Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

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.