As a Paladin, I usually side with Bodhi (spoilers)
pplr
Member Posts: 17
I wanted to throw that out there because I often (but not always play Paladins in the game-including the undead hunter kit).
I sometimes surprise others by siding with Bodhi over the Shadow Thieves. Here are some points and counterpoints.
1. But vamps are evil!! Yes they are, and I plan to destroy them after taking down the Shadow Thieves. Why settle for taking down 1 evil in a vanilla game when you can take down 2. (the un-modded game gives you a chance to take both down if you fight the Shadows thieves first but not if you fight vamps first)
2. But you should fight the worse evil!! I'll argue the Shadow Thieves are actually the bigger fish and thus more potent evil here. A. Linvail is about as ok of a Thief leader as it gets but there are a number of Renal Bloodscalps & Mae'Vars running things alongside him. And they infest/corrupt so much of Amn they are usually a dominating force. Most other thieves guilds are destroyed by them and if it wasn't for the vamps tactical advantage in individual battles the vamps would be destroyed like all the others-thus the vamps are a rare chance to seriously disrupt the Shadows Thieves.
Also in some of my other playthroughs I had a thief PC and took over Mae'Vars guild. And more people in it were evil (detected evil & know alignment) when it was loyal to the Shadow Thieves with you running it than when cruel Mae'Var was in charge. Sure most were evil but some weren't (as in the trainer lady on the 2nd floor). Plus it is your morality not Shadow Thief morals that decide not to do the worst things when you run the guild. Assassination (including of innocent folks)-the Shadow Thieves have a guy that specializes in it. Smuggling-ok but the Shadow Thieves provide you with someone quite willing to do slavery on the side as well. The Shadow Thieves just want their cut and let you do the bad stuff that goes beyond the pale.
(PS you can avoid giving them a cut by charming their representative, taking him away from your guild and letting the charm wear off so he attacks you and looses out of sight.)
The Shadow Thieves do some of the same bad and nasty stuff the vamps do but just drink less blood while they are at it.
3. But the vamps have you do worse things than the thieves right? Actually they both have you do things to hurt the other. So there isn't usually much moral advantage either way. (On one of Bodhi's missions she actually gives you a choice of doing something bad or not-but it is still your choice of how to fight the other side).
The 1 person I feel for is Mook (one of the few thieves in the game that detects as good). So I charm her, pickpocket the shipment Bodhi sends you to grab off her, and stick her inside a building I don't plan to visit later-end result she lives if I attack the Shadow Thieves but dies if I work for them. A bit ironic.
4. But Keldorn & Mazzy leave you if you work for Bodhi but not the Shadow Thieves-so they are better. Good point. Which is why I temporarily drop them from my party before joining Bodhi and have them rejoin when I'm done. And they don't like either group and they shouldn't. Don't forget that Anomen, even if he passed his test and goes Lawful Good, doesn't trust Bodhi but stays with you if you side with her-and you can tell Bodhi that you don't trust her and will only temporarily work with her.
If you go to the Prelate of the Order of the Radiant Heart to ask for help fighting Bodhi after your Paladin has joined his organization he will question your judgement about deciding the Shadow Thieves are the bigger evil (yes questioning my point 2) and say he wants to talk to you about it later but doesn't boot you out of the Order and is actually happy in the end if you keep the knights he sent to aid you alive (which is harder than you'd think thanks to 1 sometimes hurting his own companions with his fireballing sword). So siding with the vamps is potentially forgivable, just like with the Shadow Thieves.
I sometimes surprise others by siding with Bodhi over the Shadow Thieves. Here are some points and counterpoints.
1. But vamps are evil!! Yes they are, and I plan to destroy them after taking down the Shadow Thieves. Why settle for taking down 1 evil in a vanilla game when you can take down 2. (the un-modded game gives you a chance to take both down if you fight the Shadows thieves first but not if you fight vamps first)
2. But you should fight the worse evil!! I'll argue the Shadow Thieves are actually the bigger fish and thus more potent evil here. A. Linvail is about as ok of a Thief leader as it gets but there are a number of Renal Bloodscalps & Mae'Vars running things alongside him. And they infest/corrupt so much of Amn they are usually a dominating force. Most other thieves guilds are destroyed by them and if it wasn't for the vamps tactical advantage in individual battles the vamps would be destroyed like all the others-thus the vamps are a rare chance to seriously disrupt the Shadows Thieves.
Also in some of my other playthroughs I had a thief PC and took over Mae'Vars guild. And more people in it were evil (detected evil & know alignment) when it was loyal to the Shadow Thieves with you running it than when cruel Mae'Var was in charge. Sure most were evil but some weren't (as in the trainer lady on the 2nd floor). Plus it is your morality not Shadow Thief morals that decide not to do the worst things when you run the guild. Assassination (including of innocent folks)-the Shadow Thieves have a guy that specializes in it. Smuggling-ok but the Shadow Thieves provide you with someone quite willing to do slavery on the side as well. The Shadow Thieves just want their cut and let you do the bad stuff that goes beyond the pale.
