If you are a paladin or have Keldorn in your group, should you join Bodhi's guild?

You CAN join her. You're rescuing Imoen.

It is all up to you who you will choose.

vampires or evil thieves, plague or cholera, it doesn't really matter

The goal softens the means

Spoiler: Bodhi does allow you to take a more or less nice road out of Atkathla. But helping Vamps is definately NOT good. Thieves are not always evil, just not Lawfull. Vamps are Always Evil. So the risk of killing evil is 100% if you join the Shadow thieves?

I still think you'd have to be a moron to join Bodhi's guild, since it's painfully obvious the vampires are in league with Irenicus and are going to betray you to them.

Of course, it works out okay in the end, so I guess it's not the most disastrous bout of stupidity one could have.

Or you could look at it from the perspective you know full well that the vamps are in league with Jon and you are keeping a close eye on them and fooling them at the same time, plus you'd hate to join the pansy thieves ;). Well that's one outlook on it :D

I want to give kudos and props to all those of you who, when you first played it through, thought it was "so painfully obvious" that Bodhi was in league with Irenicus BEFORE you actually allied yourself with her.

Neither I nor my game playing friends remember it that way at all... We, collectively, remember discussing which side to side with because we felt that the decision was being made with insufficient information - the first time through.

Obviusly, as soon as you have reached a certain point in Spellhold, you know exactly which side a "good" party should have picked... However, do you remember absolutely KNOWING that that was the way to go the first time you played?

None of my friends or I do... As I said, kudos and props to those of you who can honestly say they figured it out decisively beforehand.

Well I'd day the vampire and the shadow thieves fighting in Jon's dungeon in chapter 1 was the first clue something was amiss. Second, you're walking through Athkatla at night and you can't help but notice that there's a guild war between the vamps and thieves, considering you take two steps at night and they appear ;) Then you remember the Shadow thieves were attacking Jon in chapter 1. Hmmmmmmmmm. What have we got here>>>> a vampire in Jon's dungeon fighting thieves, who are attacking Jon's dungeon, who are in a guild war with the vampires....If they were in a guild war with the vampires why would they be wasting their time with a major assualt on Jon's hidden dungeon if he wasn't connected to the root of their problem>>>the guild war with the vampires. It makes good sense and is obvious if you sit back and think about it.

OK but then again, maybe to Duharrel it doesn't make good sense ;)

[This message has been edited by Big B (edited September 10, 2001).]

When you are a Paladin, (of course Good alignemt) I shouldn't join a Vampire-Thief guild. You'd better choose for the Shadow Thiefs, for in the end you don't have to kill Aran Lindvall but you DO have to kill Bodhi.

I for one, never even thought of joining the vampire guild. I mean vampire = undead, evil to the core bad guys(girls), thieves = not lawful but not altogether bad people (look at Imoen before she dual classed) And iirc, using detect evil, Aran is not evil.

In defense of my friends, not myself, I only wish to offer the following...

If you remember the televison sci-fi series now in syndication, Dark Shadows, not all vampires are evil per se. Just because two groups are fighting does not mean either one is necessarily evil. Thievery, by the values most people we know were raised with IS evil. If you accept all of the above, then you might begin to see how non-obvious which side to choose was for us.

OTOH, if you accept that stealing IS an honorable profession, then siding with them might be the "good" choice. If you are unable to step outside your personal viewpoint and see that any creature on the face of the Earth, real or fictional, acts only in accordance with its true nature, then again you may only be able to see vampires as necessarily evil.

In the real world, Stalin was viewed as a "necessary evil" as an ally against a greater evil in Hitler. If I remember correctly, Americans fought a war to be free from Britain's control in one century and then allied itself with Britain for two wars in another century. Nothing remains fixed it seems; alliances can change in the real world.

(sarcasm mode on) But, I am sure everyone thought out this decision as thoroughly as all that. I know I did (sarcasm mode off now).

Lastly, Duharrel awoke in the dungeon with NO memory at all of how he got there, didn't remember anyone and went on from there - a scripted option that I have chosen to roleplay as much as possible. Quite different from how I initially played the game with no foreknowledge of things to come.

Hindsight can be (but isn't necessarily) a wonderous thing.

Thieves are raised evil????, huh. I have plenty of good aligned thieves to pull out of my magic-hat.

Anyway someone who bothers about evil and good could just cast a detect evil. simple, easy.

What Big B says, Kailynne.

