#at the time of drawing this i did NOT know the durge also just. eats the parasite like a feral animal like I imagine Ael did

[xdraonarts]

I don't even think an illithid parasite is the weirdest thing he's eaten tbh.

[gyrovagi]

hello and welcome to my gamer's den. i'm lok ming i'm 23 i use it/its pronouns. i draw when my wrist agrees with me but mostly i talk about my ocs instead of actual shit that happens in video games.

quick worldstate/oc rundowns below ⬇️

CANON PROTAGS/NORMAL MEN. INNOCENT MEN:

eloy "el" surana (blood mage/arcane warrior) - i'm like if a control freak could control things ❤️ with blood magic ❤️. generally well-intentioned but hypervigilant, always playing 5d chess about the worst scenario. world's first moral (not necessarily ethical) male bigender manipulator. wields a wholly inappropriate degree of political influence in denerim

seongmin hawke (primarily diplomatic, sword + shield berserker) - afraid that his abandonment issues will leave him. pathologically conflict avoidant, fawn response to the max - up until someone he loves gets threatened, at which point good luck leaving alive lol. 'i don't think i need to talk about my feelings,' says man who just broke the arm of a templar asking around too much about the darktown clinic and then continued making casual conversation with varric as if nothing happened

ga-sun "arav'assan" lavellan (archer, assassin) - king of compartmentalization. would really prefer to be one guy helping people on the ground rather than the unwilling inquisitor chained by power he never wanted, fighting for his life to be as politically uninvolved as possible. guy who is duty-bound never to return home

dak-wai schlegel (spellblade) - bellara kisser, direct port of my bg3 durge. tal-vashoth grey warden mage seeking a righteous purpose after a complicated and bloody past, but who has yet to find a better general approach to problems than killing things with hammers.

TGIRLS SAVE THE WORLD(STATE):

sang tabris (champion) - next shem bastard who pisses me off i'm just going to fucking kill you. alistair did you eat yet ^_^. struggling to reconcile an irrepressible hope for a better world with the abject horrors he's been subjected to by the world he lives in at present. morrigan's lesbian husband.

so-min hawke (blood mage) - girl could you at least pretend not to be a chantry-hating apostate in the middle of the gallows. carver just got suddenly pissed off in a darkspawn tunnel and he knows it's not because of the genlocks

r trevelyan (rift mage) - tranquil since 18, and at age 33, honestly dealing pretty well with accidentally getting a magical lobotomy reversed. yeah ok so maybe the random prolonged neutral-expression weeping is a little off-putting. it's hard when you're the white girl who needs to save yourself and you're still figuring out the girl part

yazmin de riva (duelist) - embittered half-elf bastard child of the young lord owain trevelyan. frighteningly competent and driven, but has difficulty taking orders and working with others due to the huge chip on her shoulder. thinks lucanis dellamorte is a nepo baby

INSANE WOMEN AND MALE MANIPULATORS:

ngayu brosca (reaver) - what do you MEAN the fate of the country is dependent on two twenty-year-olds one of whom gets scared looking at the sun. has never once in her life believed she would live past twenty and that's looking increasingly likely as a prediction

rina hawke (assassin) - when you are endlessly bitter and refuse to deal with it in any healthy way because that would require you to acknowledge your resentment towards the family members you perceive as a burden. chronically insincere, subservient but seething the whole time, wouldn't be able to name a solid belief if you asked her, incapable of self-reflection. crack baby you don't know what you want...

caden trevelyan (templar) - wildly repressed homosexual. has weird ideas about being a man. constantly develops obsessive fixations on authoritative older men. believes he has the divine right to mete out violence but also that he has to spend his whole life repenting for his own existence. white boy who sucks 🔥

ha-neul aldwir (slayer) - born in the minrathous ambassadoria, hasn't been back there for half his life. fascinated by magic and magical artifacts since a young age. something of an oddity by both dwarven and non-dwarven standards, a guy with an endless thirst for life and little interest in denying himself pleasure or dwelling in guilt, for better or worse. unserious.

