Not sure if we ever find out where Neera's from originally, but it seems like possibly Thay? Other than that possibility (I never used her in BG2 so idk if there is more elaborated on there)
Neera is from the High Forest, pretty sure. Not sure if she mentions that in BG1 or BG2, but she has some dialog talking about it.
Not sure if we ever find out where Neera's from originally, but it seems like possibly Thay? Other than that possibility (I never used her in BG2 so idk if there is more elaborated on there)
Neera is from the High Forest, pretty sure. Not sure if she mentions that in BG1 or BG2, but she has some dialog talking about it.
Alright then, half and half from BG1 if you wanna include Baeloth, or 1/4 if not. Seems about right!
How could you have forgotten about the origins of the most important character in the whole series... Boo!
True! A miniature giant space hamster is definitely not from the Realms, but it could also be a Rashemi hamster! Either way, Boo is not a Sword Coast hamster.
True! A miniature giant space hamster is definitely not from the Realms, but it could also be a Rashemi hamster! Either way, Boo is not a Sword Coast hamster.
Unless of course you open your eyes and realize the truth of the multiple-Boos-theory, which has Minsc replace him every few weeks when the current tiny defenseless rodents gets squished, lost, eaten, or set on fire, and then blank out the fact that he did.
Minsc claims he acquired Boo from a gnome merchant in Rashemen, probably a tinker gnome, after he got his head injury. He believes Boo to be a giant space hamster -from the Spelljammer campaign setting- that got miniaturized, which explains Boo intelligence and capacity to converse with Minsc.
Boo appears to have no powers or abilities beyond those of a regular hamster, but no one will dare explaining it to Minsc.
I think that Boo is the link that changed Minsc from a berserker (Runescarred berserker?) into a Ranger due to his empathy toward the animal, and him being a favorite of Mielikki somehow imbued Minsc and Boo with a symbiotic relationship so they are basically unstoppable as long as they keep kicking evil buttocks.
On the subject of non-human companions, a good aligned female dwarven defender or barbarian would be a welcome addition to the series.
@GenderNihilismGirdle Indeed, I know where all the npcs come from but that was my problem to begin with. A large portion of current npcs may be from the 'region', but I feel that definition is too broad. Sure people like kivan are from around the sword coast but that is still not very local to where you come from. And local npcs of races that are not represented in the town whatsoever can barely be considered local either. I expect more that you are able to join a group of town members in the adventuring rather than that you immediately join foreigners or underrepresented races.
I think the part where all adventures are foreigners of races that are rare in the region is flawed in the dnd setting. It suggests that locals are not heroes in their own backyard but rely on foreign aid to solve their problems. This is truthfully stupid. Where are the local legends to recruit? Did they all go abroad to adventure and smite evil or good there? Why not fix the local issues? Why are all those foreigners around? There ought to be more locals percentage wise than foreigners for the world to make sense to me. Otherwise adventurers just do not care about their home which proposes the notion that they should not care about the problems abroad either which means that good npcs can only be abroad being either sent there or being cast out from home.
And I find more that tolkien writes extended fetch quests where the adventurers meet plenty of local heroes along the way but almost never invite any of them on their quest. Only strider joins the fellowship, the rest was summoned, only gollum joins the left over post of the fellowship. Noone asks the locals to join the quest and no locals ask them to fix a local problem.
@Iroumen Well there isn't just one "the dnd setting", and the post I made does make it clear that not only is a statement like "all adventurers are foreigners of races that are rare in the region" not true in Baldur's Gate, it's also definitely more weighted towards people from the region! So I'm not sure what to say about this other than that in most D&D settings the point of adventurers standing out is more about different strengths complementing one another. Even in The Lord of the Rings, you had the Fellowship made up of a bunch of people with a bunch of different strengths, from different regions, which told a story of international solidarity in the face of an evil that threatened them all. That's one of the most classic and traditional fantasy tales in Western fantasy, and part of why these heroes could solve global problems was because they were epic heroes from all over the place with a perspective that "the local" was not all there was. That's traditional Hobbit thinking, stay in your own backyard and worry about your own neighbourhood. If Bilbo had thought that, he'd never have gone on an adventure to confront Smaug! If Frodo had listened to Samwise Gamgee's initial worries, they'd have never left the Shire and no adventuring would have gotten done!
