#I’m running another bg3 play through with my friend and god that game is so fun Lmao

[the-three-whumpeteers]

The whumpee had lashed out and hurt their friends, they’d cried and broken things before- and they hated every second of it all. The whumpee just couldn’t deal with the aftermath of what had happened to them, and they just wanted to be left alone.

[nerdalmighty]

WIP folder game

Thanks for the tag @khywren!! I'm excited to participate :)

Rules: Make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it! Then, tag as many people as you have WIPs.

I only have a few wips, 4 in total right now, all for bg3, but one is a multi-chapter where each chapter is named after a different song from ANOTHER video game, Deltarune (because I'm the most creative woman in the world), and one is JUST a shitpost of a fic that I wrote to make myself laugh:

An Evening to Ourselves

Sewer Party

Don't Forget (Multi-chapter: Field of Hopes and Dreams, The Legend, Scarlet Forest)

Dont! Cross! This! Line! With your hand

Feel free to ask about any of them! I'm really enjoying posting snippets :)

Seeing as how I'm VERY new to the writing scene, I don't have a ton of mutuals who write, but I'll tag a few friends! @maladaptive-menace @ladyduellist - No pressure! And also if YOU (the person reading this) write and YOU want to share your wips, please do! And tag me in it!!

And for you, my dear @khywren, below the cut is another snippet of my long one shot (she's clocking in at 17.6k words! oops!):

“Listen to me,” you turned your head towards Astarion. “I need you to reach into my pack and get out a Scroll of Sleep.”

“You don’t just know that off-hand?”

“Astarion.” 

“Fine, fine.” The vampire drew out his daggers and slowly circled around the room, drawing the bugbear around so he wouldn’t be able to attack from behind. Astarion looked up at the rafters and saw a hay bale hanging precariously over the edge of a beam. If he angled his daggers just right…

He let the blades fly and when they connected with the hay bale, it fell from above, landing right on top of the bugbear. Astarion looked over at you with an excited grin to make sure you’d witnessed his victory.

“Yes, yes, you’re very good at knives,” you quipped. “Now get over here!”

“As you wish.” Astarion weaved his way across the barn and positioned himself behind you to look in your bag. You felt his cold breath on your ear. “Hello,” he purred.

Your fingers stumbled on a few notes and the ogress suddenly looked around, as if waking from a trance. 

“Wha-”

You scrunched your nose and kicked behind you at Astarion’s shin. 

He laughed out in pain, but you could feel him rummaging through your bag. The song you were playing resumed its hypnotic tones and the ogress seemed to calm down. 

“Remind me to never have you organize my wardrobe, darling. It is a mess in here.”

“I know where everything is!” You argued. “The scrolls are in alphabetical order.”

“My gods, you’re lame.” Astarion squinted into your bag, trying to read the titles of the spells in the dim light. 

“ASTARION!” You shouted and twisted as the bugbear suddenly reappeared, apparently having been able to push the hay bale off of himself. He was running like a madman around the right side of the barn, towards Astarion. 

Astarion reached for his daggers, only to come up empty. They were still in the hay bale on the other side of the barn. Swearing, he looked up just in time to see-

WHAM!

Your lute connected with the bugbear’s face with such force that he went down instantly. 

As a result, however, your lute was now shattered. Which meant there was about to be a very angry ogress on your hands.

Astarion quickly shuffled back to your bag and filed through your spells.

“Astarion…” You said hesitantly. Your body tensed as the ogress blinked a few times, growled, and began stomping her way towards you two.

“I’m going! I’m going! A HA!” Astarion pulled out the proper spell and leaned forward over your shoulder to shove it ungracefully into your hands. “Read it out read it out read it out!”

“Shut up shut up shut up!” You uncrumpled the spell and shouted “SOMNUM,” just as the ogress reared back to swing her club.

Instead, she went down heavily, instantly asleep.

You and Astarion stayed frozen in place. When it was clear the ogress was truly out cold, Astarion chuckled against your shoulder, still leaning into you from behind. 

You smiled. Then you joined in his slight chuckle, which turned into laughs, which turned into the both of you doubling over in weezing delight.

“Have you ever seen anything so ghastly?” Astarion looked between the two unconscious creatures.

“Love finds a way,” you continued laughing.

“My dear, love had nothing to do with that,” Astarion wiped a tear from his eye and went to retrieve his daggers from across the barn. “That was all lust. And probably a bit of morbid curiosity to see if it was even possible.”

“Clearly it is,” you said. “Shows what we know about interspecies relationships.”