PRONOUNS USERS GOING THROUGH IT/TRAGEDY WORLDSTATE:

enasa mahariel (ranger) - deadalive nothing girl who isn't. didn't anticipate that taking the vallaslin of dirthamen, twin brother to death, would be quite so prophetic. very clearly crumbling under mounting pressure while refusing to stop dragging the rotting corpse

bryn hawke (force mage) - half-avvar on malcolm's side, raised with what avvar beliefs and practices their father could half-remember from childhood. never quite at home in ferelden and struggling to come to terms with the idea they'll never be quite at home in their mother's city either. quietly shouldering other's burdens until it chokes them.

ga-kei lavellan (knight-enchanter) - turns out when you take an anxiety-ridden elf burdened with excess responsibility since youth out of their familiar environment and support system she'll have a bad time. solas' ex-spouse still misses him… but their aim's getting better!

orpheus ingellvar (death caller) - < he doesn't know (that he's the child of the last theirin king and the missing presumed dead hero of ferelden). surprisingly cheerful for a guy collectively raised by a bunch of necromancers, seems like a polite young man, but then he says something weird and offputting that makes you realize he's spent a lot of his life interacting with skeletons. and nevarrans.

ASSORTED GUYS:

dea surana - reserved but observant, knows it's best not to attract attention, tries to look after herself and her own in the ways she can. surprisingly worldly/cynical after her brother was taken by the templars at a young age and her life afterwards was spent largely on the road. then her situationship was like 'you know the hero of ferelden is named surana? circle mage, relative of yours?' and now she regularly talks to the king of ferelden

owain trevelyan - never really stopped hoping his older brother would come back from the circle and everything would be fine again. he's socially well-connected and charismatic, and could make for an influential heir to the house with motivation and an advantageous marriage - but he's a lot more interested in dragon hunting and boy bestiesisms with the prince of starkhaven.

valerie trevelyan - black sheep of the family, annoyed that this is more about lesbianism than being a fantasy communist. managed to pull off a 'buy my silence - for $8000 a month i will stop' ploy on her parents at 20, before she knew that this would end with her as the warden-commander's sister-in-law

kyunghee andras - former keeper of clan lavellan. her magical talent as a spirit healer was undeniable, her leadership capability was another matter. afflicted by the taint in a darkspawn raid that killed her husband, conscripted by the wardens c. 9:19. hasn't communicated with clan lavellan since informing them she survived the joining, out of the belief that as a symbolically dead woman, it would be best to cleanly sever ties. her orphaned daughter is probably fine.

daeun andras - kyunghee's daughter, taken in by her uncles at age 7 after her father was killed by darkspawn and her mother conscripted. both her parents were talented mages; she never manifested the gift, but her older cousin ga-kei did. ends up joining the veil jumpers to try and step out of her family members' shadows.

ga-hou lavellan - middle sibling b/w ga-kei and ga-sun, closer to both of them than they are with each other. one of clan lavellan's craftsmen. tends to take things a little too lightly, an optimist unconcerned with anything outside of the clan and the present. the siblings' dads (and ga-kei, and his wife) are hoping the birth of his daughter will make him more serious. ga-sun likes him as he is.

everybody's parents tend to be less developed than their kids are but they exist. In my mind . there's also a couple other extremely incidental fellas but they'll come up when they come up. i might also ramble about my non-da guys here but (closes my eyes and passes away silently)

[popiellart]

Hello!! I don’t know if you take OC asks but I keep thinking of your big dragon durge and thinking. Did he live outside of the temple like the canon suggests before coming to the temple as an adult? What was his life like before that? I remember seeing an art with Sceleritas Fel where he was an awkward teen, did he have a family and was he sweet once?

thank you, that's a fun question!! :D answer under the cut, cause long

yep, he had a foster family as a child, his foster father was a butcher (hehe. wink wink. etc.), somewhat impoverished, but generally loving. (he had another name than 'the dark urge' back then, but forgot what it was even before the lobotomy)

he was a surprisingly sweet child. giving off the 'well-socialized as a puppy' energy, you wouldn't pick him out of the gaggle of kids he was running around with, other than maybe visually (dragonborn are fairly rare, and he's noticeably pitch black from nose to tail, so he stood out a little)

the most violent thing he ever did was lightly nipping a half-orc girl when they got into an argument who's gonna be sarevok and who's gonna be jaheira when they played (he wanted to be jaheira!! and the girl looked nothing like jaheira either!!). didn't even draw blood

well, other than the wholesale slaughter of his foster family, of course. that's where his backstory diverges from canon - in canon, durge is left on their own until adulthood, but he was taken to temple immediately, hence the art you mentioned.

playing around with the 'why', but i'm thinking maybe this was malevolent on part of the other branch of the happy bhaalspawn family - sarevok telling orin to watch the pup, and to bring him in as soon as the first urge happens, hoping that the kid will just break down from the shock of murder and immediately meeting the cult of bhaal, and. well. the problem will hopefully remove itself

Which almost worked, words cannot describe how much the sweet, generally normal kid that he was, was utterly unprepared for the murder cult shit. he wasn't eating, he was scared shitless of his divine father, he was scared of the cultists, he felt sorry for all the victims, he was disgusted at all the rituals, Orin was tormenting him on the daily, he hated Sceleritas, and blamed himself for the murder of his parents, he prayed to Bahamut to send paladins to kill everyone and take him away or maybe kill him, too.