In other words, if that's a problem with D&D settings, that's a problem with the fantasy genre from its inception!
I think you can tell different stories in fantasy, and it's not universally true that people have to play people from all over the place, but neither is it true that when people sit around a gaming table everyone goes, "Yeah, let's all play humans from the Sword Coast." because people want their characters to be unique, and so they go to a lot of trouble crafting backgrounds for themselves, which often means that they end up being from different places because different players are attracted to different aspects of the setting (whether that setting is Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Darksun, Planescape, Eberron, etc, etc) and the same can be said of fantasy novels with authors that want to show you different corners of the world both by travelling there and describing things as well as by showing you what a character from that part of the world is like, and how different characters from different parts of a fantasy world relate to one another is part of the draw of a fantasy setting, and certainly more interesting than showing those differences in isolation or simply in passing (i.e. it's more interesting to see these characters interact over the course of a trilogy of novels as they adventure together rather than "everyone's from the same area and every once in a while we see someone from a different nation for a chapter or two").
I think while all of this is true, it's far from the only way fantasy stories are told, and certainly a band of heroes from the same region (although none come to mind) solving their own nation's problems could make a rip-roaring fantasy series, I just think when an author goes to the trouble of building a world they do generally want to show you more than one corner of it after they went to all that trouble crafting the world, and that's even more true of role playing game settings, which are designed to let you tell many more stories than a single novel's worth, where the authorship is shared between players and DMs (or in the case of CRPG attempts at replicating D&D, between the devs and the players of the game).
Same goes for pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons, I don't know if you've ever played tabletop RPGs, but the adventuring is rarely restricted to one area since players can go anywhere in the gameworld if they have the motivation and desire to do so. Although in 1998 the area you could travel across was quite big for the time, I'm sure Black Isle would've let you travel across a much larger section of the game world if computers at the time could've handled it!
That said, if everyone was from the same region in a tabletop game, you could tell interesting stories where they're always strangers in a strange land, but I think telling stories restricted to one nation would quickly feel less like adventuring and more like homesteading in a place with a lot of problems. One of the things about the Baldur's Gate games is that they were localized to the Sword Coast, but even then you go into Amn, another nation, for the entire duration of Baldur's Gate II, so it's not like you stay solving problems in Baldur's Gate and Beregost and Nashkel in the sequel same as in the first. It would get old fast, because adventurers are supposed to go on...well...adventures!
That said, there's nothing stopping you from having a party made up entirely of people from the Sword Coast, and if you play a pen and paper game of D&D, if you can convince everyone to play characters from the same nation you certainly could...although you'd also have to get the DM on board, since they might want to explore more of the world than just one nation, but if you were the DM you could try to sell people on playing in a game you're running where local heroes solve local problems without going elsewhere. It doesn't sound very epic or adventure-y, but it wouldn't somehow not be D&D.
I kind of doubt, though, that most people would be complaining if Baldur's Gate III covered more than one nation's worth of space to explore.
Edit: This might be a topic for another thread tho, I'm realizing now. Feel free to start one and @ me if you wanna continue the discussion, but I think it's probably better to keep this thread on track with people's votes and suggestions/clarifications/insights related to those votes!
Nah that's fine. Views may differ. I wwould just like to have a party for once where it is not all the minority races in town that you always can interact with (ex. Beregost only dwarf is joinable, 1 halfling (gnome?) with spiders in her house, 1 halfling with a stolen sword, 1 with stolen boots, 1 gnome with stolen cape) and not so few of the locals (granted marl marianne, bjornin Iis adventurer). I'd like the five local town hicks start a band for adventuring for once rather than the out of place halforc and halfelfs (friendly arm inn) or at least the daughter of the gnomes that now own the fortress or something. It's just disproportionate to me.
Nah that's fine. Views may differ. I wwould just like to have a party for once where it is not all the minority races in town that you always can interact with (ex. Beregost only dwarf is joinable, 1 halfling (gnome?) with spiders in her house, 1 halfling with a stolen sword, 1 with stolen boots, 1 gnome with stolen cape) and not so few of the locals (granted marl marianne, bjornin Iis adventurer). I'd like the five local town hicks start a band for adventuring for once rather than the out of place halforc and halfelfs (friendly arm inn) or at least the daughter of the gnomes that now own the fortress or something. It's just disproportionate to me.
