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Minsc is nothing more than a psychic projection created by Boo.

Trio 30 Update 4
Dreen II - halfling thief, protagonist (Corey_Russell)
Rex - half-orc shaman (Grond0)
Drimler - dwarven defender (Gate70)

So the Trio found themselves at the entrance of the Cloakwood Mines. We pressed our way inside. As is our usual practice, we bypassed Heirashan, and then used the "trick" of Drimler/Rex standing in a room close to the exit and Dreen stealthed his way to the exit of level 2. Then a fairly quick battle at level 3, then a straight path to Davaoeorn's level. Dreen did great de-trapping and then handed a potion of magic blocking to Drimler to keep Davaoern occupied. Rex couldn't resist getting immolated, but Drimler duly got the kill of Davaoern.

Then we were off to the Great City, the Trio made rapid progress. Dreen was having some inventory issues, and need a brief AFK, so Rex used fog on some mages in the Sorcerous Sundries. The party got themselves poisoned. We then paid the priestess of Umerlee a visit, before then killing her. We then tried to get the haste boots from Lothander. We messed up though as he got hit with darts of stunning BEFORE his dialog. When the stun wore off, he turned hostile! Uh, oh! We had no choice but to charm him and do the dialog and miss out on his boots. Oh well.

We pressed on. In no particular order, we did the following:
* Took down Marek. A few traps and a dwarven defender were too much for Marek.

* Worked on Razamith's tower. It got pretty hairy as Rex found his health dropping and with a ghast blocking his exit downstairs. This meant he went up and then down and brought a bunch of hobgoblins down with the ghast! He was finally able to made a run for it. Drimler tanked great, and Dreen's acid arrows were wiping out the enemies quickly. Rex dropped to ONE HP. A bit close.

* Jardak was taken down with backstabs and Drimler's reliable melee. For some reason Jardak wanted a piece of Dreen and did a big hit on Dreen, but Dreen was OK.

* Mountain Maulers were taken down rather easily. Two snares helped and also Mountain Maulers were rather keen on wiping out Gropel Hind's bunch so made it easy for us to shoot them from behind.

* Degrodel's minions taken out. Dwarven Defender stance proved invaluable once again. Degrodel was softened up with a backstab and couldn't get anything going before going down.

* Vayya and Deserta were killed for their gauntlets. Unfortunately, as it turned out Dreen couldn't use them - doh! Oh well.

* Rex tried to solo Sunin, but found himself running in horror. So Dreen got the kill with his acid arrows.

* A boy's body was returned to his father and raised. Ragefast blew up in a backstab.

We paid a visit to the Iron Throne. PfM scroll and Defender's stance did a good job of keeping the enemies busy while Rex and Dreen pumped the enemies with magic and arrows respectively. One last errand to do, we took down Vail and his friends. Drimler then picked up the cloak from Quenash.

We then proceeded to Candlekeep. The doppleganger/Shistal was taken down like usual. Dreen did great trap work in the crypts, thanks mostly to his thieving potion to shore up his pick lock scores (his trap score is 100). We go to Prat's caves and needed to save here.

Amel, Elven Stalker, Update 19

Previous updates:
Entering Boareskyr bridge, we made a habit of saving some charges on our necklaces of missles by mostly using the two wands of fire and finishing off remaining opponents with Amel's backstabs: We don't actually have any trouble with the charges - I'm just doing this for fun, because I want to get as much use out of the short amount of time we will have with the Gauntlets of the Stalker as possible. Will take a while until our backstabs will be as strong again.
Good news: We got working boots of speed from Glint's relative! This is only the second time I've got usable ones in a new-reload run. We crafted some more items (dragon scale armor for Amel being the most important one) and started doing the sidequests around here, including the murder of Vichand: After we got our hands on the void arrows +3 and dealt with the false priestess (gaining a nice shortsword with great crit chance, which Amel is using sometimes instead of the +3 options), we returned to camp in order to charge, together with the flaming fist. I decided to hang back for a while, waiting for the majority of crusaders to arive before throwing my first salve of fireballs: This, and a few quick ranged attacks, got rid of every non-wizard involved in the initial assault, and we never once went into harm's way: We waited a bit more, using some monster summing charges to gain some time, still evading all attempts to hurt us in any way (such as enemy fireballs): Why did we still wait? Well, mostly because MGOI doesn't last forever, and we wanted to wait out all the mages MGOIs, which would allow us to use another barrage of fireballs against them: We got there just in time, as the flaming fist mage died - and only a single crusader mage survived our second salve. No trouble dealing with that one: With the party still buffed, we equipped Corwin with some of our few dispelling arrows and used two of them to debuff and disrupt the wizard at the bridge, in order to prevent the dreaded non-standard game over: Now, we wait at the Coalition Camp.