You come out of Chapter One with the following information: 1) there are two guilds fighting, the Shadow Thieves and a secret guild made up of people who only come out at night and all look exactly like the vampire you saw in Jon's dungeon. Hmm. 2) The Shadow Thieves invaded Jon's dungeon and attacked him, claiming two or three times that he was in league with their enemy guild. 3) There was a vampire in Jon's dungeon who was in league with him.

Putting these three together, it would be pretty hard not to reach the conclusion that the secret guild is made up of vampires who are aligned with Irenicus.

It's just my years of tabletop playing showing through, here. You don't ignore clues like that. (-:

[edit]

I'm talking about what the -player- should be able to figure out, of course, not the character. If you have a character with a three intelligence, then he or she might well not be able to tell something's amiss even if you can. But playing through this the very first time, the alliance between Bodhi's guild and Irenicus against the Shadow Thieves was pretty much the only thing that was totally obvious to me from the get-go.

[This message has been edited by tjekanefir (edited September 10, 2001).]

I guess the key here is that I DID NOT notice the vampire in the initial dungeon. Maybe I am/was blind... I would still argue that vampirism, per se, is not necessarily an indication of evil - per se.

OTOH... maybe I and my friends all have "CRPG" Intelligence stats of 3 (well, maybe 6 - I mean, we all did finish the game eventually without looking at any walkthroughs or hint books).

But.... that's just one man's opinion.

Well at least Vampires are lawful.

Actually, all vampires including Bodhi are Chaotic Evil.

I might have missed a lawful one, but I don't think so.

Odd that you would think vampires aren't necessarily evil, but thieves are. (-:

I don't think all of -anything- are necessarily evil; but Bodhi's cadre certainly are. One little first-level spell can ascertain that for ya. *wink*

L

PS I wasn't trying to diss your brainpower there with the "3 intelligence" thing--just to point out that it's possible to intentionally role-play somebody who can't figure out clues. (-:

*SPOILER*


As a paladin, it would ultimately be better for you to side with the vampires, because - by my interpretation - Paladins would ultimately want to destroy both the vampires and the thieves, which is something you only get to do with the vampires. Vampires are unnatural. Thieves are poor. Paladins hate unnatural things. Paladins hate poor people.

Paladins aren't omniscient, though, so they probably wouldn't be aware in advance that they were going to get the opportunity to slaughter more people if they went the vamp route. (-:

Hey! Sociopathic killers have a good rationale there, too... kill more people... (-:

Throw him a bone, guys. Creatures that live to feed of human blood, leaving them dead behind, can be nice people. right? Think about Lawyers ;)

Anyway I still say cast "detect evil" and its all settled.

Vampires evil? That's like saying all dow elves are evil. The vampires in the graveyard happen to be evil.

Arent all drows evil by the way. Except Do'urden. Drows are just more Lawfull than vamps.

[This message has been edited by Nobleman (edited September 11, 2001).]

Okay.. okay. I give.

I also admit NEVER having used Detect Evil or Know Alignment in any game by any character!

Those have to be two of the most useless spells I can think of in that I have completed every game I started without ever having used/needed them.

Just my opinion... No offense intended or taken by anything said previously.

Play a paladin sometime. Then you'll see the worth of those spells. (-:

For the most part, no, they're not the best spells in the stack. They're very useful for settling arguments like "Is so-and-so evil," though. *grin*

In general I do agree with the individualists here. Sure, there can be a good vampire, a good drow, and a good orc. Why not? There are evil elves, right?

But it's not too hard to learn that Bodhi is not one such woman, any more than Phaere is. (-:

Yep, detect evil is a useful spell/ability. Ever since first game of BG1 (how many years ago...2?)that I was a paladin, I found good uses for that ability.

This spell s a very good way to spy on enemies on a specific map, it is more than likely that the big baddies WILL be evil and thus shown in the message box.

just out of interest... did anyone NOT realise that bodhi and her lot were vampires? i always thought that it was funny the way the game hinted at it, ie; "hmm a large swimming pool of blood, how strange."

Ever since I saw my first vampire (Ulvalyl), I had already known how they looked at what they could do. The hint on "I am already dead, thief" and the messages on level drain got me to the conclusion that she's a vampire at once...(Yup, I've been through games where you wouldn't know a vampire from a dancing banana mascot)

But back to the other topic, In a game where elves can fly, humans can cast magic, thousands of dimensions exist and where arcane lore is infinite... yes, some vampires are good. You could say they had their hunger for blood healed somewhere, but couldn't get the vampirism reversed.