Well, you can always make a party of 6 self-made characters and give 'em all local backstories!
That said, it seems like you have your own unique ideas about the demographics of the Sword Coast. The Sword Coast is full of dwarves, elves, half-elves, halflings, humans, gnomes, etc. (and hell, even full of goblins and hobgoblins and gnolls and orcs on and on, which is why you fight so dang many of 'em) if you go by the statistics in the books, in enough numbers that their inclusion in the numbers we see NPCs in BG1 and BG2 makes a lot of sense. We constantly see quest-givers of races available to the PC at character creation, which makes sense, since there's tons of them around the Sword Coast to Bhaal likely had a very diverse selection of women worshipers to woo!
The monstrous races, and even to some extent half-orcs, could be seen as outcast enough that you might not come across them as often, but Baldur's Gate as a city is a very racially diverse locale in the Realms and the Sword Coast being littered with communities that aren't 100% humans, as well as plenty of communities that are near to 100% of one race or another that's not human! That's all canon. It's not "The Human Coast" by any means, and so the five local town hicks could quite easily be of all different races without it being incompatible with the Forgotten Realms campaign setting's depiction of the Sword Coast. Quayle's community is implied to be somewhere along the Sword Coast, and it's a community of gnomes, but he was basically kicked out of it (gently) for being an annoyance, and I imagine many people like that meet and end up settling down in a human village here and there until generations down the line you've got gnome families and dwarf families and elf families living intermingled with the humans in a given town (which also gives rise over generations to half-elves and so on).
Which is part of why I put up this poll, to see which of the non-human races you felt was under-represented in the slate of companions thus far. That speaks both to the wackos who want planetouched whatsits crawling out of every crevice (like me!) and the old school Forgotten Realms fans who want to see some evidence that it's the same Sword Coast from the campaign books and the novels (but not the Baldur's Gate game novelizations *shudder*), which is also like me (seeing as I picked Dwarves ultimately, as they're one of the races you'd normally encounter along the Sword Coast with a fair amount of frequency that we don't see enough love for in companion selection).
On that note, which one do you think needs the most love of the normal races above? I can see your vote wouldn't be with a weird one like one of the planetouched or monstrous options, but of the normal Forgotten Realms races which do you think deserves a shot at a new companion more than the others?
Also, more on topic (although demographics of the Sword Coast are probably relevant to the topic at hand at least tangentially), although I really wanna see a female Dwarven Defender companion in BG III, it was tempting to click Genasi for a 2nd choice, which got me thinking about rankings and if I had to rank 'em I'd say I want to see:
1. Female Shield Dwarf Dwarven Defender! Most Important! 2. I love that 4 Genasi idea from earlier in the thread, especially if they go back to BG1 numbers for companions rather than BG2 numbers. But just one Genasi is fine too, I just wanna see at least one (and if it's gonna be one, give us a front-line Earth one or an archer of Air, and either way make 'em arrogant as all get out about their skills flowing from their connection to their element)! 3. Half-Orc who favours their human half! Half-Orc was very tempting to click because of this concept. Make 'em Good or Neutral, and make 'em more complex than a barbarian fueled by rage. A blackguard fueled by vengeance and evil and bloodlust was pretty great, and Dorn, especially when being romanced, was a tad more complex than that, but still sort of playing to the orc half. Give us human-aspiring half-orcs! 4. Another Evil Halfling! Maybe a Ghostwise one! Montaron was great, but give us a refined and sly evil halfling! Aside from Half-Orcs down at the bottom, Dwarves and Halflings are tied for least love even factoring in Beamdog additions, and only one of 'em has been evil! Give us an Evil Halfling! 5. Half-Elf with a focus on their Elven heritage, give us that Spock/Sarek relationship in their background (could be daughter and mom, daughter and dad, son and mom, etc, but I just mean parent/child and cultural immersion like the Spock/Sarek relationship)! Since Elves are way over-represented in BG1 and 2, it'd be nice if there was only 1 or 2 Elves in BG3, but then 2 or 3 half-elves as well, and I'd love for "the most elven" of all the companions to be a half-elf with a complex about who they are! All the half-elves so far might as well have been humans, which is nice for its own reasons but now that note has been hit many times. Give us half-elf Spock, I don't care what class (but a spell caster of some kind'd be a nice choice IMHO, maybe even a Cleric of an Elven deity?) 