#and playing a lot of bg3 aGAIN

[cybershock24601]

I ship Wyll and Gale for a lot of reasons, but the funniest one is imagining the post canon battle of the century between Ulder Ravengard vs Morena Dekarios (and Tara) on where their sons should settle down. Ulder is still working on repairing his relationship with Wyll and Wyll is his heir as Grand Duke so obviously Gale and Wyll should live in Baldur's Gate.

Meanwhile Morena is over here like, excuse me, my son has a well regarded academic career in Waterdeep and it would be unconscionable to make him give that all up just to move to Baldur's Gate. That woman is a force to be reckoned with and after Mystra played with her son's feelings she is more than happy to see Gale settle down with a nice, well mannered adventurer who treats him well and who Morena absolutely ends up mothering as well because that's her future son in law.

It turns into a huge back and forth between the two as they attempt to sway Wyll and Gale into staying in Baldur's Gate or Waterdeep because neither one of them is willing to give up easy access to the inevitable grandkids. Hells, I'm sure Ulder would even go so far as to sponsor a whole new magic school in Baldur's Gate to try to get Wyll to move back after Morena points out that there is no place in Baldur's Gate that offers the same prestige as Blackstaff Academy. It's a dirty underhanded affair as both parents do all they can to attempt to get their sons to live in their city. I can only imagine how much worse the eventual wedding planning will end up being.

[elvyn]

Anyway, I finished Baldur's Gate 3

[what-is-it-to-be-pk-esque]

Decided to use the freecam to see Astarion's faces when the camera's not on him during Gale's romance in an origin run and LOOK AT HIS HAPPY FACE AFTER RELAXING ON THE BED

The next two pics are just ones I thought were cute, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not imagining this is what he'd look like if my Tav and him post-game we're just goofing around and being adorably flirty on a bed one night

[arlathen]

every other party member: im cursed. im going to die. im owned by someone much more powerful than me. my days are numbered for one reason or another -- the tadpole is only the latest life threatening circumstance.

halsin: i like whittling ducks :)

[loquaciousquark]

Cazador's Ritual Runes, Translated

Inner: AMPLIFY + HIM + FLOW + EMPOWR [sic] Middle: WE OFFER THE FORCE OF LIFE Outer: WE GATHER HERE TO INVOKE THE POWER OF BLOD [sic]

Mephistopheles can't spell for beans.

(Detailed analysis & conjecture regarding this text, the Rite of Profane Ascension, & Astarion's translated scars under the cut.)

The second ring was the easiest, as the characters are very similar to Latin letters and clearly read out "WE OFFER THE FORCE OF LIFE." Characters were now known for C, E, F, H, I, L, O, R, T, and W. It wasn't clear yet if there were cases.

I was struggling with the first ring, though after decoding the second, I could get a likely "_M_LIF_ + _IM + _LOW + EM_OWR". Guessing the character for P, Y, and A based on context gave me "AMPLIFY + _IM + _LOW + EMPOWR", but I had doubts over the first characters for words two and three. I suspected they would be HIM and FLOW, but the H and F characters didn't match the H from the second ring's "THE" or the F from "AMPLIFY". Also, "empower" was misspelled, which made me pause.

Abandoning those for a moment, the third ring mapped well onto "WE _ATHER HERE TO I__O_E THE _OWER OF _LO_". Ruling out known letters which were not present, I could guess "WE GATHER HERE TO I__O_E THE POWER OF _LO_", but again the P from "POWER" was not the same as the P from "AMPLIFY" in the inner ring. However, it was very, very similar, and nothing else fit, so I committed, now suspecting there were capital versions of some letters included in the text.

At this point I went digging for resources. I found a copy of an Infernal alphabet on the Forgotten Realms wiki, and while it looks like the typeface Larian used is a bespoke creation for the game rather than a 1:1 copy of this alphabet, the letters for lowercase G, N, K, B, and D were nearly identical. Y (from AMPLIFY) also matched perfectly, confirming that earlier guess. This gave a clear "WE GATHER HERE TO INVOKE THE POWER OF BLOD."

This resulted in: AMPLIFY + _IM + _LOW + EMPOWR WE OFFER THE FORCE OF LIFE WE GATHER HERE TO INVOKE THE POWER OF BLOD

Looking at the wiki for capital letters, the only ones I could find which might reasonably fit the _IM missing character (assuming the Larian alphabet was based off this wiki typography) were A, B, H, O, T, V, and Y. Of those choices, only AIM, HIM, TIM, and VIM were words, and as cheesy as Cazador is, I couldn't imagine him saying AMPLIFY TIM FLOW EMPOWR. Given the alternatives, HIM was the only choice which made sense.

I went through the same process for _LOW, but this character seems unmatchable to me. By far it looks the most like the E from the Infernal alphabet, with maybe a capital Y being a distant second. However, ELOW and YLOW are certainly not words, and absent all other comparatives, the character in question does resemble a fancy F. Barring other languages, FLOW with a capital or unique F fits best.

