Before we go journeying into the cesspit of Athkatla, we’ve got one more thing to take care of in the promenade. We’re going to talk to Galoomp the bookkeeper.
Am I the only one who thinks that “Galoomp” is onomatopoeia for swallowing? Gulping something down? Real mature, Bioware. There’s another merchant standing next to him; why not call him "Patooie"?
Anyway, you may be wondering why we want to talk to Galoomp, seeing as how he’s just a standard scroll merchant and we already bought enough scrolls earlier on to leave us all but broke. The answer? We’ve got the Quest Pack installed, which means this guy’s got a problem that he has no intention of solving himself, and he has therefore decided to stand around and wait for some rag-tag assortment of “heroes” to come along and fix it for him.
In other words, he’s got a side-quest for us.
Galoomp seems to be miserable about something, so being the nosy adventurers we are, we ask him what’s up. He informs us that someone’s been stealing his scrolls, and as such it’s been hard for him to make ends meet…because, you know, it’s not as if the money he’d make off a level 1 scroll alone would be enough for a person to live comfortably on for years.
Speaking of scrolls, we’re going to buy a second scroll case from him. They can only hold about a dozen each, and we certainly won’t be scribing every single scroll we find, so we’ll need to make room to stash the more useful ones away should we end up in a pinch later on.
Back on the subject of the quest, though, Galoomp says that, should we manage to catch the thief, our reward will be whatever scrolls he may have on him. Gee, thanks a lot, Galoomp. What exactly makes you think that he hasn’t already used them all? Cheapskate.
Asking him whom he thinks might be responsible, he mentions a “right scruffy halfling” that he’s seen skulking around the north side of the Bridge District. This is, of course, exactly where we need to go and whom we need to apprehend, since we haven’t had any hints suggesting otherwise. Nothing like a good mystery.
As a final note before we part, he tells Vespero that he is a good soul.
Ahaha.
Onward to the slums.
I’d forgotten how much it sucks to buy stuff without the full reputation discount. We did speak to the guard outside the tent letting him know that we’d solved the problem in there to get a rep boost of 1, so I think we’re getting a small one. Nevertheless, those scrolls just about cleaned me out.
Later on, when I have more gold than I will ever need, I will look back on this moment and laugh, but right now I am not best pleased.
We haven’t spent so much that we’ve screwed ourselves out of a place to sleep for the night, however, so it’s off to the Mithrest to memorise and cast Find Familiar.
At this juncture, I find myself wishing that I’d done the honest thing and set Vespero’s alignment to Chaotic Evil. Starting reputation be damned; he should have a Quasit familiar, not one of these nauseatingly cute little pseudo-dragons.
“Ooh! Do you have an apple, master? Apples are so good. And pie. I like pie too, master. Can we play a game, master? You’re so good to me, master. I wub you soooo much.”
Christ. It’d almost be worth waiting until the Hell trials so that I can turn evil first.
We rest again after this, both to replace Find Familiar with Shield, and because it’s safer to travel during daylight hours. That, and I don’t think the potion lady we’ll be looking for comes out at night; which is odd, because her name is Mrs. Cragmoon and she an old woman who calls you “dear” and she sells a variety of alchemical concoctions. She’s so obviously a witch it isn’t funny. She weighs less than a duck. She turned me into a newt. You wouldn’t think she’d balk at the notion of a moonlit evening, and nobody *else* disappears at night. She’s obviously hiding something.
Not that we care, of course. All we want is her smart juice.
In any event, with my characters kicking back for now at the Mithrest, I think it’s about time that I took a break myself. Tomorrow we leave the Promenade and commence Chapter 2 proper.
This is Lorph Halys, and you’ve been reading Baldur’s Gate: The Zero Reload Saga. Thank you, and goodnight.
It is done. Vespero has taken his first steps on the path of wizardry, while simultaneously forgetting every single aspect of his extensive combat training for no good reason, causing him to become so utterly clumsy and inept that he literally dropped his katana on the ground.
As tempting as it is to immediately scribe this huge pile of scrolls we’ve amassed to our spell book, not least because the experience from that alone will be enough to bump Vespero up by a few levels, I’m not taking any chances here. Not even an intelligence of 19 is enough to scribe scrolls with a 100% success rate, and since I can’t reload if I fudge one and I have no intention of being a pansy and setting the difficulty to anything lower than Core Rules, these are staying right where they are until I can pick up a Potion of Genius.
Here, of course, I reach a bit of a dilemma. I want to get Vespero’s Kensai class active again ASAP so that he can stop cowering in the corner during fights and get back to killing things, so it would make sense not to amass any more NPCs right now. That way I can run around town doing easy, Fed-Ex quests that don’t require any combat, amsssing more wealth, buying more scrolls and maximising my XP.
