Bardic Inclinations

New goal in the queue: writing more, and regularly, for "Our Days Are Numbered" just so that in-progress longfic is in y'all's heads enough to remember it when the next BW3 Minthara Compilation recommendation survey goes around. I'm 15 chapters in, and not all of it is good. But much of it is interesting and some of it is great, if I do say so myself, because while I don't have many moments, when I do they are gold.

You may blame my own bardic hubris if you wish, and you wouldn't be wrong, but I was more inspired by @tavsversion's first fic in 10 years as linked here (the inter-tadpole communication is something I've always found difficult to pull off but this one does it well).

This is…well, I don't know what this is other than an excuse to play two things I haven't before: 1) a sort of isekai self-insert as a modded Commoner class, and 2) a Circle of Dreams druid, namely the "here to be hot and awesome" Sabyenne (whom you've met already).

I mean, if I don't play a self-insert in the same party with the hottest elf I've made in the character creator, what am I even doing in this game, right?

That's gotta be good enough, because the playthrough has no direction yet other than also snapping up Shadowheart and Alfira, though they may just be camp casters (Alfira will go Bard 2/Wizard X) after a while. It's definitely not a post-Singer x Sailor priority like the other two I've posted so far.

So I guess if I'm gonna do a full-on prep session for "playthroughs to do when Cannor and Zaf are done" then I might as well scatter some more worm-brains into Faerun. This one, whenever it truly gets going, will be called my "Mercerite" run, since it will star a Blood Hunter and an Oath of the Open Sea paladin.

Those of course are a homebrewed class and subclass created by Matt Mercer, the famous actual-play DM, and while I don't and likely won't listen to any shows by him or anyone else (actual plays are fine! they're just not my thing!), I'll definitely incorporate his homebrew into my game when suitable. And so here I have.

Longtime LTB readers will recognize both of these guys; Wade is my one and only Durge, but when I did his canon run he was a "Blood Mage" modded class, since I couldn't make Blood Hunter work at the time. But now I can and have—wisdom-focused patch included—which folks might remember from my current run (where he and my Stars Druid are romancing each other).

However other characters will find it hard to get airtime in any run with Cannor and Zaf in it, so Wade stars here, and as an ordinary Tav, so I can focus on playing this particular class. Also because if he were a Durge his overworld barks would infect the other Tav on this run, whom I've never spent substantial time with either, but he's appeared on this blog before (and will show up in Singer x Sailor soon too).

That other guy is Daven, who's kind of a nerfy paladin; he eschews medium-to-heavy armor (sailors shouldn't wear it), though he might change his mind here on land, he wields tridents (not great for melee), and he's more DEX-based than STR-based (Dexy Minthara convinced me it's worth doing). He's gonna try to cool off Karlach for the duration, which he hasn't yet seen through past the end of Act 2, while Mister Wade will reprise his romance with Lady Shade. The goal is to complete the run with only those four characters (with maaaaybe one or two more).

I was tagged by @the-starflower in a post for Esperani here (thank you!) and since this game has done the rounds many times over I will 1) respond with my signature LTB-open-tag and 2) point everyone at the five OCs I've infodumped about via this game (in this order):

Farago Heli (rogue scout)

Zafraia Zital (swashbuckler rogue)

Ruy Acavés (knowledge cleric)

Cannor Coth (whispers bard)

Qiranna Jasti (hexblade warlock)

I know I should probably do something new for one of my umpteen dozen lesser-explored characters but this is what I can offer right now.

Singer who? Sailor what? Fear not, those faves will be back at some point. I simply decided to throw Drem and Slie off the Nautiloid early just so I could re-create this old scene with Rikka. Sorta rushed through it so it's not great—this is indeed the real Rikka, but she's wearing "immersive Nudity"-supplied leathers instead of her usual scale hauberk (though Dammon can get her that via Pseudo-Milanese).

