You ever think how gales isolation from society (his lack of friends, and his only real friend being Tara) is probably very intentional by Mystra. Social isolation is a very common tactic by abusers and if there’s no one around to tell him that this is wrong and the only person he is relatively close with (Elminister) is encouraging it…. then he’s probably just being paranoid any time he has doubts. Mystra loves him. She does. He’s just… overthinking this.

:) imma cry now

Doing some brainstorming tonight and I realized Halsin actually has some insecurities around what he's able to control.

BG3 spoilers below:

He blames himself for the Shadow Curse and for what happened to Thaniel. He also feels responsible for Kagha's decision to begin the Rite of Thorns, and probably the fact that she was so easily swayed by the Shadow Druids.

Never mind the fact that he can't control his bear form for long...

Even his imprisonment and repeated assault by the drow could be part of this discussion. Like, "Haha yeah, I was young and dumb and that's what I got!" Like....no dude. You didn't have ANY control over these things.

You didn't do anything wrong, and you certainly don't deserve to feel any of it is your fault, or weak for being fallible.

God I just wanna hug him.

DnD mechanics wise there are two ways I can see Astarion being cured.

First option is uh— for him to die and then a Druid to use the reincarnate spell. He’d come back not a spawn, but also might come back a totally new random race.

Second option would be a wish spell. Easy in that it literally could just be, “I wish Astarion was an ALIVE non-vampire spawn high elf again.” Difficult in finding an artifact that has the spell or a scroll. I don’t believe wish exists in the game itself, but it does exist in the world!

So I like to imagine my Tav and him set out on a journey to find a wish to cure him post game~

BG3 ACT 2 SPOILERS

So ketheric thorm had people build that temple to Shar at some point ? Am I understanding that right? And then the devil guy went in and absolutely smashed it to bits in the last 100 years and that's why it looks like That™️.

So ketheric commissioned all the sexy statues of shar? He had the stone masons in reithwin working overtime carving Shars battle bikini over and over again? That's so wild. Absolutely feral behavior. What did the townspeople think? Ketherics wife died and he's suddenly commissioning a bunch of sexy marble statues of an evil goddess? That's crazy. How many shar statues are in act 2? The Reithwin stone masonry guilds whole docket was just carving shars tits for weeks.

Idk the whole story is compelling but that particular bit of logistics is making me laugh so hard rn.

Man, I know I live in delusion land, but I do really think the Emperor knows who Durge is and their affiliation with Gortash.

So him saying this is extra cruel, he's doing the same thing Gortash did. Taking the person who meant the most to him like he was taken from his old life. Technically* enthralling the Durge to work against and dismantle everything Gortash built. He doesn't step in when the brain kills Gortash, he waits until after when the Durge and co are at risk.

He's giving the biggest fuck you back to Gortash for bringing him back to the brain.

*whether he enthralls them or not, he definitely isn't above manipulating their thoughts, building the perfect dream guardian for each of the prism bearers, only telling them what he wants them to know, etc.

Do you think maybe Sceleritas tried to make Durge kill Gortash back when they were "allies" (or lovers... oopsie)?? Will he be upset seeing his master "admires" Bane's choosen so much? I bet there was something going on there

Raphael and/or Gortash enjoyers, do we know if Raphael knows that Gortash broke into the House of Hope with Helsik? If not, what are y'all's theories?

People have pointed out that maybe the Emperor did something with the companions minds, since the companions don't mention seeing Tav and Emperor like that

However I propose another theory

None of them have the guts to commentate. Frankly I don't blame them. Mind Flayers are freaky by DnD standards and I don't think any of the companions want to risk offending a mind flayer emperor OR the person whose... intimate with said emperor

Like sure Astarion may want to dry heave at the mere thought but like... he also knows that Tav could just go tattle on him to their boyfriend and then what? Who knows, none of them know, and they don't want to find out

For all they know they're one cross comment away from a tadpole being shoved into their head, they don't wanna do that, they're just gonna keep their mouths shut and side eye Tav when they aren't looking

Oh absolutely! I like to think it's a mix of that and just trying to pretend that was a bad dream. Like, if I don't say anything, I can pretend it was a freaky nightmare.

Then again, twirls my hair, the screencap was from my dark urge playthrough and girlie Slays 💅💅 (has commited multiple homicides in Slayer form) She's crazy, the fear of ending up like Gale's hand runs deep in these hoes 🤭🤭

Like it's definitely fun to find out that they never comment no matter what, but it is so funny to think even Shadowheart, her doomed yuri gf, is too scared to her confront not-Shar-approved-not-girlfriend-girlfriend about her Crazy-on-Crazy astral sex

I do really hope that they patch in reactions and stuff with the larger QoL patches. I need the option to be kinkshamed to my face so I can bully them for not being into it.