6. Grey Orc Wizard! Grey Orc Wizard! Grey Orc Wizard! Make 'em Neutral so any character can grab 'em! 7. Orog Barbarian/Berserker type for evil characters to team up with! Make them contemptuous of all other orcs like a good Orog would be! Give us dialogue from Orog foes accusing them of being weak for allying with us so they fly into an uncontrollable frenzy and begin ripping everything in sight apart! 8. More dwarves! Give us a gold dwarf to compare cultural notes with our Dwarven Defender! Give us a Wild Dwarf Druid! 9. More halflings! Give us a LN Strongheart mercenary fighter! Give us a Lightfoot that's a spellcaster! 10. Give us a troll! A cursed troll who tried to become immune to fire and acid, but it backfired and made them killable by every other means! Evil parties deserve this troll! 11. Give us a Svirfneblin that's grim as heck! If you include psionics in BG III, make 'em a psion that hates mind flayers!
and, y'know, give us some humans too, but that's not what this thread's about...and I guess give us an elf or two, but I think we ran through the pool of BG III elves in BG1 lmao there's like 4 of them (5 in EE) to the 2 of every other race but half-orc (aside from the baker's dozen of humans)
@Foggy I would also like a dwarven defender, male or female doesn't matter since both genders are about as plausible. I would not like a dwarven barbarian since there are no dwarven barbarians in the forgotten realms setting that I know of, I know there is one dwarven druid, but I already said I do not like special snowflakes. Gutbusters and their brethren are not technically barbarians, more like berserkers.
I would also not like a female barbarian of any race (maybe orc/half-orc don't know much about them) for the same reason.
I would not like to vote since I Think most NPCs should be human but with a pretty generous splash of dwarves, elves, gnomes and halflings.
People of mixed heritage are supposed to be VERY rare from what I remember, half-orcs almost exclusively born after "raids".
Long story short: Please no mixed heritage race, maybe a tiefling (although done to Death already) or aasimar or something, but no more than one or two altogether. If you want to add more females please make it plausible like a dwarven defender, not some super special snowflake halfling/half-orc/anything barbarian.
It's just a poll and not as if my vote will influence the developers. For the record I'm male, you know the hetero white male kind that bench 340 pounds but doesn't project insecurities in video game fearing special "snowflakes". I like a female dwarven barbarian, I'd like to romance her in game or not doesn't matter, methinks that if the female NPCs and other mixed races bother you, you can always stay in your safespace and avoid making a fool out of yourself.
Also what if I told you that the best race to play barbarian is dwarf and half-orc, and that it is the case since 1998 in BG1, and that you can now find barbarian as a subclass fighter? You know that right? Right.
@Foggy I would also like a dwarven defender, male or female doesn't matter since both genders are about as plausible. I would not like a dwarven barbarian since there are no dwarven barbarians in the forgotten realms setting that I know of, I know there is one dwarven druid, but I already said I do not like special snowflakes. Gutbusters and their brethren are not technically barbarians, more like berserkers.
@Foggy I will not give a long response since I do not want to derail this thread that I Think is a good idea btw. I just want characters to be believable in the given setting. I feel no need to defend myself for this. You can hate my opinion, but why jump to conclusions about what I am like irl? And how does lifting weights make my opinion less valid, sorry you lost me there.
@EnialusMeliamne I stand corrected. From the books I've read in the forgotten realms setting the only barbarians are northern (male) tribesmen a la Wulfgar. I also never read about any wild dwarves in those books.
I love weird and odd companions, like Deekin, the most. There should only really be one or two of those though, since their rarity is what make them interresting. A gnoll, a troll or maybe a shaman xvart? I don't especially like too powerful companions, but tend to avoid the weak ones as well. So balance is the key. Wilson may have been an easter-egg, but he was kinda funny and an interresting addition.