(PS you can avoid giving them a cut by charming their representative, taking him away from your guild and letting the charm wear off so he attacks you and looses out of sight.)
The Shadow Thieves do some of the same bad and nasty stuff the vamps do but just drink less blood while they are at it.
3. But the vamps have you do worse things than the thieves right? Actually they both have you do things to hurt the other. So there isn't usually much moral advantage either way. (On one of Bodhi's missions she actually gives you a choice of doing something bad or not-but it is still your choice of how to fight the other side).
The 1 person I feel for is Mook (one of the few thieves in the game that detects as good). So I charm her, pickpocket the shipment Bodhi sends you to grab off her, and stick her inside a building I don't plan to visit later-end result she lives if I attack the Shadow Thieves but dies if I work for them. A bit ironic.
4. But Keldorn & Mazzy leave you if you work for Bodhi but not the Shadow Thieves-so they are better. Good point. Which is why I temporarily drop them from my party before joining Bodhi and have them rejoin when I'm done. And they don't like either group and they shouldn't. Don't forget that Anomen, even if he passed his test and goes Lawful Good, doesn't trust Bodhi but stays with you if you side with her-and you can tell Bodhi that you don't trust her and will only temporarily work with her.
If you go to the Prelate of the Order of the Radiant Heart to ask for help fighting Bodhi after your Paladin has joined his organization he will question your judgement about deciding the Shadow Thieves are the bigger evil (yes questioning my point 2) and say he wants to talk to you about it later but doesn't boot you out of the Order and is actually happy in the end if you keep the knights he sent to aid you alive (which is harder than you'd think thanks to 1 sometimes hurting his own companions with his fireballing sword). So siding with the vamps is potentially forgivable, just like with the Shadow Thieves.
Post edited by pplr on
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Comments
If someone wanted to try to do an in game response to this the Shadow Thieves could try to ambush you themselves. Though something to factor in is how many looses they may have had fighting vamps-especially if you sided with Bodhi and just cleared out their biggest guild/HQ in the city (dual-classing away from a thief class de-activates it until your new class surpasses it by 1 level, if you talk to Bodhi when you do this she will let you join.. meaning you can run a thieves guild while running anti-Shadow Thief missions for Bodhi. But that is straying from the original point. Anyway glad to share the knowledge if it proves useful.
Yes, some of it is meta-knowledge (which is part of why I put out a spoiler warning). I'm assuming many of us have already played though BG2 a couple of times. As people who have played the game we can think over points both within and outside of the limited perspective of a character inside the game.
No, some of it isn't meta-knowledge. It is common enough knowledge within the city that the Shadow Thieves hold great power. Even if your character doesn't know it he or she can pick up bits of knowledge that make the point-including talking with some city dwellers who point out that the Shadow Thieves have typically beaten any challengers thus far.
Also a number of the choices with the thieve's guild I figured out or could see on my own by looking at my options after I gained control of it. A Paladin wouldn't know that directly but he or she-hearing about the amount of control the Shadow Thieves have-could guess at some of the things they are involved in.
I've always wished there was a third option of some sort that didn't involve consorting with thieves or vampires, but the developers probably didn't have time to offer a "paladin option" for that decision.
But I can not side with the vampires when I play a good character. Vampires are pure evil. While thieves are bad, their not evil.
However, I think it could be argued that, if you were to put yourself in the place of someone who has no knowledge of future events, it may make more sense to side with the vampires because you don't yet realize the scope of their power and ambitions, whereas the Shadow Thieves are far more (in)famous.
For the record, I know in 3rd Ed, Aran is specifically mentioned as a decoy/puppet leader. He's actually canon. A really well educated charname might be aware that huge evil organizations aren't going to be stupid enough to let a loose cannon Bhaalspawn meet the actual head honchos.
So, a real dumb Paladin could justify infiltrating a smaller, new guild of vampires to enable him to 'destroy' the established guild, with the intention of destroying the small one later. There is enough info available to make this a viable choice imho, if a kinda unintelligent/naive one. Ymmv!
Not all heroes are successful. Maybe Charname is tough enough to take down some human thieves, but not tough enough to take down a cabal of vampires. And if he or she has a reason to suspect vampires would be too dangerous to fight, the best decision may be to pick the winning team, if only to make sure Imoen is okay.
Also don't forget that Amn is very corrupt. Wouldn't it be possible or even likely that the strength and control of the Shadow Thieves is one of the forces promoting that corruption.
So one could argue the Shadow Thieves are evil and have a bad effect or society/government. This currently puts them at a scale larger than the vamps-which are evil but haven't reached the ability to drag down government/society (and never will if you consider the plan).
