DavesGaming

Chuck

We returned to the village of Brynnlaw, and met up with Saemon again. He told us his ship had been scuttled in the harbor. I rolled my eyes guessing this was not new information. Of course, Saemon had a plan, for us to help him steal the Pirate Lord’s ship. I looked at my crew, yeah, we’ll pick a fight with a pirate.

So we did. We set sail with the now deceased pirate lord’s ship. About a day out we were attacked by some sort of aquatic creatures.

And then I don’t really know what happened. I think we were all dragged under.

And we were to be tools in a civil war. The clearly bonkers “king” wanted us to slay his rival, a mad prince.
They were all mad, bloodthirsty and evil. We did not find much cause for hope, and finally chose neither side. I think we killed all the warriors, at least all that showed themselves.

The city seemed empty. We went to our only exit, a great hole that led to the Underdark.

It was a long way down, but we all made it fine.

Of course the Underdark is the stuff of nightmares for everyone who grew up on the surface. This seemed to hit Aerie particularly hard, she’s a good companion but a sensitive soul.

Somewhere down here were Irenicus and Bhodi. We talked with Deep Gnomes who were friendly enough. We encountered a number of others who were less friendly and combat was frequent. We gradually concluded they must have gone to a Drow city, Ust Natha. We would need a plan to enter.

The Deep Gnomes had referred us to a Silver Dragon, Adalon. She is probably the single most powerful being in this part of the Underdark. And she needed our help. Her eggs had been taken into the Drow city. She would give us a disguise as Drow to enter the city.

*****

Funny how I’ve come to see Drow portraits as an essential part of illustrating Baldur’s Gate! Some of the characters went much better this time than on my last run.

I’ve certainly learned how to get the dark skin color. There are two key things, the first is not to use any words like “black” that are commonly used on real world ethnicities (Charcoal and Indigo were terms I used here). At least not on characters who are otherwise not of those ethnicities. The second thing is to put the skin color first in the character’s description. I got pretty proficient at this on my last IWD run (“Aias and the Aliens“). Its nice when a learned skill actually carries over!

The particular challenge this time had to do with Chuck and Sarah. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get OpenArt to do different skin colors.
I ended up building special “Drow” models for them. I did some dark skinned renders in Co-Pilot, then built the new models from a mix of their current renders and the new dark skinned renders. Then every description starts with “Charcoal skinned”. This all worked better for Chuck than Sarah, but I got several passable results. Especially if we assume Adalon’s illusion may also change features somewhat.