DavesGaming

We didn’t have to explore long around where we thought the entrance to the underground river might be, to know we’d found it. A narrow canyon in a hillside led to a wooden palisade with guards. Okay.
Naturally we would start with a quick reconoiter of the area, to avoid any nasty surprises sneaking up on us when we tried to breach the gate.

We dug out two druids, who had been betrayed and abanded by a renegade member of their order. Korrusk had become obsessed with mutating nature, and had done something to the large tree right nearby. They gave is directions, and a pure seed we should place in the root system of this tree, deep underground.

We also battled a group of orcs, and bluffed our way past another group. A lot of activity around here!

Next we came across a noxious fungus garden of some sort.

Apparently this was some sort of Myconid graveyard, and we managed to offend another small group of them. Myconid’s are generally considered gentle, but they seemed to be angry and quick to take offense. Its a shame since we meant them no harm.

As we journeyed on we heard a loud arguement coming from another small cleft in the hillside. A group of ogres were having some disagreement about their leadership.

I guess I volunteered to stand in as her champion. That wasn’t quite what I meant, but okay. Two ogre males were giving her a hard time. Ultimately I supported Murs by killing them both. Hey, girls got to stick together!
But we had some good come of this. We learned Murs’ mate Slug had been taken by the Crusade, along with several other members of the tribe. If we could free their friends, they would join with us in our fight against the Crusade.

So our back was clear to approach the gate.

There were also some archers, and we could tell by the volume of traffic this road had seen there were likely more inside.
The Cyclops really had little imagination, and just wanted to smash us. He was big and strong and being smashed by him would have been bad! Fortunately, he was also fairly clumsy and not a skilled warrior, we brought him down quickly.
The defenders made our job easy, by opening the gate to send out reenforcements. We battled a lot of them both outside and inside the gate. Soon enough, all was quiet.

We all made our introductions, and it was amusing. They were Rigah and his witch Julann. But they were a little different from Minsc and Dyna. Rigah seem stolid and level headed, Julann was a dingbat. Thoroughly. She was seriously considering joining Caelar’s Crusade, and nothing we could say made much impression. Maybe they’ll get lost looking for the castle…

There was cave into the hillside here that the crude fort was protecting. Presumably access to the the underground river. We entered cautiously.

The gnome casually asked what all the fuss outside was. I told him a couple volunteers were arguing over who was most devoted to Caelar. He only said “Again?” Hah! Apparently the Crusade is as big a mess as our own army. Ladle wasn’t worried about much other than monitoring his inventory. We were free to explore the surrounding cave system.

We met the druid we were after, but a number of sick Crusaders were right near his cave. We got his help concocting a cure. He did help, but it was obvious he had taken leave of his senses. Among his ramblings we heard something about Caelar’s lieutenant Hephernaan running a group of Necromancers down here (Interesting?) I thought maybe it could help him if we could get the pure seed into the sick tree roots…

We healed the Crusaders, hopefully they’ll still on sick call when fighting breaks out.

Across the underground river a couple of Sahuagin were holding up the Crusades’ supply lines. They seemed unwilling to let us pass either, unless we paid a toll. They wanted a story!

In the end we had free access. I think (hope!) the Crusade is still bottlenecked.

A few little things we found down here, some ghosts trapped in a cave of negative energy, some corrupted young dragons, and a group of Drow looking for a young couple that had run off together. I even had an encounter with my dreaded hooded visitor from my nightmares. This time, he wanted to mock me for crawling around underground when my army is preparing for glory. I’m not sure what he hopes to accomplish, his taunts rouse nothing in me.

We did find something significant.

Fortunately the dragon delighted in perverting her master’s orders, she considered saying “don’t go in there” as fulfilling his commands.
We entered a city, long abandoned by the dwarves who built it. Now necromancers called it home.

Fighting this was an easy choice, we all rushed in to end this evil. We found notes, journals with orders and directives in Hephernaan’s name. He wanted the undead. And we had proof of darkness at the heart of the Crusade.

