causing this. Luckily, I do have all my posts backed up, so if any of them disappear or something, putting them back shouldn't be too much trouble. Just letting you know that if you're going through the archives and you see the same post twice, or a "Day 1, Hour 6" post coming after a "Day 1, Hour 2" post or something, I'm aware of the problem and am currently trying to fix it.

We’re here for a bear and a woman, in no particular order. In order to get either of these, we’re going to have to speak to Lehtinan and convince him to let us into the back rooms.

As far as I know, this is one of the few instances in the game where charisma actually affects how a conversation progresses. If your charisma is too low when you speak to Lehtinan, he refuses to let you past the bouncers, but if it’s high enough then he tells you that you look like someone who might appreciate prostitution and pit fights, and so he gives you permission to enter.

Does this seem a little backwards to anyone? If you’re speaking to someone who oozes charm, personal magnetism and raw sex appeal, (which is exactly why Charisma is a dump stat for many D&D players; they cannot successfully pull off any of the aforementioned factors) why would you assume that they’re the sort of person that would be interested in paying money for sex? People like that don’t need prostitutes. Ugly people do.

Of course, we’ve got both our bases covered in any event. If we need to become a D&D player we just take the Ring of Human Influence off. We don’t, though, and luckily we made a point of picking it up as soon as we got the chance, so we have no trouble persuading Lehtinan.

Ahh, Lehtinan. Was there any doubt in anyone’s mind, even for the people that had never played or heard anything about the game before, that Lehtinan was evil? His voice alone is such a ridiculously over the top sinister growl that it gives him away. Most adventurers would just kill this guy as soon as they heard him speak the first time, knowing full well that it’d save them having to come back and do it later.

You actually can do this, as it happens. Seriously. You can just walk into the bar, stride up to him as bold as you like and hack him to death where he stands, and not a single person in the whole tavern so much as raises an eyebrow. Obviously they too could tell from his voice that he was doing something that meant he deserved to die, even if they didn’t necessarily know what it was. Still, we’ll save ourselves a little trouble by leaving him alive for the time being.

I promised myself soon after I started the play-through that I wasn’t going to use the phrase “hive of scum and villainy” to describe this place, so I will not. We are not now going to enter into a hive of scum and villainy. We’re going past the bouncer and into the back rooms. That’s it. There are no hives involved here. None at all.

There are two things of note about the fight we just engaged in.

Number one is that there was a scroll of Protection from Energy on the corpse of the standoffish one.

Protection from Energy. That’s a level eight spell. Level EIGHT. What in god’s name was he doing with this? Had he discovered the “anyone can use scrolls” exploit or something? Well, he didn’t have any potions on him, so tough luck on that one. Not that it would have helped much anyway since he got beaten to death, and “kinetic” isn’t considered a type of energy in this game. This explains why Baldur’s Gate II is not especially popular with physicists.

Secondly, before the fight actually starts, the not-standoffish one makes a mysterious reference to a man named “Mr. F.”

As far as I know, this is one of the game’s unsolved mysteries. We never find out who “Mr. F” is. In fact, the only important character whose name begins with “F” that I can come up with off the top of my head is Firkragg, and it doesn’t seem to me like these morons would have had much business with a dragon. When you’re an ancient, tremendously powerful lizard masquerading as a high-standing member of the local nobility, you could probably do a lot better than those two.

Mind you, it would explain where they got that scroll from. Hmm.

Well, anyway. They’re dead now, so we won’t get our underwear a-tangled over it, although once again, Korgan ended up taking more damage than I would have liked him to. He really hasn’t been having much luck so far. We’re all out of healing spells too, so he’ll have to wait until we’ve returned a certain stuffed animal to a certain spectre.

Speaking of which, into the tavern once more.

There are two thugs outside the Copper Coronet that pick a fight with you if you get too close. We avoided them back when our party consisted of Jaheira and a wussified Vespero, but now that we’ve got Jaheira, a wussified Vespero and three other people, it’s probably quite safe to invite these fools to sup on a nice, warm goblet of “die horribly“.

The reason I dislike these two, (or rather, one of these two) so much is that they start fighting with you because you’re “in their way”.
















Yeah. I’m totally stopping them from walking into that wall.

