Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

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.