The Once and Future Champion (Baldur's Gate 3/Dragon Age)

[Simonbob]

Minsc?

That's..... Ok, yes, he's strong enough, but he usually wouldn't do this kind of thing.


Must not be with Boo. That hamster's smarter than that.

 

[cliffc999]

That's..... Ok, yes, he's strong enough, but he usually wouldn't do this kind of thing.

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Not a spoiler - remember how it was said that the 'Stone Lord' runs for the Absolute? He's tadpoled. They're also doing some other stuff.

 

[Mizu]

The Emperor is no more. Dunno why he thought his pedigree would impress Hawke either, as a foreigner to Faerun.

Sometimes the game puzzles can be very silly, as solutions go. I can definitely see "stop doing X to break Y" as a note from management to incompetent staff though

 

[Simonbob]

Poor bastard.

I hope they can get it out. He's a pretty good guy, if not that bright.

 

[TyricGaias]

Wonder how Ansur is gonna take it?

 

[cliffc999]

Wonder how Ansur is gonna take it?

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I'm still wondering what to do with Ansur. I mean, by one token he shouldn't be around any more because like any other unquiet ghost the only thing tethering him to this plane is his unfinished business and Lae'zel just cut that business' head off.

On the other hand, without the Emperor hanging around fucking everything up undead Ansur has no reason not to be totes chill with the party, should he still be extant to talk to them. It is an author's conundrum, but I have some chapters to go before I have to decide.

The Emperor is no more. Dunno why he thought his pedigree would impress Hawke either, as a foreigner to Faerun.

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There are three native Baldurians in the room, one of them expat Baldurian high nobility to boot. And at that point the Emperor was pretty desperately shotgunning.

 

[2 Hot Crown Subdues the Sinful]

Minsc is peak, as always.

 

[TyricGaias]

Minsc is peak, as always.

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Naw it's Boo. It's always been Boo. He goes for the eyes ya know

 

[cliffc999]

Naw it's Boo. It's always been Boo. He goes for the eyes ya know

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If you use Minsc's 'Summon Familiar: Boo' ability in-game and then throw Boo at the enemy, he actually has a chance to inflict 1 turn of Blind. I have tested this.

 

[civiulas]

The Emperor is no more. Dunno why he thought his pedigree would impress Hawke either, as a foreigner to Faerun.

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Its a false pedigree anyway. Balduran died and his soul was destroyed. The tadpole he was infected with has his memories and stole his (mutated) body, but what remained was not Balduran.

 

[Matrix Dragon]

."

"And so that your true goal - to usurp the power of this Crown. I see." Orpheus frowned mightily.

"Gale?" I turned to him, lifting an eyebrow inquiringly.

"It was just an... intrusive thought!" Gale insisted, his face red with embarassment. "One of those niggling little temptations we all feel but never actually act on!"

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"... twice!"

"...Wyll, we have a new candidate for team idiot."

"If you keep lying, I'm going to start cutting tentacles off until you've either run out of bullshit or tentacles."

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This line makes me giggle far far too much.

"No matter what we pressure him with, he'll just keep lying. And I really doubt his oh-so-convenient story that we have to keep him alive to do a job we already saw three non-illithids doing just the other day."

"I agree." Orpheus said. "Guards, dispose of it."

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On the one hand, this may be a problem later. On the other, GET FUCKED EMPY!

"In fact... Lae'zel, do our people still hold to the principle that a crecheling may not claim the full privileges of adulthood until they have claimed the head of a ghaik and presented it to their superior?"

"They do." Lae'zel bowed.

"Lae'zel, formerly of Creche K'llir." Orpheus recited formally. "I, Orpheus, Prince of the Comet, do hereby accept your offering of this insolent ghaik's head as proof of your loyalty and skill. From this day forth shall you be deemed a true warrior of the gith, adult and beholden to no creche master."

Lae'zel bowed formally to the captive prince. "I accept this honor from your hands with pride, Your Radiance. Sha'vah Orpheus!"

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I am amazed Lae'zel managed to resist squeeing as loud as Karlach did when meeting Jaheira. To be the first to be named an adult by Orpheus in thousands of years... that's a tale to tell her grandkids.

"Because when I originally came up here, I was intending to apologize."

"For what?" I asked her confusedly.

"For what?" she echoed incredulously. "Does a certain conversation by the river at Last Light not come to mind? Where I pretended to be a jealous idiot?"

"You were doing that under duress." I reassured her. "I don't hold it against you."

