At the bridge, I'm not sure whether an initial trap disrupted the mage's fire portal spell. However, Retro's first dispelling arrow struck home, allowing Doppel to puncture him with the Dagger of Venom and he died shortly after that.
At the Coalition Camp we checked in to pick up some Bwoosh & poison and bought a few goodies from Nazramu. There was nothing of interest at Dead Man's Pass and just a brief stop at Dragonspear to rescue Skie. I couldn't remember whether there was anything useful in the vampire's hoard at Bloodbark Grove, so we went to find out. Doppel did well to keep away from him for some time, but eventually got drained once before Retro landed a 2nd (and fatal) backstab.
Checking the equipment though disclosed the efforts had been wasted as there was nothing we wanted.
Back at the Coalition Camp, Mizhena was nowhere to be found, so Retro used up a restoration scroll to get Doppel back to full health.
On to the Underground River, where Retro enquired if Doppel would like a club that could hit Belhifet. He said yes, so Retro went to find a couple of druids and, rather than complete their quest, just attacked one of them. With the club bagged, we retreated from the remaining combat - but not together. Retro went along a path we hadn't explored, while Doppel tried to return the way we'd come past a large group of orcs. This time though he wasn't in stealth and, once they'd blocked his passage, he lasted only moments.
Retro sneaked in to grab equipment before returning to the Coalition Camp once more. Once more there was no Mizhena and, deciding to treat that as a bug, we agreed to bend our normal rule of no NPCs and briefly recruited Viconia to revive Doppel.
Back at the Underground River, we both got confused a couple of times, but pre-laid traps helped deal with myconids reasonably easily anyway. The nearby gargantuan spider is a dangerous enemy, but Doppel saved against a web tangle there just before shooting it down.
A fight with a cyclops then proved easier than expected when some animals turned up (a legacy of our encounter with the druids previously, despite killing Jamven).
We just grabbed a token from the body before sneaking past all the remaining guards and into the underground area.
The various quests in the initial area were all ignored as we placed the Bwoosh and blagged our way into the Warrens. Retro opened a few containers to get some +3 arrows and bullets before we used the lift. Stealth allowed us to poison the food and water and escape pretty unscathed.
Outside the entrance, Doppel found he had become visible during the transition and hastily gulped an invisibility potion to allow us to escape peacefully.
The Coalition Camp invasion waves didn't take long. Pre-laid traps cut the first wave down to size a bit and a couple of exploding arrows dealt with most of the rest.
Traps left only two of the mages alive (one of those held) in the second wave.
More survived traps in the third wave, but they were largely held and exploding arrows quickly made that combat a formality.
There were no pre-laid traps for the final wave, but a single thrown trap was still very effective at the start of the contest.
However, Swift Rabbit remained active and took advantage of Retro having his bow equipped to land a nasty backstab. That prompted a swift retreat to hide again and Swift Rabbit switched targets and found himself on the wrong end of a backstab from a Coalition Spy.
At the Siege, Ashatiel was stunned by a single dart from Retro.
Inside hell, we ran through the first area before traps helped deal with various demons quickly. Thrix was impressed and handed over a longsword to Doppel to slightly boost the potential damage he could do to Belhifet.
The enemies in the elevator were all dispatched without problems and Retro got the bonus of another level going up there.
At the top we accepted the help of Caelar (though simulated her being outside the party by not allowing her to be controlled). One potential strategy would have been for Retro to try and lay a cluster of traps early on in the combat, before summoned demons appeared, and try and lead Belhifet into them. Instead though she took on a couple of initial demon helpers while Doppel joined Caelar in the assault on Belhifet and Hephernan. Retro kept an eye on that from afar and used restoration scrolls to keep health up.
That strategy seemed to be working nicely as Belhifet's HPs seemed to drop pretty quickly. However, we lost track of time and it came as a surprise when Doppel succumbed to Belhifet's fear aura and started running in panic.
Retro had a small window of opportunity to renew her own potion of magic shielding to protect against that - but failed to act and she started running as well.
That spelled disaster as, without any more healing, Caelar quickly fell.
Belhifet was now near death, but only under attack by Doppel (using a non-proficient longsword) and Retro (fatigued as a result of using the restoration scrolls and requiring a critical to hit anything). As more and more summons arrived it became increasingly difficult to even get an attack in and all the while Belhifet was gently regenerating. Retro advised Doppel to attempt a suicide run and hope he got lucky with a melee attack. The result was, as expected, another dead body littering the floor. Retro didn't have much time to mourn though as his protective potion once more expired and Belhifet landed a hold person.
@Gate70@Grond0 So near and yet so far.
Journal of Tharl Twinaxe
We picked up Ajantis prior to going sirine hunting. That was straightforward, then we returned to the bandit camp and attacked Taughoz. Dynaheir got hurt by archers but recovered somewhat by draining them. Once Taughoz was killed Branwen cast healing spells after which we all had a quick nap.
The rest of the bandits outside the tent were then killed before attacking those inside. Web and silence were the most critical spells cast inside, but holy smite and acid arrows certainly helped. We picked up Coran and he helped us loot the camp before returning to Cloakwood.
Cloakwood so far has proved easy. We even slew some more wyvern in transit. Coran is mainly used as an archer and wears heavy armour, but if required as a thief he is quite happy to strip it off so long as there are no nearby enemies. We are now outside the Cloakwood mine having killed every wyvern that we have seen.
Those in the mine didn't cause too much trouble, though wew did summon monsters to deal with Davaeorn who wasted his spells on them.
After doing the minor quests in Baldur's Gate, we took on the Iron Throne.
Upon arriving at Candlekeep, I have reached the level cap, not so my allies.
I used a new tactic against Prat, sending Ajantis solo against them but protecting against electricity first. It worked, but not as well as I expected.
Our party made their way out of the camp, clearing the Coast Way Crossing. We swapped around rings of free action for the spiders, dealt with the Menhirs (with Baeloth + Nymph's Cloak) and won the battle at the bridge via fireball charges:
Teleria was our next target, and she died to ranged attacks and a stealthed attack by Amel (which somehow didn't count as a backstab) before her buffs even fired up:
Next up, we traveled to the Coast Way Crossing, killing the vampire - he was simply shot with our massive barrage of magical ranged weapons (with three bow-wielding rangers, one of them an archer, this party can deal tons of single target damage at range if needed, especially if I choose to add in a Wand of the Heavens and two Wands of Frost or Magic Missle spells), not even able to finish his first attempt at domination. We threw fireballs at the orc party and dealt with the troll cave ambush site upon returning. The trolls themselves weren't much of a problem (most of them were killed or slowed right at the start of combat), though the Neo-Otyugh was annoying and forced Amel and Minsc to be a bit more careful:
With a new sling for Baeloth, we now made our way to the Dwarves of Dumathoin. The first area was simply done with either ranged weapons or moderate amounts of fireballs, while for the very dangerous second part, we used our two remaining PfU scrolls, a cloud giant strength potion, heroism and speed on Minsc, who took down all the undead (except for two invisible greater shadows and maybe a wraith - and he needed some help with a stoneskin/MI/Blur-buffed Baeloth for the bronze sentry):
With the exception of this encounter, the party stayed at the entrance of the place, buffed with invisibility 10' radius. After dealing with the big northern room, Minsc had to return for the party so Corwin could renew his PfU scroll, and he returned to destroy the final remaining enemies:
Now, we looted everything, got The Secret Revealed and took down Coldhearth - attacking him a few times at range, using TSR as his buffs fired up and shooting him once more:
Glint, buffed with haste + boots of speed, threw the phylacterty into the fire, and we sold three gem bags worth of gems before moving on to the Troll Claw Woods, where we will continue next time.
Dear brothers, sisters and siblings in arms, I haven't been active in this thread for a while (real life), but I've noticed that @Enuhal has joined the Hall of Heroes with an Undead Hunter (congratulations!) and nobody has made the update yet.
I'll gladly help to do such stuff from now on, so if anyone finishes a run, please tag me and I'll get to it asap.
I'm still new to this whole moderation business and not exactly swimming in leisure time, so I'd appreciate if you kept, as has been done, organizing the noteworthy details with links to the essential posts in a post after a successful run, so that I can just copy them, and forgive me if it sometimes takes a few days to react. Also, let me know if anyone else hasn't been added yet.
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.
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:
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.
Final entry. Lost this game too due to corrupt files. At least I know the two files now that were causing the problem so future runs should be OK.
I have just done a run with an Inquisitor, a Cavalier and a Fighter.
It came to an end fighting an ankheg near Tenya. It killed the Cavalier first and then the Inquisitor. Will start it again at Candlekeep. We had killed Tarnesh and Sonner en route. Next time we'll get better armour before fighting the ankheg.
@Wise_Grimwald Remember the acid protection scroll can really help with the Ankhegs - you can get it at Thalantyr's. Also high misssile defense helps with the acid attacks, and remember for your tank to wear girdle of bluntness to defend against their melee.
The best way to boost missile defense, of course, is to close to melee range. That's -8 to hit for them, so an ankheg is at effective THAC0 21. Even without a Dex bonus, splint mail and a large shield will make them only hit on a 20 in melee range.
Then again, my usual answer to that particular ankheg is to just run past it the first time. Ankhegs have slow initiative, so you can pretty reliably reach the edge of the map and travel to either the zombie farm or Ulgoth's Beard without engaging. And fighting them at level 1 is just too risky; the acid and high damage means there's always a risk of a one-hit kill.
@Wise_Grimwald Remember the acid protection scroll can really help with the Ankhegs - you can get it at Thalantyr's. Also high misssile defense helps with the acid attacks, and remember for your tank to wear girdle of bluntness to defend against their melee.
In my second run I waited until my party members reached level 2 and then they were a walkover. @jmerry You're right of course. I thought that with two paladins and a fighter we might be tough enough and we weren't.