Astarion sheathed his daggers and came back around to see you picking up the broken pieces of your lute. You sighed and took off your bag, carefully making the pieces fit inside. 

He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Thank you.”

You looked up at him.

“For knocking out that bugbear. And for sacrificing your lute in the process.” He bent to pick up a piece that had slid across the floor and brought it over to you.

“It’s just a thing,” you said. “I can replace it. But I’m glad you’re okay.”

[thenugking]

✨🌊🌸🌿

✨Which is your favourite platonic BG3 dynamic and why?

Hmm. Based on purely in-game stuff, it’s got to be Wyll and Karlach. Enemies to BFFs in like three days. Out of game, I love my Durge Lee with Astarion (they are like when you have two pets or perhaps siblings who sometimes just slap the shit out of each other for no reason before going back to chilling together) and my first Tav, Val, with Shadowheart (bitchy goths who don’t care about people except actually they care So Much). Would love to get around to writing them someday.

Also the dynamic I’m writing between Orin and Ketheric in No Highly Esteemed Deed. This is Ketheric’s emotional support surrogate daughter figure with zero red flags!

For my favourite dynamic not in the game or made up by me… we’ll get to that in question four!

🌊What moment in the game had the strongest emotional impact on you? 

Karlach’s breakdown after killing Gortash gets me every time. And I was sobbing in my Shadowheart Origin playthrough when I saved her parents. That storyline is so comforting to me, especially when, if you’re not playing as her, it’s Arnell who goes, “Ohh you don’t want to go by your old name anymore, of course we’ll love you for whoever you are now.”

🌸Rec one of your fics and tell us what you like about it!

My series No Highly Esteemed Deed Is Commemorated Here is my baby at the moment. So I’m actually reccing two fics but look I spend half my time thinking about this series and I want some validation. But, uh, warning for incest and every relationship here being at least toxic, if not downright abusive. If you like your doves dead, come and give me some validation, if you’re not into that shit, understandable, have a nice day.

What Is Here Was Dangerous And Repulsive To Us: Gortash and Durge take a nice romantic carriage ride to Moonrise Towers except that lol no they don’t, Orin Is Also Here, and gortash isn’t positive she wants to fuck her sibling but The Vibes Are Fucking Rancid.

Super proud of the slowly building Well This Is Fucking Uncomfortable in this one! And that multiple people have told me “damn how did you make me feel for Gortash here?” He’s still very much a bastard and I loved writing him hating the whole world, but he’s fucking Going Through it.

One of my favourite reviews: EXCUSE ME ORIN> MA’AM. THIS IS A WENDYS

This Place Is Not A Place Of Honour: The multichapter sequel that I’m currently working on! The events between the gang arriving at Moonrise and Orin stabbing my Durge in the brain (and the aftermath of that, if I ever get there). They’re all doing their evil plotting in the background, but it’s mostly focused on the relationships between Durge, Orin, Gortash and Ketheric, and the various ways in which these characters are deeply fucked up.

Like I mentioned, I’m really enjoying writing Orin and Ketheric’s weird fucked up friendship. Ketheric imprints on Orin as his New Daughter Figure after Isobel runs away from him (just because he told her that her wife who he is currently torturing was dead so Isobel should get over her) and that’s going about as well as you’d expect. Ketheric is trying to fix Orin while ignoring most of her underlying issues, Orin’s worrying that she’s going to lose Durge to the Gortash and the Absolute plot, Gortash is determined to Win his relationship with Durge despite the constant red flags, Durge is causing problems on purpose.

Another of my favourite reviews: i went into that scene like "hehe the horrors" and i went out like "OH DEAR GOD THE HORRORS"

🌿Rec someone else’s BG3 fic and tell us what you like about it!

here there be dragons by shadowfell

13 year old Orin ends up the ward of the BG1/2 protagonist and under a geas stopping her from murdering people, and becomes friends with 14 year old Wyll. Two Weird Theatre Kids with no other friends hanging out while Orin puts a lot of effort into drawing Wyll’s thematically appropriate gruesome death. They work so well together and their dynamic fucking delights me. And I love getting to see my two blorbos who fandom often doesn't give the love they deserve fucking shine.

There’s also a multi-chapter sequel of the two of them as adults going through the game plot. It’s still early on, but chapter four got posted last night and that’s my read for this evening, once I’m done killing Orin in my current BG3 game and need to go and read a kinder AU for her.

[rottenbrainstuff]

BG3 playthrough - Endless Act 3 quests

Spoilers below the cut!

