DavesGaming

The mediocre team tore through Siege of Dragonspear in pretty good time. Jill was plenty effective on point, at least to say she makes a pretty solid tank. She is not extremely hard hitting (single wielding a short sword with shield). But that’s sort of the point with mediocrity, you can make up for a few deficiencies with *stuff*. But you can’t make up for everything.
The rest of the team is not particularly powerful either. Jill’s husband Christopher has a really good wisdom, but no bonuses anywhere else. Minsc is strong and can hit hard with his sword, but he’s actually more fragile than Jill. Dynaheir is a competent mage. And the new NPC Erato is a useful but not powerful cleric/thief. Corwin of course, as a Ranger-Archer IS powerful.
For those following along, it is true. I have created Bhaal-spawn Barbie. Often these renders really make me laugh.
This post will likely be all I do with SoD.

*****

After getting a few friends together it was time to march out with the army. Christopher and I thought it might be good to have Captain Corwin with us, with me using a sword for now we were down to the scout Erato as our only archer. And she’s not really a trained warrior at all.

Wow does Corwin make a big difference. She might be the best archer I’ve ever seen!

Captain Corwin is sort of a grumpy one. I think I annoy her.

We fought more scary undead. We saw a Dwarf turn into an undead right in front of us! Wow, but obviously he was sort of stupid. We had to kill him then. I mean, shoot. Destroy him? That sounds better. If he hadn’t turned into undead maybe we all could have been friends, but yeah. He was stupid.

The Crusade blew up the bridge we were going to use, so we had to head to the next one. On the way we found an old Temple of Bhaal. It might even be where I was born? Some of the story seemed right for that. But it was all a pretty big deal, we killed a dragon! Wild right?

There was a whole lot of evil going on in that Temple. We found a few Crusade prisoners, we let them go. I won’t let anyone suffer like they were if I can stop it. I hope they quit the Crusade and we don’t have to fight them again, I’d feel bad to have to hurt them after saving them.
What Christopher called “The Mad God” had taken over the temple, but another group led by a purple squid head was fighting them. Evil all around! It made it easy to just fight everyone. The old temple isn’t so evil anymore! I wish we could have just burnt it.

We finally got to the other bridge, it was under attack by the Crusaders, but Christopher and Dynaheir had figured a way in for us.

We got into the fort, and found our friend Khalid was running it now! Good for him! Actually it was a little bad because there were so many Crusaders just outside. So we came up with a plan where we brought the rest of our army to attack outside while the guys in the fort attacked coming out. Big battle. Just a lot going on.

Then it was time to move out. Something really bad tried to take me on that bridge. I know it has a dark history connected to my bloodline. But wow. It was like something tried to take me over for a moment, I felt like I had to hold it in and beat it all at once, or it would hurt more people. THAT was not going to happen!
But now most of the soldiers think I’m something evil. At least my friends are all still with me. Although they understand this fight as well as I do, maybe better.

We finally made it to the camp. I could quickly tell we weren’t entirely welcome here. The Generals had a mission for us, Christopher said it was a really stupid mission, but at least it got us out of the camp.

We wound up at an underground entrance that led to Dragonspear Castle. We needed some information in there.

Amongst other things we did find Haephernon, Caelar’s number two guy, is working with some sort of Demon? Wild, but it proves this Crusade is evil at its core.

We rushed back to camp, and had a last meeting with Caelar before the fighting really got started.

The Generals said my team was back in camp as a last defense. Apparently, I was supposed to be in charge of this!

And we did. We kept the camp safe from several attacks. The day’s fighting seemed to break the Crusade. Most of their army was either killed, or melted away. Corwin said this is common with “such rabbles”.
Whatever she meant, the Crusade was down just to the forces defending their Castle. And we had an attack all set up for the next morning.

When we blew up the gate and entered the castle, I was challenged to a duel by Ashateal, another of Caelar’s lieutenants.

I felt really bad about killing Ashateal. But the Crusaders felt worse and most of the ones still fighting just sort of quit after that.
Then we got into the Castle, and found Caelar and Haephernon in the basement. He wanted to open a gateway to the Abyss. I would ask “what was he thinking?” But we found very soon that he was some sort of little demon. A demonette? Or was he a devil? Ask Christopher.
We had to fight Haephernon and his boss. Caelar never wanted things to go like this, so we welcomed her to join our fight. She was a really good warrior! But what did she think was going to happen? I mean, sometimes I feel like a stupid fool next to my husband. (Hah! Joke’s on him, he married me!). But anyway, Caelar was really the stupid fool. She made me feel smart! At least she saw her mistake and switched sides. When the Abyss was dropping in on her…

We defeated the Demons and returned home. Then, well, after the celebration that night; a friend of ours, Skie was murdered. I saw it all in a fuzzy dream. And I woke up next to her dead body in morning. Everyone thinks I killed her. I get it. But I didn’t!

That all led to us being kicked out of Baldur’s Gate in the middle of the night.

*****

Obviously, my next update will start with BG2.

A few thoughts as this continues on, I am really enjoying this run. I had worried a bit about finding the voice for writing up Jill. I was worried about a simpleton, good natured, but with an overly simplified view of things. Specifically worried about how to write this up. It turns out, I’m having a great time! Its quite different from how I’ve done it before. If you look at something like “Psyche and Diomedes” or “Chuck and Sarah“, those runs had much more insightful narrators. I don’t mean to sound smug, but to me their tone and narration seems more normal.
With Jill, I try to reduce thoughts to their most basic level and not look at much of the nuance. I do still see Jill as having some sense of humor, and a sense of wonder about the many things she can’t wrap her mind around. And maybe being a bit overly enthusiastic about her friends and loved ones.
And I just let her ramble more. She’s more “stream of consciousness”, less structured and edited.

The renders have proven more challenging than expected in one dimension. Jill’s description is so overly “cute”, the AIs either want to show her as an Anime or Disney character. I have dealt with that by building a model of her at OpenArt, so on these last couple updates whenever you can see Jill’s face I’m using that AI. But as before, it is a more limited AI for fantastical subjects. So we’re working around that as best as I can. One more challenge, just to keep things interesting!

Yeah, Jill is Bhaal-spawn Barbie.

I’d also mention the video-render of Dynaheir. The image it was based off shows flame erupting from her hand, my idea was a Fireball launched away. But as a video it came out curiously, like she created a little spurt and directed it like a flame-thrower.
Well I love that! My previously mentioned character Psyche, in a PnP game, had developed a spell called “Flame Bolt” which would be almost exactly like this. A third level spell that’s less area effect but more easily targeted than Fireball. So this video is a keeper!