However I am looking forward to doing this run's complete 180 from what Cannor and Zaf usually do. Like, for example, defending the Grove. Drem did so in his canon run—and in epic fashion—and this time he'll have his blue-haired elf buddy and at least one tiefling and one druid up on the gate with him.

Because yeah, the druid Inwe will be along for this ride as long as she can handle it (since she claims she wants out). She won't stay at camp during the night (some NPCs simply refuse to leave their default positions), but she'll get more/better attention than she has from certain other characters.

My old State of Play post is long out of date and requiring an overhaul if not complete deletion, but with Singer x Sailor near (?) its finish line I've been thinking about what's next. And it might be these guys. See, before Cannor and Farago, there was Drem and Slie. Like, way way before. Like AD&D/2e, 1992-Final-Fantasy-1-black-belt-and-thief-ripoff before. Monk and rogue, buddy-cop, spy vs spy stuff.

Drem may be familiar to most of my mutuals. His pal may not be. I'd thought about playing Slie in his 5e-era aged incarnation (with Arnell as his face), but that no longer seems compelling. I'm much more interested in seeing what happens when he's his younger, accidental-chaos-agent self. This elf isn't young, but he doesn't have the cool and wisdom and patience one might expect from a man of his heritage. Slie usually gets in trouble, and Drem usually has to get him out of it.

But this time (and like his canon run) Drem's on a mission for the Guildmaster. Between that, his unexpected romance of Ranger Rikka (who will be the real Rikka this time and not a custom companion), and umpteen dozen other things, he might not be able to rescue Slie from his own worst impulses. Those have run the gamut in his long elven life, from bizarre romances to, well, blue hair. And about that: Slie usually has gray-white hair. He's had that hair, canonically, for decades. However to avoid confusion with other more famous white-haired elf rogues in this game (I mean, not in MY game but in others'), he will go blue-haired (at least for now) like his original thiefly inspiration.

g o o d l o r d

I was tagged by @thesanguinesonnet here (thank you!) for a Disney redesign, but I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any—hang on, that's Star Wars, not Disn—no, of course that's all Disney now too. Whatever.

Anyway I didn't want to redesign any of my characters as Disney properties, because I decided it was high time to show you all my beloved swashbuckler Zafraia as a Gerudo from the Legend of Zelda games like BoTW. Now, I haven't played a single second of those latter-day games, but I'm a Zelda I and Zelda II guy from way back, and as a late-’90s undergrad, watching my friends play Ocarina of Time was fun.

And the most compelling Zeldaverse in-game culture, to me as a non-Zeldaverse-lore-expert, is the Gerudo—for umpteen reasons that aren't worth getting into. However, some of that did seep into my own worldbuilding for certain Nua Gazetteer regions (ideally without the attendant and sloppy orientalization), one of which is Zaf's native stomping grounds of Narán and its neighbor Saván (a sort of faux Al-Andalus and, less so, Maghreb-plus-Pampas), which is matriarchal but not in that cartoonishly-misinterpreted "exotic Amazon" way.

So I decided that Zaf would join the reductively problematic ranks of Urbosa, Riju, Ganondorf, and all the rest. Because she too is reductively problematic—worse, even—but she doesn't care what anyone thinks about that. She's a bandit, sort of, and the Gerudo are too...sort of—but she doesn't care about canon compliance or consistency either, so she's dressing how she wants to. So have some quickies of her looking commandingly badass in the desert, thanks to The Wilds.

I was tagged by @arcanearcherayz here (thank you!) and I'll preface all of this with a reminder that I play BG3 on a Mac, so I got mods late and Photo Mode even later. Weigh any VP you see on this blog against that. Also this goes long but I'm proud of my progress, so no Readmore link!

Another point worth making: while I've never been a photographer, I was a designer for 20 years, and have art-directed my fair share of product or portrait shoots, so that might count almost as much as the trivial stuff I learned in one semester of 12th-grade elective photography 30 years ago.

