DavesGaming

Chuck

A few days taking care of business at the Castle. This is by far the most fun of our ongoing chores for now.

Of course Imoen will use the lab also, its still pending if she wants her own space here. The sphere is becoming more her hideout.

That all seems to be going well, we’ve cut way down on bandit activity in the area. And have an interesting range of dilemmas to sort out, things I never imagined to be involved in before. Like finding space for a boisterous cleric of Tempus, or a dowry for a maid. The biggest looming thing would seem to be some trouble with our neighbors, the Roenalls are not amused by our presence. That is particularly what Sarah is working towards with her soldiers, its sort of the key to protecting the people of this land.

I explained to her a lot of Sarah had told me, the militia is not full time. They’re all here now because we are training and getting them ready for possible trouble. But normally they will work a few days a month so about 10% of what you see now will be working on any day. We only have about a dozen full time guardsmen. But a trained militia means we can mobilize a lot of troops if we are attacked by grumpy neighbors or have something bigger to chase off.

We’ve also had to run errands into Athkatla, both the students at the Planar Sphere and the Knights of the Radiant Heart have needed some attention. After a few days, we figured it was time to head out to look into the problems around the Umar Hills again, and see what was up with the dark shadows around an abandoned old temple.

We entered the old temple and found it overrun by all sorts of undead.

I’ve not known such things to cooperate before. Maybe they still weren’t? They were sort of at opposite ends of the ruin.

This took the whole team, both steel and magic were needed.
Beyond the dragon was a “Shade Lord”. I don’t know all the lore there. He was actually less threatening to us than the dragon and the lichs. But he was able to exert some sort of control of the dark forces. We were able to defeat him and restore the temple as a sacred site to Amunator, a god of sunlight.
We had exhausted ourselves pounding through these foes quickly. We hadn’t wanted to give them time to regroup, but it meant running at a high tempo for most of a day.

We’ll spend a couple nights back at the castle before we head out again.

*****

I did few other things not mentioned here, like cleaned out all the lichs in Athkatla, the Unseeing Eye Quest and the Planar Prison. All are simple little chores at this point in the game.

For my renders, I added an Imoen model to OpenArt and this is her debut at this site. But I figure if I do a few runs of BG in the near future, I may have the opportunity to use this, a more stable Imoen render. I will still likely use Co-Pilot more, my feelings about both AIs have mostly strengthened these last few weeks.

Which leads to a little test, and some results shown above. Zeno_42 (at Zeno’s Ziggurat) had recently shown how we can indeed get some bloody/hurt renders. I used Co-Pilot to test that for the Jaheira and Aerie render. I had previously had no luck at all with this sort of result. I *think* in the past I’d often used words like “beaten and battered”, which my wife suggested the AI may just automatically reject, especially for female characters. While terms like “Bleeding and Cut” will go through. Go figure. This was actually quite easy to get on Co-Pilot.
But then I tried for a similar result on OpenArt. That “Exhausted Sarah” shown was also described as “bleeding and cut”. OpenArt will not “reject” words via a filter notification (I’m not categorically sure that’s true, but I’ve not had it happen), it will simply not do what you tell it. It does limit what sorts of drama you can get.