Other than that I wouldn't mind alot more shorties, especially females, like the proposed female dwarven defender mentioned by others above. That would be interresting indeed. Odd combinations of race and class can be intrigueing as well, or just a non-standard personality for a certain class or race. I've always enjoyed ie Grimgraw in NVN. A quite different depiction of a dwarf which I thought was refreshing.
@EnialusMeliamne I stand corrected. From the books I've read in the forgotten realms setting the only barbarians are northern (male) tribesmen a la Wulfgar. I also never read about any wild dwarves in those books.
Since you mentioned that you have read some of the Forgotten Realms books, here is one series that you might find of interest. I wouldn't read the whole link, as it will spoil you on the story. In the series, there is an Arctic dwarf ranger who adventures with a half-man, half-golem.
There are enough younger NPC's in the game to make them be most of your recruitable NPCs in the game. Off the top of my head there are: Brus: theif Dylan: ranger Tat & Tot (Jansen): Illusionists and/or thieves. Corwin's Daughter: fighter (?) Keldorn's Daughter(s): Cleric(s) Albert: Your monstrous NPC Cernd's Son: Mage The kid from the druid stronghold quest that wants to be an adventure The 3 kids you buy swords and alochol for Aerie's kid: A winged half-elf with divine blood (how cool is that?)
Any elf in the games (Vic, Aerie, Kivan) can probably be re-recruited due to their long lives.
So what's missing is Dwarf (there is always a dwarf npc) and halfling who gets much less love than other shorties. So that is my vote.
I love weird and odd companions, like Deekin, the most. There should only really be one or two of those though, since their rarity is what make them interresting. A gnoll, a troll or maybe a shaman xvart? I don't especially like too powerful companions, but tend to avoid the weak ones as well. So balance is the key. Wilson may have been an easter-egg, but he was kinda funny and an interresting addition.
Other than that I wouldn't mind alot more shorties, especially females, like the proposed female dwarven defender mentioned by others above. That would be interresting indeed. Odd combinations of race and class can be intrigueing as well, or just a non-standard personality for a certain class or race. I've always enjoyed ie Grimgraw in NVN. A quite different depiction of a dwarf which I thought was refreshing.
I'd love to see a Jester Xvart now that you've mentione xvarts. I mean, who wouldn't be confused (as per the status effect) seeing that in action?
There are enough younger NPC's in the game to make them be most of your recruitable NPCs in the game. Off the top of my head there are: Brus: theif Dylan: ranger Tat & Tot (Jansen): Illusionists and/or thieves. Corwin's Daughter: fighter (?) Keldorn's Daughter(s): Cleric(s) Albert: Your monstrous NPC Cernd's Son: Mage The kid from the druid stronghold quest that wants to be an adventure The 3 kids you buy swords and alochol for Aerie's kid: A winged half-elf with divine blood (how cool is that?)
Any elf in the games (Vic, Aerie, Kivan) can probably be re-recruited due to their long lives.
So what's missing is Dwarf (there is always a dwarf npc) and halfling who gets much less love than other shorties. So that is my vote.
This is really interesting, I hadn't thought of all the kids throughout the series that could potentially be companions in BG III, good point! This is well worth a click of the insightful button!
I hope they let you answer questions about who you romanced, so that based on your questions you get a different "child of CHARNAME" companion, it would add a lot to replayability and make the choices you made in the originals feel real. Whether they let you import a save or do it with a quiz at the beginning of a new game, I really do hope you get a choice! One kid per pairing option would be neat, and maybe if the pairing would only make sense with adoption there could be adopted kid(s)!
Not enough Half-Orc. Preferably female, but that's my personal taste.
Of the races the player can choose to be at chargen, it's the one with the least love. And we need some Neutral or Good aligned ones so Good parties can get in on the Half-Orc companion action! After more Dwarves and some Genasi, Half-Orcs are what I most want to see in BG III for sure!
Comments
Boo appears to have no powers or abilities beyond those of a regular hamster, but no one will dare explaining it to Minsc.
I think that Boo is the link that changed Minsc from a berserker (Runescarred berserker?) into a Ranger due to his empathy toward the animal, and him being a favorite of Mielikki somehow imbued Minsc and Boo with a symbiotic relationship so they are basically unstoppable as long as they keep kicking evil buttocks.