"Truly?" she asked nervously. "Because..." her eyes closed in shame. "Back when she thought I was as at least as bad as any other Sharran Isobel once challenged me that the worshippers of Shar had 'made mental cruelty both a science, a fine art, and a competitive sport' - and she was not wrong. Hawke, I hurt you." she said mournfully. "When I pretended that you'd let me down the same way you'd let Merrill down, I took your greatest fear and greatest shame, which you'd told me in confidence, and deliberately used it against you. I was so desperate to fulfill Shar's will that I manipulated you in the cruelest, most underhanded way I could possibly think of - and for no better reason than because I thought it had the best chance of working." Without actually moving she seemed to painfully huddle into herself and pull away. "Remember what we both said that night about how a relationship can't survive once the trust has been so gravely violated by the one that the other can never entirely overcome the fear that they might do it again? That was false in your case, of course. But I'm afraid-" she looked up at me with moist eyes. "I'm afraid that I've made it true in my case, with what I did to you. That's... the real reason I've been so busy the past several days. The longer I could postpone this conversation, the longer I could pretend I still had-" She gulped. "Still had the best thing that's ever happened to me. But- but I can't pretend forever. And I'll... understand, if you can't-"

"Shadowheart, stop talking nonsense." I cut her off firmly. "I am not mad at you, I certainly am not breaking up with you, and you have very little to apologize for." I paused momentarily. "All right, you have something substantial to apologize for but you just did that, and a sincere apology is all that you needed." I smiled at her. "Because I already understand why you did it. And you already understand why it was wrong. And we both understand why it's not something to be afraid of happening again." I quirked a lopsided grin at her. "I mean, I think we can rest assured that the next time Shar tries to hold a loved one hostage on you then you'll actually tell someone about it, yes?"

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Talking over their relationship drama like reasonable adults? Is that legal?

If you use Minsc's 'Summon Familiar: Boo' ability in-game and then throw Boo at the enemy, he actually has a chance to inflict 1 turn of Blind. I have tested this.

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Everyone gets unique lines for doing it too

 

[Toad]

Ahh, proper Minsc, without the Strength debuff.

His miniature giant space hamster hooked him up with that good rejuvenat.

 

[MissileTeatime]

Spoiler: suggestions

not very scared is because - not to sound like I've got a big head - because you all think that I'm handling it.

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This is valid, but the effectively-doubled 'because' feels weird to me.

a long-list prince of a multiplanar kingdom from an ancient era

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Should be "long-lost" instead of "long-list".

Pretty sure there was a "his" that should have been "us" when doing disguises between the Guild hall and the Counting House, too, but didn't grab a quote for that one.

And yay for Shadowheart actually talking about her stuff! Very important skill, that.

 

[Mizu]

Ahh, proper Minsc, without the Strength debuff.

His miniature giant space hamster hooked him up with that good rejuvenat.

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He has a strength debuff during bg3 gameplay? What's his actual strength stat, then?

 

[cliffc999]

He has a strength debuff during bg3 gameplay? What's his actual strength stat, then?

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Minsc, like all other playable characters, is reduced to the standards 27-point stat array you all get. Which means his stats are far lower than they should be.

 

[DIT_grue]

Spoiler: Suggestions

"Hah. No, I did not." she agreed. "And I looked into the access situation. First off, we can forget the about the Guild getting us in via the sea route. There's a new outfit in town, led by someone called the Stone Man, and they are on a rampage. In just a few weeks Nine-Fingers' people have already been pushed out of half of their territory - including both the harbor and the coastal inlets on the Chionthar where smugglers like to dock when they are avoiding the harbor. She's busy hiring mercenaries to try and hold on to what she's got left. Oh, and worse yet, it's common knowledge among the thieves of Baldur's Gate that the Stone Man serves the Cult of the Absolute."

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Delete this word.

"Shadowheart was right about the access controls. Wyrm's Rock has raised the drawbridge from the South Span - nothing is being allowed into the city from Rivington at all until after the coronation without an official pass, and those are rare on the ground as hell. The access controls on other gates are being even stricter. Rivington is a giant refugee camp now. Even our old tiefling acquaintances are stuck out there." Jaheira said.

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It took me a while to track down the previous mention for a reminder of what this was about. Maybe a time cue so at least readers aren't trying to look in the same chapter?
This seems to me a more awkward phrasing than ordering it as rare as hell on the ground.

The Guild had existed in Baldur's Gate for decades. At its height it had been an organized crime syndicate whose fingers reached all the way from the humblest streets of the Outer City to peeking through the windows of the High Hall itself. Although the Guild traditionally restricted itself to the less objectionable categories of criminal behavior, they were still as ruthless as any crime syndicate needed to be when necessary. Not paying your Guild debts led straight to a very unpleasant encounter with its enforcers, and excessively getting in the way of the Guild's operations often led to the Guild spending good coin to ferret out your secrets and then make sure they ended up in the hands of the people you least them wanted to. Even the patriars of the Upper City or the Flaming Fist didn't casually cross the Guild, although they certainly had more ways to make their displeasure known than the common Baldurian and thus earned a measure of restraint in how hard the Guild would fleece them. Not that weren't any number of guardsmen or nobles engaged in perfectly willing arrangements with the Guild, for everything from to contraband luxuries to strategic blackmail. They smuggled, they sold protection, they spied, and they did almost anything except murder for the right price - that latter was saved solely as a matter of in-house discipline.