Seriously, they just stand there waiting for you to come along, and then as soon as you get too close, no matter where you happen to be standing, this prick starts yelling at you to get out of his way on a broad street that nobody else is using.

There’s no way out of it either. Even if you tell him that you’ll move, he still insists on trying to kill you. Yes, that’s right. You accidentally move into the path along which he apparently intended to travel, and his way of dealing with this situation is murder in broad daylight.

Of course, in this particular instance it happens to be night time, but he does the same thing even if it isn’t.

It’s just sheer, bloody-minded belligerence of the sort that should be possessed only by hormone-poisoned teenagers and adventuring parties such as ourselves, and as such he deserves everything he’s going to get as a result of this encounter; to wit, death by dwarven berserker.

Alright, we’re looking for an orange pavilion, orange…oh yeah, that thing!














I have to say, I’m glad that the mod actually put this part of the map to some use. It always seemed odd to me that there’d be such a (relatively) big, prominent structure here with an isolated NPC placed right in the centre of it…who doesn’t really serve any purpose. I mean, those are generally good indications of someone important that you should talk to, but she’s normally just a standard, dime-a-dozen merchant selling the same mundane crap that you can find being stocked by any of the other morbidly obese people in this city.

Why are almost all of the merchants in this game fat? I suppose all that aimless wandering that the commoners do must keep them in shape or something. The merchants never move at all. From dawn till dusk and back again, they just stand perfectly still in their designated spot. Waiting.

Interminably waiting.

Ooh, but she has large shields. Ribald doesn’t have any of those. I’ll take two.

Anyway, like I said earlier, we’re here to talk to this woman because she might know the whereabouts of this zombie’s wife; apparently she employed her for a while. As it turned out, since her husband’s died she’s been spending an awful lot of time in the Coppor Coronet’s “back rooms”, if you catch my drift.

So…her husband was murdered, and her reaction to this is to head straight for an extremely shady den of prostitution. Lovely. Obviously someone took “Till death do us part” a little too seriously. Either that or she’s been taking lessons from Jaheira.

Still, a quest is a quest, and we do not judge. Let’s go drag this woman’s sorry ass back to the graveyard and make her smush her lips on a decaying corpse. All in a day’s work for Vespero.

For people that were so easily killed, this group has some damn fine loot on them, the most notable of which is Arbane’s Sword. Chances are we’ll be keeping this around for the rest of the game. The only one proficient with it is Jan, of course, but we’re more interested in its added effect: Free Action. This will be a tremendous help in dealing with those pesky Hold Person spells.

Hold Person, of course, is just one of many spells that always seems to decimate your party when it gets cast on them, but never, ever works when you use it on anything except, say goblins. You know. Creatures that there is no point in wasting spells of any kind on.

From their names, we can deduce that the people who attacked us were slavers. I can only assume that this was their first day on the job, because otherwise they’d probably be much more savvy in their choice of targets. Oh yes, there are harmless commoners and unguarded merchants everywhere you look in this city, but no, let’s attack this armed, armoured and generally well-equipped party of adventurers that maintains a cohesive formation at all times, one of whom is walking around covered in a layer of stone and is therefore quite obviously a wizard of some kind. Hurrrrr.

It’s not like you get taken captive if they beat you, either. You die. They kill your whole party without hesitation. Generally speaking, guys, I don’t know if you realised this, but the kinds of slaves that tend to be most in demand are living ones.

Hell, I don’t know. Maybe they were just trying to expand their target market group out to the necrophile population of Athkatla.

Anyway, aside from the sword, we also get a bunch of +1 arrows that nobody can use, a Mace +1 (just the ticket, given that I forgot to pick up a melee weapon for Vic) and enchanted plate mail. We give this to Jaheira, who surrenders the Mail of the Dead to Viconia. There’s also a stack of scrolls on the mage, although none of them really have any spells I would have liked; say, for example, STONESKIN or HASTE.

Since there isn’t anything there that I couldn’t stand to lose, I just go ahead and scribe them all right away. All we end up losing is Shocking Grasp. Woe.

We’re done here, so we’ll patch Korgan up (again) and resume our trip to the promenade.

And we’re back.

