#Miriam plays bg3

[miriamforster]

Maybe it is because I am An Old, but so much Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse sounds like people arguing over how to play with a dollhouse.

And I think that’s because we’re not used to video games where WE write the story. So when options we don’t like are added, or we see people choose one thing over another, it feels like those things become canon.

But they don’t. It’s a dollhouse.

Some people want to do a wedding with their tiny teddy bears.

Some people want their Barbies to fight to the death in ritual combat.

Some people want Thanos to put on an apron and take care of babies.

Some people want to make all the dolls kiss naked and have a doll orgy.

You can be a superhero and save everyone, or a cruel god who demands murder and sacrifice.

(Have you seen little kids play with dolls? Absolutely vicious stuff.)

The whole point is that you can play however you want, and make what stories you want.

Yes, it’s frustrating that some toys don’t have as many accessories, or that other people make your favorite doll do weird shit that you hate.

And I DO think media analysis has a role here. We should be aware of content and biases, just like we are with what kids get representation with toys and dolls.

And obviously we get attached to them! They become our comfort objects, and it can feel like a personal attack when someone hurts them.

But YOUR characters are still yours. Everyone gets their own set here. No one is stealing your Astarion doll and giving him a terrible haircut, no one is throwing your Gale action figure out the window to see if he flies. Those are other people’s toys.

Yours are safe and right where you left them. It’ll be okay.

The dollhouse is for everyone.

[miriamforster]

THIS IS WHAT I’M SAYING

You like canon? Hang around with people who are playing in canon. You like murdering barbies? Great, so does this group, have at it. You want to make everyone kiss and have kids and be a fluffy family together? There are others who want the same.

Find your people, do your thing. Stop making yourself miserable over how other people play with their toys.

[je11ybe4r]

Post BG3 story Miriam stays in the city after being banished from the underdark. Astarion remains by her side as they transition back to life before the tadpole.

Miriam forms a small mercenary group, though the word mercenary might not be the best description. A ragtag group of misfits doing small jobs around the city and the sword coast. Astarion follows along wherever Miriam goes, he remains right at her side.

Played around in character creation to make her little group of misfits.

Essence | She/Her | Tiefling | Ranger

Personality wise she reminds me a lot of Ty Lee from ALAB. She is cheerful, always positive, and a little bit of a dork, but that doesn't diminish her skills as a ranger.

Sam aka Sammy | He/Him | Hafling | Rogue/Artificer

Uncle of the group. He is a skilled bomb maker / metalworker / rogue. He can get into anything whether it's by lock pick or blowing a hole in the side of a wall. Common Miriam line "Piss me off and i'll have to send in the hafling, and you don't want to deal with the hafling."

Striker | She/Her | Dragonborn | Monk

Specializing in hand to hand combat, Striker will get shit done. Not necessarily into murder, more about subduing her target for interrogation, flexibility and speed is her prime. She is a sweety, mother of the group. I imager her like that one shop keeper in worm's crossing that's overly peppy because i love her.

Sapphrina (Rina) | She/Her | Drow | Sorcerer

Also banished from the underdark, Sapphrina found her home in baldur's gate. She is a sorcerer, yet her magic is not fully attuned, which sometimes leave the room ablaze, or shrouded with fog. She is working on it. Very smart, has a lot of trivia knowledge, probably a bit autistic.

Bartholomew | He/Him | Human | Bard

Oh your traditional bard, playing music and singing his song to the masses, except with a bit of a darker side. Secretly a trained assassin, he uses his wit and charm to get into royal parties and sneak away when no one is looking, only to find his target where they least expect it.

anyway that's the Miriam crew,, they are very gay and silly and i love them to pieces. i hope to write more about them and astarion and create my own little universe

[dismalzelenka]

Febuwhump 6 - "you lied to me"

Pairing: Tav & Dream Guardian Warnings: none

Context: Miriam's guardian takes the form of her dead brother.

THANK YOU AND ILY to @sulky-valkyrie for helping me figure out where to go with today's prompt. My light, my joy, my dear fellow cursed content peddler, may your evening be full of everything you could ever want.

BG3 Act 2 spoilers!

Read From Beginning || Previous || Next

Grief isn’t linear. Miriam knows this, knows it in the marrow of her bones, but it doesn’t stop the way the grief hits her like a brick to the head from time to time.

She wakes up in her familiar dreamscape on the worst possible night. Cassian is wearing something far truer to life tonight: padded leather trousers, a dark blue tunic, his artificer’s apron — enchanted with shielding magic, Taveric’s A&A embroidered neatly across the chest — hanging loosely off of his neck. And it should be a comforting sight. She’d asked for this, after all. This ridiculous game of make-believe.