On the subject of non-human companions, a good aligned female dwarven defender or barbarian would be a welcome addition to the series.
I think the part where all adventures are foreigners of races that are rare in the region is flawed in the dnd setting. It suggests that locals are not heroes in their own backyard but rely on foreign aid to solve their problems. This is truthfully stupid. Where are the local legends to recruit? Did they all go abroad to adventure and smite evil or good there? Why not fix the local issues? Why are all those foreigners around?
There ought to be more locals percentage wise than foreigners for the world to make sense to me. Otherwise adventurers just do not care about their home which proposes the notion that they should not care about the problems abroad either which means that good npcs can only be abroad being either sent there or being cast out from home.
And I find more that tolkien writes extended fetch quests where the adventurers meet plenty of local heroes along the way but almost never invite any of them on their quest. Only strider joins the fellowship, the rest was summoned, only gollum joins the left over post of the fellowship. Noone asks the locals to join the quest and no locals ask them to fix a local problem.
In other words, if that's a problem with D&D settings, that's a problem with the fantasy genre from its inception!
I think you can tell different stories in fantasy, and it's not universally true that people have to play people from all over the place, but neither is it true that when people sit around a gaming table everyone goes, "Yeah, let's all play humans from the Sword Coast." because people want their characters to be unique, and so they go to a lot of trouble crafting backgrounds for themselves, which often means that they end up being from different places because different players are attracted to different aspects of the setting (whether that setting is Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Darksun, Planescape, Eberron, etc, etc) and the same can be said of fantasy novels with authors that want to show you different corners of the world both by travelling there and describing things as well as by showing you what a character from that part of the world is like, and how different characters from different parts of a fantasy world relate to one another is part of the draw of a fantasy setting, and certainly more interesting than showing those differences in isolation or simply in passing (i.e. it's more interesting to see these characters interact over the course of a trilogy of novels as they adventure together rather than "everyone's from the same area and every once in a while we see someone from a different nation for a chapter or two").
I think while all of this is true, it's far from the only way fantasy stories are told, and certainly a band of heroes from the same region (although none come to mind) solving their own nation's problems could make a rip-roaring fantasy series, I just think when an author goes to the trouble of building a world they do generally want to show you more than one corner of it after they went to all that trouble crafting the world, and that's even more true of role playing game settings, which are designed to let you tell many more stories than a single novel's worth, where the authorship is shared between players and DMs (or in the case of CRPG attempts at replicating D&D, between the devs and the players of the game).
Same goes for pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons, I don't know if you've ever played tabletop RPGs, but the adventuring is rarely restricted to one area since players can go anywhere in the gameworld if they have the motivation and desire to do so. Although in 1998 the area you could travel across was quite big for the time, I'm sure Black Isle would've let you travel across a much larger section of the game world if computers at the time could've handled it!
That said, if everyone was from the same region in a tabletop game, you could tell interesting stories where they're always strangers in a strange land, but I think telling stories restricted to one nation would quickly feel less like adventuring and more like homesteading in a place with a lot of problems. One of the things about the Baldur's Gate games is that they were localized to the Sword Coast, but even then you go into Amn, another nation, for the entire duration of Baldur's Gate II, so it's not like you stay solving problems in Baldur's Gate and Beregost and Nashkel in the sequel same as in the first. It would get old fast, because adventurers are supposed to go on...well...adventures!
That said, there's nothing stopping you from having a party made up entirely of people from the Sword Coast, and if you play a pen and paper game of D&D, if you can convince everyone to play characters from the same nation you certainly could...although you'd also have to get the DM on board, since they might want to explore more of the world than just one nation, but if you were the DM you could try to sell people on playing in a game you're running where local heroes solve local problems without going elsewhere. It doesn't sound very epic or adventure-y, but it wouldn't somehow not be D&D.
I kind of doubt, though, that most people would be complaining if Baldur's Gate III covered more than one nation's worth of space to explore.
Edit: This might be a topic for another thread tho, I'm realizing now. Feel free to start one and @ me if you wanna continue the discussion, but I think it's probably better to keep this thread on track with people's votes and suggestions/clarifications/insights related to those votes!