But since Bahamut couldn't be arsed and no legendary heroes dropped by the Temple, he ultimately came to a point where he had to make a yes-no type of choice, and he chose to survive. Knowing that he's destined to be the world-devouring antichrist, and his death would probably marginally improve the world, he still chose to live. Because, to be fair, what has the world done for him so far? His family is dead, and he's trapped in a sewer with a bunch of freaks. Maybe if gods didn't want the world destroyed, they should've done something back when he was still sweet, still redeemable, right?

(in that way, he's a parallel to gortash, who also has very little reason to feel fondness for the forces of good in the world - where were forces of good when a little boy was getting sold to a devil, yeah?)

Eventually, with time, he went from just surviving to living, slowly started getting a taste for the Bhaalist specials - hard not to, lots of positive reinforcement from murderous ecstasies, being constantly amongst the brainwashed cultits, it skews your view of the world.

Sceleritas was sorta helpful there, he hated the little thing so much he eventually snapped and killed it, and found out Sceleritas actually makes a great chew-toy, and with time his hatred twisted itself into sort of fondness.

By the time he was a full grown adult in the prime of his life, he basically forgot all about his childhood and even the early days in the Temple; he had the whole Dark Urge thing on lock, the victims were just meat, the cultists were in his sway, the previous cult leader was eaten, Orin was sat the fuck down, the only thing that lingered from those early day was the he never really stopped being scared shitless of Bhaal, although he long rationalized it away as simply part of worship and natural part of father-son relationship besides

[lewvithur]

OC: Rylzyne Auvryndar

well i did this for Brynnrae a few months back, and since this is December 8th, it has been a full year now since i brainstormed this Bhaalspawn babe who has won my heart. so let's talk about them and how they came to be.

meet Rylzyne!

(i was working on some art i meant to have ready for this post, but my tablet pen kept fucking up so you just get this)

now here's how it goes. i was wondering to myself what should i do for a Dark Urge run of Baldur's Gate 3. at the time, i was doing a run with a tiefling sorcerer named Zenith, but i was thinking about other things. then one night, while i was driving, a song happened to start playing, and that was Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene by Hozier. and that's when the idea snapped into place. this Durge would be the epitome of sex and death whose very presence is akin to a high one becomes dependent on. who loves to slit throats at any form of climax. who draws people into their crazy little world and then end them just as fast. the lyrics that stuck out to me was "straw blonde hair" and "tongue so mean". that was what i was working with.

the next day, i fucked around in the character creator to give myself ideas. i chose a short feathered bob, and then the idea came to me. i want this character to have Roxie Hart vibes. someone who could easily be seduced into evil by the fame that is promised by being a killer. this may have eventually melted away, but the conceit is there. someone who isn't good aligned. someone who is selfish. someone who likes killing. and in fact, someone who is not above manipulation and deception to get what they want, which is the finer things in life.

i also decided to make them non-binary, because frankly i will make any character non-binary if i wish. and that is why their name is Rylzyne by the way. i found a table for drow names, picked the first half from the male section and the second half from the female section. already, this makes them an anomaly among drow, as if the pale skin is not enough. these were fun little hints i put in to suggest that as a Bhaalspawn, they have no real connection to drow heritage. otherwise they'd most likely be fucking slaughtered for refusing to play into their matriarchal society by just straight up not having a gender.

a bunch of other things started to creep in. by making them a dual wielding fighter/rogue, they became an assassin, bhaal’s favourite little killer. everything about them is geared towards making them a streamlined perfect murderer. they’re light on their feet, barely eating, a waif that clings to the shadows and catches victims unaware. however, their favourite method is what they call the little death that starts the big death. they love to kill their victims during sex. that’s what that means.

in order to create perfect scenarios for themselves to kill without getting caught, they’ve developed a talent at reading people. their penchant for insight grants them opportunities, including one Enver Gortash. that said, their charisma could do with some work. while they do try to play the role of in-over-their-head ditz who is secretly a silver-tongued bastard who holds all the cards, the truth is they’re not a silver-tongued bastard. so when that mystique is destroyed, they reveal just how much of a brat they really are.