My second run is going exceedingly well, paladins are level 4, fighter dualled to cleric at level 3 and is now level 4. All ankheg are now dead unless I decide to rest.
Journal of Jehu and Party
True sight and protection from fear made Tarnesh a walkover.
When we discovered that Sonner and his cohorts were evil, their fate was sealed.
We returned the bowl to Tenya.
On the way to Joia to return her ring, we were attacked by 5 bandits who hurt Elthan.
However after using "lay on hands" his wounds were not too serious and we were able to walk away from the incident unlike the bandits.
Marl was calmed and a tome taken to Firebead.
We headed south where we killed a couple of ogrillon. On the body of one was a letter to Mirianne which we delivered. We then picked up the Colquetle amulet and proceeded to Nashkel where we chatted to Noober and refused a reward from Oublek. Heading east, we killed the Amazing Ooopah and Zordral.
After picking up some armour, a wand and a ring we took Samuel to the FAI. We then headed north where we began an onslaught on ankhegs.
We all reached level three wherupon Elli dual-classed to Cleric
We gave Farmer Brun 100 in gold, delivered the Colquetle Amulet and helped Mellicamp.
The battle against Droth and Shoal was touch and go but ultimately successful.
We helped Arcand the Mad before slaying some sirine and helping Charleston Nib.
So far, SoD has been smooth sailing, but this time around, I started making several mistakes. Everything started out well upon travelling to Bloodbark Grove - in the ambush area, my fireball barrage was enough to kill the Shadowy Figure outright, and the only one surviving member of its band was killed by a few arrows:
This gave me access to Vexation +2, another excellent weapon for backstabbing. Truth be told, there are simply too many good short swords available in SoD - I just can't use them all. Would've loved some more diversity among weapon types with numerous great pieces - but since I've never gotten access to Vexation before, I'm going to use it - guaranteed bleed effect and +2 strength after a successful backstab sounds amazing.
Clearing the Blood Bark Grove was relatively easy and was mostly done via backstabs and ranged attacks, with no fireballs needed. I buffed up for the group of skeletons, taking them down in regular combat. However, I badly mishandled the vampire cellar. Instead of using one of my countless potions of clarity or swapping around the helm of charm protection, I gave the vampire a chance to dominate one of my party members, which he promptly took, taking over Minsc's mind. My genius plan was to simply flee the cellar, but as I was trying to do so, I realized that every area transition in SoD requires the gathering of your party, which involves actually having control over them. Now, I was trapped in a small corner of the room, with no way to dispel Minsc or leave, and Minsc was hacking through Dynaheir's stoneskins. My backup plan was to drink potions of invisibility on everyone in order to wait out the domination effect (meanwhile, I had killed the vampire with ranged weapons) - which did eventually work, but before Dynaheir could drink her potion, she was hit and stunned by a vampire wolf, resulting in her death:
After domination ended, we had to clear the remaining wolves and pick up her gear, returning to the camp.
Next, we entered Dead Man's Pass, clearing the various monster groups with a few fireball wand charges, backstabs and ranged attacks:
Having gotten into trouble in the vampire cellar, we did much better with the shadow cellar - after buffing up and entering, we started casting oracle and took down the unsleeping guardian with some well-placed nukes:
One greater shadow managed to level drain Minsc, but I decided to move on to the mimic cave while still buffed. However, once again, just like in the vampire cellar, not using my potions aggressively enough (despite having an abundance of them) cost me - While killing the initial group of spiders, I missed one web tangle in the combat log, and Minsc didn't have Spider's Bane equipped. Since I didn't realize what was going on, I didn't swap one of my rings of free action to him - he got tangled and killed by the horde of spiders. I actually use free action potions on everyone as a rule in this cave because of the AoE crowd control available to the mimic, but I had planned to rest before taking on this foe, so they weren't active yet. Once again, I had to return to camp and resurrect a party member. Forgot to take screenshots here.
Finally, I did buff up (including free action potions) and summon skeletons for the mimic, neo-othyugh, slimes, spiders etc. at the end of the cave - these can be very dangerous otherwise. The killer mimic can deal tons of damage, so he was my primary target:
The neo-othyugh did manage to hit a skeleton and Amel. Luckily, Amel is wearing the green dragon scale armor, granting her immunity to poison damage - so victory was easily acquired:
Next up, we will enter the outside area of the underground river.
Next we went basilisk hunting, ending up fighting Mutamin and killing him.
Upon heading south we reunited Albert and Rufie before fighting Vax and Zal
We headed westward where I protected a dryad.
We then took 'Drienne's cat to her and killed Ingot before heading yet further west to kill more gnolls.
Heading north we killed a polar bear and Nevillle before heading for the Lighthouse Area where we cleared the area of sirine before exploring the cave.
Elthan was held when he set off a trap, but Elli and I were able to kill the golem in time. The next trap wasn't a problem so the second flesh golem was killed easily.
We have all reached 35,000 experience now so it is time to complete our party. Thieves and mages are out of the question as we intend to be REALLY righteous.
Entering the outer underground river area, an invisible Glint disarmed the traps, fought the ogres for leadership by kiting them with his sling and returned to the group, which cleared the various enemy forces in the area, acquiring Mizhena's necklace. The fight at the gates went fairly well: We fireballed the initial enemy force, and as the others started to teleport in, a well-timed oracle spell revealed the dangerous crusader scouts just before they were able to start backstabbing:
They all used their one invisibility potion, and I countered with the instant detect invisibility via the sword from the Dorn questline - this neutralized most of the immediate danger, as the party rushed inside to take out all of the hostile ranged fighters. Eventually, two crusader mages started porting in, but both were busy fighting druid summons from our allies and got destroyed by the party before casting any significant spells on us.
We looted Caelar's Seal and made our way to the Crusader Camp, where we completed every single sidequest for some great experience and useful items. No trouble here, as there are basically no fights involved. One last thing I did for now was entering the inner underground river area in order to backstab the mage summoning water elementals (one additional hit was needed, as the backstab didn't kill him outright) - next time, we will explore all of the caves and enter the castle basement.
We took Khalid and Jaheira to Nashkel but dumped them there as Jaheira was far more interested in balance than righteousness. The same with Xzar and Montaron. They were pure evil. Then at last we met up with Ajantis. He has much the same ethics that we have and I think that we will get on well with him. His experience was also almost the same as ours. I think that we will investigate the Nashkel Mines together.
After some thought I decided that just because Jaheira was unsuitable for our party, that was no reason to exclude Khalid, so we picked them up and left jaheira in the Nashkel Barracks.
As we proceeded southwards we were ambushed and helped by Dorn, however when he suggested joining us, Khalid vetoed the idea.
We then killed Greywolf, Neira and Silke and after killing the latter Garrick identified al of ou items for the cost of an identity scroll and a night in the inn.
Of course we also had to tell him our tales which he said he would put into verse. "Those tales will make me welcome in many an inn for months to come," he said. We then sought out Bassilus and killed him.
We accidentally bumped into Zargal and killed him too.
After entering the Nashkel mines I was able to save a miner anf discovered that the yipping demons that I had heard about were less fearsome than the tales that I have heard about them since they were merely kobolds.
Mulahey was no problem to us and neither were a group of hostile Amazons.
We then cleared the caves in the area of undead and killed some slime that a foolish mage had created.
We gave Joseph's ring to his widow before going to kill the half-ogres that had hurt Bjornin.
We didn't need to kill Neira as Amnish soldiers did it for us.
Whilst looking for them we were attacked by some bandits. Elli cast silence which didn't affect the mage who then proceeded to panic all but two of us. We however defeated the bandits, but the panicked members of the party ran into a group of gnolls who chased them. Eventually we killed the gnolls, but it was a long battle.
We then helped Drittz before eventually finding and killing the half-ogres that we were looking for. He suggested that we use guile rather than brute force.
I delved into the first underground river cave, fighting some shadows - Minsc got level drained once by a wraith, but I continued to venture on. Using my six green scrolls with protection from acid helped with the blind albino wyrmlings and their breath weapon:
To the south, we quickly backstabbed and killed Ferrusk:
Sadly, his summons still appeared despite his immediate death. I made another mistake herr, not taking gargantuan spiders seriously enough. While I swapped around my rings of free action this time around, I didn't make sure to never engage them in melee range, so their uncisciousness-attacks managed to hit Baeloth - which resulted in every enemy in the room focusing on the sorcerer, getting through his stoneskins and killing him before I was able to take them down:
My remaining five party members continued to fireball/shoot the groups of myconids, dryads, spiders and umber hulks. After that, we returned to the camp to rest and revive Baeloth, because we wanted to be prepared for Kanaglym - going directly south, ignoring the undead for now, in order to rush and firebomb the mages before they would be able to fire up their buffs:
Most of the battle was basically won at this point. Our most important other encounter here was Zadroth, against whom we used the second charge of "The Secret Revealed" in order to make him vulnerable:
His robe is going to be important, because it allows Dynaheir to cast sequencer - which we will use against Hephernaan in the basement (a quick way to disrupt his spell protections). Entering the warrens, we moved on downstairs with full buffs, quickly rushing down the first enemy group and immediately moving to Hephernaan's room, where we were able to kill one of the mages before his buffs were activated. Glint immediately started detecting illusions, because Hephernaan had included improved invisibility in his pre-buffs:
The second mage had no unusual physical defenses (mostly only MI/Stoneskin), so the party took him down while Dynaheir waited until Glint had detected illusions. Meanwhile, Hephernaan was able to finish his first spell - unholy blight:
Now, Dynaheir used her sequencer to remove Hephernaan's spell protections:
Things for Hephernaan looked really bad now - The fighters got through his stoneskins at the same time, and now we were able to hit him with wand charges and melee hits alike (Corwin dealt some damage to herself because I didn't notice his physical mirror):
Hephernaan didn't get to finish a second spell and teleported away:
So... at this point, things got a bit crazy. I was quite confident that the constant teleporting in of crusaders after Hephernaans disappearenace had been removed in a previous patch. Maybe this was only true for lower difficulty levels? In any case... after taking down the regular main fighting force, teleports kept coming in, with groups that always included a crusader mage, which made things incredibly dangerous very quickly. We got swarmed, forcing me to stop looting - I only had time to quickly poison food and water supplies before I just had to run - Dynaheir even got trapped by the enemy forces and had to drink an invisibility potion to escape:
All the crusader upstairs turned hostile, so the hasted party just ran as fast as they could, freeing Slug on the way:
We placed the barrel of bwoosh, used invisibility 10' radius and another haste spell and moved to the east. Upon encountering the main enemy force we interrupted the cleric and mage, who were both casting divination spells, with Amel and Corwin, before both of them drank invisibility potions:
We made our escape and returned to camp, where we are now resting. Next time, we will defend the camp and attack Dragonspear Castle.