The transition from forum to blog went about as smoothly as I could have hoped, though I suspect there are still a few references to “the thread” and other such inconsistencies that I might have failed to spot when I was reviewing my posts. I am sure, however, that you are very clever and won’t let such little errors confuse you.

Quick Recap: A zombie wants to get his mack on with his wife one last time, so we’re off to try and find her like the charitable XP hunters we are. Our next stop is Waukeen’s Promenade.

On our way there, though, we encounter some trouble. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen; Vespero has just had his very first ambush. Aren’t you proud of him?

The problem with these battles is that you never have any opportunity to prepare. The enemies generally aren’t that tough, but they always seem to end up positioned dangerously close to your squishiest party members when the battle starts.

Because of this, the fighters will almost invariably go for your vulnerable mages and thieves. No matter how furiously you click, of course, they’ll never bother to pay any attention to, say, a screaming, axe-wielding dwarf that is actually scoring hits on them repeatedly, so you’re basically forced to pause every second to run your fragile NPCs in circles, so that they stay out of reach of their assailants.

We take a bit of a chance here and have Vespero start casting Summon Monster I right away. The fruits of his efforts turn out to be two Kobold Commandos and a Worg, which is actually a lot more than I was hoping for; all I really wanted was something to take the focus off the party members for a while so that we could dispatch the spellcasters without impediment. But hey, if my conjured monsters can actually put up a decent fight, so much the better.















With Korgan tying up the melee fighter, the kobolds plunking away at the mage and the worg and Jaheira going toe-to-toe with the archers, this battle went down with only one hitch; we weren’t able to finish off the mage before she Lightning Bolted Korgan. Thankfully, though, a quick Magic Missile from Vespero ensured that she didn’t cause any further trouble.

By the time the cleric had finished buffing himself, everyone else was dead. We congratulated him heartily on his performance at fulfilling the “support” role, and rewarded him with his giblety demise.

And guess what? The Cowled Wizards don’t care about me casting spells out here either. At this point, though, does that really surprise anyone?

We’re in the graveyard and it’s night time, so we’re going to talk to the ghost of the murdered halfling kid…

OK, time out.

We’ve seen one kid abandoned in the street by his mother so that she could go and enjoy the circus, one kid kicked out of his village to embark on a gruelling journey into a cold, cruel city, one kid that’s been brutally murdered in his own home and cannot find peace in the afterlife because his teddy bear’s missing, and later on we’re going to encounter Neb, the child-killer, who has with him a group of tormented, weeping wraiths, spawned from the corpses of little boys and girls that have been tortured to death.

Am I the only one seeing a pattern here? What the hell does BioWare have against children?

Regardless, we agree to find this kid’s stuffed bear, twee though the whole idea might be.

(Note: I know that this quest doesn’t boost your reputation, before you tell me about it. This wasn’t the one I was talking about. Still, we might as well pick it up now while we have the opportunity. Eventually, they’ll both lead us to the same spot.)

With that side-quest taken on, we now head into the south-easternmost tomb.

Remember how I said earlier that I liked most of the content in the Quest Pack aside from the voice-acting? Here is where I have to take my headphones off.

Because there is a zombie in here. Not a hostile zombie that we need to kill, but a friendly one that needs us to do something for him. And as is the way with NPCs in this game, the first line of his dialogue is voiced.

It is not voiced well. Presumably the person doing it was trying to put on a sinister, hissing tone in order to sound more like a zombie. Fine. Good idea. But it comes out in this horrible, nasal, strangled mess that tends to conjure the image of someone with a peanut stuck in their throat as opposed to a rotting, undead monstrosity.

As for the quest itself, the short of it is that we need to find this guy’s wife. Apparently the reason he’s not at rest is that he had an argument with her and stormed away without saying goodbye, then rather unfortunately got murdered while he was out on a voyage. So now he wants to give her one last kiss in order to be at peace.

Yeah, I know. But who am I to argue with easy XP?

He’s given us our lead; a woman named Mira in Waukeen’s Promenade. Three guesses as to where we’re headed next.

OK, we’re safe. I realised what the problem was as soon as I brought the game window back up; Vespero got hit with a Silence spell.

He hadn’t taken any actual damage during the fight and the effect doesn’t last that long anyway, so I just Ctrl+R’ed it away and tried again. Sure enough, Viconia asks to join us and our reputation takes an undeserved hit. Phew.