On the other hand, I can’t avoid fights entirely. There are quite a few instances of you getting ambushed, and if I haven’t recruited anyone else then Jaheira would basically have to handle these all by herself. I don’t think Vespero would be much help with Find Familiar, Shield and an intimidating leer.
I think, therefore, that it’d be safer to take the middle ground. I’ll pick up a few more important scrolls (Breach and such) to round out the ones I already have, then get a Potion of Genius from the Bridge District. Once I’ve squeezed the XP out of the scrolls, I’ll go and find a couple of NPCs (probably Korgan and Viconia) just to make sure I survive the unavoidable encounters.
Returning to the present, however, we’re still in the tent, and the Ring of Human Influence is ours.
I must confess that I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Aerie. She’s not a particularly strong character, but I like her versatility. It’s just nice to have a single character on-hand that can, herself, cast almost any spell you’re ever likely to need on demand. Alas, she doesn’t make the cut, and since she doesn't have any side-quests to complete, (unless you count the one we just did) we leave her here with her ass of an uncle.
Now that we can pretend to be good at interacting with people, we head to Lady Yuth in Wal-Mart to make some purchases, the first of which is a scroll case. Since scrolls constituted about 80% of our occupied inventory space, our bursting backpack problem has now been solved.
You’ve got to love that. The game doesn’t care what you’ve got as long as you ain’t got more than 16 things. Be it sixteen scrolls or sixteen suits of full plate armour, the unspoken conversation goes thus:
“Have you got more than sixteen?”
“Nope.”
“Then you can carry ‘em. It‘s cool.”
This place is infuriating. You know the damn werewolves aren’t real and you know what will happen if you attack them, so you don‘t. Nevertheless, they insist on being obstinate and chasing you everywhere, taking swings at you until you’ve beaten Kalah and escaped. They’re like one of those stubborn, obnoxious children that follows you around and sings “The song that never ends” incessantly, even though you’ve explicitly told them that they’re not annoying you and you’re just going about your business and ignoring them and they’re not getting to you in any way and you’re not going to rise to their provocations because that's exactly what they want you to do so you're just going to be the better man and DEAR GOD WILL YOU SHUT UP WILL YOU WILL YOU JUST SHUT UP SHUT UP AND DIE.
As for the Shadows, these creatures are not a threat unless they attack in swarms or are paired with other enemies. As they are, they just can’t inflict enough damage to really pose a problem, and the strength drain is only a minor annoyance. Much as I’m sure you’d love to hear me scream and rant that I accidentally sold all my enchanted weapons, and as such am going to have to dispatch them using only a Wand of Missiles and a Potion of Firebreath, it just didn’t go down that way.
Up pops the genie again, and then we’re off to kill a Kalah.
I have to admit, I really want to just hang back for a while until Kalah kills Quayle here. Why, you ask?
Have you played the first game? Quayle’s an ass. What’s more, he’s a useless ass. I can deal with asses if they make up for being asses by also being worthwhile party members, (Edwin) but Quayle is probably the most useless NPC in Baldur’s Gate that isn’t named Garrick, which in no way compensates for assness.
Just to make it worse, you can’t even get him until the game’s almost over since he’s in Baldur’s Gate, (the city) and you assume he’s going to be awesome since you’ve had to wait so long to come across him, but he isn’t. None of them are. All the NPCs in Baldur’s Gate suck.
I quickly find, however, that I do not have the patience, probably because I’m already sick of hearing phantom werewolves snarling in my ear at this point, so I just go ahead and kill him. Again, no strategy here since he doesn’t even bother putting up a fight.
Hark! What’s that I hear? Did Vespero just level up? You bet your Quayle he did. Since we imported him, that places him firmly at level 9, and you know what that means, folks.
It’s time to d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-dual.
Whoops, almost forgot to talk to the boy outside the tent.
Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture? This kid’s outside crying because his mother went in to see the circus and hasn’t come out. What kind of godawful parenting is that? Don’t you think it would have been a good idea to, I don’t know, TAKE YOUR SON IN WITH YOU RATHER THAN LEAVING HIM OUT THERE ON THE STREET BY HIMSELF?
I want to tell the child that his mother is a horrible person and he’s better off without her, but sadly, no such dialogue option exists, so we’re just going to have to settle for agreeing to track the errant parent down.
Inside: Genie, riddle, and I know by now that the right answer is option 3 without even having to look at it. Once I answer, Jaheira levels up in Druid again, giving her a 5th level spell. Hurrah. We’ll put Iron Skins in there, because with the amount of HP she ended up with, she’s pretty darned fragile.
Say hello to Aerie! We’re not going to be taking her with us, but we’ll go ahead and free her anyway for the XP, and because she’ll probably cry if we don’t.
