:D It does feel that way round here far too often for sanity.
I was going to start a new thread with the following, but since JDR13 has gone full retard it would look like I'm starting a thread to make point about my 'argument' (?) with JDR rather than just some fun musings I thought of while out for a walk today, so I'll just stick it here, where it'll sadly get buried in a couple hours:
Spoilers! Alert!
Sarevok the dumb
The more I think about the plot of Baldur's Gate 1 the more I'm reminded of the Star Wars prequels, and in particular the infamous Plinkett reviews. No matter what angle I approach the story I find myself thinking in the voice of Harry S. Plinkett.
So what was Sarevok's plan again?
He wants to generate as much bloodshed as possible. That's it, that is his entire objective. In order to achieve this he wants the city of Baldur's Gate to go to war with Amn. In order to do this he has supplanted a large number of shapeshifting dopplegangers into positions of power in Baldur's Gate. So far, so good.
Now...
Where does he put these dopplegangers? In the high political offices? Nope. In the diplomatic offices? Nope. Maybe in the departments responsible for propaganda? Nope again. He decides to put his dopplegangers into an obscure and fairly irrelevant trading company called the Seven Suns. He then gets the Seven Suns to bugger up the local Iron Supply so that his daddy's company, the Iron Throne, another trading guild, can monopolise the iron trade. It is supposed that he has people going about 'whispering' that Amn is behind the iron sabotage because Amn obviously wants to weaken Baldur's Gate before an invasion. Erm... ok?
Hmm. Not really ok. Really quite dumb in fact. Lets examine some questions which this all poses:
1. If you had hoards of dopplegangers you could drop into a city in order to take it over and bend it to your will, why would you waste time with all this stupid and convoluted trade shenanigans? Just replace a few key people, pay a mob to claim some Amn troops invaded their land, get your dopplegangers to vote for war. Job done.
But wait. Are the dopplegangers working for Sarevok or Sarevok's daddy? If they're working for daddy then why doesn't daddy just use the dopplegangers to literally take over any company he chooses in order to get his monopoly, no shenanigans required. If the dopplegangers are working for Sarevok, and Sarevok doesn't view his father as anything but a disposable pawn in his own plans, then why doesn't Sarevok use a doppleganger to replace his dad?
2. If Baldur's Gate cannot get iron because its one iron mine is out of action and all the trade routes from other places are plagued by bandits robbing all the iron, and yet there's this one guy offering to sell you iron, seemingly oblivious to the crisis, then what would be the problem with simply acceding to the obvious ploy and agreeing a deal with the guy, he clearly has more power than the entire military/intelligence structure of your town. Even if a bunch of adventurers prove to you that the obvious guy is behind it all (Sarevok's daddy), then you can still say thanks to the adventurers and continue with the iron deal. What exactly would have been the outcome if your posse of meddlers hadn't done anything? The city of Baldur's Gate buys its iron from a different dude. That's it.
Further, even if Baldur's Gate did go to war with Amn, who's to say that they'd bother putting up much of a fight? Even in fantasy settings, if a region thinks it's about to be literally overrun on the battlefield then the first thing they'd do is try to sue for peace as quickly as possible, take the best offer at the best time while they still pose a 'hassle' to the invaders. By buggering up the iron reserves all Sarevok will achieve is a weakened Baldur's Gate, to the point where he's actually vastly reducing the maximum possible bloodshed. Literally the opposite of his plan. Ideally, Sarevok would desire months, nay years, of thoroughly antagonised unsettleable trench warfare. If daddy wanted war with Amn, to sell even more iron, then its the same deal, you wouldn't want one side to be severely under-powered, meaning that you'd likely be selling to Baldur's Gate extremely cheaply in order to re-level the playing-field as quickly as possible.
3. The legend of the Bhaalspawn is that there's 20 offspring, all of whom have to kill the other 19 in order to be some mighty special snowflake. So... when Sarevok first meets you and your daddy/carer/whatever, he decides not to kill you. There's like two of you and three of him and he just kills daddy and lets you wander off into the sunset. I know its a well worn cliche that the bad guy can't kill the good guy while he's levelling up, but in this particular instance he really did only have one job to do. But then maybe Sarevok hadn't worked out the one-of-20 at that point? After all, he's still researching the topic in the library way down the line in chapter 6, maybe he doesn't know what he has to do yet? But then if that's the case, then why is he there in the first place?
This whole maximum bloodshed agenda is just a massive sidetrack for Sarevok. His one job is to kill the other bhaalspawn. And he has a monumentally large infrastructure to go about doing this. While he himself could be bothered to kill your daddy, for some reason he has no particular time to hunt you yourself down personally, instead always sending solo low-level assassins and generally incompetent bounty hunters. Bounty hunters who usually attack you when you enter an inn. An inn... you know, that place you will be... fast asleep in... for 8 hours. However, this whole maximum bloodshed thing, which doesn't even guarantee maximum bloodshed, is obviously taking up
all of his free time. Which, meanwhile, you yourself are generating more blood across the region by just walking aimlessly about than any war between two cities probably would. Literally thousands of bodies lay in your wake by the time Sarevok has manipulated a town to sign a new iron-trading contract. Or was that just his daddy...!?!?
4. Once you expose the dopplegangers at the Seven Suns for chapter 5, why in all that's in anyway logical doesn't the hierarchy at Baldur's Gate immediately shut-down everything and enforce emergency measures via a police state until every citizen has been inspected for dopplegangerness. How could any political organisation function under the knowledge, not just suspicion, but actual knowledge, that there are dopplegangers rife about town? That same day the gates would be locked, curfews installed and the streets overrun by Flaming Fists and bureaucrats/loyal wizards/clerics all out on the hunt. Doppleganger checks before entering and upon exiting all official or important buildings. No-one is allowed to go out alone. etc etc etc.
Its all so fucking blase on this. Blader's Gate seems to be both the all-powerful base from which to generate all wealth and/or bloodshed while at the same time some weak and ineffectual provincial backwater that can't deal with even the tiniest crisis. Oh, house robbers, it can deal with house robbers in approximately 20 seconds flat, that's what it can cope with. Except if the robbers are anyone but you. You, the guy who's being paid by them to do their work for them...
And does Sarevok's daddy not get in the least bit 'worried' about his 'son'?
His dad's the bald fella in green. The trading executive who's also a wizard (who must have the detect evil spell). At what point would he think it might be wise to send his kid off to 'learn the culture of a foreign land', or, I dunno, get a bit worried that his son's appearance was embarrassing him at meetings? How exactly do the machinations of these two play out? How much are each other really involved in each other's plans?
