This post has nothing to do with the game. I just want to inform everyone that the blog is behaving a bit strangely at the moment.
As you may have noticed, I've gone back and started adding titles to the entries I've made in addition to the timestamp from the game. However, when I did this, weird stuff started happening. Sometimes a post would duplicate itself. Other times it would end up getting thrown out of order, one place above the post that was supposed to come after it.
I have no idea what's causing this. Luckily, I do have all my posts backed up, so if any of them disappear or something, putting them back shouldn't be too much trouble. Just letting you know that if you're going through the archives and you see the same post twice, or a "Day 1, Hour 6" post coming after a "Day 1, Hour 2" post or something, I'm aware of the problem and am currently trying to fix it.
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.
There are two things of note about the fight we just engaged in.
Number one is that there was a scroll of Protection from Energy on the corpse of the standoffish one.
Protection from Energy. That’s a level eight spell. Level EIGHT. What in god’s name was he doing with this? Had he discovered the “anyone can use scrolls” exploit or something? Well, he didn’t have any potions on him, so tough luck on that one. Not that it would have helped much anyway since he got beaten to death, and “kinetic” isn’t considered a type of energy in this game. This explains why Baldur’s Gate II is not especially popular with physicists.
Secondly, before the fight actually starts, the not-standoffish one makes a mysterious reference to a man named “Mr. F.”
As far as I know, this is one of the game’s unsolved mysteries. We never find out who “Mr. F” is. In fact, the only important character whose name begins with “F” that I can come up with off the top of my head is Firkragg, and it doesn’t seem to me like these morons would have had much business with a dragon. When you’re an ancient, tremendously powerful lizard masquerading as a high-standing member of the local nobility, you could probably do a lot better than those two.
Mind you, it would explain where they got that scroll from. Hmm.
Well, anyway. They’re dead now, so we won’t get our underwear a-tangled over it, although once again, Korgan ended up taking more damage than I would have liked him to. He really hasn’t been having much luck so far. We’re all out of healing spells too, so he’ll have to wait until we’ve returned a certain stuffed animal to a certain spectre.
Speaking of which, into the tavern once more.
There are two thugs outside the Copper Coronet that pick a fight with you if you get too close. We avoided them back when our party consisted of Jaheira and a wussified Vespero, but now that we’ve got Jaheira, a wussified Vespero and three other people, it’s probably quite safe to invite these fools to sup on a nice, warm goblet of “die horribly“.
The reason I dislike these two, (or rather, one of these two) so much is that they start fighting with you because you’re “in their way”.
Yeah. I’m totally stopping them from walking into that wall.
Seriously, they just stand there waiting for you to come along, and then as soon as you get too close, no matter where you happen to be standing, this prick starts yelling at you to get out of his way on a broad street that nobody else is using.
There’s no way out of it either. Even if you tell him that you’ll move, he still insists on trying to kill you. Yes, that’s right. You accidentally move into the path along which he apparently intended to travel, and his way of dealing with this situation is murder in broad daylight.
Of course, in this particular instance it happens to be night time, but he does the same thing even if it isn’t.
It’s just sheer, bloody-minded belligerence of the sort that should be possessed only by hormone-poisoned teenagers and adventuring parties such as ourselves, and as such he deserves everything he’s going to get as a result of this encounter; to wit, death by dwarven berserker.
Alright, we’re looking for an orange pavilion, orange…oh yeah, that thing!
I have to say, I’m glad that the mod actually put this part of the map to some use. It always seemed odd to me that there’d be such a (relatively) big, prominent structure here with an isolated NPC placed right in the centre of it…who doesn’t really serve any purpose. I mean, those are generally good indications of someone important that you should talk to, but she’s normally just a standard, dime-a-dozen merchant selling the same mundane crap that you can find being stocked by any of the other morbidly obese people in this city.
Why are almost all of the merchants in this game fat? I suppose all that aimless wandering that the commoners do must keep them in shape or something. The merchants never move at all. From dawn till dusk and back again, they just stand perfectly still in their designated spot. Waiting.
Interminably waiting.
Ooh, but she has large shields. Ribald doesn’t have any of those. I’ll take two.
Anyway, like I said earlier, we’re here to talk to this woman because she might know the whereabouts of this zombie’s wife; apparently she employed her for a while. As it turned out, since her husband’s died she’s been spending an awful lot of time in the Coppor Coronet’s “back rooms”, if you catch my drift.