there is also a gamine aspect to their character, an impish boyish charm. they also aren’t good hearted, despite ultimately resisting the Urge. they only care to do good if it benefits them, and they dream of a life surrounded by jewels and gold and more people than they know what to do with. they want their name to go throughout Faerûn. Rylzyne, the most beloved killer. they’ll steal your heart. maybe literally. they love the image of a killer. the mystique it brings. the certain je ne sais quoi. all of that and more.

but even with all of this, there is one thing they crave more than anything else in existence. they crave control. and the Urge is a threat to this very control. there is poetry in a kill. it is an art form. and the Urge wants them to paint a canvas with nothing but splatters of blood. they want to be present within the moment. they don’t want to close their eyes and find a corpse mangled beyond recognition. and the moment they start holding people close to them, the last corpse they want to see is their loved ones. so their game is a tightrope act, balancing from embracing to resisting and then ultimately disposing of Orin and being reborn into their Urge-free self.

the way i imagine Rylzyne going from act to act is. act 1, they're tetchy and grumpy because of this headache and these urges, and since bloodlust is soothing them, they might as well indulge. that said, they think the tieflings aren't a satisfying enough kill, so they're hunting goblins instead. turns out they can do the good thing, if not for completely fucked up reasons. Alfira is an example of what a bad kill feels like. they do not know yet that the reason they didn’t like seeing Alfira dead is because it was out of their control. they just assume that it’s because this kill was too much. this is an outright gore fest that feels motivated by a deep primal hunger that they are trying to fill with a single slice. but hey, at least they aren’t making themselves sick by holding back. so they’ll gore it up. for now.

act 2 is when they realise that these orders from the butler are more structured. but Rylzyne doesn't like being told who to kill. they decide it for themselves. so they do what they can to not kill Isobel by hoping that spilling blood in the shadow cursed lands will make up for it. it doesn't, and now they're forced to put a hand on Astarion's neck. at least until they fight back. it is then when it hits them that they can't soothe the wound of murderlust with more murder. they want their body back. they want control. and they can't mindlessly kill their way to this control.

act 3 is finally when they turn over a new leaf, knowing that they are a Bhaalspawn and this is their birthright. now they know who to aim the knife at. Orin. they'll shed a tear for her because they see themselves in her. but in the end, they are still quite selfish, and if they have to spill Orin's blood to be rid of these urges, so be it.

post game, they'd realise their love of luxury is really mostly a fascination with jewels. the artistry and precision of cutting jewels is a skill they can practice quite well. they’d probably end the game running a jewel shop with all of their finest works for sale. at least, by day. by night, they’d play hero for a bit, killing for hire. maybe Astarion can join them too, if he’s up for it. but the important thing is they’re killing by choice, no longer to sate a hunger that has haunted their mind for too long.

that’s their story, but i did come up with some other bits of information.

one thing i developed is their thoughts surrounding food. as a Bhaalspawn, their concerns were keeping light, not concerning themselves with eating as that could weigh them down, and only ever feed the hole in their stomach with raw meat when they felt like feasting. it wouldn't really be until Astarion sits them down and offers them food that they realise "yeah if it helps him have tastier blood I'll do it, it’s all part of the transaction". and then they become more aware of the yawning ache within them, and they find whatever helps to ground them, whether it be a good meal, love, or indulgences they denied themselves because it wasn't murder.

there is also their view on sex. in some ways, it strengthen Astarion's views, in that they see him as part of a transaction. because of their emotional intelligence, they figure out quite quickly what he's doing, but they're willing to play along because it will motivate him to fight. and hey, he's the only person they've slept with that they haven't had the urge to kill because he's already dead! there's also the fact that he's the only one who is willing to let them indulge. so when he admits his feelings and admits he's been seeing this as a transaction, they assume that he knew that they knew this already, which is why it confuses them. but now that he’s putting his heart on the line, they will do the same. and they will hug. and it’s great.

so uhhhh that’s them!

on another note, i have to give many thanks to @abysskeeper for breathing life into this character through their commissions. after seeing these fun little conflicts with them and Astarion i've been given new angles i've seen this character through. it's added another dimension to them and i love it. stormy has taken a basic description and turned it into vignettes that speak to my vision. again, thank you so much. and check out their stuff! it is very good <3