AMPLIFY + HIM + FLOW + EMPOWR WE OFFER THE FORCE OF LIFE WE GATHER HERE TO INVOKE THE POWER OF BLOD

I did double-check the texts available in Cazador's mansion just to make sure this hadn't been translated elsewhere (after I'd done all the work, of course), and the only written text of relevance is from the Black Mass scroll you find near Vellioth's skull. It reads:

The Rite of Profane Ascension Oh, piteous dead! Oh, ravenous dead! Immortality is your gift, but darkness is your prison and hunger its gaoler. The Rite of Profane Ascension will release you. Walk in the sun. Suffer not from hunger. Grow your power beyond anything you imagined. A pact has been made with the Lord of Hellfire. Deliver unto him seven thousand souls, each bearing an Infernal mark, and you shall be free of your chains. You shall know true power. Deliver the souls. Speak the words. Ecce dominus, Has animas offero in sacrificio, Nunc volo potestatem quam pollicitus es mihi.

The Latin translates (as best I can tell with my incredibly weak Latin) to:

Behold [the] Lord, I offer these souls in sacrifice, I want the power thou hast promised me.

Which is interesting, but not clearly mapped to the Infernal above. Then I started wondering what relationship Astarion's scars have with all this, but thankfully, someone else has done the work here!

Astarion's scars have been transcribed and translated in a wonderfully detailed Reddit post by northpaw_s in 2020, but the salient points are that they appear to be in a mishmash of mangled Latin and Romance languages ("Infernal") and read:

Hoyc inferiu non iurare per igneu Naec virba loquor Eoai mundo muoat

Which appears to roughly translate to:

This soul swears no oath by fire Nor words does he speak In the realm of death

This makes sense if it's a fragment of a contract. I suspect the other spawn's scars are all identical to Astarion's for game mechanics/development reasons, but it'd be wild if they did have minor differences to complete the rest of the phrases! I know the scars don't show on their backs they way they do on Astarion's outside of the moment of the ritual, but it really does make me wonder if there's a complete text of the poem in some writer's documentation somewhere.

Anyway, what did you do with your Thursday night?

[marblerose-rue]

basking in moonlight

[letmebegaytodd]

in many ways backstitching is like quicksaving

[a2zillustration]

The desire to draw these two again but without the motivation to make something more than one of these little charts (oops)

Thank you Valc0 for making the sheet!

[aelyosos]

i don’t think i’ve mentioned it here yet, but i recently started an ocean run in bg3 a few days ago !

[pushing500]

The gang at Arwell continue to pull their weight while staying at a comfortable distance.

Mechi doesn't let his studying get interrupted by things that are definitely not bad omens.

He studied so much that he figured out how to switch off the twisted obelisk! However, we don't have enough archotech shards to do it, so it can stay put for now. That's fine. It doesn't hurt anyone so long as we keep it suppressed. Plus, it's a kind of cool, edgy decoration—if we're lucky, it might even scare visitors (ugh) away!

We finish with Mechi being easily swindled by small children with sob stories about their younger siblings. Again.

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[redrockcanyons]

Gone off with the sunrise Reno never felt so slow Wednesday's child with a rented ride And a head that's full of woe

[slayerdurge]

A Deal with God (Post-Ending Durgetash Fanfic)

CHAPTER TWO - THE REUNION

Enver re-entered his body screaming.

As The Dark Urge listened in transfixed stillness, his screams gradually changed into a strange and discordant mixture of laughter and sobs, and all she could think was that she’d heard that sound before.

But she couldn’t place it until a series of sensuous fragmented memories crashed into her mind—the damp stone walls of an underground dungeon, the thrust of steel as it penetrated flesh, the tantalizing ferrous scent of fresh blood, an influx of saliva pooling in the bottom of her mouth, and the howling keen emanating from the pile of meat in front of her. Then came the feeling of satisfaction. The knife clattered to the floor, and as she wiped her mouth, she heard the sound change.

It was the sound of a torture victim who’d been offered a moment of reprieve, and the only coherent thought she could form in the mangled, macerated caverns of her brain was that that sound should not be coming out of him.

She couldn’t say exactly how long the sound continued, but eventually she became aware that it had stopped, and that his eyes, which had been alternately twitching and rolling backwards into his head, had refocused. He was looking at her.

She became aware of what she must look like, standing stock-still and staring at him in paralyzed silence, but she could rouse herself to neither speech nor movement. 

Slowly, he sat up, supporting his unsteady balance by spreading his hands flat on the rock’s surface. He looked around, taking in the sizeless expanse of the Astral Prism. His gaze seemed to sharpen. “How long?” he asked.

“How long…” She didn’t immediately understand the question. 

“How long was I dead?” he repeated, over-enunciating each word impatiently. 

The twinge of annoyance that caused within her brought her fully back to herself. “Less than a day,” she said. “Maybe slightly more. I lost track of time during the battle.” She glared at him pointedly. “You’re welcome, by the way. For your life.”

