I've seen a lot of mention of everything to do with Mol being horrifically bugged and potentially game-breaking, but I haven't seen a case quite like mine.
Here's the sequence of events:
1. I spotted the entrance to the kids' hideout and went in. Mol started counting and I didn't leave in time, so she ran off.
2. On exiting the hideout, I got the guard dialog with the "you've been threatening children" line. I persuaded him to go away.
3. I played the rest of act one, all of the stuff in the Tiefling camp, rescued Halsin, killed the goblin leaders, saved the day, the Tieflings love me. They'll all come to my camp to celebrate!
4. Upon camping, all the Tieflings are there. I talked to a few. Then I got the guard "you've been threatening children" dialog again, like he's been secretly lying in wait this whole time, just waiting for me to let my guard down. This time it only gave me options to intimidate, persuade, or attack.
5. I succeeded the check, but the dialog instantly popped up again. Succeeded a second time, dialog popped up a third time (fourth time total). I failed it that time, and instantly I'm in combat with all 400 Tieflings.
This is a somewhat unintuitive course of events to come from once not obeying the commands of a child in the earliest couple hours of the game. I'm not sure if there's a way to game the system, and frankly it isn't my job to un-break the game. It's a bummer, though. My enthusiasm for starting over is pretty limited. Even in notoriously buggy games from ages ago like Arcanum, or Vampire: Bloodlines, or Daggerfall, I don't remember happening across a bug like this that completely annihilates a whole save file, especially not from something that happened 30 hours ago (or however long it was).
Anyway, am I, in the parlance of our times, cooked?