So…her husband was murdered, and her reaction to this is to head straight for an extremely shady den of prostitution. Lovely. Obviously someone took “Till death do us part” a little too seriously. Either that or she’s been taking lessons from Jaheira.
Still, a quest is a quest, and we do not judge. Let’s go drag this woman’s sorry ass back to the graveyard and make her smush her lips on a decaying corpse. All in a day’s work for Vespero.
For people that were so easily killed, this group has some damn fine loot on them, the most notable of which is Arbane’s Sword. Chances are we’ll be keeping this around for the rest of the game. The only one proficient with it is Jan, of course, but we’re more interested in its added effect: Free Action. This will be a tremendous help in dealing with those pesky Hold Person spells.
Hold Person, of course, is just one of many spells that always seems to decimate your party when it gets cast on them, but never, ever works when you use it on anything except, say goblins. You know. Creatures that there is no point in wasting spells of any kind on.
From their names, we can deduce that the people who attacked us were slavers. I can only assume that this was their first day on the job, because otherwise they’d probably be much more savvy in their choice of targets. Oh yes, there are harmless commoners and unguarded merchants everywhere you look in this city, but no, let’s attack this armed, armoured and generally well-equipped party of adventurers that maintains a cohesive formation at all times, one of whom is walking around covered in a layer of stone and is therefore quite obviously a wizard of some kind. Hurrrrr.
It’s not like you get taken captive if they beat you, either. You die. They kill your whole party without hesitation. Generally speaking, guys, I don’t know if you realised this, but the kinds of slaves that tend to be most in demand are living ones.
Hell, I don’t know. Maybe they were just trying to expand their target market group out to the necrophile population of Athkatla.
Anyway, aside from the sword, we also get a bunch of +1 arrows that nobody can use, a Mace +1 (just the ticket, given that I forgot to pick up a melee weapon for Vic) and enchanted plate mail. We give this to Jaheira, who surrenders the Mail of the Dead to Viconia. There’s also a stack of scrolls on the mage, although none of them really have any spells I would have liked; say, for example, STONESKIN or HASTE.
Since there isn’t anything there that I couldn’t stand to lose, I just go ahead and scribe them all right away. All we end up losing is Shocking Grasp. Woe.
We’re done here, so we’ll patch Korgan up (again) and resume our trip to the promenade.
And we’re back.
The transition from forum to blog went about as smoothly as I could have hoped, though I suspect there are still a few references to “the thread” and other such inconsistencies that I might have failed to spot when I was reviewing my posts. I am sure, however, that you are very clever and won’t let such little errors confuse you.
Quick Recap: A zombie wants to get his mack on with his wife one last time, so we’re off to try and find her like the charitable XP hunters we are. Our next stop is Waukeen’s Promenade.
On our way there, though, we encounter some trouble. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen; Vespero has just had his very first ambush. Aren’t you proud of him?
The problem with these battles is that you never have any opportunity to prepare. The enemies generally aren’t that tough, but they always seem to end up positioned dangerously close to your squishiest party members when the battle starts.
Because of this, the fighters will almost invariably go for your vulnerable mages and thieves. No matter how furiously you click, of course, they’ll never bother to pay any attention to, say, a screaming, axe-wielding dwarf that is actually scoring hits on them repeatedly, so you’re basically forced to pause every second to run your fragile NPCs in circles, so that they stay out of reach of their assailants.
We take a bit of a chance here and have Vespero start casting Summon Monster I right away. The fruits of his efforts turn out to be two Kobold Commandos and a Worg, which is actually a lot more than I was hoping for; all I really wanted was something to take the focus off the party members for a while so that we could dispatch the spellcasters without impediment. But hey, if my conjured monsters can actually put up a decent fight, so much the better.
With Korgan tying up the melee fighter, the kobolds plunking away at the mage and the worg and Jaheira going toe-to-toe with the archers, this battle went down with only one hitch; we weren’t able to finish off the mage before she Lightning Bolted Korgan. Thankfully, though, a quick Magic Missile from Vespero ensured that she didn’t cause any further trouble.
By the time the cleric had finished buffing himself, everyone else was dead. We congratulated him heartily on his performance at fulfilling the “support” role, and rewarded him with his giblety demise.
And guess what? The Cowled Wizards don’t care about me casting spells out here either. At this point, though, does that really surprise anyone?