OH MY GOD there’s too many things in Rivington…….. Luckily it seems most of these quests are small and self-contained so I can play by slowly advancing through areas and finishing whatever NPC thing is there before moving on?

Hey fellow dark urge players - have you ever noticed that if you look in the magic mirror, it resets your tav’s name back to The Dark Urge? And you will have to retype out the name you want? It does not do this for normal tavs. I wonder if this is just a bug. MORE interesting would be if they did it on purpose, and you are constantly having to reassert your new identity.

I was going through some old papers and letters and in a roundabout way realized there was a whole cutscene with Karlach that I missed back in Moonrise Towers. If you approach the bugbear trader with Karlach on your team, you will get a whole scene about an old friend of hers from Avernus. I love that there are little details like this in the game, and even though I am uncovering I think all or close to all of the little plot points, there will still be additional surprises like this if I replay with different teammates.

God, Rivington and especially Wyrm’s Crossing are so damned full of people. My computer is just lagging the fuck out. Not inspiring. I wish there was some way to optimize this better. Maybe reduce the rendering radius even more or something I dunno?

I found Arfur and his delightful little plot to blow up refugee children with toy bombs! What a delight that was. Too bad for this motherfucker, my brain-scrambled durge tav imprinted like a baby chick on the tiefling refugees during his first few days off the nautiloid, and this guy’s ass is now grass.

I’ve noticed that online guides seem to be incomplete (A SHOCK!) about how to resolve the situation with him, saying that you must either side with Arfur and the squatters leave, or else you side with the squatters which causes Arfur to go to Sharess’ Caress, and you can confront him there later about the plot. Me, I’m trying to take this enormous area in little pieces and I don’t really feel like opening up yet another new area yet - what if I want to deal with him right here and now?

There might be other dialogue branches to get to the same result, but here’s what I did: if you use detect thoughts during the confrontation, you can see Arfur is nervous about the squatters finding his basement. You can ask him about his basement, then ask him if you should go check it out. He will lose his patience and instruct his hired goons to attack. Once you kick their asses, (which btw you can safely do, as far as I can see, this fight does not aggro anyone else in the area) he stays in the area without running off, waiting for you to make a decision.You are then free to go and explore the basement and do the whole exploding toys quest. When Manip Nestor tells you to go find the one responsible for this, Arfur is still standing right there in front of his house, and you can finish the quest right here instead of going all the way to Sharess’ Caress. I’m assuming this conclusion is all exactly the same as if it was at Sharess’ Caress: you can agree to let him go, you can accept his bribe, or you can insist he’s going to be arrested. Then he walks away, presumably off to turn himself in at the jail like a good boy lmao, and the squatters thank you for allowing them to stay. Easy peasy and no need to go track Arfur down in some brand new area.

OMG Tara is so cute. If you approach her with Gale, she has a longer conversation with you. Is that the only time we see her?? Please say no! I love Tara so much!

Hey so I talked to the ironhand gnomes, went up through the ladder in their hideout, and discovered, surprisingly, that it leads to the smith’s rooms??? I wanted to ask him about it, why he has a secret hatch that leads to a domestic terrorist organization, but when I came through the hatch, I found he had been murdered by Orin!!! Is it possible to talk to him somehow that I missed?

Speaking of Orin - I know a lot of people are annoyed with her “ooooh it’s Orin, what an unexpected surprise!” schtick, but I actually do like the way she pops up. I like how you start speaking to an NPC and the conversation slowly starts to get more and more deranged. Before I realize it’s Orin, there is a second where it’s a genuine “what the hell is happening?” reaction. What I think the problem with Orin is, is that it happens too close together. Like, I spoke to the guard at the refugee camp, then extremely shortly after that, I spoke to the blacksmith and found her again. I am less annoyed with this concept, I think it’s cool, I kind of like the implication that Orin is out there gathering intel on you so you maybe need to watch what information you give out to random strangers, I just think the meetings needed to be a bit more spaced out, and it might avoid that annoyance that some players have with her.

I loved the courier’s zhentarim note that they hadn’t heard from the group in Waukeen’s Rest for a while. In my game, I killed all those guys when I found their hideout. I think it’s neat you have options to ally with them, but my tav personally has no use for a mafia that deals in slaves and tadpoles. If you didn’t kill the zhents in Waukeen’s Rest, does the letter still say they’ve lost contact, or does it change and say something else?