There's no penalty in the BG series for learning spells above the level you can cast. Only intelligence and kit matter to scribing.

Thanks Arvia, that is greatly appreciated!

Amel, Elven Stalker, Update 18

Previous updates:
I started exploring the Troll Claw Woods. Because firebombing was getting a bit boring, I started to do go for some more regular battle strategy in order to change things up, mostly relying on my buffs and strong ranged damage - such as in the troll cave: However, once again, this turned out to be kind of pointless - it takes a lot longer, the party takes more damage, and more resting is required. Consequently, at the end of the area, I went back to fireballs against larger enemy groups: The sheer amount of big enemy groups in SoD (especially on insane) sadly makes it so that the most effective strategy is also one of the least interesting ones.

In the Forest of Wyrms, we first picked up the Stalker Gauntlets - an item which isn't all that useful for most groups, but amazing if you have a stalker. Aside from the dexterity bonus, it increases Amel's backstab modifier by one - and, as a nice bonus, at about the same time, Amel reached level 9, which results in her having a powerful +4 backstab modifier right now.

Entering the spider cave, we experienced some strange AI behaviour - preserving some fireball charges, we only used wands in the beginning, no necklaces of missles. This resulted in a prolonged battle near the entrance of the cave (with us swapping around rings of free action as needed), and the AI would send spiders from the other parts of the caves to us, mostly one by one - and from each part, even the pretty distant western area - but never all of the spiders, only a few: This strange behaviour resulted in a very easy clean-up, and we took down the rhino beetle with ranged weapons: Now, we turned to Morentheren. Has this encounter been changed? In previous runs, I was always able to get the throwing knife kill, but twice in a row now, the dragon has awakened immediately, forcing me into a regular battle. Luckily, I had buffed up just in case (and included protection from poison scrolls). Morentherene was really only protected by one stoneskin spell, so I was quickly able to get through it and deal damage at range, with wands of frost and of the heavens added in - I also retreated to the cave entrance, to delay the arrival of the brood and give myself an option to leave the area: Retreat wasn't needed, though - the dragon didn't survive for much longer: We used firebombing to get through the bugbear caves quickly, because we still wanted to use the PfP buff to deal with Ziatar - which turned out to be unneccessary, because Ziatar died immediately, unable to even activate her sanctuary: No strong physical defenses on these cult mages, so I just punched through with ranged attacks. The approach I used against many SCS mages in BG1, where I would go after their defenses against magic instead, so far hasn't been all that needed in SoD (though I still have the required spells memorized). The Neothelid shared Ziatar's fate in not being able to do anything - it died before being able to submerge once: Akanna can be dangerous - not because of her abilities, but because of the two invisible aerial servants. I sent in my skeletons (used to waste the Neothelid's domination) to draw out these two, and Amel approached with a quick backstab - note the improvement in our backstab damage thanks to the gauntlets and level 9, resulting in a one hit kill: Amel now continued to kite the aerial servants around while the others took them down with ranged weapons. Leaving the shadow aspect in peace for now, we approached the big party at the end of the map - our initial fireballs somewhat failed us, barely killing any of them, but the fully buffed party had no trouble finishing the fight: Now, let's go for the scaries foe in insane SoD: The shadow aspect. It uses the mislead-backstab cheese to utterly destroy parties without the ability to repeatedly dispel illusions, and we didn't have true sight yet. However, we did have Glint, and I had made sure to get his detect illusions to 100. Still, my first approach failed - the hasted party approached the door, I used a monster summoning charge and tried to send in glint to detect the trap - but this trap is super hard to detect, for some reason - it almost never shows up. The shadow aspect usually will kill every summoned monster with one hit, so we ran out of time and fled with the hasted party, all the way back to the bugbear caves. Returning again, we buffed up once more. This time, I decided to just activate the trap (there's some kind of cloudlike AoE blindness effect involved when triggering it) and get my whole party in. The shadow aspect's main weakness is that he doesn't have the best targeting AI - he just tends to go for the nearest vulnerable target, so monster summoning wands can keep him busy for a time if you don't approach him in the meantime. Upon entering his chamber, glint started detecting illusions and was able to get rid of the mislead clone: The shadow aspect countered with another mislead immediately, but Dynaheir had already started her oracle spell. Baeloth used another monster summoning charge, as the others started dealing damage to the shadow aspect - his horror failed to affect the protected party, and Minsc landed a huge crit, ending the battle very early. Note that Minsc is using the two-handed sword from Korlasz's tomb and has * in Two-Handed Weapon Style - so he can crit on an 18: Greatly increasing crit chance is a nice strategy in some P&P editions, but generally not all that useful in BG - but I found it to be more fun compared to just equipping a +3 sword or two +2 maces, and it has payed off so far.