Ultimate WoWdur's Gate

This used to be a Warcraft blog, then a character blog, now it's my general roleplaying blog. Named for Ultima (the series that got me into roleplaying), World of Warcraft (where I started RPing with other people) and Baldur's Gate (I've loved it since the old ones, but the new has reignited my passion for RP).

[sixteen-strikes]

I want varsh Ko'kuu to meet baby Xan.

Xan doesn't have spots because Ptaris doesn't have them and I decided to go with the 'taking the egg out of the acid made him spotless' theory for this image.

Will document my full spiral into madness over his lack of spots separetly🙃

[alinamghart]

Lae'zel ready to free the true leader of the Gith, The Prince of the Comet.

[vimesy-art]

I'm happy to share with you my fanart based on Baldur's Gate 3! I really like the confrontation line between Lae'zel and Vlaakith

[steelart]

*sweating* i'm uh. i'm running out of lame jokes to explain why i'm still making these put-bg3-into-Hades-game things

anyway Minthara in Hades would totally be a Nemesis-like and kinda help but also kind of fuck up your run and she hates all the gods and forces you into a trade-off with one of your existing boons

others in this style (ish): the dark urge (OC); karlach (bg3); shadowheart(bg3); gale (bg3), halsin(bg3), lae'zel (bg3), wyll (bg3), astarion (bg3), kotallo (horizon)

i'd let her kill me!

[merulaturdus]

Just sketches of all the companions, with some of their banters and how they'd say it Drawn in March 2025. Wanna color them someday

[artist-rat]

where it's at!!

[ranger-jahen]

do you ever think about the way that Wyll carries himself when you first find Karlach. his hostility, his fervor, his unrelenting resolve. how he pushes back initially if you start to defend her; tells you she’s lying, she’ll say anything to save herself, she must be put down.

then, when all shadow of doubt is gone, how quickly he turns to complete remorse. how deeply he feels that he very nearly made an eternal mistake. how relieved he is that he was stopped (even though it means punishment for him.) how he so immediately takes her into his heart. how he only truly wanted to do good, but he was afraid to question, because he feared if he questioned or wavered, he’d become corrupt.

do you ever think about how angry and damning Ulder Ravengard is of Wyll when you rescue him from the Iron Throne. how he scorns the very idea that his wayward son was the one to save him. how he seethes and bristles and castigates Wyll at camp later, for all the perceived wrongs he doesn’t yet know an ounce of truth about.

then, when all shadow of doubt is gone, how quickly he turns to complete remorse. how deeply he feels that he has made an unforgivable mistake. how relieved he is that he has finally seen the truth (even though it means a battle with pain and regret for him.) how he so immediately wishes to earn his forgiveness with his lost son. how he only truly wanted to do good for the city, but he never let himself question, because he feared if he questioned or wavered, he’d become corrupt.

do you ever think about how Wyll is so very much like his father?

[elceewunjo]

Wyll - The Morning Star

I thiiink he's done? I'm gonna call him done. He might be my favourite that I've done so far.

Wyll as The Morning Star from Alphonse Mucha ✨

Shadowheart is here as The Moon Astarion is here as The North Star Lae'zel is here as The Comet

I'm only missing one for the Evening Star to complete the serie hehe It'll probably be Lae'zel. Then if I wanna do all the companions I'll have to make up additional star themed ones... Karlach as the sun, Gale as the Midnight Star? That would work right?

Maybe next year...

[erikailustra]

🌊Dark waters, dark star✨

Painting a dark fire was more difficult than I imagined, but since I just wanted to throw colors on a sketch to end the day, this was enough.✍️

[baldursghaik]

alright if they remake bg1/2 but fully turn based, I'd drop money on it

wotc you have an amazing opportunity, please try not to squander it like so many others

[baldursghaik]

A Baldur's Gate 2 remake is apparently in development, with the original co-lead designer returning

The Bhaalspawn are back, baby!

I am. cautiously optimistic

[directactionforhope]

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

[vasyan-pupkinyan]

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

[directactionforhope]

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

[directactionforhope]

Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Why Fire Makes Us Human

Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Fire and the Brain: How Cooking Shaped Humans | AMNH

It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.

[reasonsforhope]

Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live

[not-a-bad-dragon]

Shoutout to Baldurs Gate 3 for having a magical girl transformation sequence but instead of a teenager in a short skirt it's a lesbian aasimar paladin in full plate about to open 13 cans of fucking whoop ass

[baldursgateconceptart]

Blood of Lathander

Concept art for Baldur's Gate 3

Art by Minyi Ho

[04k96]

[hope-the-feathered]

spgetti

[reginasknight94]

spaghetti

[nurabelmax]

Molly

[apricoctopus]

I randomly thought about face tattoos in Infernal in Baldur's Gate 3 and had to do this

[threekegs]

entwined ⚓ for @ sshomoerotica.bsky.social