New game manuals

Alonso

Beamdog has published two new game manuals: The Adventurer's Guide, which covers the games in the Baldur's Gate series; and a new version of the Sword Coast Survival Guide, which covers Baldur's Gate I. The manuals were announced here: Get your Siege of Dragonspear Manuals Here!. I create this thread to let non Dragonspear players know of their existence and to discuss their contents.

The Adventurer's Guide

From the thread mentioned above: "The Adventurer's Guide is your one-stop shop for all the most accurate information about races, classes, spells, and equipment in the Baldur's Gate series. The "back of the book" also features a pair of appendices: one for a bestiary of creatures you can summon and control, the other containing full level progressions for each of the base classes."

This seems to be a very improved version of "Mastering Melee and Magic", the long, detailed manual which comes with the games. Although I've read parts of both, I still don't know very well the differences between them. This is a summary of the changes I've seen so far and the information in the mentioned thread:

• New format, even more beautiful than the original (in my opinion, of course).
  
• As stated above, a bestiary of creatures you can summon and control, and very detailed tables with full level progression for each of the base classes (the old manual only has a simple table that covers the first 10 levels).
  
• Some mistakes, which have been reported here, here and here.
  

Revised Sword Coast Survival Guide

From the thread mentioned above: "Featuring all-new layout and design, the latest edition of the Sword Coast Survival Guide describes the region south of Baldur's Gate city, which is where the initial Baldur's Gate campaign takes place".

At the moment I'm not interested in this one because I'm playing BG2EE, so I don't know the difference with the original version. I can tell you that it also has the beautiful new format, and, according to the thread mentioned, they removed the Table of Contents ("to maintain the aesthetic of an in-world document") and the Gameplay section.

Give your feedback on the differences between the new and the old versions and any other information related to the new manuals, and I will update, expand and correct this first post accordingly.

Tip for people with not so big screens: The PDF documents are configured to display automatically a two page wide view. I guess it must look great in very large screens, but if you use a 19'' screen like myself, you will find that the fonts are too small to read. You can zoom in, of course, but then scrolling the document can become inconvenient. I fixed this by choosing View -> Page display -> Enable scrolling in Acrobat Reader. That changes the view to one page wide, which gives you convenient scrolling and readable font sizes in most screen sizes.

joluv

Alonso said:

The Adventurer's Guide, which seems to cover all the games in the Enhanced Editions

Only the Baldur's Gate series. Not IWD:EE.

Alonso

Thanks. Corrected.

Alonso

A few questions about chapter 10, "High-Level abilities":

1. There are three sections: Ability descriptions, 10th level spells and Quest level spells. Does it mean that 10th level spells and Quest level spells are a kind of HLA? If so, why are they separated from the rest of HLAs?
   
2. Does the list of ability descriptions follow any order? At first sight the order seems random.
   
3. How often can HLAs be used?
   
4. Do they have a casting time?
   

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Erisceres

The bugs mentioned in the post and comments above don't appear to be publicly accessible anymore, hence it is no longer possible to see a list of errors and omissions.

Would it be possible to publish this list publicly? Perhaps here in another post or comment?