Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

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.