#i say i'm trying to be a more positive person and then wyll ravengard from the alleged '''''2023 goty''''' comes up and i can't take it

[mukuharakazui]

i know next to nothing about bg3 and do not care enough to learn but wyll is my favorite simply because he's my best friends favorite, and also that he's also a warlock apparently which subverted my expectations? and he gets horns. he's just really cool in general i think. he should be the highlight of bg3 and not that vampire stick figure

for reallll his concept is easily one of the best out of the origin characters. his character, in a meta sense, was a victim of last-minute, not-well-thought-out writing choices, a lackluster story that didn't even center him, and a huge relative lack of content and compared to characters like astarion and shadowheart.

while he does unfortunately has the least amount of in-game companion content compared to the other 5 origin characters, he immediately stood out to me. my friend who bought me the game as a gift back in early access was dming a string of campaigns for us that ended with descent into avernus. so, right when i'd gotten out of a dnd campaign where my character had saved ulder ravengard, his estranged son who'd made a warlock pact a la thavius-kreeg-with-far-less-bloodshed-and-consequences-for-anyone-but-himself-until-now comes along. ok, i can vibe.

i will save you from me complaining about how he was done dirty to say that he's the character highlight of bg3 to me <3 he's so cute and his idle chats with other companions are so cute. if you let the wacky dnd wizard (whom they made into a bard for some reason?) replace your eye, he welcomes you to the one-eye club. if you play as him and spare karlach, you can ask her for horn care tips to lighten the mood while she's feeling guilty. one of my friends who knows nothing about bg3 told me "my friend just got the game you like" and when i assumed it was town of salem, they clarified for me. and i'm glad that people like people like both of you simply know baldur's gate 3 as "NO NO," the game "WITH THE HOT BLACK GUY AND THE RED WOMAN THAT DANCES" <3

[rinwellisathing]

Okay so I know I did a big OC spam yesterday but I have to admit, I've been getting really excited about some plot twists in the magical girl inspired BG3 sequel campaign I'm running in 5E.

So the story follows a group of young women(the PCs) who accept a call to adventure in the form of an open invitation to Lady Alyce Ravengard's seventeenth birthday in Baldur's Gate. At the ball in her honor, she plans to announce an important quest. The players meet her and are tasked with helping her to assist a strange Feywild entity known only as Will'O'Wisp to escape its prison in an old rotting tree.

To do this, they must hunt down the corrupted souls of adventurers who have previously made deals, and allegedly gone back on them, with the creature. Their liasons whom Alyce works with are a strange feywild cat being named Calloway and the printing press Jelliwig from the Stop the Presses! Quest. The players are collecting the soul essences they defeat and are meant to hand them over to Jelliwig to be made into books of the soul's life and then destroying the books to free the soul.

The players have rolled very well and love to poke around in the settings I describe, so very early on, they realized Calloway, Jelliwig, and Will'O'Wisp aren't exactly trust worthy.

Through various shenanigans, the players have managed also to build an unusual group of allies after freeing Gortash from Bane completely by accident, encountering Bhaal's new murder tribunal now run by a feytouched Bhaalspawn, and helping the goddess Umberlee free an ancient chosen of hers from the clutches of Will'O'Wisp.

The big secret I'm so excited about, however, I haven't revealed yet and can only even say here because none of my players in that game follow me on tumblr:

Will'O'Wisp is not what it seems, they're totally right about that! It is actually a clever trick by the demon Pale Night to amass power and spread chaos by sowing the seeds of despair( hey, I admitted many times this is heavily Madoka inspired) in clueless mortals she tricks.

Alyce's mother is dying of a terminal genetic illness and Alyce took the pact to protect her. Alyce also fanatically hates devils because of what Mizora and Zariel did to two of her parents plus her grandfather's harrowing tales from Elturel. Pale Night sees her as an easy way to maintain a puppet on the material plane as well as stick her hands into the blood war just a little to have some fun.

More importantly, if Alyce manages to keep up her pact and her mother becomes well again, Pale Night intends to harvest Alyce's mother's soul and replace her in her own body, thus gaining a position of political power as well as all of her potent storm magic to play with. If Alyce can't keep up her pact and falls to despair, that works as well. Pale Night is nothing if not flexible and mercurial. She will in that case use the deaths of both Wyll Ravengard's wife and oldest child to try and persuade him to bargain with her, blaming Alyce's death on the work of devils. She then feels she could convince Wyll to carry out her bidding within the city at least until she gets bored.

One player is a warlock pacted to Baba Yaga and I love that because I've woven Auntie Ethel back into the story as a result since Baba tends to be a patron of hags and this has allowed the players to find a lot of clues about some of Will'O'Wisp's servants due to Ethel's connections to the fey, for instance they noticed Calloway never goes with them to the bar Ethel has been covertly running, Ethel will explain to them if asked that this is because Calloway is not a cat thing at all, but instead an Annis Hag who not only pissed off Baba Yaga by breaking a pact with her to instead work with Pale Night, but also owes Ethel money.

