2 - ryker's long day
ryker's long day
12/17/2024
super long entry spanning several hours of gameplay. ryker crawled through the crypt with his buddies, got attacked by zombies, and ran into peepaw withers. yay!
it's good that i found him, because on a dime i changed my mind to reclass him from a fighter to a rogue/fighter. rogue is more befitting of his thieving ways - but i still wanted to keep his fighter class because it's 1 - fun to play and 2 - still quite fitting for his kind of... knight-ish charm. tragically, i had to change my difficulity in order to multiclass (why?) so now i'm no longer playing on easy mode for litle babies. le sigh. i will be killed. ryker left the crypt and found the grove, which is where the main quest of the first act starts. he finds himself thouroughly unimpressed by the druids, antagonizes kagha and saves arabella, has a fruitless visit with nettie, and then gets wyll on his team. that means i've got all but one of the main companions, and i've gotten the three main partners i want to have for this save - being gale, shadowheart, and wyll.
the party has a lot to do. lae'zel wants us to find her creche, nettie wants us to find halsin (ugh), kagha wants us to kick out the tieflings and the tieflings kind of want us to bash kagha over the head, ryker wants to expose her for political corruption, and we STILL need to get the worms out of our heads. we've got a million things to do, but first - new clothes! i can't play this game without giving everyone fun armor. my favorite mod, the basket of equipment, is totally broken with patch seven, which is a huge shame. i do miss it something awful, but i found a few cool custom item + dye mods to fill the void. here's the starting equipment for our party.
for ryker, i gave him a sleeveless bandit's outfit and scarf. i like it a lot, it's pretty evocative of how he dresses in his own story, even if not exactly the same. i'm also glad it fits - a lot of the outfits for body type 2 don't fit them because i've got them modded to look a little more androgynous and less ripped. (it's this one, if you're curious.) i'm also EXTREMELY fond of the chunky gloves. gale has a funny little nerdy suit which makes me laugh. my friend ash says he looks like a random guy that got dropped into a fantasy world, which i agree with. i think it's cute, though. none of the screenshots i took of shadowheart are particularly good, unfortunately, but she has a really cute dress that i dyed with a shadowheart specific dye from a mod. wyll's got a badass bandit's outfit from the same source as ryker's. i think it's going to look particularly cool when... you know. we'll get there.
after spending like two hours trying on different clothes and dyeing everything, i got back into the game and continue ryker's adventures. he makes friends with the local tiefling kids. despite being so unfriendly, they've got a soft spot for the youngins. he can't even bring himself to be angry when the baby's first crime syndicate tries to rob him. side note, the responses and actions exclusive to rogues are super fun and a lot more in line with ryker's character than the fighter options. being able to show off to the thief kids was really cute and super sweet. his kindness to these kids (and prior rescue of arabella) earns him the friendship of mol and her crew.
things quickly start sucking, though. astarion is a vampire and sucks ryker (confused) like a juicebox! gale informs ryker (still confused) that he needs to eat magic shoes or he will die. evil ryker takes over and kicks a squirrel to death, ruining normal ryker's day. ryker's entire party gets lured and suckered by harpies. he and the party come across a dead guy and his (alive) siblings in the middle of the woods, and they inform us that ryker is a "true soul..." whatever that means. it's probably for the best to play along, though, and so we do. between nettie and this guy, we now know that people have been worshipping this "absolute" figure, and it's got something to do with the tadpoles. we continue our hunt for halsin (UGH) but we don't make much progress because even more things start happening to me against my will.
maybe this one isn't against my will. ryker, physically unable to stop causing trouble for two seconds, walks into a barn where an ogre and a bugbear are getting it on. shadowheart and wyll hate them for doing this, the ogre and bugbear hate them for doing this, they get beaten within an inch of their life for this, but it was funny. so it was worth it. nevertheless, the party carries on. they find a dog, too! ignore his owner's dead body. it's probably fine.
but things get worse when a surprise visitor joins the party. it's alfira, a tiefling from the grove that ryker spoke to earlier. she insists on staying, despite ryker's demands to leave and go back to the grove. if only she had listened - but it's not her fault. she couldn't have expected the night's horrific events, and neither could anyone else.
ryker immediately tells everyone what happened. he makes no effort to hide it. everyone's trust in him takes a hit - understandably so. he wouldn't expect anything else. the guilt of murdering alfira, despite not remembering even a second of it, eats him alive. it'll take some time to recover from the shock of seeing firsthand what he's capable of deep down - but he'll probably never truly move past what he's done.
ok anyways raphael. i don't really care that much about him right now. ryker is smart enough not to trust literal demons, especially when they look soooo schtewpid. he stuffs his face with hellfood instead of listening and immediately forgets whatever he was offered as soon as he's out of there. he's also visited that night by a second rude spectre, sceleritas fel, who is a weird little freak and refuses to tell him anything about his past, despite clearly knowing full well who he was. after the one-two combo of incredibly rude interruptions, the party comes across a group of gnolls. the battle goes well and it's easily won.
joke. poor half-starved gale had to revive everybody one by one. that's three revivify scrolls that are gone forever - but at least everyone else has been brought back to life. we're all in working order to go take on our many quests - but maybe in smaller chunks, next time.