I've mentioned many times about how I got sucked into BG3 because of perfect-storm circumstances, so since this is nominally about VP I won't get into all that again. I like playing as my OCs (instead of companions) and I love how VP helps me tell their (5e-originated) stories outside the vanilla BG3 plot framework.

Without Photo Mode, the best imagery I could do was passable, but I had to develop an itchy trigger finger for cutscene screenshots (which now clog my laptop and external drive to an alarming degree). Some of my luckiest shots were capturing my OCs seemingly breaking the fourth wall, or indeed doing anything different than Standard Stoic Tav poses.

Initially though, my very first BG3 run in Fall 2023 was laughably newbie in all ways—as perhaps it should have been—including that trigger finger, which only captured my beloved 5e bard Cannor as Cringe-Boring John Baldursgate. However I soon got better at it, with lots of lucky screencaps that I could then adjust a bit in Photoshop (which I've been using since like 2002, a few years before I became a professional designer). Perhaps predictably, Minthara—the companion that most attracted me—benefitted from this immensely:

I think the recent shot of Isobel below might be one of my best cutscene-screencaps, though. There's no way I could set up subtle shadow and lighting like that on my own.

When I finally got access to Photo Mode on Mac, I still only had the basics—no pose pack mods, no Lighty Lights (which I still can't use), no nothing—and I had to dust off some old brain cells to try and remember that high-school-era photography elective class. In my first attempt, Shadowheart and Zafraia (from her canon "make them all worse" solo run) were Not Impressed With My Shit:

However, the tide began to turn when I realized I could create my own faux-Lighty Lights by setting up spellcasting shots in dark places, and got some iconic Cannor and Minthara shots that way. I think magical effects or character ability effects (like the Silvanus statue or Karlach raging) will always yield compellingly contrasty pieces.

Eventually I got better with gimbal and focus, and learned how to avoid needless fish-eye stretchiness. I also sort of do poses technically wrong—say, for intimacy scenes—because I often pair up mismatched sets. Tav Romance pose A doesn't always look good with its corresponding Companion Romance Pose B, for example. I once joked about how "I'm not into this to make Basic Artsy Nudes" but then I ended up doing just that in many instances (albeit with some boundaries/self-imposed standards). I guess it's a good thing that as a Mac user I can't deploy Script Extender mods like BG3SX or whatever. You all would find me insufferable, surely. Either that or Tumblr moderation would ban me.

Anyway I've noticed that I prefer to focus on faces, and closeups of faces for the sake of expressing emotion, over almost anything else in VP—with one exception: shapes. If I find a compelling shape or shapes that can dictate composition I'll almost always default to that in favor of conventional perspective or whatever other best practice. It's mildly troublesome if that shape just happens to be part of a nude body, but whatever. Vanity is more of a sin of mine than lust (though not by much).

The only thing I've found myself rushing through sometimes, and thus getting "meh" results, are the sort of "what's happening in this scene" illustrative shots for my game journals like this one. I too often seem to settle for quick go-to settings on depth of field, light/shadow, and subject, when maybe I shouldn't. Or rather I forget how rewarding, quality-wise, it can be to take time to make something better. Well, that and accept when I don't and won't have it, and should try again later.

I still don't really consider myself a VP "expert" though, because I can't work with the full array of what others can do with apps I'm unable to use. I'm pretty good at what I do have to work with, when I give myself time to refine whatever I'm making. I wouldn't call myself "skilled" in this, the way I feel with design or writing or song lyrics (though I'm probably only a proficient musician and not skilled per se).

However I predict that very soon, most of my BG3 time will be taken up by VP instead of regular gameplay. Gameplay itself feels less passive than, say, watching TV, but working with VP certainly feels as mentally active as time spent on any of my pro or hobby design work or audio projects. BG3 is no longer a video game for me; it's an art-project tool. It's can glaze my faves, sure, but more importantly it's a great way to keep bringing my own characters to life and have them exist outside of my head.