Even before my run with Shade was put on hold by Bassilus' Skeleton Warrior that killed her companion Gizi, I had started a new run in LoB mode. This time with the double XP option enabled rather than the double XP + 1,000 per kill option of my previous run. Setup is BGEE v2.1 without Siege of Dragonspear for fewer messed up strings, modded with BG1 NPC Project, SCS (almost everything, including full enemy pre-buffs), p&p dual-wielding for Thieves and Bards, Free Action protects against Stun, and a number of BG2Tweaks that will probably only become relevant in BG2.
Melody, Halfling Shadowdancer
The protagonist is Melody, possibly a go-to Thief from now on. I have an active run in BGEE where she's an Assassin (in v1.3, meaning her poison still stacks and allows no save), and I've also rolled her as a Bounty Hunter but haven't played her as such yet.
Here's Melody the Shadowdancer:
The main reason I consider making her my staple Thief character for future runs is that I love
the portrait, beautiful artwork that sparks my imagination. Melody looks sweet and wily at the same time to me, and that's exactly how I like to imagine her personality. Her Chaotic Neutral alignment matches this ambiguous nature. She can be as sweet, cheerful, and helpful as she can be cold, capricious and selfish. I do feel the good side is slightly stronger in her than the dark side, at least in the early game, thanks to her upbringing.
Melody sees herself as an artist more than anything, a ballerina whose dance is not to music but to the play of light and shadow.
She only discovered her innate connection to the Plane of Shadow a year or two before the events that marked the beginning of her adventure. In Winthrop's inn, a nobleman whose coffer she had just emptied entered his room before she could leave. She had nowhere to hide, she thought, but a supreme effort of will saw her enter a different world, familiar yet alien: a dusky, hazy image of the room she was in. The walls, the doorway, the bed, the strongbox, even the nobleman, everything was there. But the outlines were blurry and moved constantly, like rippling reflections on water. Colors were pale and greyish, and the excitement she had felt while pulling the heist made way for an equanimous state. The nobleman shouted and stomped his feet, but the sounds were muffled and distant. He looked around, then walked into the hall, but he completely ignored her. He never saw her. She had become one with the shadows in the dimly lit room.
Melody was lucky to have disappeared precisely when the nobleman would have noticed her. Because of this she suffered no repercussions for the theft nor was her ability found out. The realization that her skill was a supernatural one, one that went well beyond that of ordinary hiding and sneaking, was a revelation. Melody could not immediately explain her ability but in the library she learned from a tome on the Planes that she had a Shadowdancer's connection to the Plane of Shadow.
Melody was grateful for having found her art and dedicated herself to refining it with discipline. She kept her ability secret from even her closest of friends (Deder and Imoen) though, well aware that the ability was condemned, feared and misunderstood more often than not. The Halfling would only display her skill to folks she would either trust or kill, and then exclusively when necessary. Showing off her talent would only draw undue attention and judgment, and remove the surprise element of her ability. This meant she had little occasion to practise and develop her skill. Reevor's cats, astute masters of both concealment and observation themselves, were her sparring partners. Because cats don't talk.
Melody's tale started one morning with a monk urging her to prepare herself as quickly as she could for a journey with her foster father Gorion. After some shopping (studded leather armor, long swords, short bow and quiver), and after her liquidation of a mysterious bounty hunter (Carbos) who had wanted her dead, she was indeed on the road. On their first night the two were accosted by a war party led by an immense swordsman, with two archers, two ogres, and a battle priestess. The warrior demanded Gorion to hand her over to him, but Gorion urged Melody to get away, which she would probably have done anyway. The warrior slew Gorion, leaving her on her own in the wilderness.
The event made a huge impact on Melody. Not only had she just lost her foster father, there were people who wanted her hide for some reason. During the first tendays that followed the event, the Halfling kept a very low profile. She ignored Gorion's instruction to seek out friends of his at the FAI, for that had been the message in a letter on his body. Surely his killer had read it. Instead the Halfling traveled the Sword Coast quite extensively, acquainting herself with the rugged, lawless land but avoiding hostilities and often even contact with its denizens. Long-drawn-out battles with four Spiders in Beregost and with a Hobgoblin that dropped a pair of Boots of Stealth south of that town taught her to shun conflict when possible. In any case, the tools of her trade were always going to be subterfuge, intelligence, and diplomacy, not brute force.