We do a little item shuffling at this point. Korgan gets the dead fanatic’s plate mail and Viconia gets Korgan’s recently shed splint mail. Korgan also gets a medium shield while handing his small shield over to Viccy. Jaheira donates some bullets and a spare sling she’d kept just for this occasion, and we’re all set.

Of course I had the foresight to keep a spare sling around, but not a mace or a hammer. Ah well.

Does anyone else find it odd that Jan wears neon blue? It certainly doesn’t look that way on his portrait. Anyway, we’re going to head inside here so that the Cowled Wizards won’t bother us while we patch Korgan up and make the party safer with a few protection spells.

Now…this is just downright inexcusable. We’re in the council building in the Government district. There are two Cowled Wizards in here, Corneil and Tolgerias, and we’re casting spell after spell RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES AND THEY COULDN’T CARE LESS. WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE?

Ugh. Well, given the selective blindness of the law enforcement in this city, we’re still free to act, so we’ll want to get back to the task of doing reputation-boosting quests. There’s a perfect one to start on down in the Graveyard district, so that’s where we’ll be heading next.

I can’t help but think that the developers didn’t really do their research here.

One of the fanatics lets slip that they worship Beshaba. If you’re not a Forgotten Realms buff, Beshaba is a crazy, evil goddess of bad luck and curses; not exactly the type that you’d expect to object to the presence of a drow. Still, I suppose it could be justified with further thought. It just seems a bit odd.

What we do know, however, is that slaughtering a group of crazy evil goddess worshippers is in no way a no-no in the adventuring hero handbook, so we set Viconia free and get ready to crack some cleric skull.

Before we actually start the fight, we position Korgan and Jaheira right next to the archers so that they won’t give us any trouble when they turn hostile. We have Jan fire at the cleric while Vespero blasts him with a wand of frost.

You may feel like I’m wasting wands here, and you may well be right, but I’m fairly confident that once Vespero’s back in action, I’m really not going to need them that often. Besides, wands of frost aren’t really that great anyway, but it’s better than trying to whack someone with a magic stick.

It’s a long battle, but we eventually dispatch the fanatics. I had to pull Korgan back about halfway through, but a healing potion fixed him up enough that it was safe to send him back in. Fanatics dead, corpses looted and…Viconia won’t talk to us.

Uh-oh.

This is, of course, a bug, so it’s OK for me to reload here and try this again. I’ve got my fingers crossed that it was just some fluke glitch and it won’t happen the next time around…but if it does, we could be in trouble.

I’ll keep you all posted.

Just realised I’ve been walking around all this time without the Metaspell Influence Amulet on. Durrr.

Into the Government District, and I’m just going to go ahead and recruit Jan now as well. We’re going to want him at a decent level too since he’s our only thief, and more NPCs means more security. Better safe than sorry.

We finish the conversation and…Vespero levels up? Huh. OK. I never noticed before now that you actually got experience for doing this. Who knew that chatting could be so good for you?

I’m certainly not going to complain, in any event. He gets another proficiency point, and since the game won’t let us put any more in Daggers, it goes into Quarterstaff. I’m sure he’ll find a use for the Staff of the Magi eventually.

While we’re at it, we go ahead and talk to Delon just to add the Umar Hills to our world map.

Now this is yet another kid in seriously messed up circumstances. This boy’s been sent here all the way from Imnesvale to find someone that would be willing to investigate the murders that have been taken place there.

Look at the world map. How long is the journey from here to the Umar Hills? 20 hours. Right.

What kind of person do you have to be to send a little boy on a 20-hour journey through dangerous wilderness, all by himself, only to reach a huge, unfamiliar city where muggers and vampires run rampant and unchecked through the streets, all in the hopes of finding some random dudes to send back to your village in order to solve all its problems?

That’s friggin’ ruthless. That is straight-up stone cold.

Vespero is intrigued, and inquires as to how to go about meeting this person, and once Korgan is done complaining about it, we’ve got ourselves a shiny new map marker to visit.

And now, onward to rile up an angry mob.

Let me just show you the portrait I’m using again.











