#compels

[felassan]

hey fel, as always i'm so appreciative of the work you do to aggregate info for the fandom! you're the first place i look for all news, and once i have disposable income i'm totally going to send you a kofi.

i've been confused by the companion classes for days and i'm hoping you can help me out—i keep seeing taash with dual wield axes, which, given information that warriors have only 2h weapon and sword and shield as weapon options, suggests she's a rogue... but that leaves only davrin as a warrior? surely not, right?? we have three mages in neve, bellara, and emmrich, and harding is of course a rogue, lucanis being a rogue would make the most sense but i'm not sure it's confirmed?, davrin has a sword and shield so he must be a warrior, and then taash....??? help have classes been confirmed somewhere i'm so confused

hello! ◕‿◕ tysm for the lovely message and feedback, and that is super kind but pls don't feel obligated to do so, it's all good either way!! We know that Bellara, Neve and Emmrich are mages. Based on DA:I Harding is a rogue. it's assumed Lucanis is a rogue and Davrin is a warrior (agreex2). Taash is assumed to be a warrior (also agree). dual-wielding as she does could easily be part of her unique skill tree/abilities or something**. also, there is this comment from Trick Weekes: "I'm a little gun-shy on confirming anything that hasn't been said officially, but please assume we would not give you a game with only one warrior companion. Somebody has to draw aggro for my Mage Rook." [source] so we will definitely not have only one warrior companion. by process of elimination as well it looks like that other warrior would be Taash. so the class breakdown seems to be:

Harding, rogue Bellara, mage Davrin, warrior Lucanis, rogue Neve, mage Taash, warrior Emmrich, mage

hope this helps. :)

** it was said in the Discord Q&A that:

Q. Will the companions have unique specializations? A. The “companions will have abilities that are truly unique to them, but also, they do fall into the archetypes of mage, rogue and warrior. For instance, because she has a bow, you might be surprised to hear that Bellara is in fact a mage, and I love that”. The bulk of the companions’ abilities are based on their own unique ‘personality’. For example, Neve is the only mage that is an Ice Mage, so she has related abilities that are distinct to her, but because she is a mage she does have access to abilities that all of the mages share, like Time Slow. The devs are really happy with this balance, a good mix of representing their archtype, their class, and also their distinct "specialization or personality, whatever you wanna call it.” “Each of these characters exists, each of these characters have a history, has a story of how they became who they were. Part of that was finding the intersection between narrative and gameplay”. They want to serve the needs of gameplay but also allow the characters to breathe as their own people both in conversations and out of conversation.

[loquaciousquark]

hello quark! i've gotten to the szarr palace again in bg3 and am now super curious about tavish and astarion's thoughts about amanita szarr and vellioth! i imagine personally that astarion had no idea amanita even existed, and that finding out about vellioth's rules might give him a knee-jerk but ultimately conflicted rejection response—something about how those rules are why cazador treated him so poorly, so he rejects them on principle, but also his life experience has been such that he actually agrees with them... it'd be a tangle for him to try to work through, i think, but what about you? what are your thoughts?

I! LOVE! THIS! QUESTION!! Thank you so much for asking!

I definitely agree that Astarion had no idea Amanita existed. That Cazador had turned a full vampire and then imprisoned her in their attic; that she was resisting her compulsions and defying Cazador's orders; that a powerful vampire hated Cazador as much as Astarion did? No way. No way does Cazador ever let Astarion or any of the other spawn even get a hint of her existence. I don't even know if she knew very much about them, actually; I think if she really thought there was someone she could help or someone she could ally with in this very lonely, isolated existence, her journal entries wouldn't have been quite so despairing.

(Sidebar: I adore the tragedy of the attic in the Cazador mansion being the only place that allows in some shafts of light. I bet he did that to her on purpose.)

After finding out about her existence, I think Astarion would be conflicted at first, then decide that if she's abandoned them all, he's not going to waste another thought on her. He didn't know her, she didn't know him, and if she fled without helping them, he's not going to worry about where she's gone. He'd have even less of an interest in her outcome than his siblings, I think, and those relationships are already contentious at best.