Tonight, she’s buried too many bodies to take solace in playing pretend.

“You are distracted tonight,” the specter of her brother says. “Why?”

“You know why.” Miriam scowls and runs her fingers along the spines of the books he keeps in this strange place, this dimension within a dimension where none of the rules of the waking world seem to matter. None of them are in languages she recognizes. When she pulls one out, it crumbles into ash in her hands before re-materializing in its proper place as though she’d never touched it at all.

“It is neither your place nor your responsibility to maintain the lives of everyone around you, Miri.”

The illusion only wavers further, because the real Cassian would never have said something like that. He wouldn’t have, because she wouldn’t have cared. The old Miriam, the version that her brother had known in the land of the living, would have walked by every tiefling corpse littering the route to Reithwin with a shrug. Maybe a remorseful lament of the sad state of things, for the ones she could actually recognize by name.

It would have all been very tragic, but it would also have wholly not been her problem. She didn’t kill them. Why should she spare them a second thought?

Why does she?

“You lied to me,” she says softly. She turns Cassian’s earring over in her palm with a bitter laugh. The ache flares up in the back of her throat again, untethered and raw.

“Have I?” her dream guardian asks.

“You said you picked his form to make me trust you.” She slips the earring back into her pocket and stares off of their little platform and into the flickering astral sea beyond. “But that’s not true, is it?” She turns and looks at him, all of him, this shrouded stranger wearing her brother’s face. “I know why you really chose this form.”

“Do enlighten me.”

Miriam laughs again. It’s a harsh, cold sound. “You picked this form so I couldn’t bear to kill you.”

[myristicisms]

Ended up further expanding upon Miriam's bg3 verse and good grief that was a bit rough, anyways I have skeleton bones laid out for all three acts now so that way interactions are able to be fluid since everyone plays the game differently.

[miriamforster]

Everyone likes to debate about how much trama Halsin should have from his time in the Underdark, but I haven’t seen anyone highlight the fact that the man was trapped in a city

And not just any city, a city that’s like half slaves, a city of gleeful misery, an underground city with no sun, no stars, no sky, and no seasons at all.

Halsin was chained in a bedroom, in a house, inside a city, with little visible nature and no access to wildshape for three years.

Even if he is mostly healed from the rest, I bet he still has nightmares about that.

[miriamforster]

I had a realization yesterday.

I got the Investigate Kagha quest in the Emerald grove after missing it the first time and I convinced her to leave the Shadow Druids. But Kagha said something interesting after we won. About how she thought power was the solution to their problems.

And isn’t that just the game in a nutshell.

BG3 is all about power.

Why we want it, what we do with it, how much we’ll pay to have it. Can you seek power for good reasons? Is it ever worth the cost?

Every major character in the game is defined by their relationship with power, including the player.

Astarion, Gale, and the Emperor are the obvious ones. The first two have to be talked out of seeking massive power for their own reasons, meanwhile the Emperor is pushing illithid power as the solution to all the player’s problems.

Power is part of the other arcs too though. Shadowheart wants to be a Dark Justiciar, Lae’zel wants to ride a dragon and ascend. Wyll made a pact he hates so he could save people.

Karlach is the only origin who doesn’t really want power, but that’s because the thing that gives her power is literally killing her. It makes it impossible for her to live the life she craves. Power makes her untouchable for most of the game.

Power isolates

For me, every origin character ending (and the player’s) comes down to a choice between power and connection. Do we choose the power on offer and pay the price? Or do we stay connected to our humanity and to each other?*

God, what a great fucking game.

*Disclaimer: this is not a moral judgment about choices in the game. There are valid reasons why some characters might choose power, but even if there weren’t, the whole point of fiction is to explore these kinds of questions in a way we can’t in real life. The choices in the game are there to be played, feel free to use them as you like.

[miriamforster]

Imagine Astarion finding out his life under Cazador was uniquely horrifying.

Not like other vampires don’t torture spawn, we know they do, but I’d bet they don’t need to keep them starving and weak. Spawn are tools, useful for spying and murder and keeping hold of territory.

Maybe they bring back prey for the master, maybe they don’t, but that’s not their sole purpose. And other spawn are probably allowed the blood of thinking creatures.

But Cazador isn’t looking for the kind of power other vampire lords want. He’s trying to ascend. He’s trying to gather souls and keep all the bits of his contract together. He keeps his spawn weak so they can’t escape and fuck things up for him. He holds power in the city, sure, but he’s not interested in conquest, only collection.

So HIS spawn are locked up in a grimy castle for 200 years and fed rats while he grows his little store of souls under their feet. And while he waits, he amuses himself by torturing them. Not for any real purpose, just because he’s evil and bored.

