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Baldur's Gate: the novel - a guide


NiGHTMARE

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A few days ago, I finally succumbed to curiousity and got the first Baldur's Gate novel. I knew it would be bad, and I knew it wouldn't adhere to the game's storyline. But, seeing as the novels have recently been acknowledged as "cannon" by the Fogotten Realms designers, I wanted to see what these differences were.

 

What I wasn't expecting was for the novel to diverge from the game's storyline on the very first page. Seriously.

 

So that no-one else has to suffer this novel, I'm going to be listing "deviations" and other notable plot points as and when I come across them. Which I expect to be fairly often. So without further ado:

 

 

1) Abdel Adrian, aka Charname, left Candlekeep several years ago. He's a sellsword, and has travelled to both Baldur's Gate and Athkatla several times in the past. This includes a job guarding a mysterious warehouse in Athkatla. Whether this plot point will be explored in the Shadows of Amn novelization is unclear, but I wouldn't be surprised if the author completely forgets about it.

 

2) Gorion is killed by a seemingly random group of mercenaries. It appears that they *aren't* working for Sarevok, as Sarevok apparently only becomes aware of Abdel after he kills the last of the mercenaries.

 

3) Imoen doesn't appear anywhere in the entire novel. Not even a name check.

 

4) Tamoko is a exceptionally skilled assassin from Kozakura. And Sarevok's sexual slave.

 

5) Xzar and Montaron are in the employ of Sarevok.

 

6) Abdel Adrian is only 10 years old, but has been a fully grown man for several years.

 

7) Abdel is absolutely petrified of gibberlings. Admittedly when he first encounters them, it was pitch black and there were several hundred of them.

 

8) Abdel likes Montaron almost as soon as he meets him, but quickly develops the desire to murder Xvar.

 

9) Xvar's skin litterally crawls (at least on his face), and he has a frequent nervous tick.

 

10) Montaron is scared of sunlight. Really.

 

11) Xvar tells Abdel that he's the son of Bhaal before they even reach the Friendly Arms Inn. Abdel doesn't believe him, and at first I thought this rather stupid seeing as he found a note on his dead foster father which was all about the children of Bhaal. Then I re-read the note, and saw it actually talked about the children of "the Black Lord", that being a title used not by Bhaal, but his boss Bane. Whether the author completely screwed up here or the novel will indeed feature Banespawn is unclear, but I strongly suspect the former to be the case.

 

12) The guards at the FAI are all gnomes. Gnomes who are willing and able to kick arse, apparently.

 

13) There's no bounty hunter waiting at the FAI; instead, there's a drunkard who accidentally hits Abdel with a chair. Abdel later murders said drunkard after the drunkard throws a bottle at Abdel's head (precisely why he threw a bottle at Abdel's head will appear to go unexplained.)

 

14) Abdel fancies Jaheira like mad from the moment he meets her, but he would never come between a man and his wife. He'll murder people and contemplate murdering others quite happily, though.

 

15) Both Khalid and Jaheira's human parents were Amnian. Odd considering that Khalid is the son of a wealthy Calishite merchant, and Jaheira is the daughter of a Tethyrian noble.

 

16) Khalid is killed in the Nashkel mines... by Abdel. But hey, it was an accident!

 

17) Mulahey is a half-orc fighter. Who wets himself.

 

18) Actually, Khalid isn't really dead. Hooray! Abdel is somewhat disappointed about this, because apparently he never fights to wound, only to kill. Although that reasoning makes no sense, because he didn't fight Khalid; the whole thing was an accident. Oh dear, plot hole time. I suspect we'll be seeing more of these.

 

19) I guess all that speculation over whether Jaheira worships Chauntea or Silvanus was pointless. Apparently she worships Mielliki. Who'd have thought.

 

20) After succesfully completing the task he assigned them, Sarevok murders both Xzar and Montaron. The manner in which Xzar is killed is rather nasty, to say the least.

 

21) According to Jaheira, the Iron Throne are a splinter group of the Zhentarim. We'll have to see whether it is her or the author who is very much mistaken.

 

22) Tazok and possibly Tranzig are, for some reason, both murdered by Sarevok and replaced by a doppleganger (the same one).

 

23) Khalid has cheated on Jaheira at least once (with a fellow Harper), and she most certainly knows about it.

 

24) Abdel and Jaheira can barely keep their hands off each other. It's usually him who pushes her away.

 

25) Khalid is dead again. This time it looks to be permanent, as most of his organs were dissolved and his entire body turned into green slime. For some reason I get the impression the author really isn't too fond of Khalid.

 

26) Apparently Jaheira has "modest but well-rounded cleavage", which Abdel gets to see after a spider goes down there and she rips off all her clothes trying to get rid of it. As you do.

 

27) Now Xan is dead, too. His head gets bitten of by a spider (a somewhat larger example of the species than the one which explored Jaheira's mammary glands).