When we slew the leader of this group we also freed the dragon’s soul, she could continue into the next world.

Exploring further, we reached a gateway into a large Crusader encampment. We were apparently now deep beneath Dragonspear Castle. Like the warehouse earlier, the number of soldiers drilling and training paid us no notice. To one far side we found ogres in cages, Slug was among them. We released them from the cages, and let Slug know his wife eagerly awaited his return. We seem to have made friends with the ogres.

We saw two more working a large lift near the center of this Crusade hide out.

It was. The architecture changed as we entered the structure of the castle. Almost as soon as we stepped off the lift we were challenged by a guard. We put down all five of them, then the basement seemed quiet. No one noticed. We were in a wide finished corridor, towards the far end were single doorways to either side. To the right, we heard the clear sounds of an army barracks. To the left, seemed more ominous. We approached the opening to the left. I could see two golems at the end of the hall.

Entering the doorway we heard a conversation. A deep, dark voice was commanding someone to find, me.

We had interupted a dark commune. Something had been issuing orders to Hephernaan. Given the history of this place, I’ll guess it was a voice from Avernus. Now we had a fight on our hands. The three of us against three mages. We were well equiped for this, Dyna has a few anti-magic spells, and Erato has a stash of anti-magic arrows (a couple of different sorts). And I’m just stupid about fighting clear evil. So we joined battle. I could hear fighting start out in the hallway too.

This fight went well, but I fear it came with a warning. The two younger mages fell pretty quickly. Hephernaan is tough. He put up a number of defenses in an instant, and everytime we brought them down he seemed to bring them back up. We finally got the upper hand, and Hephernaan teleported out. But warned he would be back.
Well okay, we’re *leaving*.
If he returns with more capable back-up we could easily be overmatched.

We ran out to the hallway where we could hear fighting still taking place.

Slowly, we fought our back towards the exit. We stayed as tight and together as we could, and were clearly winning. But we are in the belly of the beast, I do not want to stick around we could end up with the entire Crusade on top of us.
We got through the heavy iron gate near the lift, and slammed it shut. Then made our hurried exit. The training area beneath the castle still seamed isolated, they knew nothing of our fight upstairs. We hurried out before that changed. We had seen an ideal place to hide the explosive Phoosey had made for us, so we placed it…
And then the gig was up. One guard pointed and yelled “its the hero of Baldur’s Gate!”.

We had to fight our way back to the storeroom, and out. There is evil in this Crusade, and we now have the proof with us. But most of the Crusaders are not motivated by darkness. They follow Caelar’s foolish dream of freeing the dead from two wars. And we just killed a lot of them making our escape.

We hurried back to the Coallition Camp with all that we had learned. We learned our leaders were currently meeting with Caelar. We had *a lot* of interesting information to share. The result was an end of discussion, Caelar launched her forces at our camp, and our army had marched out to meet them. I was directed to lead the defense of the camp, with its infirmery and all of our supplies. And was given about 30 soldiers to help. Some small groups of Crusaders got through the front lines and had to be cleared out. I counted four breaches. Only the last was real trouble.

We were well up to the challenge.

Both inside and outside the camp. The Crusade seemed broken now. We would storm Dragonspear Castle, and finish off this thing in the morning.

*****

So a single day of gameplay, and almost a week working on renders. This was my most expensive update yet, almost 10000 credits spent at OpenArt. The attack on the Necromancers took some 15 renders/tweaks/edits to get what I wanted. The hardest by far was the video. Nine attempts, changing a lot of details and parameters as I went. Those are expensive and slow! It took a while. The result is not *perfect*, but it is beautiful. I’m very happy with how this came out.
I did feel I could blow a lot of points on this, because the newer engines are broadly more efficient. They are powerful and cheap if you’re doing fairly simple still image renders. And a couple of my updates have been just that. But with more tools, things can get more expensive in a hurry. It is fun though!

Expect one more update for this, and I’ll start a new post for BG2 (this one is huge!). But I may not do another video until my points reset on the 15th…