So we currently have big-name voices for two out of our three big antagonists, JK Simmons for Ketheric Thorm and Jason Isaacs for Enver Gortash...so what does that mean for Orin the Red? Do we got a trend going here and we're gonna end up shocked that she's voiced by someone we'll identify immediately the moment we hear her or nah? I won't be complaining either way, I just got to speculating bc what else am I gonna do with 9 days until BG3 finally drops.

my predictions on polyam content in bg3:

- it won’t just be specific companions that will be monogamous or polyamorous, but they’ll have different opinions depending on who else you want to date.

who i think would be down for polyamory no matter what:

- astarion (do i even need to explain myself here)

- lae’zel (it’s canon that githyanki don’t do monogamy iirc)

who i think would have differing opinions depending on the companion:

- shadowheart. i don’t see her wanting to be metamours with lae’zel AT ALL.

- wyll, potentially? i don’t know how far the rivalry with karlach will go, especially considering they can become friends according to larian, but idk if that just meant when they are played as origin characters

who i don’t think would be interested in polyamory:

- gale. i could see him getting involved with the mc while potentially getting back with mystra in the endgame, but i don’t see him being willing to really share the mc

- ik this is completely contradictory to what i said before, but potentially lae’zel? depending on whether any of her arcs have her questioning that aspect of gith society, i could see her going monogamous as kind of a rebellion against gith sexual norms

- halsin seems like a mate 4 life kinda guy idk (EDIT: he was confirmed polyamorous by Larian + wood elf society is typically poly)

- same with minthara, but more mommy-flavoured

What's a dumb little thing you wish was in BG3? I'll go first.

I really would love to be able to right click an item and have the option to ask for it from the owner if they're nearby. I just think it would be absolutely hilarious to be damn near arrested for theft and then you just turn to the owner like "can I have it?" And they're like "yea it's chill"

Gods what if they added a pregnancy mechanic to bg3 and no one’s found it yet because no one’s gotten that far?

I’m playing BG3 with a friend and he has made it his personal mission to collect all the teddy bears we find. I hope they’re going with Halsin to the orphans 🥹

I've only just noticed a new little voice clip on character select for Touchstone. Now that she has her special "Pajamas", I'll occasionally get:

"Nothing hurts anymore..."

Makes me wonder if the pajama blessing also grants some sort of pain resistance. It'd make sense; easier to overpower a victim if you can't feel most of their retaliation.

Don't spoil if you know the answer please, I'm only partway through Act 2 :>

OKAY so I'm thinking over Astarion again, big surprise, and I'm specifically overthinking the lie/half-truth(?) he tells you at the beginning of the game. Note: everything beyond this is entirely speculation. He tells you he's a Magistrate back at Baldur's Gate. This lie to us in the modern day is still kind of weird, but more understandable. Depending one where you live, there could upwards of 400 magistrates in a large city or metropolitan area, overseeing different districts or working in specific ways.

But that's the modern incarnation of a magistrate. Magistracy in earlier time periods was far more complex.

I can't pin down a specific historical inspiration for Baldur's Gate, though I've seen some say it's a bit like Renaissance Italy in some aspects. Architecturally I think that makes sense, but I cannot say for sure unless there's a game designer who's talked about this somewhere I haven't found. The Florence legal system is a whole other issue which I'm not gonna get into because I'm still making sense of all the specifics, but the point being that magistrates were probably less like the judges we have today. But the specific point I'm trying to make is about numbers.

There are only 125,000 people in Baldur's Gate in BG3, according to the Forgotten Realm's wiki at least (using 1492 as our date). That's a big city, for a setting in the late 1400s/early 1500s, but nowhere near what we would consider a big city today- at least for our purposes. Again, this varies by country. I'm painfully American, so I'm gonna make a lot of Americanisms, sorry. But that size means there's almost certainly a limited amount of Magistrates. I mean, there are only 541 federal magistrates for a country with a population 331 million people (the United States). Practically speaking, Baldur's Gate isn't going to have use for that many magistrates- their government is smaller, and they just won't have to deal with all that. There might be a few extra ones considering it's a mercantile city, but still.

Getting an exact number for Florencian magistrates/judges in the Renaissance was deceptively difficult, so I don't have one. But if we give a generous 15 per district, with 19 districts, that's still 285 magistrates for the whole city. (By districts, I'm referring to the one's listed on the Forgotten Realms Wiki- 4 in the upper city, 6 in the lower, 10 in the outer). And that's assuming- A) there's more than 1 magistrate per district, B) that every district has the same amount of magistrates, and C) that the outer city's districts are even treated as being different. That's a whole lot of assumptions. More likely the smaller districts only have 1 or 2 magistrates, and the larger ones likely don't have more than 5 or so, especially given the kind of judiciary Baldur's Gate seems to have. So, really, it's likely there is not that many people, and almost all of them would be connected to either nobility or wealthy mercantile families.

Which means if your character has any kind of understanding of those systems, or god forbid is a Baldurian themselves who's like, a noble or a merchant, at the very least it should strike them as odd that they aren't even a LITTLE familiar with his name. Like, we don't know who our local judges are now because they're usually just Some Guy, but that's less the case here. Now if he said 'barrister' or some other part of the judiciary that would have made sense. But a MAGISTRATE? Astarion is so lucky all of the companions are like. Amnesiacs or haven't been in Baldur's Gate in the last ten years because MY GOD was that a terrible lie.

Things I've missed on all my other Dark Urge runs

I swear to god this game