Now, Vellioth--I think that's another story. Finding out that Cazador, who has effectively set himself up as god-emperor to the spawn, the source of all pain and pleasure and the total sum of their universe, couldn't even come up with his own base set of rules? Finding out that Cazador is just one more link in an endless chain of suffering?

Man, I think it'd be rough for Astarion. I can easily see him going in a circle of laughing at Cazador for being a pathetic copycat -> a pathetic copycat enslaved me for 200 years -> does that make me even more pathetic than I originally thought -> is my escape therefore worth less in the grand scheme of justice -> no, what I did was great and good -> Cazador was pathetic but he was also powerful -> it is admirable that I killed him and therefore he must have had intrinsic value as an enemy -> Cazador was powerful in his own way even if he stole from Vellioth -> Cazador stole everything from Vellioth & was nothing more than a pathetic copycat, and so forth. Exhausting!

Once he got over the initial surprise, I do think he would have looked back at his time under Cazador and wonder if it needed to be reframed. The account of Cazador's impalement is horrifying. The brutal murder of Cazador's friend (Cazador had a friend!) is horrifying. And at the end of that horror, Vellioth still made Cazador a full vampire.

What does that mean for Astarion? Did Cazador really think he was being merciful by only imprisoning him for a year? Would Cazador have ever fully turned him if the ritual hadn't come into play? Probably not--probably he's just as cruel as Astarion always thought he was, and likely even more, but I think it's one last element of rug-pulling viciousness from Cazador to Astarion right at the end, one last time. Cazador dies, and Astarion can't even be unquestioningly happy about it.

As far as Astarion internalizing those rules, I think post-Cazador's death, he has a kneejerk rejection of anything like them for himself, just like you say. I do think if he's not checked by Tav/his LI, he may unconsciously lean into similar rules for them (see: the nearly identical ruleset he gives a turned Tav after Ascending), but I think a spawn Astarion with a healthy relationship could be coaxed out of that mindset given enough time & support.

An incredible question. Thank you so much for asking! :D

[catalists]

hello, i found your dbd fic "what some circumstance stole" a couple hours ago and followed the link in your author's note here, only to find that you have the excellent taste to have a dessa lyric as your blog title *and* you also like critical role! i enjoy your blog and your writing and will be waiting with bated breath for the next chapter of wscs, thank you for sharing your talent with the fandom!

Thank you so much, that's so flattering <3 I'm thrilled you like the fic and that you found me here!

[malvernsims]

hello malvern! i'm interested in using your defaults as bases to make comprehensive poppet v2 defaults, but am not sure how that would differ from making a default myself from the beginning—would you be able to point me in the right direction as to what my first step should be? regardless of your answer, thank you so much for your defaults. i've switched to them despite preferring the poppet colors because they're so comprehensive, and i know a lot of work must have gone into all of them. you're a great asset to this community!

I'd be happy to help where I can! Feel free to DM me if that's easier. And I hope you don't mind that I've answered this publicly, when I respond to messages privately I almost immediately forget what I've said and then it's hard to remember what advice I've given if I need to give clarification later on.

I think the main difference would be that you wouldn't have to extract the property set and 3DIRs yourself if you use somebody else's default as a base.

If you wanted to use the same hair mesh and just swap out the textures for Poppet ones I think you'd just have to delete the TXTR lines in the default file and add the corresponding Poppet ones. I'm not too sure on that though as I've never done only a texture replacement. You might also have to delete the old TXMTs, add the new ones and then link them in the 3DIRs.

In terms of starting from scratch I learned how to default from this tutorial. Once I got comfortable with the process I found ways to make it faster for myself so I could extract and add multiple files at once. I've been meaning to write up the modified version I use...maybe I'll get around to that after Christmas before I go back to work.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

"Our confidence in Christ does not make us lazy, negligent, or careless, but on the contrary it awakens us, urges us on, and makes us active in living righteous lives and doing good. There is no self-confidence to compare with this."