He stood, wobbling slightly but catching himself and righting his posture quickly. He walked towards her, stopping when there was only a few feet of distance between them, and met her gaze evenly. “Thank you,” he said, without a trace of sarcasm. “For my life.”

The Dark Urge found it suddenly difficult to maintain eye contact. 

[read more on ao3]

[nikatyler]

Update

Hey guys,

I'm sure you've seen this coming, but I'm going to have to cancel Michael's BC. Between my health issues and stupid need to have too many projects scattered across too many places on the internet all at once, I don't think I'll be able to do it, at least not anytime soon. I'm really sorry, I was looking forward to it too, and then other things went down.

Feel free to use your contestants in your own games, naturally, or put them up for public download. I may still do the BC in the future but I highly doubt it.

Thank you for your patience and once again, sorry for letting you down.

[fenharel-archived]

The Dark Urge. Whatever that is. That is you.

[jacqcrisis]

The post game idea I had for Ronan and Astarion is after a few years of adventuring and looking for a solution to vampirism, they get a proposition from a mutual high-level adventurer they've had dealings with before. She's a dragonborn warlock needing someone to moonlight as her husband on a trip back to Tymanther to make nice with her clan to get a hold of some relic or artifact or WHATEVER. DOESNT MATTER.

What matters is that she asks Astarion to be her 'husband' for the trip since her clan won't let her back into their home without one, hes overdramatic enough naturally to pass for a dragonborn, and since he doesnt know shit about the culture, he can be molded easier into passing for someone of a higher ranking clan than a lowborn weirdo like Ronan who would give the game away within ten minutes of opening his mouth. Astarion will be changed under True Polymorph for the time into a living dragonborn and, once she has her macguffin and they return to Fae'run, she'll use the same spell to change him into the living version of himself permanently. Simple as.

It takes some thinking for both Ronan and Astarion to come to a decision. The trip will be long, months to even a year, and all that time, they wont be making much of an income on top of being half a world away from home. Ronan isnt too keen on returning to his country of origin and Astarion certainly isnt too happy about having to spend so damn long as a lizard. There's a lot of debating, arguing, but this warlock is the only person that they can trust they've found capable and willing to cast the spell and the closest they've gotten to a solution to vampirism that seemingly has no downsides, so they agree.

Before the trip even starts, Astarion is changed in order to get him used to both living and a new body as they make the long trek to Tymanther. He takes to it as well as one would expect: doing just fine while also finding as many reasons to complain about it as he can. It's an adjustment getting used to just the sensation of his heart beating again, the general ebb and flow of biological processes, being warm all on his own, and the dysmorphia when he looks in the mirror to see a dragonborn instead of what he expects, but it's so much more comfortable and right in comparison to undeath.

Now, since Astarion needs to be her husband, one of the stipulations from the warlock is that he and Ronan are not together in any respect for the trip. Ronan is Astarion's bodyguard for this journey and anything closer than that could jeopardize the whole plot given they'll be surrounded by judging scrutinizing vultures looking for any cracks in the warlock's tale and an excuse to kick her to the curb and exile her from the macguffin she needs. Normally this wouldn't be an issue for Astarion, but there's a curious new problem that crops up when his heart is beating once more.

Love and attraction are very numb emotions when one's body is mostly dead. While he knows he loves Ronan mentally, it is not a physical feeling for him. Until he's breathing again and all of a sudden he's got butterflies in his gut when Ronan's around, he's warm when the cleric looks at him, sweating, flushed, shivering when there's a brush of a hand on him, and just thinking about speaking to him makes him smile like a moron despite himself.

Astarion can't stop looking at him. Can't stop wanting Ronan near him. Burning for him in a way he didn't before and its like he's falling in love both again and for the first time. And oh boy, does he hate that considering he can't do anything about it lest he lose his chance to get back to being himself.

That's the setup. Astarion's first taste of being not a vampire comes with being forced into a body that isn't his as he plays mental chess with a bunch of dragonborn to earn his living body back and while he's fighting with Love and Yearning in a physical sense for the first time. Theres a lot of politics, and weird magic mutants, and making googly eyes at each other over dinner, and eventually, Ronan and Astarion break and have a night together, fucking everything up. But then they get the macguffin anyways through their own means and escape and Astarion gets to be a real elf boy again.

Oh and Gale is there too. Because you gotta take your wizard on a walk every now and then to a fucked up displaced lizard continent or he'll start clawing at the walls and doing magical environmental terrorism.

[herotune]

in fair faerûn where we lay our scene.......

im a little late heading into wyll week and im so sad but here's an illustration for day 3: modern au!!!!

wyll gives me theater kid vibes and i think modern au wyll would Absolutely be an actor. and i think he'd be incredible in shakespeare adaptations and historical dramas... so i Had to redraw one of my favorite shots from baz luhrmann's romeo + juliet with him. a modern au in a modern au...its perfect 🎭