I am just beginning to realise just how big a handicap I have placed on myself by restricting my party to lawful good characters who are not thieves or mages. It certainly has made for an interesting game as many tactics that I normally use are unavailable.
Journal of Jehu the Righteous and Party
We decided to investigate Durlag's Tower which proved to be "Challenging" without a thief. The traps and the doppelgangers proved to be the worst problem though spiders that poisoned us proved difficult too.
Then we were taken to the bandit camp after which we fought Deke and then Tranzig.
The conflict at the camp was relatively easy. Straightforward fighting outside and a silence spell followed by straightforward fighting inside the tent.
Cloakwood was similarly straightforward. My party could have been designed with Cloakwood in mind. Freedom of action spells negated all the webs.
We have now arrived at the mine. That could be more challenging.
Not much to say about the attack on the coalition camp - I just threw six fireballs at each of the approaching groups, buffing up in the meantime in order to be ready for the final assault of named enemies. I started using some of my potions (such as heroism, invulnerability, speed) because I have way more than I will need for the remainder of SoD:
I had the mages and the dwarves with me when approaching Grimgor, and decided to stay back for a bit, taking down anyone foolish enough to approach with ranged attacks:
With all of our buffs, our damage output was easily high enough to deal with any incoming foes, as Grimgor himself soon had to learn:
We cleared the remaining attackers and rested one more time, getting ready for the siege. There, we started buffing up with oils of speed, and Amel + Corwin equipped our arrows of detonation in order to decimate the enemy ranks:
I was also starting to buff up Amel with some protective spells and useful potions, preparing her for the forthcoming duel. Indeed, soon the courtyard was clear:
I also had to take down the guards at the secondary gate before being able to start the duel:
Our enemy appears:
I usually use a PfM scroll for this fight, but I felt ready to go without one, due to Amel's buffs and a few potions of magic shielding at my disposal if needed, so we started off with full aggression, applying our bleed effect:
Ashatiel didn't get to finish a single spell before being forced into her sanctuary - I used my necklace of missles to finish the fight in order to get around sanctuary:
Time to make our way to Avernus. We entered hell and buffed up with chaotic commands (bought all of the scrolls of this spells available in SoD), resist fear and more oils of speed, taking down the initial group of fiends, which I usually just skip:
With these powerful buffs at the ready, we fought our way to the elevator, and Amel offered up a piece of her soul for a +3 longsword. Now, we spent a lot of time buffing up with the usual Big B preparations: Green scrolls + potions of cold resistance, fire resistance, poison protection, absoption; some potions of fortitude, agility and strength. Mind-focusing, heroism, defense, invulnerability, speed, power (which we used later on in the elevator), storm giant strength, clarity. Scrolls of chaotic commands, emotion: courage and hope, and all of our regular buffs, such as stoneskins, blur, shield, MI for our casters, now adding spell shield and SI:A, AoF for the rangers, including DUHM for Amel; bless, prayer and recitation + DUHM and PfE 10' radius for glint. I'm sure I'm forgetting something - oh yeah, enchanted weapon on Dynaheir, the only one without +3 weapons or ammunition.
So, we reached the end of the elvator ride, and Belhifet, Hephernaan and their devils were ready to fight our party + Caelar. We immediately spread out in order to take down the devils, while Dynaheir approached Belhifet in order to draw out his dispel magic:
However, something is wrong with this screenshot - if you check Dynaheir's buffs, you can see that her SI:A is actually gone already. I used it too early, and didn't notice. Now, until today, I somehow was convinced that spell shield also protects against dispel magic - but it doesn't, as I now know. So, as our fighters with their amazing damage output were killing some of the first devils, Dynaheir lost all of her buffs:
Well, at least spreading out prevented anyone else from getting hit. Not too much of a big deal, as Dynaheir isn't really here to deal damage in this fight. She quickly drank a potion of magic shielding to prevent any crowd control effect from hitting her and moved away from Big B. Our fighters made short work of their assigned targets and started shooting down Hephernaan, while Belhifet used his improved invisibility, prompting Glint to cast his one and only true sight spell. Meanwhile, Dynaheir added an oil of speed to get her mobility back:
I can't overstate how much damage our rangers were dealing at this point - all this is happening within seconds, Hephernaan died before Glint got much further with his spell, and Caelar, for some reason, was just standing around doing nothing instead of helping us:
Glint was still busy casting as we equipped all +3 weapons/ammo and got Big B to heavily wounded status:
As Glint finally completed his spell, Belhifet was already near death. It's only been three rounds since the initial dispel magic:
And we're done:
Our three rangers did a lot of work here. This might be the first time I've managed to kill Belhifet before he was able to gate in any more reinforcements, and we even got rid of all of his allies first. Our stalker was a lot of fun in BG1 and SoD, though the loss of our SoD items will certainly hurt us a lot (especially our gauntlets and the boots of speed). Not sure how much of the original playstyle we can maintain in SoA.
Starting with SoA, we faced some potential trouble with the opening dungeon: Thanks to the improved SCS NPC customization, Jaheira and Imoen start without any memorized spells in their spellbook, so for most of the first level of the dungeon, not wanting to waste my one rest quite yet, I decided to only engage in physical combat, using Amel's stealths and backstabbing as much as possible:
As you can see, fighting the duergar in the library also attracted Illych and his team - with the last one coming in being the duergar wizard, who managed to hold Minsc, because Amel failed to backstab him before he was able to activate mirror images - still, Amel still has great thac0 and damage, and she was able to deal with this threat in time:
Now, we decided to take our one rest before facing the Otyugh - though we wouldn't have needed it yet, because Amel was able to backstab, run, hide and backstab again without taking any hits:
For the mephits in the plane of air, we summoned a forest being, serving as a distraction and target for their first barrage of abilities, allowing the party to swoop in relatively unopposed:
We buffed up before facing Ulvaryl, with Amel getting the kill with ease:
Using our haste to its fullest, we ran over to the shadow thieves, where Jaheira also cast true sight to prevent backstabs. Still, she got into a little trouble due to an icelance hitting her:
The only potential danger was the remaining duergar mage to the north - we were still hasted, and this time, he didn't get to mirror image before being backstabbed:
Now, we were able to enter the city and rest. First things first, Amel needs the ring of human influence, so we used True Sight and our magical weapons (Varscona and the Sword of Chaos) to deal with illusions and shadows (static charge turned out to be overkill):
Amel ended up disrupting Khala's spellcasting with the cold damage of her longsword, ending this fight without any trouble. Now, we moved to the slums, entering the copper coronet in order to recruit Nalia and Anomen before moving on to the government district for our final party member for now, Jan - I plan to replace Minsc with Mazzy, but only once I get there - no need for rushing to the temple ruins with our SCS installation. We also helped out Viconia:
As I had some extra time to kill, I also completed the first part of the copper coronet slaver questline, using our full party, a fire elementla, some buffs and a slow spell to get a significant advantage in combat:
We will strive to acquire Lilarcor and destroy the remaining slavers next time around. So far, so good - but I dread the moment Nalia gets impatient and wants us to go to De'Arnise keep. We don't want her to leave the party, but I also don't want to deal with spirit trolls and yuan-ti mages early on.
Elli backed up by fighters and paladins used Silence and Holy Smite to great effect at the Cloakwood Mines. The true sight of the inquisitors took away one of the main defences of the mages.
Against Davaeorn she summoned an animal who was killed by Davaeorn's Lightning Bolt.
Having used his lightning bolt made the battle easier for the rest of the battle.
We decided to flood the mines later.
We picked up our rewards from the Temple of Lathander before heading to Baldur's Gate.
So... I started posting a very involved, long update on our next steps in the city, with detailed descriptions of how we dealt with the first four ambushes without having invisibility 10' radius, killing groups with multiple mages such as Prebek and Galavery, a limited resting approach because we wanted delay Nalia forcing us to go to De'Arnise keep and the like - having spent over 30 minutes on this, but then klicking on something in my browser which forced me to exit the forum, the entire thing was gone, and I don't want to rewrite it. Instead, the super-short version, and then the screenshots, which should give you some idea of how we went about things:
- We completed the sewers and the slaver ship
- We started picking up sidequests for the bridge district (at the graveyard and the temple district, with a visit to the government district)
- We weren't able to travel invisibly, got ambushed multiple times and started the Haper questline, taking on Prebek and Galavery plus Baron Ployer (though we bought off his mages)
- We had to heavily limit resting, in order to avoid Nalia getting too impatient, though she eventually started complaining anyway
- On our way to De'Arnise keep, we got ambushed twice and had to use varied approaches with our available spells, but we eventually made it
Here are all of the screenshots:
Sewer + Slavers:
Ambushes 1+2:
Prebek + Galavery:
Muggers + ambushes 3+4:
We are a bit low level for SCS De'Arnise keep. No sixth level spells (well, except for Jaheira of course), not much in termins of equipment or protection against spirit trolls. Might be quite tough - I don't know if we could just leave and Nalia would stop complaining, as we have now visited the place at least, but I don't want to try - I'm going to do my best to try and clear the entire thing.
