A song of fire on ice

RTC

Hi everyone,

Here the short summary:

Help me out completing my Calimshan flavoured/based group for an insane IWDEE playthrough:

Human Archer
Half-Orc Barbarian, Berserker, ... with Axes
Human Swashbuckler -> Fighter
Half Elf Cleric/Mage or Sorcerer
???
???

Now the wall of text ; )

I am a BG, BGII veteran (didn’t try the EE versions yet) but I never ever touched IWD. I want to change this circumstance after my finals and get myself a copy of IWDEE. So I really don’t know much about the story or game but as far as I understood you are some random adventure group which gets involved in the local affairs and step by step you unveil greater evil.
I love roleplaying and the whole ‘random adventure group’ gives the player so much more leverage over the background. Here is where I seek out your knowledge and wisdom, to find inspiration and advice, to complete my vision of the party.
What I had in mind is to create a group from Calimshan, and while there is quite some background on Calimshan I found that its purpose is more suited for adventures within Calimshan rather than for creating heroes with Calishite background. Anyway:

The leader and center of the group is this dull, naive, rich young men of a wealthy Manshakan money lender dynasty. He was born into the 'idle rich' class with many servants and slaves pampering him throughout his childhood, and was quite fascinated by heroic tales of the north which he got told by his nannies. Now, coming of age, he decided that creating his own stories would be a pleasurable avocation. So he set off to hire a bunch of servants… ehm adventurers, ‘willing’ to immortalize themselves as his companions. There is really nothing impressive about him other than that he has the means (through dads money) to realize such a venture and he actually spent much time of his childhood with the noble pastime of archery, ergo Human Archer (this more a mechanical choice).
The father couldn’t care less about the whereabouts of some son of his. But knowing particularly him being completely unsuited for life outside the riads comforts, he addressed one of his trusted bodyguards to watch over his offspring. A grim Half-Ork fighterish (axes?) guy, loyal (to the family) and superior in almost all accounts to the young men. He is not afraid of speaking out his mind and advise him but will finally comply with whatever our leader has in mind. Those two compose the initial group, next would be the more or less willing helpers with looser or no ties to the leader.
I was thinking about to have a badass female swashbuckler (pirate of the shining sea?), and a mystical female half-elf mage/cleric or sorcerer (? maybe she has some efreet blood hence the innate casting abilities). In general I am not sure about their definite class and background, and totally unclear what to do with the left 2 spots (maybe just a 4 man group). For example I heard the Druid is much better in IWD than in BG but I wouldn’t know how to implement one in a group of Calishite background, he kinda feels out of place, but maybe I am wrong.

While I could come up with more characters of my own, I decided that I would like to collect some ideas from other people with more knowledge of the lore of calimshan and/or experience with IWDEE to spice things up and finally create a ‘lore rich’ and fun to play group. I also have nothing against and enjoy optimizing chars. Dual classing swashbuckler -> fighter, or even EEkeeping and the like. They should be viable on insane (for a player without crazy knowledge of IWD). Cause, lets be honest, as much fun as it is to RPing, it is also great fun to kick ass too.

Thank you for reading all this and your responses in advance.

Wowo

I can suggest that if it's your first fun through that you include the following:
Vanilla Bard
Druid (any)
Paladin (any except Inquisitor)

These three classes have enough unique dialogue and content to make them worthwhile taking on a first play through I think.

Fitting that into the group that you have so far is tricky. Perhaps you can combine the swashbuckler and archer character? Honestly unless you're playing on HoF mode I'd recommend avoiding Archer and Sorcerer as they are too effective at trivialising the game.

Druids can come from lots of different environments so a Calishite Druid could be from the desert or even an aquatic elf from the ocean (full blooded elves can be Druids in IWD). Alternatively you can dual class a Kensei or Berserker in Druid for massive OPness but again I'd leave such a build for HoF mode.

Regarding difficulty I'd recommend playing on Insane if you are familiar with BG and bgII but be sure to disable the bonus xp from insane difficulty as normally it doubles xp which means that insane is often easier than core rules.

If you feel like a confident player and enjoy a good challenge then I'd also disable the bonus damage from insane (making the game easier) but then don't use the + and - buttons when rolling stats for your characters, it's amazing how much the game changes when your characters don't have 18s in multiple stats. Then of course avoid reloading and you'll be sweating just as you might hope to be.

So, putting all that together:
Swashbuckler or Assassin -> Fighter
Aquatic Elf Avenger Druid
Cavalier Paladin (seems more like Calishite than Undead Hunter)
Half-Elf Bard
Gnome Illusionist/Cleric (there's a great Short race only helm and the bard can fill in any spells that are banned for illusionist)
Half-Orc Barbarian (some unique dialogue for barbarian)

Axe and Hammer for Barbarian
Mace and Flail for Gnome
Longsword and Flail for Paladin
Longsword and Longbow for thief

Or something like that anyway.

RTC

Thanks for all the information.

The unique dialogue and content it is certainly something I want to take into consideration, although I fear that the dialogue options are more suited to prototypical Paladins Druids rather than what my group is intended to be/have.
Is there actually the aquatic sub race in IWD? Nonetheless I really really like this idea.

Now to the more mechanical aspects.

How come the Archer trivializes the game isn’t he simply a ‘ranged kensai’ while at the same time bows and their respective arrows tend to underperform compared to other weapons (well at least in BGII they do).
The Sorcerer surely is OP but I kinda warmed up to the idea of having one. Would rping the spell selection to Fire flavored spells restrict her sufficiently?
Also with all those suggestions you made (like no extra XP, no higher dmg, etc) wouldn’t that and me being totally new to the game cause enough of a challenge, or is IWD rather easy?

Wowo

RTC said:

Thanks for all the information.

The unique dialogue and content it is certainly something I want to take into consideration, although I fear that the dialogue options are more suited to prototypical Paladins Druids rather than what my group is intended to be/have.
Is there actually the aquatic sub race in IWD? Nonetheless I really really like this idea.

Now to the more mechanical aspects.

How come the Archer trivializes the game isn’t he simply a ‘ranged kensai’ while at the same time bows and their respective arrows tend to underperform compared to other weapons (well at least in BGII they do).
The Sorcerer surely is OP but I kinda warmed up to the idea of having one. Would rping the spell selection to Fire flavored spells restrict her sufficiently?
Also with all those suggestions you made (like no extra XP, no higher dmg, etc) wouldn’t that and me being totally new to the game cause enough of a challenge, or is IWD rather easy?

Sorcerer is so OP because scrolls are so scarce in IWD which heavily restricts the usefulness of arcanes but a sorcerer doesn't need scrolls and can choose any spell.

No there isn't an aquatic elf sub race but all you really need is blue skin and green hair or similar.

Archers are very powerful and they don't become less useful so much like in bg2, nothing wrong with them, I just don't think the kit fits in very well.