 

28) Angelo is both a duke of Baldur's Gate and a good man. This simultaneously conflicts with both the game and pnp lore regarding the city.

 

29) Abdel is redeemed by his love for Jaheira, and her love for him. Very Sweet. Shame that this is the novelization of BG1, not SoA.

 

30) The complete list of joinable NPCs who actually appear in this novel: Montaron, Xzar, Jaheira, Khalid, Xan, and Yeslick. That would mean these characters are technically "canon", though it also mean all but Jaheira and Yeslick are canonically dead. And I've heard rumours Jaheira dies in the novelization of SoA, too.

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....Whoever wrote this novel should be forced to drink a potion of explosions. After being doused in everburning oil. While suspended over a vat of acid. In the Underdark. After angering several High Priestesses of Llolth. And a Yochlol (sp?). Named Petey. Seriously. That novel sounds like it was written by Cespenar after being kicked in the head by Bhaal about 15 bajillion times while simultaneously being flayed like a priest of Ilmatar and being hammered on dwarven grog.

 

And that's all I have to say about that.

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I never had any desire to read any of the Baldur's Gate novels. I looked at the Shadows of Amn one at the bookstore, but after reading a few pages here and there, decided it was trash. It looks like the first one is equally bad - if not worse.

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23) Khalid has cheated on Jaheira at least once (with a fellow Harper), and she most certainly knows about it.

:)

 

Out of all of them, that one just struck me as the most ridiculous.

 

I have a semi-theory that people who hire others to do "game-based" anything, novels or movies, despise people who play games. And so do the people who create the "game-based" whatevers. Therefore, they churn out this kind of absolutely ridiculous dreck, as some kind of in-joke. "Gamers are evil imbeciles who never leave their houses, let's make fun of them with this garbage." OK, it's not really a theory, I'm not quite that paranoid, but it sure makes a lot of things make a whole lot of sense they don't otherwise make. :)

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Iirc, per the official WotC website, they suspended direct discussion about their novels in their forums around the first of this year. They even went so far as to post a lengthy set of guidelines on 'mentioning' novels in other WotC forums with direct discussion outright forbidden. Whether this is to prevent spoilers from dampening book sales, or they tired of hearing complaints is anyone's guess.

 

MG

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If this book is so bad then why would WOTC even publish it? :)

Quality is not something I associate with most novels based on role-playing games. Almost everything published from TSR/WotC to White-Wolf just struck me as a waste of paper.

 

Even novels that others do enjoy like the Weis & Hickman Dragonlance books left me cold.

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Lousy books are being printed all the time.

 

Some of them are so bad that their authors should be taken behind the nearest sauna and shot (to use a traditional Finnish execution method). :)

 

Baldur's Gate novels belong to this unfortunate category. Avoid them like the plague.

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Definitely will give the "novelization" a miss. I thought it might be better than that, seing as some "canon" fiction that survived relatively intact in the Sci Fi realm was prety entertaining, and even avoided most problems with internal consistency.

 

Blah, and thanks for falling on your sword by reading this one for us.

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Gnomes pwn.

 

Iirc, per the official WotC website, they suspended direct discussion about their novels in their forums around the first of this year.  They even went so far as to post a lengthy set of guidelines on 'mentioning' novels in other WotC forums with direct discussion outright forbidden.  Whether this is to prevent spoilers from dampening book sales, or they tired of hearing complaints is anyone's guess.

 

MG

 

Discussing novels was banned on the FR boards a while ago, yeah--but a few posters have discussed them at other parts (e.g. the Deities and the Planes board) without recrimination. Perhaps the moderators don't comb all of the forum.

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I fear that if I read even a single page of that drivel, my brain will have an anurism that will combust, my heart will rip itself out of my own chest as a sign of its absolute hatred and disgust for me, and my bowels will burst from my stomach with impunity. Thanks for giving me that warning so these horrible things will not happen to me.

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Rather interesting isn't it that a game which can inflame the imagine tends to be afflicted with horrible prose.

 

Hell, I've read fanfiction which was better than 90% of official 'fiction'.

 

Even worse than most AD&D novels were the White Wolf ones. Material which might work in a short narrative tend to fare poorly when expanded (and I know I've said that elsewhere before)

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11) Xvar tells Abdel that he's the son of Bhaal before they even reach the Friendly Arms Inn.  Abdel doesn't believe him, and at first I thought this rather stupid seeing as he found a note on his dead foster father which was all about the children of Bhaal.  Then I re-read the note, and saw it actually talked about the children of "the Black Lord", that being a title used not by Bhaal, but his boss Bane.  Whether the author completely screwed up here or the novel will indeed feature Banespawn is unclear, but I strongly suspect the former to be the case.

 

Aside from all the internal story inconsistency with BG2 (I'd hate to see what the hell will happen with the story there) you'd think that there would be editors to catch this kind of thing. Obviously no one cared very much about the construction of this... book.

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