Meanwhile, Glasya, Archduchess of Malbolge, has her faithful warlock, Enver Gortash's former personal assistant Valda Everett, reestablish herself as his employee now that he's returned. Glasya has instructed her to steer him in the direction of helping the players 1. Because she doesn't like the idea of some ancient demon lord running amok and getting the upper hand on the material plane, and 2. Because she believes she can take Gortash's soul right out from under Bane's nose and add him to her collection of playthings along with Sentry(redeemed Durge) and Teela (Enver's daughter with said Durge who is currently working for Alyce because she has a crush on her).

Glasya and Pale Night are two of my favorite rarely used beings in D&D as a whole since my 3.5 days and The Blood War is some of my favorite lore so running this campaign and having my players love it so much has been amazing ><

[acespaceacepilot]

Genuinely the academia fic makes me want to read every poem you cited!! Oh my god. Obviously I looked up Staying Quiet and I had a moment of stunned silence and wonder that you specifically knew the poem and exactly where it would be at home. Insane. Also reminded me of other great academia AUs in that now I almost want to write my english lit end of semester essays, thank you for the motivation. Anyway I'm here and not in the AO3 comment section because in the author's note at the start you mentioned having planned out what the characters would be doing and since you were on point with what you showed I am so so curious what else you've got for this setting 👀 in any case thank you so much <3

up top, thank you so much!! amongst my friends, i am a known poetry heaux. i go to poetry readings and feel my feelings; my partner got me a necklace that's engraved with a buddy wakefield quote. i have one of his collections signed to me. i fucking Love poetry.

hieu minh nguyen is one of my personal favorites and something was pinging around in my skull being like "hey! listen! there's a poem from them that perfectly fits astarion!" it fell Perfectly into place, shout out to my adhd background thoughts that were So Sure that hieu minh nguyen's poem should be there.

i'm going to put the rest below the cut, because. i have A Lot of thoughts and feelings

let's start with what i directly used in all my visions converted to blurs:

wyll is a low-rung english professor at a state school when he Could be at an ivy league bc of his dad’s nepotism. but wyll doesn't want a position his dad gets him, obvi. i want wyll to want to be out of his father's shadow, damn it.

(ulder is dean of a business school at an ivy league in my mind. it just fits. as a person with an english/linguistics degree: ulder ravengard has hella business major energy.)

astarion has taken a year or four off from school at this point. i hinted at substance abuse being the main reason that it's taken him so long to graduate from the law program? when he was the same age as his classmates, i think he partied A Lot and ended up having to retake some classes during his undergrad. i think i landed on coke being his chosen vice? idk it's vague for a reason. he's trying to get his life back on track

wyll and gale share an office space.

now here's what i left on the cutting room floor:

astarion is Still older than wyll, but not by more than six years

mizora is head of the english department. wyll has to play nice bc he's waiting to defend his dissertation and she'll be on the panel. she uses this to push her work or responsibilities onto wyll

lae'zel is doing her doctorate in anthropology/paleoanthropology. she's researching ancient war strategies and how social norms impacted them.

minthara is lae'zel's advisor because they'd have a Great dynamic. she specializes in biological anthropology. she can ball park which century any given human skull comes from.

shadowheart is working on her doctorate of psychology and specifically writing her dissertation profiling the susceptibility of cult victims mixed with religious studies to compile information about modern worship

1000000000% there are rumors about shadowheart's personal experience with cults. people say she goes by shadowheart so the cult she escaped from can't find her. she's heard every joke in the book about midsommar. there's some frat boy in the greek row that swears up and down that she bit his buddy hard enough to draw blood when they hooked up.

halsin and jaheira do ecology and agriculture, respectively. environmental sciences people. they both have tenure. halsin runs an internship for wetland management in the summer. jaheira is like a leading expert in soil science.

jaheira told mizora she was a bitch during a whole university department head meeting once and that's why halsin's the department head now.

minsc is literally just a coach. he does not teach Any classes and hangs out with the university's mascot Constantly. he coaches rugby and crew in the summer, basketball in the winter.

gale is a double discipline professor for history and cultural anthropology. So Close to getting tenure. his rate my professor score is mid as hell bc students either love or hate him because boy does this man drone onnnnnnnnnn

he's been on like four different digs in egypt and will talk about them at length but does that thing of "my second time in cairo. wait.... no. it was my Third time in cairo."

i posted this on twitter, but here's the couch lore: the couch in their office is a hand me down from gale's apartment because tara scratched it to hell on the corner of the armrests + the reason why the couch doesn't have any throw pillows is because gale didn't want to be tempted to nap and he already has a terrible time maintaining a work life balance

karlach is in sports medicine. she coaches the track team and works with weightlifters that have olympic aspirations. she was good enough to go to the last summer games for weightlifting, but an accident with a treadmill that she doesn't like to talk about prevented her from going.

she still has beef with gortash because he was on the shortlist for open spot availability.

she's Convinced that he's on steroids