DavesGaming

News came while we were still celebrating with the elves that serious trouble was brewing to the south. Bhaalspawn led armies were ravaging the land, killing many innocents. We all knew at once that we had to investigate at once. This was a part of my curse, and I had to put an end to it or Bull, Imoen and I would never know peace.

It didn’t end well. I should mention this is all framed by my being called to a sort of pocket dimension, a fragment of Bhaal’s domain. I would be taught by a friendly Solar what my heritage was to mean. And it was confirmed this whole Bhaal saga was coming to an end. We would be fighting for my own role in the universe, fighting to avoid a destiny in the Abyss. A lot was on the line.
But more immediately, a city with a large number of Bhaalspawn refugees was under seige by an army led by another Bhaalspawn.
Yaga-Shura, the Bhaalspawn in question, was apparently impervious. We needed to detour to his childhood home, a dark swamp, to learn his secrets.

Next we had to set out across the desert to find the next two Bhaalspawn generals.

Really, after that was a little tidying up. A deranged monk, and an old Bhaal Priestess who’d lost the story.

And it was over. I was able to give back my share of the Bhaal essence, Imoen did too. It was like I’d never quite known peace before in my life, until that moment. We all set out on the road together to get back to De’Arnise Castle. Home. We’d been a lot of places these last months, but Bull and I knew the Castle was *our* place.

*****

As I said before, this last was faux ToB run. I lost my save files right near the end of SoA. That was really heartbreaking in a way, not getting to do a proper send off for Gabby and Bull. But this write up trully helped me feel better about it!

I found myself relying heavily on Seadream again, that will likely be the way of it for now. OpenArt gave me a little start when the cost of Seadream renders jumped to 60 credits a pop yesterday! But today it dropped back to 15. Still more expensive than other renderers but not stupid about it. We are still in a period of rapid change and growth for this new technology, I cannot predict where this may go. But hopefully things will get less expensive, not more. I have read that in spite of all the buzz and attention on AI right now, no one is really making money on it yet. That pretty much garuntees instability.

In the immediate future I’m taking a break from the IE games for a bit, I will try to do a run of some (or all?) of the old Gold Box games. I should start with a brief write up on Pool of Radiance in a few days, then I’ll introduce the team I’m using and start a run of that. I think you’ll see a mix of new characters and familiar ones.