Huldrych Zwingli

[luckthebard]

that ask about yennefer has me curious — do you think you could ever love a sorcerer in d&d as much as a wizard? if not, what stops them from hitting the buttons that specifically wizards hit for you? as someone who just fucking LOVES SORCERERS GODDAMN, i think it's really interesting how we both love what would, to most people, seem like the same damn thing, but which are actually very different and (usually) involve very different tropes!

This is a really interesting question! I had to think about this a bit. Because you’re right, they are very different, even if on the surface they have a lot in common. 

I think if a sorcerer was done really well they could worm their way into my heart, but the tropes involved with sorcerers don’t quite hit my buttons the way the tropes involved with wizards do. And for D&D specifically, my love of wizards is twofold: 1) mechanics; 2) storytelling tropes.

First off, mechanics! I like what sorcerers do with spellcasting mechanics, because it really fits how they get their magic - they’re innately good at certain spells, and those are the ones they can cast. And that’s it. With wizards, though, I really enjoy the sheer variety of the magic they can be capable of. As a player, this means a lot more spells to juggle, and more decision-making to do with daily spell-prep. With the right game and a DM willing to go along with the Full Wizard Experience, wizards don’t really have a limit to their skill-sets. Sure, each wizard picks a School, but that just determines which magic is narratively your focus, and makes one school little easier for you to transcribe. (This is something I love about 5e wizards, actually. In older editions, when you picked your School of Magic, whatever you picked would also come with an accompanying school you couldn’t learn from.)

This mechanical difference is tied to the storytelling trope difference in a big way. Sorcerer tropes, to me, involve a lot more “I suddenly realized I had this power I never asked for, oh no what do I do with it!” It’s an “I’m special and have to learn how to harness my great powers to keep myself and others safe” kind of vibe. (More like the X-Men than, say, Dr. Strange. Actually, that might just be a pretty good base distinction, for anyone familiar with Marvel Comics.) Wild Magic Sorcerers are an especially fun embodiment of this. The sorcerer doesn’t choose the Call to Adventure - the Call chooses them. Sorcerers lend themselves to a lot more “chosen one” type storylines, and can have really interesting explorations of destiny and the whole idea of “greatness thrust upon” an otherwise ordinary person. 

Wizards, on the other hand, seek out power. To be a wizard, you have to have spent years ambitiously trying to harness all the arcane power a sorcerer might not have even asked for. So for me, the really interesting question of D&D wizards is: why. Why spend all that time and effort to trying to control the elements and reality itself? The kind of person with that kind of motivation and ambition is just inherently interesting to me. And I really like the idea of a class of character with no real special talent beyond sheer determination to learn how to do magic dammit. 

So I guess the difference in preference comes down to - I find ambitious, self-made characters very intriguing. While I find stories about people struggling to understand themselves and their natural gifts interesting as well, and magic is always very cool, that’s why sorcerers don’t quite reach wizard-level for me. Very different tropes, indeed!

[eponymous-rose]

hey rose! it's been a while since i tuned in to cr and i want to get back to it, but i just remembered what made me stop watching in the first place, and i thought you could help with that -- i stopped watching before the mn first commandeered their ship because i heard some Vague But Distressing Things about what happened to the animals they bought when they had to leave the city. can you tell me what happened to the owl and the ferret and the blink dog, please?

Oh gosh, I totally get this - I always have to make sure the pets make it out okay in movies and TV, etc. They’re all alive (that we know of!).

Relatively non-spoilery rundown:

The red weasel has been waterlogged a few times but is still okay and with the party!

The owl wound up separated from the party due to a chaotic sequence of events that escalated extremely rapidly, but the assumption is that he’s doing just fine (and may or may not be less grumpy) wherever he is now.

The blink dog puppy is safe and staying with Jester’s mom. :)