Straight after our last mauling at the hands of Belhifet we rolled up two more randoms and left them to moulder for almost two weeks. Once they had matured nicely we set out from Candlekeep.
Our post session recollection was of two pinch points. Reviewing the screenshots added a third where our stubborn refusal to glug potions or to retreat had a few temples thinking their services would be required. Stan knew his job though (the job being to whack away with a non-proficient quarterstaff until the enemy gave up) and held his nerve.
Clearly we needed better equipment and despite sufficient coin to purchase a suitable blade we sought out Greywolf and persuaded him to relinquish his valuables.
We wasted no time in seeking out Samuel and promising Lena that we would return him to the Friendly Arm Tout suite which as Samuel found out meant taking a minor detour to pick up the Revenant's +2 dagger and another detour to see if this ogre had a girdle of webbing. Stan by this time showed his empathy for the ogre and lurched into the web himself.
We return Samuel before he expires, and move on north to play with ankhegs. Imaginome has 6x sleep and that's enough for us to get half way around their nest but Stan wants to play on. And on. And on. OK, he calls it a draw with one left so we leave it in splendid isolation and continue our journey.
Basilisks are next. Imaginome has both defensive and offensive spells which he uses against the first group.
The remaining basilisks are given more of the same and Mutamin finds fighting a wizard slayer harder than he can believe, more so as he's stood in a web.
Kirian and her gang fail their audition for dancing with webs.
Ye olde Doomesayer soaks up six full sets of Magic Missile and requires two charges from the emergency Wand of Missiles before Stan can stop his run and fight tactics.
We can then look fondly back at the instant where Imaginome almost perished. You can't really say it was our fault as our tactics were exemplary.
- We were fighting a trio of sirenes
- We had a potion of clarity, unused since Stan can't drink it and no use to Imaginome
Lesser Wiser adventurers may think twice, but not Imaginome and Stan. We boldly used a pair of webs and set about the sirenes. Soon enough Stan gets charmed, and yells for Imaginome to run. Imaginome casually thinks he'll get away safely but Stan is throwing darts at 3 1/2 APR and unlikely to miss. Each dart causes Imaginome to stagger briefly and although Imaginome does manage to break contact one more dart could well have been fatal.
After recovering we continue our attack, Stan getting himself poisoned and surviving with 3hp. Sil and her two sirenes try to finish the job on us but we have rested and their less defensive position makes them an easier kill for us.
Inside the flesh golem cave Stan used arrows and sword to kill the golems while Imaginome lands the odd glancing blow with his +2 knife. Stan uses the tome to boost his constitution to 20 and begins the first of many regenerations.
It is then time to loot or secure Nashkel Mine, and Mulahey the half-orc never emerges from a pair of webs. Outside the mine are four amazons - one blinded and the others webbed or darted.
Their equipment fetches a pretty price and we top up our reputation to 20 before using Friends for charisma 19 and purchase a staff +3 and cloak from Ulgoth's Beard.
Imaginome taps his staff into the ground as we walk to Naskhel, thinking the regular clicking sound reminds him of a metronome. Phenomenalistic
Anyway, back to Beregost. Tranzig has little to say, being pre-occupied with his body lying on the floor gasping for a final breath. Something about a bandit camp in Cloakwood. Thanks.
At the bandit camp Stan wonders if Taurgosz Khosann has noticed his bandits reducing in numbers. It appears so but as he moves towards us a nicely-timed (if Imaginome says so himself) web stops him in his tracks and Stan sends him to join his archers.
We saunter through Cloakwood, killing a few spiders and ettercaps before reaching Cloakwood mine. A pair of webs there are enough to allow further spells - making Drasus and his defenders hapless victims for our missiles. Drasus makes a last blind stand - not a great idea if you are facing Stan the darter from Darterfordham.
Imaginome started off thinking he'd let Stan do all the killing but appears to have claimed 48 kills anyway. Stan is gently running away on the kill count, currently at 148.
Well, I kind of had a streak of successful runs going, and the impropability of such a things was certainly only possible due to not changing much about my mod setup and playstyle throughout these runs, just going with what I knew would work. Putting the SCS difficulty slider to Insane and going to De'Arnise keep earlier than I felt comfortable with was enough to end things for Amel, especially considering my limited experience with insane SCS in SoA (this is only my second time experiencing it).
I'm not going into much detail, as the run is over now anyway, but things didn't start out well - facing two spirit trolls for the first time, we were unbuffed and not ready at all - a greater command literally hit five party members at once, and through the use of many healing potions, we barely managed to win this battle with two deaths:
From then on, I made sure to only ever engage spirit trolls when buffed. Things went much better upstairs, as Amel was able to backstab the yuan-ti mage with a crit:
Fire elementals were very helpful for Glacius and the golems:
When I went back downstairs to forge the Flail of Ages, I encountered two gigantic groups of trolls, among them propably 5-6 spirit trolls - but I was buffed this time around, and actually pulled off a fairly convincing victory:
Seems like SCS spirit trolls, given the right preparation, are certainly possible, despite their spamming of powerful spells. We even managed to snipe Tor'Goal early on in the encounter with massive damage:
With a slow spell hitting the other foes, we destroyed the umber hulks, giant trolls and spirit trolls - but we found our master in the two yuan-ti mages. They fell a bit behind (which was the whole reason we pulled Tor'Gal back into the previous room), and I realized upon their approach that I had litte resources left to overcome their defenses, so I decided to run, though not before getting hit by dispel magic and slow - we made it upstairs, and I thought "yeah, I've done it":
However, the mages appeared upstairs immediately, and instantly hit three party members with hold person, preventing us from dancing around between upstairs and downstairs in order to evade spells. With the party slowed, escape was even less of an option (especially since the yuan-ti mages were hasted). I tried to fight, and was able to get through one of them at least:
However, this wasn't comparable to BG1 or SoD, where it often took me just one round to punch through a mage's physical defenses - these yuan-ti mages have way more spells in their pre-buffing routine, and they have sequencers to renew a bunch of stuff - with alle the summons, Amel's fate seemed doomed. In the end, I decided to try and run to save at least the main character, but was hit by a horror spell (my remove fear was gone due to dispel magic), which easily gave the second yuan-ti mage enough time to end our run.
The jump in difficulty from SoD to SoA when it comes to facing any type of spellcaster is rough. One problem here is that I am quite confident that I can get through BG1 and SoD on any setting with a certain amount of consistency, but the same is certainly not true for SoA, where I have often struggled on higher SCS difficulties - but it takes quite long to even get to SoA, and if the run ends in early SoA, I don't get much time to experience this part of the game and improve on my lacking knowledge and understanding. I will take a break for a while, as I don't feel quite motivated yet to start another run.
Well we managed to get through the session without anyone dying, though just barely. With just a potion of absorption and greenstone amulet and probably dwarven defender stance, Drimler easily wiped out Prat's gang with some support by Rex and Dreen II ranged attacks. The spiders on the other hand caused a nasty scare when Rex got poisoned. While Rex easily could have used a potion, he has this unnatural fear of potions so that wasn't an option...so Rex ran around a pillar with Dreen II getting close for a slow poison - it connected, leaving Rex with THREE HP! Close one! But the rest of the crypts was cleared without incident.
Next up was we realized we never got the ring of fire resistance in Samuel's area. We picked up Samuel and then Grond0 and Gate70 dropped. We got everyone connected back to the game, returned Samuel's body, but Samuel did not survive the trip...1st time that's happened to me. We did at least get the ring, so on to Slythe!
Dreen II got a critical miss on Slythe, but the party still wiped out Slythe before he could do too much. The two snares on the ground surely didn't help him.
The party was very careful at Duchal Palace and with the help of some Nymphs and a few potions for Drimler we had a success. It was a little scary as a Nymph went hostile, but we ended up OK, though Grond0 dropped from the game again.
We made very rapid progress in the Maze. Rex wasn't afraid of the Iron Throne party, and with the help of Dreen's scouting, did some nice spells like fog to hurt the enemies. Some nymph confusions were also devastating. With a PfU scroll, Drimler took out the nearby undead (skeleton warriors), which gave Drimler his final level for BG 1.
On to Dreen II's half brother! Dreen II carefully pulled out Sarevok. Samej came, but he was being hit by dispelling arrows and went down pretty fast. Drimler was hoping we could kill Sarevok before his HP ran out, but we could not. He tried to run, but with the dwarven stance slow run speed, he looked to be in trouble. So Dreen II went behind a pillar, hid, tripped a lightning bolt and went in for a 33 pt. backstab on Sarevok - success!
Corey_Russell worked on importing our characters, and then we made our way to Irenicus' dungeon. After getting rid of a pesky little girl, and briefly recruiting Minsc and Jaheira, we picked up some meager equipment and made our way. Rex got a lot of kills down here as the goblins were rather vulnerable to his fog. The 1st level of the dungeon without much incident. We had a nasty scare 2nd level and Dimlier foolishly pushed forward and found himself stunned by the steam mephit. His HP were rapidly declining. In desparation, Rex cast fog to help rapidly kill the enemies. This worked but left Drimler with a sliver of life. Rex was like, what are you complaining about?
Fortunately, the rest of the 2nd level was cleared without trouble. Even the vampire succumbed to our might.
The circus problem was solved easily enough as we all had magic weapons.
We were running low on time, we had just enough time to talk/loot Galen Bayle/his place, and our last act was to teach some thugs a lesson (the 2 outside Copper Coronet) and save our session here. Drimler nearly has majority kills but was short one - he demanded a recount!
Short stuff part 2. Imaginome and Stan made their way into Cloakwood Mine and eventually almost faced Davaeorn. Stan girded his dwarven parts ready to do some wizard slaying but Imaginome used 8 of the 10 wand of fire charges. Davaeorn was dead but still on fire so it seemed best that we add water quickly - we picked up the mine plug and headed back to someone who could open the floodgate.
