Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General For Dove's Wings - BG Fan Comic

Just a little thing I made (mostly in DazStudio like most the fanart I've done) in the last couple of weeks because I needed to chill for a bit. It might serve as the prequel to a mod or campaign some time in the future, or I might just keep it going with various episodes in which characters from across the whole series may show up. (There are lot of images so I'll use spoiler tags).




On a technical note, although I have versions of the characters I'd made, I decided to redesign them for the newest Daz3D figure (Genesis 9). If you're as eagle-eyed as Aerie you might notice small changes to her model throughout the images that follow this. Nothing huge; I change her eyebrow color and forehead to better fit her hair, and decided I thought her legs were too long and thin. Although it might just be the angle, or the fact her pants her very tight to avoid poking through her clothes - they get loosened a tiny bit later - or the weird way the front of her tunic floats (it's converted from an older figure so its a bit rough in places).

The fight is on!

Down, but Minsc's witch has plenty of tricks up her sleeve (also, tiny bit of blood splatter in what follows. Nothing much that you see):

The fight over, she sets about freeing the slaves (there is an F-Bomb in the next bit. I write the dialogue by PG-13 rules, so there won't another one for a long, long time).

The young Halfling is in shock, Aerie reliving some of her own experiences, but has to assure her that there is hope.

Leaving the slavers behind, Aerie and Fina camp out in the swamp.

Aerie's morals won't allow her to simply say no to someone asking her for help, even if she thinks what they're asking for isn't really in their best interest.

She consults a friend about what to do.

And the next day they set off.


That's all for now folks. They'll be more, like, when its done. It's something I'll likely keep doing in my spare time, as I've lots and lots of ideas ranging from comedy to drama to real Lovecraftian horror, which I might turn into individual episodes. And as I mentioned, characters from across the series might show up now and then.

Is the "twitching her nose" an Easter Egg from a sitcom from the 1970s?

I would call it a reference rather than Easter Egg. As is the fact that she always favors using her left hand (although of course she'll have been taught to fight with weapon in right and shield in left).

OK - a reference it is then.

English is not my first language.
BTW - I'm slow on the uptake - I needed a second pass to understand that this is about the ex-winged elf that Minsc adopted in BG2.

That's okay. I don't know if there's an agreed difference between, but I think an Easter Egg is usually something that's hidden. Like in a video game, you have to perform a specific action in order to see it.

Got a little more done. The title for the upcoming episode is 'Doomed'.

Aerie and Fina find themselves outside what appears to be a Dwarven settlement. But it's strangely quiet.

Loved the curse
Serve her right for badgering Aerie for the trinket

Aerie spent a lot of time hanging around Imoen. Whether she was a good influence or not...

Although I think her choice of deity suggests Aerie always had a playful and mischievous side to her, so maybe she's just grown far less self-conscious over the years.

What surprises await our heroes?

Xan? Is that one of the irritating edgelords from BG1?
I see that Minsc has rubbed off onto our Dainty Heroine - meet resistance? Beat with stick! If no yield - use BIGGER and MAGIC stick!

Xan is one of my favourite companions from BG1. He’s so glum, it never fails to make me laugh.

Xan is the depressive wizard, you save in the mines of Nashkell. Love him.

He always made me think of Marvin the Paranoid Android. Maybe crossed with a little bit of original Doctor Smith from Lost in Space.

I had a feeling that it prolly was the Elf Wizard with a Magical Sword only he can (mis)use

So why has Xan travelled such a long way to what seems a minor Dwarven settlement? (I never specified before, but they're somewhere between Luskan and Neverwinter).

"Courtesan?!?" - "A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do" :P
"Gnome lover" - best insult evah
"I'm so glad we came here" - best line
"... we're all doomed" - vintage Xan

Tav : Never thought I'd ever walk in on a bugbear and an ogre.
Astarion : Oh I've seen worse. Gnomes can be... ugh

Excellent catch! I did not notice the referrence to our Mister Discerning Male Gaze incarnate! I simly thought that to an elf a gnome would be like totally eww ...
Chapeaux bas to your keen eye and to the authoress for her writing skill!

Well, been a little while. Honestly my PC is not really up to these Iray renders, but I'll be upgrading it soon. Also, I was hacked a while ago! Or rather, the password for my email got leaked from my provider, so someone was able to get in and use it to reset passwords and change details for various other accounts. Including Sony, even though I thought I had 2FA on it, but apparently they were able to just turn it off? Even so, everything affected was very good and I got it all back pretty quick (Epic games were the slowest to respond, but came through in the end).

Anyway, Aerie is a character we only really ever saw taking her first steps in the world, and is hugely important to Minsc and Boo. So with Larian's final patch I will shortly start seriously looking into bringing her to BG3 and finally reuniting them.

Just a few more images to finish this scene before Easter, and to test out my new graphics card.

For those interested in the sexy tech stuff; I was running on an 8GB RTX 2070, but it was really struggling with these underground and low light scenes in DazStudio. The pictures would come out very grainy, and I would try using denoisers but of course then they come out blurry or losing some details. Now I've upgraded to a 16GB RTX 5070 Ti - it's that extra VRAM that really matters a lot in Studio. Now I'm not getting the best performance I can out of it since my CPU and Motherboard are still a few years old, but already renders are a lot faster. Still a tiny bit of grain after rendering for a similar amount of time to I was before, but nowhere near as bad.

(Basically, I wanted to get rid of Aerie's cloak for the time being. I think it looks good, but it's annoying to work with, especially since there will be some action bits coming up.)

