Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

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.