Then we head into Baldur's Gate and get ourselves poisoned and greased up. Lothander makes a really good crawl for the exit despite the grease but Stan stuns him with a Stanstun dart. Lothander had almost reached the stairs and try as he might he cannot totter himself over and downstairs to safety a slightly delayed death. Imaginome helps himself to our second set of boots of speed.
& off we race. Well, off we crawl being both affected by the grease. A few rounds later Stan recovers first and races in to ask Drelik about seeing Jardak. An arcane response sees Stan use his miscast skills and Drelok is no more. Jarkdak lasts a bit longer but fails to avenge the slaughter of his butler.
Next Stan races into Ramazith's tower only to race out again. Ramazith is having none of this and shouts that he will see us at the top of his tower.
Imaginome asks where Stan has got to. Stan! Stan! Where are you. Wrong tower!
OK, we're going to have to use the console to get you down from there.
With Stan back into the party we StanLarzestun our way into finding Marek and un-poisoning ourselves.
Then we decide we should return Joia's ring, find Melicamp and loot the easy part of Durlag's Tower. On our way back Stan mentions the Tome of Leadership so we pick that up too. Stan re-ingratiates himself into the city by sharing his miscast of magic and some poison with Sunin.
The Iron Throne HQ is next and Stan switches to arrows of detonation, which leaves Imaginome with very little left to tidy up. As Imaginome sweeps valuables from the floor into his backpack he realises Stan has moved down a floor to hunt down the doppelganger and Gardush. They are dead before the floor is clear, and after selling items we call it a day.
Journal of Jehu the Righteous and Party
After doing many mini-quests at Baldur's Gate we ended up going to the Iron Throne where we were successful.
At the Helm and Cloak we got into a battle with the Maulers whereupon Gorpel Hind was unfortunately killed.
In the Low Lantern we killed a couple who were intent on seeing me dead.
Down below Yago attacked us and was killed.
At Ulgoth's Beard we were sent to Ice Island where we picked up some experience. In one battle two party members were confused and we had to dispell magic before too much harm was done.
After picking up the charts for Balduran's Isle we went to Duke Eltan who sent us to Candlekeep.
Everything went smoothly until we met up with Prat. Casting silence didn't stop them using spells and before we got a chance to dispell them Elthan was killed partly as a result of friendly fire.
We killed spiders and basilisks before finally killing Diarmid.
We went to raise Elthan but had insufficient funds. We headed north intending to search for enemies loaded with gold but were ambushed by hobgoblins. That gave us enough gold to raise Elthan and we even had one gold piece left which was enough for a night in an hotel.
Since our necklace of missiles have a low number of charges left we will go ankheg hunting in order to replenish our gold supplies. Then back to Baldur's Gate.
[We could have sold items that we want to have in SoD but chose not to. Despite not having bought robes of the Neutral Archmage and the Good Archmage, or Shadow Armour or the Dagger of Venom we still had little gold to spare. ]
EDIT
Everything went smoothly apart from the fact that Liia was killed at the Ducal Palace. Without a thief different tactics were needed approaching the final battle. Where the skeletons are near a load of traps I protected Elli against electricity and sent her way on ahead protected by sanctuary.
When she triggered the traps she got minor damage but the lightning bolt killed one skeleton and all but killed another.
Near the temple Elli again went on ahead using sanctuary. She then summoned animals twice and placed them in the middle of the party of those who were not yet hostile. I then went forward to trigger the conversation and once it was finished I immediately withdrew and waited for the carnage to start. The one with the fire arrows killed the animals but made the others hostile towards him. He was killed and the others badly hurt. Holy smite was then cast twice. (A pity that I didn't have more memorised) A couple of blasts from the necklace of missiles were highly effective though the mage saved against them as she did against Holy Smite. One of the two remaining attacked but was already nearly dead. Ranged weapons finished him off. Only the mage remained. I cast true sight and took on the mage single handed to avoid the danger of a confusion spell or similar. She died very quickly.
We talked to Sarevok's Consort before entering the temple where we killed three battle horrors.
In the temple I prayed and was given insight into the future. The God that I worship suggested that in the near future I might need a thief and perhaps a mage later on. I realised how few potions I have to protect from electricity so decided to return outside, find a thief of good alignment and finish of all the reputation boosting quests as there was now no chance of falling.
We found Coran, gave away the key at the Cloakwood Mines, killed the worgs at the lighthouse, saved Arabelle etc. etc.
When the potions have been bought we will return for the final battle.
Condolences, @Enuhal. You're a star player and it's hard to see a promising run cut short. Spellcasters are indeed very scary in BG2, especially early on when the party has fewer anti-magic options. Yuan-ti mages have always been one of the most challenging fights in SCS due to their numbers and pre-buffs. Even now I give them a wide berth whenever I can.
I decided that I didn't know SoD well enough to try it without a mage and a thief. I should be able to do the prologue without a mage though it will certainly be harder. I do remember that there are a lot of dangerous traps which concern me, hence recruiting Coran. I found having no thief or mage made me a bit more imaginative and I might use some of the tactics in the future even if I have them in the party.
EDIT
Afterwards I tried playing the proglogue without a thief. I was successful, but found that there were items that were unavailable without having either a mage or a thief. There were chests that I was unable to open even with a strength of 25. I am presuming that knock would have opened them, but didn't try that as my thief had already done that.
The battle against Sarevok did NOT go according to plan but went much easier than I expected. I only fought Semaj and Sarevok. Presumably the others are still alive somewhere.
We are now back to being a party of three and are about to investigate Baldur's Gate. Apparently the Shining Ladt was responsible for an assassination plot to kill Imoen and myself. We can barely carry all of our equipment. Indeed, we left an abundance of non-magical arrows in the chest. They are something that we can replace even if they are lost.
We picked up Safana, Minsc and Dynaheir. I think we are a bit too heavy as far as fighters are concerned. Another Cleric, mage or perhaps a druid would be better than Minsc.
EDIT
We arrived at Coastway Crossing, our companions being Dynaheir Minsc, and Safana. Our fight against Korlatz was harder than usual and since my rep was already 20 I didn't do all of the quests.
Cliff-notes adventure: A F/M/C out of time, part 5
Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
First SoD update found here
It's been a little while. Going by previous updates, nearly all of the Sword Coast has been cleansed, apart from TotSC areas and Candlekeep. The party does some shopping (full plate from Beregost, a few good potions), then heads for Durlag's to clear out the underground levels.
... crud.
We head back to Baldur's Gate, realize we told Alora to get bent upon first meeting her (and so cannot recruit her), depart instead for the western coast and pick up Safana. At 32k experience, she gets enough skill points to handle all traps and locks in Durlag's with the occasional help of a single potion, and the dungeon goes smoothly. As is customary, we back down right before the Demon Knight and teleport to the surface.
Next stop, Ice Island. We rough-house it a bit, simply powering through using the fact that we have four fighter-types (three of whom are in possession of good ranged weapon options), as well as putting The Victor and a Wand of the Heavens to good use: WotH goes straight through MGoI, as does The Victor.
There's a bit of a close shave against Garan of all people: A double Horror Minor Sequencer almost catches us out since Aldain had a partially clouded aura, but he managed to complete Resist Fear even though he was technically panicked. Following this, a Lightning Bolt could've been bad news, but failed to bounce spectacularly enough to kill anyone (though Dynaheir came close to kicking the bucket).
Back on the mainland, Balduran's Isle seems an unnecessary outing, so we're off to Candlekeep. Rieltar and his cronies are left alive, and we clear out the catacombs utterly. Departing Candlekeep for the second time, we swing back by Baldur's Gate, rescue Eltan, take down Slythe & Krystin (Krystin being a real pain as always, but it helped that she spent a fair bit of time in her own Death Fog), and start preparing for the big doppleganger fight, though so far I've never lost a run here.
Nor did I lose the run this time. Things got a little chaotic as we winged it (just some Skeleton Warriors and basic clerical buffs + Haste), but the Assassin went down first, followed by the Mage, and after that it's always smooth sailing.
We rush through the Maze and the Undercity (Iron Throne mercenaries just get a single Wand of Monster Summoning charge, a few Web scrolls we had laying around, and then bunches of Fireballs).
I actually had Safana quaff a Potion of Insight prior to speaking with Tamoko, which allowed us to talk her out of fighting us.
Alright, final fight remains. Since we've been exceedingly prudent, we've got 5 scrolls of PfM; everyone but Dynaheir gets one, then it's potion galore, some Skeleton Warriors to initially occupy Sarevok, and in we go. An Arrow of Dispelling drops Sarevok's Haste, then it's really just a matter of carving through his acolytes (they can't do much to us, owing to PfM). Sarevok locks on to Minsc early on, so we're down one fighter as Minsc leads him around the room, but it's not an issue; Sarevok drops within a few minutes of the battle starting.
And that's that, yet another BG1 run done. F/M/C kind of felt like a weaker F/C with moderately improved defenses (Mirror Image/Blur for big fights, but you'd better finish the fight quick, because those buffs won't last long at his caster levels), though that was to be expected given BG1 level cap. Things will probably be more fun in SoD and especially SoA.
At any rate, Aldain finishes BG1 as a level 6/6/6 Half-elf Fighter/Mage/Cleric, and will be returning in SoD.
Comments
Retro (female gnome bounty hunter, Grond0); Doppel (male human sun soul monk, Gate70)
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1158813/#Comment_1158813
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1158872/#Comment_1158872
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1158916/#Comment_1158916
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159627/#Comment_1159627
At the bridge, I'm not sure whether an initial trap disrupted the mage's fire portal spell. However, Retro's first dispelling arrow struck home, allowing Doppel to puncture him with the Dagger of Venom and he died shortly after that.