I’m finding an awful lot of murdered refugees all strewn about. I’m not exactly sure what’s happening here. I know Orin is being shitty, I know we have these doppleganger freaks, and I know there’s other stuff going on as well that I haven’t even explored yet, so who knows. I wish there was some kind of reaction line from tav or companions or something? Like. When we approached the blighted village, they commented on the dead villagers on the road. Here, I climbed down a well and found like four murdered refugees all in a pile, and there’s no comment??

I LOVED the weirdness of finding a child next to the southern checkpoint gate that was actually voiced by a real child, and not an adult VA. Very very jarring! As this is the only actual child voice in the entire game that I’ve seen so far, I assume this must be one of the dev’s kids that they put in to be cute, and I think that’s fun.

[ollypopwrites]

i’m just gonna get into it

“Bringing back Manfred throws away Emmerich’s lifelong dreams and doesn’t let him grow as a person. it’s selfish for you to bring manfred back cuz you’re only doing it cuz you will miss him”

Well first of all what are you? the fun police? play the game your way, disagree if you want to but don’t be a self-righteous little bitch about it

aside from THAT i’m gonna be so honest about this game — so far those choices aren’t as clear cut as that. this isn’t ascended vs spawn astarion or mortal vs god gale. this is not baldur’s gate and there is no “evil ending” go play bg3 again if you’re looking for that or make some lovely fan work im sure it’ll be amazing

but that isn’t what this game is or does, at least with Emmerich’s choice

I haven’t done a lich run yet so i’m not as familiar with all the commentary he has. but im not talking about that choice.

“bringing back manfred takes away his lifelong dreams” and “it’s rook/player being selfish to choose to bring manfred back” yes and no.

it does take away a lifelong dream, i won’t argue with that. but sometimes dreams change, sometimes they slip away, sometimes they come true and they aren’t what you thought they’d be. and even when you are at peace with those dreams never happening, regret still happens, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t happy. i’m not saying lichdom isn’t satisfying for emmerich, im saying it’s a different path. hence it being a choice. that’s not always a bad thing.

Emmerich outright tells you he has regrets sometimes about losing lichdom, but he also says he wouldn’t trade having manfred back for anything.

he is a grown man. his entire romanced arc culminates to an argument about him obsessing over needing to think, and act like one to the point where he almost infantilizes rook and acts like they don’t understand what it means to be in a relationship with him given the age difference.

he is competent, he is intelligent, he is not a child and he knows exactly what he’s giving up. he says he wouldn’t trade it. he means it. he loves manfred, like a child, even if he doesn’t say it rook does for them both and then he proves her point with his excitement at everything he does, the look he gives manfred is the look of a parent lovingly at a child. bringing back manfred is selfless of emmerich, id argue, he sacrifices a dream for his surrogate child. he sacrifices a dream because neve would miss fred and spite would miss curiosity. he gives manfred (curiosity) a chance to be something completely new in the necropolis, a spirit in a vessel that’s An APPRENTICE. what more does a spirit of curiosity want? to explore new things and possibilities.

emmerich loves spirits, he wants to be of service to them after he dies. he does that through bringing manfred back.

“it doesn’t let him grow as a person”

nah wrong again. he’s not scared of other people’s deaths he’s scared of his own. he made part of manfred from the ribcage from a “dear friend” he’s a necromancer that’s afraid of death it’s a great character trait, it’s interesting, and i’d argue letting him choose lichdom just lets him circumvent his phobia. not that it’s wrong, because the same way his dream of becoming a lich can change, he can certainly be happy and fulfilled in lichdom but he never has to confront his fear of his own mortality. he ALSO starts to fear rook’s loss when he obtains immortality. that’s not growth and in my opinion it’s regression and leftover sadness from losing manfred in that path.

another regret, same as he has about lichdom after he brings back manfred. there’s no clear ‘win’ he still has regrets (THE THEME OF THE GAME BTW) and he has to come to terms with them.

(could it be argued that he faces his fear when he defeats johanna with the gloaming lantern? absolutely! but he does that REGARDLESS of this choice and one moment of facing fear doesn’t mean he’s over it or has worked through it btw)

stop treating him like he doesn’t know what his choice means, that he is without joy in either choice. gameplay wise we have to choose for him obvs, but the dialogue doesn’t even have rook saying “no i will miss him don’t do it” it’s “if a spirit can love, he loved you” or “let him rest.”

this game has a lot of faults and lacks in a lot of ways, don’t take away from a beautiful story about being a grown up and letting things go despite how much you wanted them before and seeing the beauty in new possibility. it’s the same for both choices, the endings just look different.

ooooo how exciting it started happening the Choice Discourse for Emmerich’s storyline

it’s not a real rpg game until part of the fandom infantilizes a grown man