I have to give Amalas credit; he’s got some serious balls calling Vespero "dolly boy".

Into the ring we go. First of all we draw our Wand of Monster Summoning and aim it at the centre of the floor, directly between Amalas and Vespero.

And…wow. Five Gnoll Elites. I was kind of expecting to have to help whatever got conjured up by continuing to blast Amalas with more wands, but the snarling hyena men just get stuck right in and gib him without me having to lift a finger, thereby proving that I am a real man and a true hardass because I can summon other creatures to fight my battles for me.

Jaheira levels up from this, which she DOESN’T DESERVE. I’m the one who killed him, damn it. I should be levelling up.

Well…actually, the gnolls are the ones that killed him, but shut up. I made the gnolls.

One extra spell slot for levels 4 and 5, to which we’ll assign Defensive Harmony and…oh, let’s say Insect Plague.

With that out of the way, we can finally do what we came here to do; recruit Korgan. We saunter up and talk to him, and after being seated around his table, he tells us he’s going to…“Flail the bladder for a spell."

To this day, I still have no idea what the hell this is supposed to mean, but it sounds absolutely disgusting. You keep your bladder to yourself, you bearded little freak.

We agree to find his damn book, but of course we’re going to stall on this for as long as we can, because the undead in that crypt are pretty tough, and at this point in time, Vespero is not.

Going to rest for now to memorise my meagre spell selection, then it’s off to add Viconia to our sorry troupe.

Into the tavern we go, carefully avoiding the two thugs outside…and the three thugs inside. Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to show Amalas who the boss man is in these parts, but as a 5th-level mage with no spells memorised, I don’t think the battle would go too well for me right now. We’ll tear him a new one later.

That reminds me. I should really get some rest once I’m done here.

Unfortunately, to avoid the thugs, we’re going to have to take the long way around, which means bumping into Anomen. We lie through our teeth here by telling him that we’re courageous do-gooders, and then do a U-turn and speak the absolute truth when we tell him we do not want him to join us.

I don’t ever want Anomen to join me, ever again. But I have to complete his quest, so it’s going to have to happen at some point. Not now, though. I can’t handle him so soon after losing those scrolls.

We also get intercepted by Nalia and subject her to the same process. Yes, we’ll come and save your keep, but no we don’t want you with us right now. Jaheira approves.

Of course, we won’t actually be going to the keep for quite some time, since I don’t think we’re up to taking on trolls and umber hulks just yet. That, however, will not be a problem, since apparently all the hostiles overrunning the place are quite content to sit there and wait forever until you come along to massacre them. No hurry, then.

Besides, she deserves to be kept waiting, giving you that crap about there being “no time” to tell you what you’d be up against if you agreed to help her. No time? How long is it that you’re willing to follow me around before you start complaining that we need to get a move on, again? And how long is the journey to the keep? Eight hours? DO YOU THINK EIGHT HOURS MIGHT BE ENOUGH TIME FOR A BRIEF SUMMARY, AT LEAST?

Interruptions, interruptions. That’s the last of them, thankfully, so we’ve got a clear run to Korgan now. Almost there, almost there…damn it. All that and they still spotted us.

Well, we’re certainly not going to back down from this moron, so it looks like Vespero’s in for a fight. Not to worry, though. He may be devoid of spells and anything resembling prowess in combat, but I’ve still got one thing to fall back on.

Wands.

This game has a sense of humour.

Don’t get me wrong. That’s not to say I find what just happened here to be amusing. But it definitely has a sense of humour.

With Vespero’s intelligence boosted to 23, he was able to neatly and efficiently transcribe every single scroll he had in his inventory.

With two exceptions.

Stoneskin. And Haste.


I realise I seem very calm and collected about this, but understand that most of the words that I want to type here would be highly, highly inappropriate for my younger audience, should I happen to have one. With that in mind, I will have to settle for the following paragraph:

**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** *********************************


In rather more welcome news, this process has caused Vespero to leap from level 1 to level 5, and he's well on his way to 6. Plus, he can't actually cast level 4 spells yet, so he wouldn't have been able to use Stoneskin anyway. So that's good. It's cool. I'm cool. There are other scrolls of Stoneskin in the game. No problem. I don't need to let this upset me. Deep breaths.