That’s fucked up even for a vampire lord.

[miriamforster]

There’s something about Halsin and Zevlor, the failed Paladin and the failed Archdruid.

Something about the one who lost his life’s calling and the one who’s been stuck in a job he never wanted. Something about how how they are both haunted by mistakes, by the dead they should have saved. Something about age and weariness and despair and finding hope and purpose at the end of it all.

Something about Tav and the tadfools being the only ones who didn’t fail them and the only ones they haven’t failed.

I don’t know if I ship it exactly, but there’s something there for sure.

[miriamforster]

ATTN GALE GIRLIES!

I am bending down to look you in the eyes so you know that I speak truth.

There are three things you must do when you get to the Emerald Grove if you are looking to romance the rizzard.

1. Use persuasion to stop Aradin and Zevlor from fighting. (Intimidation may work too but currently unconfirmed) +8 approval from Gale

2. Rescue Arabella from the druids. +8 approval from Gale, plus if you get his little convo after, you can ask him if he wants to confess something and he’ll get a little flirty 😉

3. This one is easy to miss. Go to the back of the tiefling area, there’s a wooden door and past that is a prison area. You’ll find a grieving tiefling holding a crossbow on a goblin prisoner. Step in front of the crossbow. Another +8 approval from Gale, and possibly he’ll tell you a story about how he diffused a similar situation in a bar once.

(Bonus: rescue Mirkon from the harpies. I have no idea what the approval numbers are here, but sometimes you get another little Gale convo after where he talks about how glad he is that you saved a kid and how he got into shenanigans as a child and summoned Tara.)

Do those things, be a generally kind and practical leader and cheerfully give him magic items to eat, and you’ll be sitting at exceptional approval before you can say “One with the Weave.”

[miriamforster]

All Gale Dekarios knows is how to worship.

All he wants is someone to worship him in return.

If he cannot be worshipped—loved—as the man he is, then he will become a god.

Not all gods are worthy of worship, but surely he will be.

It’s not the kind of worship he wants, of course.

But he doesn’t know that.

[miriamforster]

Sleeping with Astarion on a Gale romance run, just to keep myself entertained because the man keeps running away when I flirt with him. 😂

Me: *imagines kissing Gale*

Gale: “Haha unexpected but welcome, yes very welcome….yes…”

Gale: *flees*

Me: 🧐

Anyway I figure if I hit up the drow early in act two, Astarion and I can decide to be friends and that way I get my RP quota out of act one and nobody gets hurt.

[miriamforster]

The Ascended Astarion “does he really love you after he ascends” debate is interesting to me because I’m not sure it matters as much as people seem to think it does.*

I don’t know about you, but pretty much every person who has hurt, neglected or abused me in my life has also been a person who genuinely loved me. In some cases they loved me deeply, in many they love me still.

Loving someone (emotion), doesn’t have anything to do with whether you are capable of loving someone (action). To love someone well you MUST be able to grow, reflect and change.

He can love (emotion) Tav, in fact I think he probably does.

But is he still capable of growth? Or is AA forever locked into the worst version of himself, doomed to repeat toxic patterns because that’s all he’s known?

And if he CAN change, is he capable of changing enough to love (action) Tav they way they need to be loved?

That’s the real question.

*unless we are discussing “does he have a soul” (which, ultimately, could also be defined as the ability to change and grow), but that is a different topic.

[miriamforster]

Welp, just got the big sad “him or me” from Gale, despite never actually pursuing him. (I ended the weave before we got to the mind reading bit, I tried to be neutral during flirty scenes, I TRIED, okay)

“You could have come and told me first.”

WHEN GALE?? THIS LITERALLY JUST GOT FINALIZED FIVE MINUTED AGO

Anyway he pulled out the “I can only just be me and that wasn’t good enough” bit and I was like NOOOO NOT YOUR TRAMA.

So now I have to romance him on my next playthrough cause I feel bad. She’s a monk who punches things to death, so I think they’ll be good together.

Also HOT TIP for the Gale girlies, the man swoons when you save kids. I had him in my party when I rescued Arabella and Mirkon and he had a little special dialogue after each one. I am 90% certain that’s how I got him to exceptional so fast, despite not trying to.

(Also also the weave scene was a lot sweeter than I expected, even ending it early. I get the hype now.)

[miriamforster]

Okay, was anyone going to tell me that if you talk Kar’niss into going into the shadows, the whole cursed and corrupted group comes back to fight you later?

Or was I just supposed to walk into that ambush and figure it out myself?

[miriamforster]

What if vampires and spawn in Baldur’s Gate 3 just keep the physical forms they died with?

What if Astarion was Already Like That?

Like..

What if Magistrate Ancunin was a Faerunian gym bro?