Mostly for the XP.
On our way to merrily butcher some “peasants“, we come across the lost boy’s mother, transformed by insidious illusion magic, and of course we immediately freak out and kill her dead because hey, giant spider.
Or maybe not. After a bit of a chat she tells us that her son “Didn’t come into the tent with her.” Yeah right, lady. I believe that your young and innocent and wide-eyed little boy decided to wait outside in the promenade, lonely and bored, while you came in here and enjoyed a circus act. You deserve everything that has happened to you and I hope someone flushes you down a bathtub.
No strategy at all involved with the peasants; we just waltz right on up and murder them both without taking a scratch. A few seconds later, Aerie is free, and we're moving right along to the next room after taking the opportunity to ogle the naked lady here.
In-character, I mean. Vespero is ogling the naked lady. I'm not. No siree.
Cutscene! And not a single one of those amateurish Shadow Thieves even attempts to backstab the unprotected spellcaster standing in plain sight. Tsk tsk, gentlemen.
“So, godchild, you have escaped. You are more resourceful than I had thought.”
Really? Is that a fact? You didn’t think I was going to escape when you left all manner of weapons, armour, potions, scrolls and magical trinkets just lying everywhere around your prison, free for the taking, and the most troublesome resistance I encountered consisted entirely of outside forces whose presence you had no personal hand in?
Exactly how unresourceful did you think I was?
You know, for the longest time, I didn’t realise that when the people in this game called you “godchild”, they meant it literally, as in “The child of a god.” Until this dawned on me I was seriously bewildered. Irenicus is my godfather? The solar in TOB is my godmother? Am I to assume that they were at the christening, or what?
Imoen and Irenicus have their little back-and-forth while I’m forced to stand there like an idiot, and then she goes and sets up a major plot point by blasting him with a Magic Missile. Yeah, Imoen. Cast a weak, level 1 spell at the all-powerful wizard that effortlessly captured us and has just blown a whole bunch of dudes to pieces right before our eyes. That’ll show him.
And now here come the Cowled Wizards the save the day.
And they do save the day, when you think about it. They may be a bunch of corrupt, arrogant jerks, but if they hadn’t intervened here then Irenicus would have just stomped you flat and thrown you straight back into your cage. When you look at it a certain way, you kind of owe them one.
But when you look at it another way, they proceed to capture your best friend and throw her into a magical prison to slowly go insane and die, just for casting a single, puny little spell in self-defence and therefore breaking a law that she wasn’t even aware of, so you also kind of don’t.
Seriously. You’ve got a megalomaniacal magical murderer here that resisted arrest and killed four of you in the process, as well a destroying a good chunk of the promenade and causing a big disturbance, and then you’ve got some kid who cast Magic Missile once, in the hopes of stopping the psycho mage, I might add…and they both get the same sentence. Nice justice system there, guys.
Anyway, Irenicus spends some more time demonstrating his unhealthy obsession with Power Word: Kill, and one brief conversation later, Yoshimo has levelled up and we are once again free to move about the world as we wish.
Or not, because we still have one more cutscene to endure before we can go anywhere but the slums.
Sigh.
I’m hearing a strange, groaning noise. I wonder what that could be?
Oh, right. It’s the seams of my inventory. Before we go anywhere, I think we’d better palm some of this stuff off. But before we do *that*, we’re going to need to do two things:
1. Improve Vespero’s abysmal Charisma in order to get better prices.
2. Artificially raise our standing in the eyes of the general public in order to get even better prices.
In less verbose terms, we want to get the Ring of Human Influence and max out our reputation before we go a-bartering, and by an extraordinary stroke of luck, I happen to know just where we can go to make a start on both tasks.
Unfortunately, we have a bit of a problem. We want to remove Yoshimo from the party here because we won’t be using him through the whole game (duh) and so he’s just going to suck up XP. Yes, yes, I know that the last time I said this it didn’t end well for me, but I’m certain that there aren’t going to be any traps I can’t avoid until I can pick up Jan this time, and the karma factor isn’t going to kick in since we’re basically just parting company in a city with which he is familiar, rather than abandoning him in a dangerous dungeon.
Back on topic, though, if we kick Yoshimo out now then our shortage of inventory space is really going to go critical. We literally will not be able to carry any more stuff, not even if we squeeze as much as we can into equipment slots. So, anathema though it may be to my packrat nature, we’re going to have to sell a few items at a sub-optimal price. Oh the trials I must endure.
With sufficient space made, we send Yoshimo on his way and tell him we’ll meet him later at the Copper Coronet, which we’ve never been to before and don’t know about yet, and it’s onwards into the tent after convincing the guard that we can help. We then surreptitiously flip him off as we enter for daring to stand in our way. Stupid guard.
