Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

It is done. Vespero has taken his first steps on the path of wizardry, while simultaneously forgetting every single aspect of his extensive combat training for no good reason, causing him to become so utterly clumsy and inept that he literally dropped his katana on the ground.

As tempting as it is to immediately scribe this huge pile of scrolls we’ve amassed to our spell book, not least because the experience from that alone will be enough to bump Vespero up by a few levels, I’m not taking any chances here. Not even an intelligence of 19 is enough to scribe scrolls with a 100% success rate, and since I can’t reload if I fudge one and I have no intention of being a pansy and setting the difficulty to anything lower than Core Rules, these are staying right where they are until I can pick up a Potion of Genius.

Here, of course, I reach a bit of a dilemma. I want to get Vespero’s Kensai class active again ASAP so that he can stop cowering in the corner during fights and get back to killing things, so it would make sense not to amass any more NPCs right now. That way I can run around town doing easy, Fed-Ex quests that don’t require any combat, amsssing more wealth, buying more scrolls and maximising my XP.

On the other hand, I can’t avoid fights entirely. There are quite a few instances of you getting ambushed, and if I haven’t recruited anyone else then Jaheira would basically have to handle these all by herself. I don’t think Vespero would be much help with Find Familiar, Shield and an intimidating leer.

I think, therefore, that it’d be safer to take the middle ground. I’ll pick up a few more important scrolls (Breach and such) to round out the ones I already have, then get a Potion of Genius from the Bridge District. Once I’ve squeezed the XP out of the scrolls, I’ll go and find a couple of NPCs (probably Korgan and Viconia) just to make sure I survive the unavoidable encounters.

Returning to the present, however, we’re still in the tent, and the Ring of Human Influence is ours.

I must confess that I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Aerie. She’s not a particularly strong character, but I like her versatility. It’s just nice to have a single character on-hand that can, herself, cast almost any spell you’re ever likely to need on demand. Alas, she doesn’t make the cut, and since she doesn't have any side-quests to complete, (unless you count the one we just did) we leave her here with her ass of an uncle.

Now that we can pretend to be good at interacting with people, we head to Lady Yuth in Wal-Mart to make some purchases, the first of which is a scroll case. Since scrolls constituted about 80% of our occupied inventory space, our bursting backpack problem has now been solved.

You’ve got to love that. The game doesn’t care what you’ve got as long as you ain’t got more than 16 things. Be it sixteen scrolls or sixteen suits of full plate armour, the unspoken conversation goes thus:

“Have you got more than sixteen?”

“Nope.”

“Then you can carry ‘em. It‘s cool.”