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wanted them
that there weren't

We moved past them and headed down into the Guildhall proper. It was a giant underground - literally - tavern and festhall built on several levels surrounding a giant open-air atrium along with multiple offices and storerooms where people were busy collecting Guild 'taxes', inventorying 'merchandise', and bustling around making sure that the Guild's business kept running smoothly day and night.

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I'm not certain whether or not this is a word, and it could easily be a typo for feasthall (although the dictionary I checked didn't have that one either).

A generous use of cloaks and hoods, as well as a quick non-magical change of hair color for a couple of his at Shadowheart's skilled hands, was the best we could do to hide our more distinctive members as we headed through the early evening streets. The 'Counting House' was one of the city's largest banks and safety deposit houses - Jaheira was as startled as I had been to find out that it was apparently a Guild-owned front business. Still, if the Stone Man was going to go for something as high-profile as outright bank robbery then helping stop that would be a public service. And even if we wouldn't earn as much of Nine-Fingers' gratitude being an assist on the job as we could have if we'd solved the entire problem for her, at this point we'd settle for what we could get.

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us - This one that MissileTeatime pointed out is still in the text, unlike the other two.

The chief clerk at the bank did indeed accept our contact's name as proof of our bona fides, and gave us a written pass that let us through all the multiple layers of security to to the main vault. I honestly wondered how the hell the Stone Man even thought he could rob this place, given that we had passed through three separate checkpoints that had multiple barred gates that could be closed in an instant to trap intruders in a solid barred enclosure, complete with teams of armed guards. We then passed through a hallway lined with multiple rooms for examining safety deposit boxes to reach the inner door of the high-security vault at the absolute far end of the secure vault section - but the door was shut.

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Delete this word.

 

[cliffc999]

I'm not certain whether or not this is a word

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'Festhall' is indeed a Realms-specific word consistently used in the D&D lore all the way back to at least 2nd edition. Amusingly it was Ed Greenwood's way of sneaking 'whorehouse' past the censors - everybody thought it meant 'feasthall' until he finally dropped a Word of God about what it had really been in his original homebrew campaign that he eventually published. Man, the original supps really take on a new meaning when you realize what is actually happening re: festhalls being a common thing in Faerunian cities. Then again, I don't think prostitution is actually illegal anywhere in Faerun.

And I should have thanked you earlier for all the work you've been doing regarding typo corrections, and didn't. Thank you very much.

 

[LeonT]

You know, this helped remind me just how sweet and soft Shadowheart is when Shar has been told to piss off.

The girl who just likes fluffy animals and flowers. I can see her being extra huggy with Hawke now that she knows she isn't about to lose him and, honestly, I am all for it.

Also anyone else find it hilarious that Orpheus and Hawke seem like budding pals? Bet Lae'zel is feeling pleased right now at her choice of party leader.

 

[cliffc999]

You know, this helped remind me just how sweet and soft Shadowheart is when Shar has been told to piss off.

The girl who just likes fluffy animals and flowers.

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I have said and will keep saying that Jenevelle Hallowleaf had a solid destiny ahead of her as a Disney Princess before her abduction into Shar's cult.

Which was actually the point. Shar was spitefully trying to prove to Selune that even the purest could be corrupted. Great plan there, Shar.

 

[S!ËGFR!ÊD]

I have said and will keep saying that Jenevelle Hallowleaf had a solid destiny ahead of her as a Disney Princess before her abduction into Shar's cult.

Which was actually the point. Shar was spitefully trying to prove to Selune that even the purest could be corrupted. Great plan there, Shar.

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I mean, she's not wrong, but she really should have cut her losses when Hawke showed up. Guy's like Geralt, he bulldozes through anything between him and his loved ones.

 

[Matrix Dragon]

I have said and will keep saying that Jenevelle Hallowleaf had a solid destiny ahead of her as a Disney Princess before her abduction into Shar's cult.

Which was actually the point. Shar was spitefully trying to prove to Selune that even the purest could be corrupted. Great plan there, Shar.

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And it took so much brainwashing there was seemingly nothing left of the disney princess, and then, every time she reacted according to instinct, the princess returns!

Shar must have been taking bites out of her surroundings in frustration, and that was before Hawke showed up