If can't beat Arun at fisticuffs, slit his throat in his sleep, then.
:P

I'm sure if Shadowheart were there her advice would be along those lines, but I don't think Aerie would go quite that far :P

But rest assured she isn't planning on just taking it until she finally snaps either (like she might have done back in the BG2 days).

Just a little bonus extra. I would obviously like to create a new campaign or mod to finally reunite Minsc & Boo with Aerie, since it would be nice to deliver something that's been waited 20+ years for. One of the big problems that wasn't really an issue with BG 1+2, is voices. So I did do an experiment in generating them:



Yeah, it will just never be as good as real actors. Why does it say 'now and then' like that? I have no idea. It's like it kind of rubberbanded there, stretching out then snapping back. Definitely need another take for that line at least. But with my budget of $0, and likely to be a sporadic timetable, generation like this is probably what I would have to use at least to start with. But at some point I would want to replace it with a real voice.

And here is like the script for the mods first encounter, maybe:



Obviously the thing about modding is you can write whatever you want. You can write 'a horde of ten thousand demons storm the city and everyone poops bricks!' But when you have to actually implement that, you might find that the game engine just cannae handle it. You can maybe have one demon. And it has to be invisible.

Anyway, obviously I'll get back to the comic soon, but right now I'm slowly learning my away around the toolkits and other stuff. I'll post elsewhere when I have something to show in that regard.

Anyone, I'm pretty much convinced that 'AI' - which is badly named because that's not really what it is - is not the future. And so, onwards:

The continuum continuums:

I recently shared the comic so far on Ao3 as well:

Not All Who Wander (I've yet to come up with a proper title, so we'll just go with this for now; it kind of works).

I'll probably wait until there's about 30-40 images before sharing them there, so you'll see them here and a couple other odd places first.

Only other note is that indeed I forgot to check to see whether the students in The Brothel for Slaking Intellectual Lusts (from Planescape: Torment) were referred to as courtesans or prostitutes. Now I think it might have been the later. But yes, if you haven't figured it out, although her relationship with Haer'Dalis didn't actually last long, meeting him and his troupe nevertheless sparked Aerie's curiosity and at some point she visited Sigil, got stuck there a while, and became a Sensate. I'm sure she'll let slip the odd mention of some of the many other adventures she's had in the last century as we go on.

You know I would like to do more fanart of other characters in the series, but these days whenever I ask for ideas most of what I get back is 'um... you could show Shadowheart's feet?' Which... sure. I could. But it's not an idea. I was asking for a freaking scenario you flipping flipper...

Here you go though:



I guess someone out there is getting something out of that.

STAND BY FOR ACTION!




The way I see it, Faraine is basically the captain of Xan's personal guard, since he's a somewhat important person these days. Although Arun and the other elves are warriors chosen by other Greycloaks for this mission.

I guess technically there are some bare feet visible in this part, so enjoy that.

I made a small edit - in the shot were Arun is kicking I hadn’t noticed that his pants had split slightly 🫢 Not a huge amount, but I covered it up. If you're seeing the split it's because of your browser's cache.

The battle continues. First redshirt goes down.

Obviously I continue working on and off on a mod for BG3. Less so right now since it is very, very, hot in here, and having my PC on doing renders - it doesn't help. But I will likely wait until the fan toolkits are officially released for patch 8 before really diving in to it. Reuniting Minsc with Aerie is obviously something that's actually been waited over 20 years for, and right now there are in fact several drafts and many, many ideas. I would probably in fact leave any quizzing about her past until she's in camp, but I do think she will need a bad ass entrance or at least something that makes it clear this isn't the same fretful kid from the start of BG2. Obviously it is a bit of a different challenge to writing Minsc or Jaheira; Aerie in BG2 is a very young character (for an elf at any rate), kind of literally taking her first steps into the world with lots of growth still left after Throne of Bhaal. So it's about taking her core traits - curiosity, compassion, courage - thinking about the ways she's been influenced by her friends and companions and filling in a hundred years of history. Then probably adding some extra trauma on top of everything else because as a writer I love torturing my favorite characters.

(As for AI voices and the like; I played with it for a few minutes and had about as much as I ever could with it. Even if it sounded decent, you still want real actors. Think about some of the most often quoted scenes and lines in movies and how much of it is really just down to the choices the actor made. So I doubt I will bother with any of that. As a Sci-Fi fan it just makes me sad that the name 'AI' has been co-opted to market a pretty crappy technology).

Well, almost as soon as I said that it was released. Guess next chance I get I have to start getting down to bringing one of the most popular and memorable characters in the franchise to BG3 as she really always should have been. No pressure at all. I already have a rough head mesh for Aerie. Need some custom hair (since I don't like how any of the default long hairstyles look), maybe some feather earrings would be cute, and some custom clothes. And then I just need a tiger.

My idea of what I think has happened to her since BG2 is essentially a combination of all her epilogues from Throne of Bhaal. She carried on travelling with Minsc for a while, kicking the butts of slavers and other evil, but at some point Aerie realized that her dajemma was over; she no longer needed Minsc looking after her and couldn't give him the purpose she once did. Believing he wanted to return to Rashemen while she had her own journey to undertake, they parted, Aerie telling Minsc he should help other young heroes find their feet and she would see him again one day. But of course she never heard from him again. She found her birthplace of Faenya-Dail, but also found that she was as much an alien and outsider to the Avariel as she was everywhere else, and their isolationist ways just didn't agree with her. She left and briefly settled in the Gnomish village of Understone (but if you pay attention to what she says when she's not sad and what her deities are about, Aerie staying settled never felt very likely to me). She soon grew restless and left there too, embracing the teachings of her gods and becoming a perpetual wanderer and vagabond whose journeys have now taken her all over Toril and beyond.