At the Coalition Camp we checked in to pick up some Bwoosh & poison and bought a few goodies from Nazramu. There was nothing of interest at Dead Man's Pass and just a brief stop at Dragonspear to rescue Skie. I couldn't remember whether there was anything useful in the vampire's hoard at Bloodbark Grove, so we went to find out. Doppel did well to keep away from him for some time, but eventually got drained once before Retro landed a 2nd (and fatal) backstab.
Back at the Coalition Camp, Mizhena was nowhere to be found, so Retro used up a restoration scroll to get Doppel back to full health.
On to the Underground River, where Retro enquired if Doppel would like a club that could hit Belhifet. He said yes, so Retro went to find a couple of druids and, rather than complete their quest, just attacked one of them. With the club bagged, we retreated from the remaining combat - but not together. Retro went along a path we hadn't explored, while Doppel tried to return the way we'd come past a large group of orcs. This time though he wasn't in stealth and, once they'd blocked his passage, he lasted only moments.
Retro sneaked in to grab equipment before returning to the Coalition Camp once more. Once more there was no Mizhena and, deciding to treat that as a bug, we agreed to bend our normal rule of no NPCs and briefly recruited Viconia to revive Doppel.
Back at the Underground River, we both got confused a couple of times, but pre-laid traps helped deal with myconids reasonably easily anyway. The nearby gargantuan spider is a dangerous enemy, but Doppel saved against a web tangle there just before shooting it down.
The various quests in the initial area were all ignored as we placed the Bwoosh and blagged our way into the Warrens. Retro opened a few containers to get some +3 arrows and bullets before we used the lift. Stealth allowed us to poison the food and water and escape pretty unscathed.
The Coalition Camp invasion waves didn't take long. Pre-laid traps cut the first wave down to size a bit and a couple of exploding arrows dealt with most of the rest.
At the Siege, Ashatiel was stunned by a single dart from Retro.
The enemies in the elevator were all dispatched without problems and Retro got the bonus of another level going up there.
That strategy seemed to be working nicely as Belhifet's HPs seemed to drop pretty quickly. However, we lost track of time and it came as a surprise when Doppel succumbed to Belhifet's fear aura and started running in panic.
Journal of Tharl Twinaxe
We picked up Ajantis prior to going sirine hunting. That was straightforward, then we returned to the bandit camp and attacked Taughoz. Dynaheir got hurt by archers but recovered somewhat by draining them. Once Taughoz was killed Branwen cast healing spells after which we all had a quick nap.
The rest of the bandits outside the tent were then killed before attacking those inside. Web and silence were the most critical spells cast inside, but holy smite and acid arrows certainly helped. We picked up Coran and he helped us loot the camp before returning to Cloakwood.
Cloakwood so far has proved easy. We even slew some more wyvern in transit. Coran is mainly used as an archer and wears heavy armour, but if required as a thief he is quite happy to strip it off so long as there are no nearby enemies. We are now outside the Cloakwood mine having killed every wyvern that we have seen.
Those in the mine didn't cause too much trouble, though wew did summon monsters to deal with Davaeorn who wasted his spells on them.
After doing the minor quests in Baldur's Gate, we took on the Iron Throne.
Upon arriving at Candlekeep, I have reached the level cap, not so my allies.
I used a new tactic against Prat, sending Ajantis solo against them but protecting against electricity first. It worked, but not as well as I expected.
Durlag's Tower is next on the agenda.
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
Our party made their way out of the camp, clearing the Coast Way Crossing. We swapped around rings of free action for the spiders, dealt with the Menhirs (with Baeloth + Nymph's Cloak) and won the battle at the bridge via fireball charges:
I'll gladly help to do such stuff from now on, so if anyone finishes a run, please tag me and I'll get to it asap.
I'm still new to this whole moderation business and not exactly swimming in leisure time, so I'd appreciate if you kept, as has been done, organizing the noteworthy details with links to the essential posts in a post after a successful run, so that I can just copy them, and forgive me if it sometimes takes a few days to react. Also, let me know if anyone else hasn't been added yet.
Cheers, Arvia
Amel, Elven Stalker, Update 18
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
Update 17: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159744/#Comment_1159744
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:
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:
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
Update 17: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159744/#Comment_1159744
Update 18: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159998/#Comment_1159998
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:
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:
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.
Final entry. Lost this game too due to corrupt files. At least I know the two files now that were causing the problem so future runs should be OK.
I have just done a run with an Inquisitor, a Cavalier and a Fighter.
It came to an end fighting an ankheg near Tenya. It killed the Cavalier first and then the Inquisitor.
Then again, my usual answer to that particular ankheg is to just run past it the first time. Ankhegs have slow initiative, so you can pretty reliably reach the edge of the map and travel to either the zombie farm or Ulgoth's Beard without engaging. And fighting them at level 1 is just too risky; the acid and high damage means there's always a risk of a one-hit kill.
In my second run I waited until my party members reached level 2 and then they were a walkover. @jmerry You're right of course. I thought that with two paladins and a fighter we might be tough enough and we weren't.
My second run is going exceedingly well, paladins are level 4, fighter dualled to cleric at level 3 and is now level 4.
Journal of Jehu and Party
True sight and protection from fear made Tarnesh a walkover.
When we discovered that Sonner and his cohorts were evil, their fate was sealed.
We returned the bowl to Tenya.
On the way to Joia to return her ring, we were attacked by 5 bandits who hurt Elthan.
However after using "lay on hands" his wounds were not too serious and we were able to walk away from the incident unlike the bandits.
Marl was calmed and a tome taken to Firebead.
We headed south where we killed a couple of ogrillon. On the body of one was a letter to Mirianne which we delivered. We then picked up the Colquetle amulet and proceeded to Nashkel where we chatted to Noober and refused a reward from Oublek. Heading east, we killed the Amazing Ooopah and Zordral.
After picking up some armour, a wand and a ring we took Samuel to the FAI. We then headed north where we began an onslaught on ankhegs.
We all reached level three wherupon Elli dual-classed to Cleric
We gave Farmer Brun 100 in gold, delivered the Colquetle Amulet and helped Mellicamp.
The battle against Droth and Shoal was touch and go but ultimately successful.
We helped Arcand the Mad before slaying some sirine and helping Charleston Nib.
We then took Brage to the temple of Helm.
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
Update 17: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159744/#Comment_1159744
Update 18: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159998/#Comment_1159998
Update 19: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160172/#Comment_1160172
So far, SoD has been smooth sailing, but this time around, I started making several mistakes. Everything started out well upon travelling to Bloodbark Grove - in the ambush area, my fireball barrage was enough to kill the Shadowy Figure outright, and the only one surviving member of its band was killed by a few arrows:
Clearing the Blood Bark Grove was relatively easy and was mostly done via backstabs and ranged attacks, with no fireballs needed. I buffed up for the group of skeletons, taking them down in regular combat. However, I badly mishandled the vampire cellar. Instead of using one of my countless potions of clarity or swapping around the helm of charm protection, I gave the vampire a chance to dominate one of my party members, which he promptly took, taking over Minsc's mind. My genius plan was to simply flee the cellar, but as I was trying to do so, I realized that every area transition in SoD requires the gathering of your party, which involves actually having control over them. Now, I was trapped in a small corner of the room, with no way to dispel Minsc or leave, and Minsc was hacking through Dynaheir's stoneskins. My backup plan was to drink potions of invisibility on everyone in order to wait out the domination effect (meanwhile, I had killed the vampire with ranged weapons) - which did eventually work, but before Dynaheir could drink her potion, she was hit and stunned by a vampire wolf, resulting in her death:
Next, we entered Dead Man's Pass, clearing the various monster groups with a few fireball wand charges, backstabs and ranged attacks:
Finally, I did buff up (including free action potions) and summon skeletons for the mimic, neo-othyugh, slimes, spiders etc. at the end of the cave - these can be very dangerous otherwise. The killer mimic can deal tons of damage, so he was my primary target:
Next we went basilisk hunting, ending up fighting Mutamin and killing him.
Upon heading south we reunited Albert and Rufie before fighting Vax and Zal
We headed westward where I protected a dryad.
We then took 'Drienne's cat to her and killed Ingot before heading yet further west to kill more gnolls.
Heading north we killed a polar bear and Nevillle before heading for the Lighthouse Area where we cleared the area of sirine before exploring the cave.
Elthan was held when he set off a trap, but Elli and I were able to kill the golem in time. The next trap wasn't a problem so the second flesh golem was killed easily.
We have all reached 35,000 experience now so it is time to complete our party. Thieves and mages are out of the question as we intend to be REALLY righteous.
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
Update 17: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159744/#Comment_1159744
Update 18: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159998/#Comment_1159998
Update 19: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160172/#Comment_1160172
Update 20: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160290/#Comment_1160290
Entering the outer underground river area, an invisible Glint disarmed the traps, fought the ogres for leadership by kiting them with his sling and returned to the group, which cleared the various enemy forces in the area, acquiring Mizhena's necklace. The fight at the gates went fairly well: We fireballed the initial enemy force, and as the others started to teleport in, a well-timed oracle spell revealed the dangerous crusader scouts just before they were able to start backstabbing:
We looted Caelar's Seal and made our way to the Crusader Camp, where we completed every single sidequest for some great experience and useful items. No trouble here, as there are basically no fights involved. One last thing I did for now was entering the inner underground river area in order to backstab the mage summoning water elementals (one additional hit was needed, as the backstab didn't kill him outright) - next time, we will explore all of the caves and enter the castle basement.
We took Khalid and Jaheira to Nashkel but dumped them there as Jaheira was far more interested in balance than righteousness. The same with Xzar and Montaron. They were pure evil. Then at last we met up with Ajantis. He has much the same ethics that we have and I think that we will get on well with him. His experience was also almost the same as ours. I think that we will investigate the Nashkel Mines together.
