There's light somewhere

As part of 3 Weeks 4 Dreamwidth, I thought it would be fun to share a silly little exert I had to cut from my current Baldur's Gate 3 WIP.

Title: Questionable Plans for Dealing With Angry Spirits

Fandom: Baldur's Gate 3

Characters: Wyll & Gale; background mentions of Shadowheart and Karlach

Rating: General Audiences

Summary: Wyll and Gale muse, rather uncomfortably, about restless ghosts as Shadowheart and Karlach loot some corpses.

Notes: Takes place early Act 1. Gale and Wyll haven't quite revealed their secrets to the rest of the party quite yet. Quick warning for casual dismissal of addiction.

( Read more... )

BG3 really has me by the throat. I'm honestly thinking about doing a series of oneshots just to get these dumb little ideas out of my head. My notes are so far:

• Cast being split up into two teams: Team Chaotic Good (Karlach, Gale, Wyll, Shadowheart, and Halsin) and Team "Make 'em Worse" (Astarion, Lae'zel, Durge, and Tav). They probably meat up in Act 2 and boy is it a shitshow.
• Shadowheart is a Regression protag, she's not happy about it. Everyone is confuse because she doesn't explain shit.
• hehe Karlach Origin goes brrrr
• Wyll probably gets a bit more of a dive into his character. My guy deserves to have a lot more to his character arc!!
• Digging into Gale having Thoughts (tm) about being shunted back to Level 1
• Astarion and Tav fighting to see which goes ilithid first!
• Durge is just trying to get people to like him ):
• Tav is terrified of being knifed by Lae'zel
• Durge picks Tav as a morality pet because she's small and cute!! Tav is unhappy about this turn of events until it keeps her from being merked. Astarion, meanwhile, is very annoyed.
• Tav is regular person who was in the wrong place/wrong time when the Nautaloid passed through. She's a halfling chef of some mid-level restaurant, so she's good with directing people but kinda sucky when it comes to person-to-person interactions.

I'm thinking of poking my nose into the Beta and other cut content for further fun inspos. Just learning of the hags, the original flavor of the Dream Guardian, and other stuff gets my brain juicing.

Now that I'm free from Sewing Hell (tm), I'm thinking about going back to doing some writing, reading, and video games.

Writing Thoughts

I've recently heard that the official NaNoWriMo organization is going down, which feels a bit bittersweet. I was on there on and off through my high school and college years, so it holds a bit of nostalgia for me. The long list of recent batshit things though...it's a wonder it's lasted as long (speaking specifically of the grooming allegations done on the forums). I still love the idea of doing a less intense writing challenge, so I may poke my nose around DW to see if there is anything non-specific.

I also want to give a crack at The Artist's Way, though reading the actual book is annoying at points. It's a bit too woo-woo for me.

Right now, I'm playing around with some solo journaling games I grabbed from itch.io. Mainly The Wandering Library as an excuse to worldbuild a magical girl story I've had in the back of my mind for the last year and change.

Video Games

Baldur's Gate 3 still has me in a chokehold. I finished my first playthrough as non-canon Shadowheart (I was playing her very out of character), and god, I see what people meant by Act 3 being a bit rough. I did enjoy it for what it was, though. Playthrough number two is a Karlach Origin run because I fell in love with her in my first one. She's best girl <3 I've also decided to grab some mods for QoL reasons. And Withers Big Naturals. Very important.

My thoughts so far on Karlach playthrough: I love how different it is! Instead of the Narrator pulling so much of the weight, Karlach is expressing so much of her interiority. She has so many more voicelines as an Origin character, it was a bit jarring (in a fun way) coming off of Shadowheart. I also love her interactions with Wyll, which I was already geared to love. I do like how their stories are still tied together, even when the initial situation between them is settled. I just wished Karlach had a little more in Act 2 beyond getting her engine cooled down, and a bit more other relationships (beyond player-companion & Shadowheart-Lae'zel) built up in the background. There probably is some stuff I missed from the party banter, but hard to tell from the billions of times I got the Halsin + Karlach banter about Karlach finding romance in Act 3. Halsin, buddy, I love you, but please, I need to hear different banter.

A friend of mine has also let me borrow Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, which I really should start. It's probably going to be the last KH game I can convince myself to play since Kingdom Hearts 3 gave a (somewhat) satisfactory end. I will probably follow the new brain-breaking Nomura will put players through in future installments, but there is only so much Nomura-isms I can take before throwing my console out the nearest window.

I also should maybe poke my nose into Genshin Impact, but hhhhhh I don't want to download whatever the most recent update is.

Reading

I've recently picked up a light novel called Babel: A Girl Embarks on a Journey of Words by Kuji Furumiya. As the title suggests, it's an isekai, but it feels more like a 90s shojo isekai than modern shojo isekai. The MC Shizuku doesn't reincarnated, but rather runs into a weird phenomenon before popping into the other world. Shizuku describes herself as unremarkable, but the story has gone out of its way to at least illustrate why she feels this way by showing how she compares to her sisters. A lot of her arc is centered on her discovering herself away from her sisters, which was something she had already begun before the start of the book. I do appreciate how the story is having her be the way she is without some cop-out thing that makes her special besides just being a person from modern-day Japan used to modern-day conveniences.

Her traveling companion Erik is a nice foil without it being dramatically different. He's a mage who is decently talented, but he's still limited in what he can do. He's knowledgeable and self-assured without being cocky. He plays to his strengths, which are research and logic, without being condescending. Shizuku and Erik's relationship is a very sweet friendship; they both admire the other's strengths and understand where the other's weaknesses are. I think it also helps that these two are adults, but it's really refreshing to see a male-female friendship like this from the jump.

The worldbuilding is fairly lowkey and the rest of the main cast is fairly small at the moment. While hinting at higher stakes in the future, this first volume is very low stake adventures. It's rather relaxing, honestly. The general vibes are along the lines of Ascendance of a Bookworm (anime, as I have yet to read the light novel).

BG3 brainrot has also wriggled in, so I'm reading a bunch of stuff for that. Special shout out to Astarion Origin Party Nonsense by starkraving (mind the trigger warnings!), Leap of Faith by lemonwood, By a Knife's Edge by JustAWritingPotato, when it all comes to an end, the world keeps spinning by erciareyes, Greet the Dawn by MidnightsLight, and friendly fire by ushauz.