Burning Bridges with Minthara in Baldur’s Gate 3

After a month of not playing Baldur’s Gate 3, Potshot and I finally got back into the game to revive our attempt to do a co-op play through.

Baldur’s Gate 3 splash screen

When last I wrote, we had successfully defeated Dror Razglin, the first of the goblin bosses on our list, after a few tries by eventually shoving him off of a high place.  After finishing off his remaining companions we emerged victorious and got to use the key to his treasure room.

Hey, loot!

At that point we camped and basically took a month off to do WoW Classic Hardcore and Brewfest in Wrath Classic.

So when we got back to BG3 I only really remembered that we had a couple more bosses to deal with and that one of them, the drow Minthara, was pretty close by.

The map, which nicely marks your quest objectives, confirmed that she was just off to the east, so we wandered that way without an ounce of caution to reconnoiter the situation only to find out that killing Dror Razglin had apparently made us persona non-grata in the goblin world as we were attacked by the first pair we ran across.  Previously everybody had been chill… we walked right into the place using only brain tadpole powers to convince a single guard that we were with the band… but now we were clearly seen as crashing the goblin party.

So the were on us right away.

Also, threats

Meanwhile, we were fumbling along trying to remember how to even play.  And we did lots of things wrong.  We walked through that pool of acid.  We moved to poor locations.  One round I managed to shoot an arrow into a barrel and then sit on that granite bench, all by mis-clicking.

We were fortunate that the goblins themselves were not all that tough as we were giving them more help than they deserved.  And new goblins kept popping up as we would slay one of the current attackers.  There was one off at a distance that summoned a worg into our midst.

Who ordered the doggie?

So we were not in any immediate mortal danger, but we were throwing away our limited use abilities just to stay afloat.  And then we stumble into visual range of Minthara, the drow.

Minthara sees us

You can see her… barely… at the desk at the upper left of the screen shot.

Unlike the goblins, we were all level 2, she is a level 5 named boss mob and we’re about out of juice.  Heals down, special attacks down, and now here is this boss who, on her turn, runs straight at us so that I know we’re probably going to bite it and have to start back from our last save point.

She gets close enough to throw out an attack, but doesn’t kill anybody on that first turn and then it is my rogue next on the initiative list and I start digging through my inventory looking to see if I have ANYTHING in there for an emergency like this.  I have been picking up all sorts of stuff along the way and I find in my bag an explosive arrow.  I immediately pick that simply because the promised damage output is greater than anything else I have.  So I aim and let fly… and BOOM!

Minthara is gone.  And so is the little wooden bridge she was standing on.

Um… that worked

Once I stop laughing, which took a while, I started shouting something about making a save point.  I was probably never going to manage that timing again.  Sure, I had lost half my health, so the arrow did for me as well, but our boss problem was taken care of.

We cleaned up the remaining goblins, saved again, then went to go loot the field.  We found a few nice items.  A couple of bottles of grease, always a group favorite, and some health potions.  Once we had that we settled down for a long camp to restore everything.

At some point our basically knocking off for the day and setting up camp in the middle of hostile territory is going to come back to bite us I am sure… that tadpole is growing in our heads… but not yet.

Once we got our rest and did a big save, we moved on to another quest objective on the map, the freeing of Volo.  Unfortunately, as we wandered into that room, we found that it adjoined the large open area where Priestess True Soul Gut was holding court, similar to Dror Razglin and his entourage.  We were clearly going to have issues.

Still, we were game to give it a try.  We were up in a side gallery with a double set of concrete steps up to us, so I figured it would be an excellent time to throw some bottles of grease.  That worked out before, trip up the attackers then apply a little fire to toast them.

So, feeling all clever, I spent two rounds dousing the stairs with grease only to find I didn’t have anything handy to set it on fire.  Meanwhile, it turned out there was another path up, so while we had three goblins down in the grease, we had another three up the other path and hitting us with ranged attacks.

By the time we got the grease on the stairs lit, the goblins had gotten up to us and it became a contest to see who could push whom back into the fire… and the goblins were shoving us as well as we were shoving them.  Everybody in the fire.

This all started falling apart for us pretty quickly, and soon we were down to just Fergorin facing a room full of goblins as the rest of us lay dying on the floor.

This does not end well… three out of four down

Also, the little icon in the middle of the “I’m dying” tag… once you think that looks like an elephant, you can’t stop seeing it as an elephant.  I apologize if I have ruined this for you.

Fortunately we had saved after the last overnight camp, so we went back to that save point and decided to maybe take another path.  There was a door in the room with us, so we chose that for our next direction.

In that room we found a bunch of goblins… who were not aggro to us… hanging around and taunting a bear they had locked up in a cell.  Now, it had been over a month since we set out on this journey, but even I could see that the bear in the cell looked exactly like the druids in bear form back at the druid camp we had been visiting so long ago.

Thanks to the brain tadpole the goblins are deferential and obey when you tell them that you’ll take the whole bear problem off their grubby little hands.  And, if there were not enough clues, at about that point the game asks if you want to attack the bear, the goblins, or just leave.  We chose to attack the goblins.

We’ve picked sides, we get the bear

That fight did not go as well as one would have hoped.  We ended up with several of us on the floor at various points while the bear took his sweet ass time getting into the fight.  Still, we ended up defeating most of the goblins.  A couple of them ran off and got away… I am sure that won’t come back to haunt us.

Then, in a completely unsurprising reveal, it turned out the bear was a druid all along.

Talking to the druid

We had to spend some time twisting his arm… or paw… or whatever… to get him to join us.  He was all, “I don’t know, you might not be able to stop me from attacking goblins” and I had to respond that, given our experience on the other side of the door, that might be less of a problem than he thought.

So he was down to join with us.  But first, having expended ALL of our abilities yet again, it was time for another overnight camp for a rest.  This actually pissed off our druid friend, who was anxious to get back to killing goblins.  But I think I talked him off the ledge and we camped.

Then I had a dream where that half elf came to me again about the brain tadpole and also chided me about spending so much time on the road simply sleeping.

But once we broke camp we found our druid friend still waiting for us.  By that point though, it was time for dinner in real life.  We need to figure out how to clear that next room full of goblins and Priestess Gut, and I think we’ll need more than just a goblin eating bear to get it done.