After some thought I decided that just because Jaheira was unsuitable for our party, that was no reason to exclude Khalid, so we picked them up and left jaheira in the Nashkel Barracks.
As we proceeded southwards we were ambushed and helped by Dorn, however when he suggested joining us, Khalid vetoed the idea.
We then killed Greywolf, Neira and Silke and after killing the latter Garrick identified al of ou items for the cost of an identity scroll and a night in the inn.
Of course we also had to tell him our tales which he said he would put into verse. "Those tales will make me welcome in many an inn for months to come," he said. We then sought out Bassilus and killed him.
We accidentally bumped into Zargal and killed him too.
After entering the Nashkel mines I was able to save a miner anf discovered that the yipping demons that I had heard about were less fearsome than the tales that I have heard about them since they were merely kobolds.
Mulahey was no problem to us and neither were a group of hostile Amazons.
We then cleared the caves in the area of undead and killed some slime that a foolish mage had created.
We gave Joseph's ring to his widow before going to kill the half-ogres that had hurt Bjornin.
We didn't need to kill Neira as Amnish soldiers did it for us.
Whilst looking for them we were attacked by some bandits. Elli cast silence which didn't affect the mage who then proceeded to panic all but two of us. We however defeated the bandits, but the panicked members of the party ran into a group of gnolls who chased them. Eventually we killed the gnolls, but it was a long battle.
We then helped Drittz before eventually finding and killing the half-ogres that we were looking for. He suggested that we use guile rather than brute force.
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
Update 17: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159744/#Comment_1159744
Update 18: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159998/#Comment_1159998
Update 19: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160172/#Comment_1160172
Update 20: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160290/#Comment_1160290
Update 21: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160404/#Comment_1160404
I delved into the first underground river cave, fighting some shadows - Minsc got level drained once by a wraith, but I continued to venture on. Using my six green scrolls with protection from acid helped with the blind albino wyrmlings and their breath weapon:
Journal of Jehu the Righteous and Party
We decided to investigate Durlag's Tower which proved to be "Challenging" without a thief. The traps and the doppelgangers proved to be the worst problem though spiders that poisoned us proved difficult too.
Then we were taken to the bandit camp after which we fought Deke and then Tranzig.
The conflict at the camp was relatively easy. Straightforward fighting outside and a silence spell followed by straightforward fighting inside the tent.
Cloakwood was similarly straightforward. My party could have been designed with Cloakwood in mind. Freedom of action spells negated all the webs.
We have now arrived at the mine. That could be more challenging.
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
Update 17: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159744/#Comment_1159744
Update 18: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159998/#Comment_1159998
Update 19: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160172/#Comment_1160172
Update 20: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160290/#Comment_1160290
Update 21: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160404/#Comment_1160404
Update 22: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160567/#Comment_1160567
Not much to say about the attack on the coalition camp - I just threw six fireballs at each of the approaching groups, buffing up in the meantime in order to be ready for the final assault of named enemies. I started using some of my potions (such as heroism, invulnerability, speed) because I have way more than I will need for the remainder of SoD:
Time to make our way to Avernus. We entered hell and buffed up with chaotic commands (bought all of the scrolls of this spells available in SoD), resist fear and more oils of speed, taking down the initial group of fiends, which I usually just skip:
So, we reached the end of the elvator ride, and Belhifet, Hephernaan and their devils were ready to fight our party + Caelar. We immediately spread out in order to take down the devils, while Dynaheir approached Belhifet in order to draw out his dispel magic:
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
SoD end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160656/#Comment_1160656
Starting with SoA, we faced some potential trouble with the opening dungeon: Thanks to the improved SCS NPC customization, Jaheira and Imoen start without any memorized spells in their spellbook, so for most of the first level of the dungeon, not wanting to waste my one rest quite yet, I decided to only engage in physical combat, using Amel's stealths and backstabbing as much as possible:
Elli backed up by fighters and paladins used Silence and Holy Smite to great effect at the Cloakwood Mines. The true sight of the inquisitors took away one of the main defences of the mages.
Against Davaeorn she summoned an animal who was killed by Davaeorn's Lightning Bolt.
Having used his lightning bolt made the battle easier for the rest of the battle.
We decided to flood the mines later.
We picked up our rewards from the Temple of Lathander before heading to Baldur's Gate.
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
SoD end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160656/#Comment_1160656
SoA start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160656/#Comment_1160656
So... I started posting a very involved, long update on our next steps in the city, with detailed descriptions of how we dealt with the first four ambushes without having invisibility 10' radius, killing groups with multiple mages such as Prebek and Galavery, a limited resting approach because we wanted delay Nalia forcing us to go to De'Arnise keep and the like - having spent over 30 minutes on this, but then klicking on something in my browser which forced me to exit the forum, the entire thing was gone, and I don't want to rewrite it. Instead, the super-short version, and then the screenshots, which should give you some idea of how we went about things:
- We completed the sewers and the slaver ship
- We started picking up sidequests for the bridge district (at the graveyard and the temple district, with a visit to the government district)
- We weren't able to travel invisibly, got ambushed multiple times and started the Haper questline, taking on Prebek and Galavery plus Baron Ployer (though we bought off his mages)
- We had to heavily limit resting, in order to avoid Nalia getting too impatient, though she eventually started complaining anyway
- On our way to De'Arnise keep, we got ambushed twice and had to use varied approaches with our available spells, but we eventually made it
Here are all of the screenshots:
Sewer + Slavers:
We are a bit low level for SCS De'Arnise keep. No sixth level spells (well, except for Jaheira of course), not much in termins of equipment or protection against spirit trolls. Might be quite tough - I don't know if we could just leave and Nalia would stop complaining, as we have now visited the place at least, but I don't want to try - I'm going to do my best to try and clear the entire thing.
Imaginome (male gnome illusionist, Gate70); Stan (male dwarf wizard slayer, Grond0)
Straight after our last mauling at the hands of Belhifet we rolled up two more randoms and left them to moulder for almost two weeks. Once they had matured nicely we set out from Candlekeep.
Our post session recollection was of two pinch points. Reviewing the screenshots added a third where our stubborn refusal to glug potions or to retreat had a few temples thinking their services would be required. Stan knew his job though (the job being to whack away with a non-proficient quarterstaff until the enemy gave up) and held his nerve.
- We were fighting a trio of sirenes
- We had a potion of clarity, unused since Stan can't drink it and no use to Imaginome
Lesser Wiser adventurers may think twice, but not Imaginome and Stan. We boldly used a pair of webs and set about the sirenes. Soon enough Stan gets charmed, and yells for Imaginome to run. Imaginome casually thinks he'll get away safely but Stan is throwing darts at 3 1/2 APR and unlikely to miss. Each dart causes Imaginome to stagger briefly and although Imaginome does manage to break contact one more dart could well have been fatal.
Inside the flesh golem cave Stan used arrows and sword to kill the golems while Imaginome lands the odd glancing blow with his +2 knife. Stan uses the tome to boost his constitution to 20 and begins the first of many regenerations.
It is then time to loot or secure Nashkel Mine, and Mulahey the half-orc never emerges from a pair of webs. Outside the mine are four amazons - one blinded and the others webbed or darted.
Imaginome taps his staff into the ground as we walk to Naskhel, thinking the regular clicking sound reminds him of a metronome. Phenomenalistic
Anyway, back to Beregost. Tranzig has little to say, being pre-occupied with his body lying on the floor gasping for a final breath. Something about a bandit camp in Cloakwood. Thanks.
At the bandit camp Stan wonders if Taurgosz Khosann has noticed his bandits reducing in numbers. It appears so but as he moves towards us a nicely-timed (if Imaginome says so himself) web stops him in his tracks and Stan sends him to join his archers.
Party & equipment:
Previous updates:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159376/#Comment_1159376
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1159550/#Comment_1159550
SoD end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160656/#Comment_1160656
SoA start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160656/#Comment_1160656
Update 25: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1160875/#Comment_1160875
Well, I kind of had a streak of successful runs going, and the impropability of such a things was certainly only possible due to not changing much about my mod setup and playstyle throughout these runs, just going with what I knew would work. Putting the SCS difficulty slider to Insane and going to De'Arnise keep earlier than I felt comfortable with was enough to end things for Amel, especially considering my limited experience with insane SCS in SoA (this is only my second time experiencing it).
I'm not going into much detail, as the run is over now anyway, but things didn't start out well - facing two spirit trolls for the first time, we were unbuffed and not ready at all - a greater command literally hit five party members at once, and through the use of many healing potions, we barely managed to win this battle with two deaths:
The jump in difficulty from SoD to SoA when it comes to facing any type of spellcaster is rough. One problem here is that I am quite confident that I can get through BG1 and SoD on any setting with a certain amount of consistency, but the same is certainly not true for SoA, where I have often struggled on higher SCS difficulties - but it takes quite long to even get to SoA, and if the run ends in early SoA, I don't get much time to experience this part of the game and improve on my lacking knowledge and understanding. I will take a break for a while, as I don't feel quite motivated yet to start another run.
Dreen II - halfling thief, protagonist (Corey_Russell)
Drimler - dwarven defender (Gate70)
Rex - half-orc shaman (Grond0)
Well we managed to get through the session without anyone dying, though just barely. With just a potion of absorption and greenstone amulet and probably dwarven defender stance, Drimler easily wiped out Prat's gang with some support by Rex and Dreen II ranged attacks. The spiders on the other hand caused a nasty scare when Rex got poisoned. While Rex easily could have used a potion, he has this unnatural fear of potions so that wasn't an option...so Rex ran around a pillar with Dreen II getting close for a slow poison - it connected, leaving Rex with THREE HP! Close one! But the rest of the crypts was cleared without incident.