I wwould just like to have a party for once where it is not all the minority races in town that you always can interact with (ex. Beregost only dwarf is joinable, 1 halfling (gnome?) with spiders in her house, 1 halfling with a stolen sword, 1 with stolen boots, 1 gnome with stolen cape) and not so few of the locals (granted marl marianne, bjornin Iis adventurer).
I'd like the five local town hicks start a band for adventuring for once rather than the out of place halforc and halfelfs (friendly arm inn) or at least the daughter of the gnomes that now own the fortress or something.
It's just disproportionate to me.
That said, it seems like you have your own unique ideas about the demographics of the Sword Coast. The Sword Coast is full of dwarves, elves, half-elves, halflings, humans, gnomes, etc. (and hell, even full of goblins and hobgoblins and gnolls and orcs on and on, which is why you fight so dang many of 'em) if you go by the statistics in the books, in enough numbers that their inclusion in the numbers we see NPCs in BG1 and BG2 makes a lot of sense. We constantly see quest-givers of races available to the PC at character creation, which makes sense, since there's tons of them around the Sword Coast to Bhaal likely had a very diverse selection of women worshipers to woo!
The monstrous races, and even to some extent half-orcs, could be seen as outcast enough that you might not come across them as often, but Baldur's Gate as a city is a very racially diverse locale in the Realms and the Sword Coast being littered with communities that aren't 100% humans, as well as plenty of communities that are near to 100% of one race or another that's not human! That's all canon. It's not "The Human Coast" by any means, and so the five local town hicks could quite easily be of all different races without it being incompatible with the Forgotten Realms campaign setting's depiction of the Sword Coast. Quayle's community is implied to be somewhere along the Sword Coast, and it's a community of gnomes, but he was basically kicked out of it (gently) for being an annoyance, and I imagine many people like that meet and end up settling down in a human village here and there until generations down the line you've got gnome families and dwarf families and elf families living intermingled with the humans in a given town (which also gives rise over generations to half-elves and so on).
Which is part of why I put up this poll, to see which of the non-human races you felt was under-represented in the slate of companions thus far. That speaks both to the wackos who want planetouched whatsits crawling out of every crevice (like me!) and the old school Forgotten Realms fans who want to see some evidence that it's the same Sword Coast from the campaign books and the novels (but not the Baldur's Gate game novelizations *shudder*), which is also like me (seeing as I picked Dwarves ultimately, as they're one of the races you'd normally encounter along the Sword Coast with a fair amount of frequency that we don't see enough love for in companion selection).
On that note, which one do you think needs the most love of the normal races above? I can see your vote wouldn't be with a weird one like one of the planetouched or monstrous options, but of the normal Forgotten Realms races which do you think deserves a shot at a new companion more than the others?
1. Female Shield Dwarf Dwarven Defender! Most Important!
2. I love that 4 Genasi idea from earlier in the thread, especially if they go back to BG1 numbers for companions rather than BG2 numbers. But just one Genasi is fine too, I just wanna see at least one (and if it's gonna be one, give us a front-line Earth one or an archer of Air, and either way make 'em arrogant as all get out about their skills flowing from their connection to their element)!
3. Half-Orc who favours their human half! Half-Orc was very tempting to click because of this concept. Make 'em Good or Neutral, and make 'em more complex than a barbarian fueled by rage. A blackguard fueled by vengeance and evil and bloodlust was pretty great, and Dorn, especially when being romanced, was a tad more complex than that, but still sort of playing to the orc half. Give us human-aspiring half-orcs!
4. Another Evil Halfling! Maybe a Ghostwise one! Montaron was great, but give us a refined and sly evil halfling! Aside from Half-Orcs down at the bottom, Dwarves and Halflings are tied for least love even factoring in Beamdog additions, and only one of 'em has been evil! Give us an Evil Halfling!