So Melody pretty much fetched and chatted her way to some degree of fame and glory, relying on stealth and on her charisma and wit rather than her blade or her arrows.
Working alone, she felled two ogrillons that had killed a fellow Halfling. One of them had carried a letter from one Roe she delivered to his wife Mirianne in Beregost. She calmed Marl the drunkard when he held her responsible for his adventuring son's premature death. She tracked down lost captain Captain Brage and escorted him to Nashkel, and babbled for a while with a tedious fellow named Noober in that same border town. In Beregost she returned a family heirloom, a necklace, to Mr Coquetle whose wife and children had been killed by Hobgoblin raiders. Up north, Melody brought Nathan's dead body from an ankheg nest to farmer Brun, the father. Like cats, ankhegs don't talk, so she allowed herself the luxury of hiding in plain sight when her picking up the corpse alerted an ankheg.
She retrieved a bowl for Tenya, a young priestess of Umberlee, from three fishermen who had murdered her mother.
Her work experience, and her long days alone in the wilds, saw Melody make considerable progress in her self-study of the art of Shadowdancing. A new ability she learned to master was the Shadowstep, which allowed her to briefly step into the Shadow Plan and walk around while others were frozen in time. It helped her survive a Hobgoblin ambush. It was an amazing feeling for the Halfling to simply walk away from an arrow that would certainly have struck true but was now suspended in mid-air.
Down south Melody received a PfMagic scroll from Hafiz, found a ring of fire resistance and a star sapphire, and met injured Samuel whom she would bring to Gellana Mirrorshade at the temple of Garl Glittergold next to the Friendly Arm Inn. Near the inn she dispatched a Hobgoblin that had stolen a ring from retired adventurer Joia, and returned the ring to the woman. She decided not to enter the inn when she discerned a mean-looking Necromancer at the entrance, which to her confirmed her suspicions that "the enemy" (whoever they were) expected her there.
On the North Coast Melody retrieved a ring for gnomish wizard Celvan. And in the Cloudpeak Mountains she dueled Ludrug the gnoll and reunited two children, or to be more precise one child named Drienne and a fiend masquerading as a kid named Albert, with their respective pets. She also battled two Winter Wolves there and slew them thanks to being protected by Gorion's belt.
East of Beregost Melody depetrified Tamah and was warned of Basilisks on the loose in the vicinity. A PfUndead scroll that Drienne had rewarded her with, lasted barely long enough for Melody to slay one ghoul and one out of three ghasts in the Valley of the Tombs south-east of Nashkel.
Melody's difficulty with taking down relatively simple creatures like said ghasts added to the fact that she had accepted a number of commissions that were likely to involve violence, such as capturing a dangerous priest called Bassilus the Murderer and investigating killings and contaminated iron ore in the Nashkel Mines as a possible source of the iron crisis, made the Halfling long for competent comrades. She decided to form a troupe, and thankfully she didn't take long in finding suitable companions.
Her first recruit was a Sun Soul Monk named Rasaad. His devotion to the light of Selune the Moonmaiden seemed at odds with Melody's dedication to the Shadow Plane. But their commitment and discipline was at the same time a uniting factor. They were both adroit in body and mind, and focused on their tasks. And Rasaad had trained himself at keeping to the shadows. His skill at hiding didn't come close to hers, but his mere trying was something that Melody greatly appreciated.
A second companion was Kivan, an Elven Archer the two met near the High Hedge. He seemed to lack the composure of Melody and Rasaad, vindictive as he was, and wounded (emotionally), because of the loss of his mate Deheriana.
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Retour en haut
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). When I eventually looked at Spirit I was horrified at how low on HPs she was (she had actually not been poisoned once, but twice and was down to 8 HPs). By that time it was far too late to use a green scroll. However, as the others wouldn't have had to get right to the edge of the map to do an area transition I thought it was still possible they might manage that - but the ettercap poison just ticks too fast (I thought I'd taken a screenshot of that, but it appears not). 
Of course, if the damage was wrong or something like that, I wouldn't know as I am no staticitian. 
). Of course, before getting to SoD the character had to survive BG1 - and the initial attempt failed to do that.
).