Next up was we realized we never got the ring of fire resistance in Samuel's area. We picked up Samuel and then Grond0 and Gate70 dropped. We got everyone connected back to the game, returned Samuel's body, but Samuel did not survive the trip...1st time that's happened to me. We did at least get the ring, so on to Slythe!
Dreen II got a critical miss on Slythe, but the party still wiped out Slythe before he could do too much. The two snares on the ground surely didn't help him.
The party was very careful at Duchal Palace and with the help of some Nymphs and a few potions for Drimler we had a success. It was a little scary as a Nymph went hostile, but we ended up OK, though Grond0 dropped from the game again.
We made very rapid progress in the Maze. Rex wasn't afraid of the Iron Throne party, and with the help of Dreen's scouting, did some nice spells like fog to hurt the enemies. Some nymph confusions were also devastating. With a PfU scroll, Drimler took out the nearby undead (skeleton warriors), which gave Drimler his final level for BG 1.
On to Dreen II's half brother! Dreen II carefully pulled out Sarevok. Samej came, but he was being hit by dispelling arrows and went down pretty fast. Drimler was hoping we could kill Sarevok before his HP ran out, but we could not. He tried to run, but with the dwarven stance slow run speed, he looked to be in trouble. So Dreen II went behind a pillar, hid, tripped a lightning bolt and went in for a 33 pt. backstab on Sarevok - success!
Corey_Russell worked on importing our characters, and then we made our way to Irenicus' dungeon. After getting rid of a pesky little girl, and briefly recruiting Minsc and Jaheira, we picked up some meager equipment and made our way. Rex got a lot of kills down here as the goblins were rather vulnerable to his fog. The 1st level of the dungeon without much incident. We had a nasty scare 2nd level and Dimlier foolishly pushed forward and found himself stunned by the steam mephit. His HP were rapidly declining. In desparation, Rex cast fog to help rapidly kill the enemies. This worked but left Drimler with a sliver of life. Rex was like, what are you complaining about?
Fortunately, the rest of the 2nd level was cleared without trouble. Even the vampire succumbed to our might.
The circus problem was solved easily enough as we all had magic weapons.
We were running low on time, we had just enough time to talk/loot Galen Bayle/his place, and our last act was to teach some thugs a lesson (the 2 outside Copper Coronet) and save our session here. Drimler nearly has majority kills but was short one - he demanded a recount!
Imaginome (male gnome illusionist, Gate70); Stan (male dwarf wizard slayer, Grond0)
Short stuff part 2. Imaginome and Stan made their way into Cloakwood Mine and eventually almost faced Davaeorn. Stan girded his dwarven parts ready to do some wizard slaying but Imaginome used 8 of the 10 wand of fire charges. Davaeorn was dead but still on fire so it seemed best that we add water quickly - we picked up the mine plug and headed back to someone who could open the floodgate.
Imaginome asks where Stan has got to. Stan! Stan! Where are you. Wrong tower!
With Stan back into the party we StanLarzestun our way into finding Marek and un-poisoning ourselves.
After doing many mini-quests at Baldur's Gate we ended up going to the Iron Throne where we were successful.
At the Helm and Cloak we got into a battle with the Maulers whereupon Gorpel Hind was unfortunately killed.
In the Low Lantern we killed a couple who were intent on seeing me dead.
Down below Yago attacked us and was killed.
At Ulgoth's Beard we were sent to Ice Island where we picked up some experience. In one battle two party members were confused and we had to dispell magic before too much harm was done.
After picking up the charts for Balduran's Isle we went to Duke Eltan who sent us to Candlekeep.
Everything went smoothly until we met up with Prat. Casting silence didn't stop them using spells and before we got a chance to dispell them Elthan was killed partly as a result of friendly fire.
We killed spiders and basilisks before finally killing Diarmid.
We went to raise Elthan but had insufficient funds. We headed north intending to search for enemies loaded with gold but were ambushed by hobgoblins. That gave us enough gold to raise Elthan and we even had one gold piece left which was enough for a night in an hotel.
Since our necklace of missiles have a low number of charges left we will go ankheg hunting in order to replenish our gold supplies. Then back to Baldur's Gate.
[We could have sold items that we want to have in SoD but chose not to. Despite not having bought robes of the Neutral Archmage and the Good Archmage, or Shadow Armour or the Dagger of Venom we still had little gold to spare.
EDIT
Everything went smoothly apart from the fact that Liia was killed at the Ducal Palace. Without a thief different tactics were needed approaching the final battle. Where the skeletons are near a load of traps I protected Elli against electricity and sent her way on ahead protected by sanctuary.
When she triggered the traps she got minor damage but the lightning bolt killed one skeleton and all but killed another.
Near the temple Elli again went on ahead using sanctuary. She then summoned animals twice and placed them in the middle of the party of those who were not yet hostile. I then went forward to trigger the conversation and once it was finished I immediately withdrew and waited for the carnage to start. The one with the fire arrows killed the animals but made the others hostile towards him. He was killed and the others badly hurt. Holy smite was then cast twice. (A pity that I didn't have more memorised) A couple of blasts from the necklace of missiles were highly effective though the mage saved against them as she did against Holy Smite. One of the two remaining attacked but was already nearly dead. Ranged weapons finished him off. Only the mage remained. I cast true sight and took on the mage single handed to avoid the danger of a confusion spell or similar. She died very quickly.
We talked to Sarevok's Consort before entering the temple where we killed three battle horrors.
In the temple I prayed and was given insight into the future. The God that I worship suggested that in the near future I might need a thief and perhaps a mage later on. I realised how few potions I have to protect from electricity so decided to return outside, find a thief of good alignment and finish of all the reputation boosting quests as there was now no chance of falling.
We found Coran, gave away the key at the Cloakwood Mines, killed the worgs at the lighthouse, saved Arabelle etc. etc.
When the potions have been bought we will return for the final battle.
I decided that I didn't know SoD well enough to try it without a mage and a thief. I should be able to do the prologue without a mage though it will certainly be harder. I do remember that there are a lot of dangerous traps which concern me, hence recruiting Coran. I found having no thief or mage made me a bit more imaginative and I might use some of the tactics in the future even if I have them in the party.
EDIT
Afterwards I tried playing the proglogue without a thief. I was successful, but found that there were items that were unavailable without having either a mage or a thief. There were chests that I was unable to open even with a strength of 25.
The battle against Sarevok did NOT go according to plan but went much easier than I expected. I only fought Semaj and Sarevok. Presumably the others are still alive somewhere.
We are now back to being a party of three and are about to investigate Baldur's Gate. Apparently the Shining Ladt was responsible for an assassination plot to kill Imoen and myself. We can barely carry all of our equipment. Indeed, we left an abundance of non-magical arrows in the chest. They are something that we can replace even if they are lost.
We picked up Safana, Minsc and Dynaheir. I think we are a bit too heavy as far as fighters are concerned. Another Cleric, mage or perhaps a druid would be better than Minsc.
EDIT
We arrived at Coastway Crossing, our companions being Dynaheir Minsc, and Safana. Our fight against Korlatz was harder than usual and since my rep was already 20 I didn't do all of the quests.
Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
First SoD update found here
... crud.
We head back to Baldur's Gate, realize we told Alora to get bent upon first meeting her (and so cannot recruit her), depart instead for the western coast and pick up Safana. At 32k experience, she gets enough skill points to handle all traps and locks in Durlag's with the occasional help of a single potion, and the dungeon goes smoothly. As is customary, we back down right before the Demon Knight and teleport to the surface.
Next stop, Ice Island. We rough-house it a bit, simply powering through using the fact that we have four fighter-types (three of whom are in possession of good ranged weapon options), as well as putting The Victor and a Wand of the Heavens to good use: WotH goes straight through MGoI, as does The Victor.
There's a bit of a close shave against Garan of all people: A double Horror Minor Sequencer almost catches us out since Aldain had a partially clouded aura, but he managed to complete Resist Fear even though he was technically panicked. Following this, a Lightning Bolt could've been bad news, but failed to bounce spectacularly enough to kill anyone (though Dynaheir came close to kicking the bucket).
Back on the mainland, Balduran's Isle seems an unnecessary outing, so we're off to Candlekeep. Rieltar and his cronies are left alive, and we clear out the catacombs utterly. Departing Candlekeep for the second time, we swing back by Baldur's Gate, rescue Eltan, take down Slythe & Krystin (Krystin being a real pain as always, but it helped that she spent a fair bit of time in her own Death Fog), and start preparing for the big doppleganger fight, though so far I've never lost a run here.
Nor did I lose the run this time. Things got a little chaotic as we winged it (just some Skeleton Warriors and basic clerical buffs + Haste), but the Assassin went down first, followed by the Mage, and after that it's always smooth sailing.
We rush through the Maze and the Undercity (Iron Throne mercenaries just get a single Wand of Monster Summoning charge, a few Web scrolls we had laying around, and then bunches of Fireballs).
I actually had Safana quaff a Potion of Insight prior to speaking with Tamoko, which allowed us to talk her out of fighting us.
Alright, final fight remains. Since we've been exceedingly prudent, we've got 5 scrolls of PfM; everyone but Dynaheir gets one, then it's potion galore, some Skeleton Warriors to initially occupy Sarevok, and in we go. An Arrow of Dispelling drops Sarevok's Haste, then it's really just a matter of carving through his acolytes (they can't do much to us, owing to PfM). Sarevok locks on to Minsc early on, so we're down one fighter as Minsc leads him around the room, but it's not an issue; Sarevok drops within a few minutes of the battle starting.
And that's that, yet another BG1 run done. F/M/C kind of felt like a weaker F/C with moderately improved defenses (Mirror Image/Blur for big fights, but you'd better finish the fight quick, because those buffs won't last long at his caster levels), though that was to be expected given BG1 level cap. Things will probably be more fun in SoD and especially SoA.
At any rate, Aldain finishes BG1 as a level 6/6/6 Half-elf Fighter/Mage/Cleric, and will be returning in SoD.