My apologies if this is off topic but it provides what I think is a good example. In a real world example ISIS attacked the Free Syrian Army quite often despite the fact that they were both supposedly fighting Assad's forces.
Your PC wants to rescue Imoen. But isn't limited to working for the Shadow Thieves to do this. For reasons mentioned above I would argue that if you could do this and weaken the Shadow Thieves hold on even 1 city a good character would at least give such a possibility consideration. And I would argue a good character could take advantage of such a possibility.
Killing the vampires does not cost you the opportunity also to wipe out the Shadow Thieves, it merely delays it. When you come back to Athkatla in Chapter 6, you can then exterminate the Shadow Thieves without penalty, if your protagonist is inclined to do so.
Some of the aggressively Good-aligned NPCs (both Keldorn and Sir Anomen, IIRC) actually state (whilst you're working with the Shadow Thieves) that they'd like to come back later and wipe them out when you no longer depend upon their help ... so sometimes I've done what they wanted.
Since Keldorn is the "model Paladin", and since Keldorn's preference in the game is explicitly to work with the Shadow Thieves in Chapter 3 but to attack them later (i.e. in Chapter 6), I regard this as the "canonical strategy" for a Paladin protagonist. Nevertheless, I accept that it's a credible alternative role-play to "infiltrate" the vampires and destroy the Thieves in Chapter 3, then clean out the vampires in Chapter 6. Either way round, however, I'm sure that any Paladin would be keen to destroy both the Thieves and vampires when the opportunity arose, because attacking bad guys is what Paladins are all about.
We agree on that.
Let me separate my response on your other point in 2 ways. Meta & not.
1. Not meta. The Shadow Thieves are powerful but have been under strain (at least in this part of Amn) recently in a way that is rarely matched. It may make tactical sense to take them out first as removing the vamps sooner could give the Shadow Thieves a chance to rebound.
2. Meta. I thought both Shadow Thieves & Bodhi have a way to prevent the player from attacking them after working with their side. A very hard to kill (may have to cheat) version of Arkanis Gath (there is a different thread about him) appears for the Shadow Thieves and a version of Bodhi is similar if you attack her except she lets out something like a Banshee's scream and won't drop below 1 hitpoint. So you get punished for attacking both if after siding with them (though I noticed Bodhi doesn't seem to react if you kill her hench-vamps out of her view.)
Side point. With the hard to kill Bodhi, I once used a cheat to recruit her hard to kill version into the party. She, like the pre-EE version of Arkanis, could be killed by stat drain (both mindflayers and the demogorgon fight did this). I think she may also have been vulnerable to very high level turning as Melissan would say something like "Away from me dead thing" and a hard to kill Bodhi would flop over dead in 1 go-so I think Melissan turned successfully turned her or something like that. Anyway totally side point but it does go to re-emphasize that the game tries to force people to stick with the side they chose in Act 3 until you have to fight the vamps in Act 6.
In your game would Arkanis appear if you sided with the Shadow Thieves in Act 3 and then attacked them? I was unaware that defense came down in Act 6 if it does. If so then thanks for the info.
If Arkanis stops appearing for the Shadow Thieves in Act 6 then great. Also is Renal Bloodscalp still around in Chapter 6? (as an evil guild leader a paladin would probably want to take him out as well)
Like I said before I think we agree a good character could join either faction with the intent to attack both-plus I got a kick out of your last sentence.
I could see a paladin wanting to give Bodhi the benefit of the doubt, especially after encountering Hexxat and discovering that not all vampires perform evil acts all the time. It would be a naive paladin to think that way (within the context of the Forgotten Realms), but certainly a justifiable player narrative. In many ways more justifiable than working with a known criminal organization that consistently and constantly works to corrupt the city's laws.
One of the reasons I mentioned working with Bodhi is because I wanted to attack both groups.
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I guess what I'm asking, is whether a particularly stupid do-gooder could commit to palling up with Bhodi, whilst being totally oblivious to her true nature? And once they do find out, they're already on the Guild's black list.
"I thought she was just a lady who really liked graveyards!"
Hey, the sex appeal alone should justify siding with Bodhi.
(Crazed Paladin, one of the very few very well-written Lawful Stupid villains)
Think about it, if shadow thieves happen upon a poor, innocent family. They will at most take a few coppers and give the husband a beating if he resists. Now think what will happen if vampires descend upon that poor family? The wife has just given birth to a little baby last month who is crying in her arms. The 4 years old little girl is looking with big scared eyes under her mother's skirt. And vampires approach, guess what they will want? Too horrid to contemplate.
Can't we kill the shadow thieves after working for them and returning from Brynlaw? I thought we could. But in any case, choosing vampires over thieves does not make sense for a good pc IMHO. Okay, the thieves are not Robinhood wannabes, but vamps are not Cullens either.