OK. In light of this development, we really can't afford to screw around here. We need some meatshields and we need them now, so it's back to the slums to pick up Korgan. Hopefully he won't start badgering us about his quest too soon.

On our way to get our potion, we come across two guys fighting over some girl. If their names are any indication, these are the two people who tried to murder us for a bounty, way, way back when we were in Candlekeep. Admittedly it was a feeble attempt, but it’s still quite enough for us to have no qualms whatsoever about breaking out the popcorn and watching these two kill each other.

Sadly, our entertainment is cut short, if you’ll pardon the pun. The fight literally ends in half a second, with Shank running Carbos through with a mighty blow and then throwing down his sword, turning to face us and bellowing “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?! IS THAT NOT WHY YOU ARE HERE?!”

Actually, he doesn’t do that, because his puny brain is incapable of that level of "badass". Instead, his girl complains that he got blood on her dress and he goes chasing after her, dragging his knuckles across the ground and drooling slightly. At first we sigh with disappointment, but then we remember Carbos’ dead body. Sweet, free gold.

With that pleasant little distraction over and done with, we move on and finally get our grubby mits on a Potion of Genius. As soon as we knock this sucker back, we’ll begin scribing these magical scrolls right here in the street, in plain view of everyone in the district.

Truly, the vigilance of the Cowled Wizards knows no bounds

We’re outside, and Brus very kindly takes us straight to the edge of the district, saving us a ten-second walk. What would I do without you, kid?

As always at this point, Jaheira immediately starts kvetching, demanding to know what our plan of action is and telling Vespero that he sounds like he was dropped or kicked as a child. Well, screw you, you insensitive harpy. Maybe he was. Maybe that’s exactly what happened to him, and is the reason for him being such a sociopathic loon despite being utterly convinced that he is Lawful Good. Did you ever think about that? Of course not. You’re far too busy concealing your exuberance over the convenient demise of your whipping boy.

We agree to try and be pleasant to each other, though Vespero secretly resolves to put fire ants in her bedroll as soon as he can find some.

To tbe Bridge district, whereupon Lieutenant Aegisfield informs us that there is a disgustingly sick person running around town. Vespero, of course, assumes that this man is on to him and immediately reaches for his katana to silence him.

He then remembers that he forgot how to use his katana and probably doesn’t stand much of a chance with his barely-adequate knowledge of how to handle a quarterstaff, so he lets it drop. For now. But this pig will get his, oh yes he will.

Conveniently, we can accomplish two of our objectives here. Not only is this where we can pick up a Potion of Genius, but the thief we need to catch for Galoomp is lurking only a few yards away. We go up to talk to him, and he immediately blurts out a confession without having to be subjected to even mild coercion.

Easy, perhaps, but not much fun.

We determine through dialogue that this thief, whose name is Kram, is extremely ugly. He gives us a sob story about how daddy made him this way and he can’t make any friends because of how he looks so he stole scrolls of the "Friends" spell to make people like him and blah blah blah.

There are numerous ways to solve this one, probably the most “rewarding” of which is giving him the Ring of Human Influence so that he, too, can pretend to be good at talking to people. Take it off for a second...yep, Vespero's natural charisma is still 4. To hell with that.

Our other options include simply letting him go on his way, (optionally taking the scrolls he stole first) turning him in to the guards, or killing him.

Remember how I said that if it didn’t break any quests and I didn’t have to force-attack them, I’d kill anyone? Yeah. Bye, Kram.

In Vespero’s defence, it was the only way he was going to wring any XP out of this quest. Giving him the ring is the “proper” way to complete this one, but with Vespero’s charisma as low as it is, it simply wouldn't have been worth it. You don’t get *much* experience, just more than you would by doing it another way, (i.e. more than zero) and there are plenty of other places where we can boost our reputation.

Therefore, we’re just going to have to settle for the XP we get for sticking this meat sack, a measly 500. Aegisfield, who is standing well within range, very kindly decides to aid us in our apparent murder of an innocent halfling, taking potshots at him while Jaheira clubs him to death. Man, he really must have been ugly if a dedicated and upstanding member of the city watch was willing to help us kill him.

Incidentally, Kram’s last words are, “I’m just a soul of good intentions…Lords, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

No joke.