While Q1 of this year has been my busiest so far as a freelancer (both inquiries and projects are up considerably compared to Q1s of 2021-23 with one completed job already out the door), the weather’s been too wet to bike regularly, so while I wait to wrap up two more “real work” projects (more on those soon!) it’s been fun to bash out some notes about my Baldur’s Gate 3 characters and collect screen shots from their respective playthroughs.
I’ve posted about BG3 before, but since it’s still completely eating my brain (which it’s been doing since I began playing while recovering from Covid last fall), I’m probably gonna do it until I’ve bled it dry. I dipped into the BG3 subreddits for a while over the holidays, but bailed quickly to a Discord sever called (appropriately) “Baldur’s Brainrot” to make weekly posts on “Tav Tuesdays,” so named for the main character’s default appellation (short for “tadpoled adventurer” or “Gustav” depending on the interpretation).
Outside of our small gaming group, I’m the only person who cares about my characters (all ported over from ongoing D&D games), which is as it should be—but the Discord folks politely obliged me going on and on each week about backstories and differences between D&D vs BG3 builds for each of my (then six, now eight) Tavs. If you’ve read my previous character design posts, you’ve seen all these folks already, but here they are again since it’s fun to compare their 5e portraits to their BG3 doppelgangers (some of which got pretty close):
Nevertheless, I understand that foisting unfamiliar characters on unsuspecting internet bystanders isn’t always tactful, so last week I spun up a Tumblr blog as a dumping ground for all my BG3 screenshots, named it “Lute The Bodies”, and created a neato visual identity for it.
The runic type and lute/scimitar visuals are based on incidental vector art left over from my 2022 fantasy gazetteer layout (where the forest green also came from), and the name itself—ridiculous pun and all—was something I spat out for one of my D&D group’s tabletop games (an “oops-all-bards” romp where we were a band named “Lute The Bodies,” behaving basically like the dysfunctional D&D version of Fleetwood Mac). Anyway, the examples here are mocked up from mobile (web and app) and desktop:
When I began weaning myself off most social media apps at the beginning of this decade, my old Tumblr site was the first to go, since that cesspool of obsessive fandom has always made me feel about 177 years old and laughably, obliviously out of touch with everything for over a decade. Upon returning to it, I still feel that way, but I figure if I keep this new blog’s focus on Baldur’s Gate 3 screenshots only (and not, say, maps or music or whatever else I’m into), it should sustain itself for a little while. At least 177 is relatively young in elf-years, right?
