Well hello there! Yes, I still exist!

I mean, if you’re my friend on Steam, you’ve seen me exist…in Baldur’s Gate 3…for the past six months.

But shhhh, we’re not talking about that yet.

As per last year, I’m setting a 2024 writing goal that I think I can hit. Nay — that I insist I must hit, dramatic fist to the sky! I need to get my butt back in gear, but I’ve finally come down off my last run of — no don’t talk about it yet! *cough cough* Suffice to say that I’m back in the headspace I need to be to actually work on my own stuff.

So!

Writing Goals 2024:

• Read through all three Tzimayat books (The Godbone Blade, The Fading Saint, The Goddess Revenant) for continuity purposes in descriptions, nomenclature and events. Tweak all books as needed.
• Complete Book 2: The Fading Saint main draft.
• Complete Book 3: The Goddess Revenant parallel draft.
• Complete Book 3: The Goddess Revenant main draft.
• Extra credit: Complete Book 0: Curseworks rough draft.
• Extra extra credit: PITCH!

I don’t really expect to pitch in 2024; that feels like more of a 2025 goal right now. But if I really burn through my work, maybe it will happen? What has me most up-in-the-air about it is that I’m not sure if I should be pitching Book 1 or Book 0. Books 1-3 are obviously a trilogy; Book 0 is tightly connected to them, but more of a standalone. It’s a bunch of shorter stories tied together with a frame story, but it shows how some of the main characters of 1-3 first met each other. If I do it right, Book 0 might be easier to pitch, but it’s the least polished, so… Well, we’ll see.

As for the continuity check and redrafts: I’ve done this business before. If I don’t let myself slack, or fall down another six-month video game rabbit-hole, I should hit my targets.

Super duper triple extra credit would be to get all the Tzimayat stuff done and find some time to wrap up my lingering War of Memory Cycle 1 projects. I have a handful of short stories that I didn’t get to, plus the Ardent/Sarovy and the Enkhaelen novellas I want to write. And then there’s Cycle 2…

If I could clone myself to have extra brains to work on all my writing projects…

We’d probably fight over the BG3 account.

So let’s talk about that, because…

Well, in honesty because I’m a feverish fan-creature still, after over 1300 hours played.

But also because STORY and CHARACTER CREATOR and because it’s the thing that enraptured me the most this year and I finished my fifth run with my darling idiot boy Aethan and took about 2000 screenshots just for his run and had a two-week downtime after the run ended just to try to decompress and I still haven’t entirely succeeded.

*breathe*

I’m not going to spam the hell out of this post with BG3 shots. (Edit: Yes I am. Anyone who doesn’t care, go ahead and tap out now. Also: spoilers.) Gods know the gaming/fantasy/nerd world has heard plenty about the game by now, what with it sweeping up awards like crazy. All extremely well-deserved, and the ones it missed it should also have gotten because GODDAMN.

And I already talked a bit about the game in my previous post. But that was on the come-down from my Rallant run, which — while involving enough to make me break my long-time No Fanfic vow to hammer out a little epilogue — was nothing near the level of insanity that I plunged into with this one.

My sweet little self-destructive baby monster/sacrificial hero. The Penitent, Aethan.

I mentioned him in the previous post too, because he was originally my second run. (He’s also the sidekick of the Tzimayat trilogy, thus relevant!) But by Act 3 of that run, I had accumulated so much knowledge of the things that he had missed that I couldn’t take it and deleted his 120+ hours in order to reroll him a few runs later.

Let me say: it was worth it.

I had a hit list of scenes that I wanted, choices that I intended to make — not so different from how I outline my books. The beauty of this game is that you have enough freedom of choice that you can turn your character into almost exactly who you want to be, at least headcanon-wise. I knew the Dark Urge’s tale this time, so I knew how Aethan would navigate it, and how much I could make him suffer along the way. Because look, okay, I write dark fantasy. HEROES MUST SUFFER.

My boys, anyway. My ladies tend to be better at dodging the traps I lay for them.

Aethan doesn’t dodge traps. Aethan sees the traps, squares his shoulders, and walks into them deliberately so they don’t hit the companions following behind him. He was so much fun to play. All of my previous runs, including his original run, were slickster kinds of things: if I saw a slick way out of a conversation, conflict, et cetera, I’d take it. I was playing rogues and miscreants who didn’t want to stir the pot, kick the hornet’s nest, get caught out for being the bad kids that they were.

Aethan chose radical honesty very early on. He kicked the pot over. He punted the hornet’s nest. He sat down by the mess he’d made and waited for everyone to wake up to show them his bloody hands and say ‘I think I did this’.

And it was great. He started a lot of fights that the others sleazed past, but they were good fights. He punched a lot of faces that the others smarmed by, but they were faces that deserved punching. We would have kept the save where he dragged the skeevy new Archduke out of his coronation and threw him off the back balcony, except it would have killed a bunch of other people in the long run and he told me he was here to save everyone — so we reloaded. But we’re calling that a violent fantasy he had, much like the other one where he solo murdered his vampire boyfriend’s abuser.

I didn’t think a Cleric could go this hard, but holy crap. (Well, Cleric 11/Bard 1, in honor of the fallen.) By the end, Aethan had reached the status of Unkillable Cleric, and cleared his personal quest duel with barely any blood lost — as compared to his very dead opponent. It was the easiest I’ve had it in the three Dark Urge Tactician duels I completed, and that includes Murder Wizard’s duel, which was completely broken. He just wrecked. I’m proud of him.

He was an absolute Undying Loyalty Determinator, which is exactly his nature in the Tzimayat books. He picked a side and refused to let anything stop him — even himself. Most of his choices were, in the end, no choice at all. He had a path and would not stray.

Luckily for him, it ended well! But he would have made the same choices no matter what.

My other Dark Urge runs were bad kids. My Disaster Rogue tried to be good, but tripped a lot and got many people killed. Even my heroic Astarion Origin was only as heroic as the fangwit can really be — which is to say superficially.

It was nice to play a dedicated, honest, unshakable, clawing-his-way-up-from-the-oubliette-of-his-dark-past hero. I tip my hat to this game for letting him be as good as he could be, while at the same time letting the others be as fucking awful as possible.

And it even let Aethan pick up a mom-figure! He can’t seem to live without some pseudo-maternal guidance to keep him pointed in the right direction. It’s easy to go off and Determinate very detrimentally, but Jaheira was here to steer!

I found a lot of obligatory-screenshot-spots along the way for my runs, but with Aethan they became less ‘stop and pose here’ and more ‘awkward family photo time’, which was fun. Especially after we picked up Minsc. Poor vampire boyfriend probably regrets everything.

(Minsc is in clown face-paint above. They’d just been to the circus before deciding to break into Hell; Minsc was looking forward to hitting a devil with a clown hammer. Which he did, but the hammer didn’t work on the devil, so we were all very sad about that.)

It was so nice to be able to run around with the old guard from the original games — legit my favorite companions from back then (minus Edwin) — and take them all the way to the end. Especially with how kind they are to a good Dark Urge. Such great vibes.

As for the romance, well…

There were good times. There were bad times. There were painful times.

But we persevered, with care and compassion.

And my boy moved from Cute Little Monster, to Oops My Actions Have Consequences, to owning those consequences and their necessity.

And even though he got his pretty face back in the end, I’m satisfied. He’s changed for the better, as he should.

Here’s to you, Aethan. May you fare just as bloodily painfully miserably sacrificially successfully in the books!

And best wishes to everyone who stopped in here, for a bright and shiny 2024.