5. Half-Elf with a focus on their Elven heritage, give us that Spock/Sarek relationship in their background (could be daughter and mom, daughter and dad, son and mom, etc, but I just mean parent/child and cultural immersion like the Spock/Sarek relationship)! Since Elves are way over-represented in BG1 and 2, it'd be nice if there was only 1 or 2 Elves in BG3, but then 2 or 3 half-elves as well, and I'd love for "the most elven" of all the companions to be a half-elf with a complex about who they are! All the half-elves so far might as well have been humans, which is nice for its own reasons but now that note has been hit many times. Give us half-elf Spock, I don't care what class (but a spell caster of some kind'd be a nice choice IMHO, maybe even a Cleric of an Elven deity?)
6. Grey Orc Wizard! Grey Orc Wizard! Grey Orc Wizard! Make 'em Neutral so any character can grab 'em!
7. Orog Barbarian/Berserker type for evil characters to team up with! Make them contemptuous of all other orcs like a good Orog would be! Give us dialogue from Orog foes accusing them of being weak for allying with us so they fly into an uncontrollable frenzy and begin ripping everything in sight apart!
8. More dwarves! Give us a gold dwarf to compare cultural notes with our Dwarven Defender! Give us a Wild Dwarf Druid!
9. More halflings! Give us a LN Strongheart mercenary fighter! Give us a Lightfoot that's a spellcaster!
10. Give us a troll! A cursed troll who tried to become immune to fire and acid, but it backfired and made them killable by every other means! Evil parties deserve this troll!
11. Give us a Svirfneblin that's grim as heck! If you include psionics in BG III, make 'em a psion that hates mind flayers!
and, y'know, give us some humans too, but that's not what this thread's about...and I guess give us an elf or two, but I think we ran through the pool of BG III elves in BG1 lmao there's like 4 of them (5 in EE) to the 2 of every other race but half-orc (aside from the baker's dozen of humans)
I would also not like a female barbarian of any race (maybe orc/half-orc don't know much about them) for the same reason.
I would not like to vote since I Think most NPCs should be human but with a pretty generous splash of dwarves, elves, gnomes and halflings.
People of mixed heritage are supposed to be VERY rare from what I remember, half-orcs almost exclusively born after "raids".
Long story short: Please no mixed heritage race, maybe a tiefling (although done to Death already) or aasimar or something, but no more than one or two altogether. If you want to add more females please make it plausible like a dwarven defender, not some super special snowflake halfling/half-orc/anything barbarian.
Also what if I told you that the best race to play barbarian is dwarf and half-orc, and that it is the case since 1998 in BG1, and that you can now find barbarian as a subclass fighter? You know that right? Right.
forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Arctic_dwarf
alcyius.com/dndtools/races/races-of-faerun--23/wild-dwarf--63/index.html
Wild dwarves, as a for instance, have a favored class of barbarian.
@EnialusMeliamne I stand corrected. From the books I've read in the forgotten realms setting the only barbarians are northern (male) tribesmen a la Wulfgar. I also never read about any wild dwarves in those books.
Other than that I wouldn't mind alot more shorties, especially females, like the proposed female dwarven defender mentioned by others above. That would be interresting indeed. Odd combinations of race and class can be intrigueing as well, or just a non-standard personality for a certain class or race. I've always enjoyed ie Grimgraw in NVN. A quite different depiction of a dwarf which I thought was refreshing.
forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/The_Year_of_Rogue_Dragons_trilogy
Brus: theif
Dylan: ranger
Tat & Tot (Jansen): Illusionists and/or thieves.
Corwin's Daughter: fighter (?)
Keldorn's Daughter(s): Cleric(s)
Albert: Your monstrous NPC
Cernd's Son: Mage
The kid from the druid stronghold quest that wants to be an adventure
The 3 kids you buy swords and alochol for
Aerie's kid: A winged half-elf with divine blood (how cool is that?)
Any elf in the games (Vic, Aerie, Kivan) can probably be re-recruited due to their long lives.
So what's missing is Dwarf (there is always a dwarf npc) and halfling who gets much less love than other shorties. So that is my vote.
I hope they let you answer questions about who you romanced, so that based on your questions you get a different "child of CHARNAME" companion, it would add a lot to replayability and make the choices you made in the originals feel real. Whether they let you import a save or do it with a quiz at the beginning of a new game, I really do hope you get a choice! One kid per pairing option would be neat, and maybe if the pairing would only make sense with adoption there could be adopted kid(s)!