Baldur’s Gate 3 – Playthrough 22 – Wings Evolved (mods)

There are some minor spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 in what follows. I think the most significant one relates to playing the Dark Urge. There are lesser spoilers that talk about the circumstances for recruiting additional summoned creatures; if you don’t know who Scratch is, you may want to skip this post.

But they can’t enjoy it if they don’t know who you are!

Goals

If you glance at the page I use to keep track of my playthroughs, you may be puzzled: Why am I writing about playthrough 22 now? What about the others?

Well, there’s the obvious: I’m not obligated to write up every playthrough I do. I want to, but I’m not obligated to.

Maybe it would be best if I let you write my stories, Alfira.

Actually, the issue here is timing:

Playthrough 1/16, the one where I play with Actual Sabrina, is proceeding as she finds time. She’s eager to play, but there’s that pesky thing called “real life” that interferes.

Scylla is Actual Sabrina’s character in our playthrough 1/16.

Playthough 19/10, the Honor Mode run I share with Real Angela, is close to completion. Real Angela also suffers from that “real life” disease. Who would have guessed?

Zvarka is Real Angela’s character in our playthrough 19/10.

For reasons that will become clear eventually, even though I’ve finished my playthrough 20, its write-up will wait until after my playthrough 19/10 write-up.

I started playthrough 21, whose goal is to see the “evil ending” for Shadowheart, the only one I haven’t seen. After that, I’ll finally be able to write a blog post on Evil Endings in BG3.

And so we come to my playthrough 22. The reason for its existence is, as has become common for me, fanfic photography for another playthrough.

As I thought about the fanfic I want to write about my playthrough 15, I realized there was a series of pictures I wanted to take. Those pictures would require the Wings Unlocked mod by chuloco. As the name suggests, this mod gives characters wings and the ability to fly.

On the left is Helia, the protagonist of my playthrough 22. On the right is Shadowheart. The resemblance between Helia and my Tav in playthrough 3 is not a coincidence.

As I was going through the start of my playthrough 21, I learned of the Evolved series of mods. Created by Exaen, each of these mods improve an existing “pet” or adds a new potential companion to the game. Exaen has created 14 such mods so far (they’ve said there’s more to come). One of them, Varrl Evolved is not yet available for consoles; that leaves 13 I might use.

I half-jokingly suggested to Real Angela that she plan a run with all these mods at once. In part, this was a response to her interest in an “all-doggo” run, with the goal of maximizing the number of canines in the party. In BG3 without mods, this would mean a Druid of at least level 2 in Wolf form, a Beast Master Ranger of at least level 3 with a Wolf Companion, a Shadow Magic Sorcerer of at least level 6 with a Hound of Ill Omen, and (of course) Scratch.

“The punch line is that they were all the same person. Also, they made a deal with me, to our mutual benefit.”

She pointed out that a level 2 Druid, level 3 Beast Master, and level 6 Sorcerer would not make a good build. I was unimpressed by this comment. After all, I spent considerable time developing Arctic Druid Angela, a sub-par build, into a character that could “solo” Tactician difficulty. If she really loved her doggos, she’d figure out a way.

I upped the ante. With those Evolved mods, one could add more doggos into the mix. Though hyenas and gnolls are not canines (by evolution they’re closer to cats), from Real Angela’s perspective they’re doggos too. I pointed out that, with Exaen’s mods, one could add some more doggos into the party.

So that you’re not kept in suspense: Here’s the “all-doggo” team. Front left-to-right: Scratch, Squire, Nimbus, Hyena; back left-to-right: ‘Barnabas’, Flind, Lupus Major, Druid Angela in Wolf form. Squire, Hyena, Flind, and ‘Barnabas’ come from Exaen’s mods.

I decided to go for it, in part to try to do something in the game that Real Angela hadn’t done before. Also, since I had to use mods anyway to get those fanfic photos, I might as well go all-in:

Let’s summon the companions from all of Exaen’s Evolved mods at once.

As I played, I discovered that one has to be dedicated to the concept of “companion maximization” to tolerate this. Real Angela doesn’t like large parties because of the management overhead.

Exaen did more with these mods then just simply add more companions to summon. For example, many of them have specific story or character requirements; for example, only Gale can gain Tara as an companion; anyone can get Bernard, but it involves a mini-quest to figure out.

In order to get the Flind companion, one has to be the Dark Urge. Since this meant that I’d have to be the Dark Urge anyway, I decided to pursue an ending that I knew Real Angela would never go after: A Dark Urge surrendering to the darkness, and becoming the spawn of Ascended Astarion.

Again, in for a penny, in for a pound!

As I scanned mod.io for mods for this playthrough, I saw Dark Urge – Slayer Equipments and Spells by Skirbie. I thought “what the heck” and tossed it into the mix. After all, when I choose to use mods, I always include FearTaylor’s Camp Clothes for variety.

This was a mistake, depending on your perspective. I hadn’t done my homework. Skirbie designed this mod for use with intense difficulty levels created by other mods. The outfits weren’t mere costumes, they were gear with extremely powerful abilities. I didn’t notice this.

My baseline goal for this playthrough was photography, with certain mods at a certain location in the game. I wasn’t looking for a deep experience. So I put the game on Balanced difficulty.

I felt that I’d proven my skill (or lack of it) in BG3, with Honor mode under my belt, and completing Tactician “solo” with a sub-par build. Real Angela likes power builds and a challenging combat experience.

Me? I’m here for the story and the fanfic.

The result: With more than 14 companions (some of the Evolved companions have sub-summons), uber-powerful Slayer gear on each character, and the low difficulty level, the game became trivial. The enemies just dissolved.

Yes, Brawler Vez. It was all too easy now.

As I played I pictured that, in the same situation, Real Angela would slam all the custom difficulty sliders to their highest positions and install every extra encounter mod available to balance things out. Not wimpy ol’ Bill. I wanted get in, see the story, take my pictures, write the blog post.

The fact you’re reading this post means I achieved my goals, right? Well, we’ll see…

The ease and purpose of the playthrough is why you’re seeing a playthrough 22 write-up before any for my playthroughs 15, 1/16, 19/10, 20, and 21.

Story

After 22 playthroughs, I still saw things that I’d never seen before.

For example, I never before noticed the deep scars on the left side of Kith’rak Voss’ face, or that half of his left ear was missing.

I continue to be impressed by BG3‘s story designers.

I’ll dance a bit around a possible spoiler:

When you play the Dark Urge, your character is going to get (write this down, this will be on the test) urges that are dark.

Depending on your choices, one of those urges might be to either kill the character of Isobel, or to kill your romantic partner.

Before you wish me luck, you might want to know what my goal is.

For the sake of the playthrough goals, I couldn’t kill Isobel. To get Squire as a companion, Isobel has to stay alive.

However, if you don’t feel like killing the one you love, there’s another option. You can choose to go to your romantic partner, confess to the urge, and ask for help. They’ll respond by tying you up so you can’t hurt them.

In my playthrough 3, the romantic partner of Dark Urge Tav was Karlach. That sequence was so lovely (I referred to it in one of my fanfic pieces) that I recommended it to Real Angela, who experienced it in her playthrough 6.

If you want to read the rest of that sentence, you’ll have to read the rest of that fanfic.

As I noted above, in my playthrough 22 I chose to romance Astarion. However, I’d seen the “Astarion ties up the Dark Urge” sequence before, in playthrough 19/10. I wanted to see something different.

In particular, as will be no secret if you’ve read some of my older BG3 posts, my eye is drawn to Minthara. I refer to her either as the future Ex-Mrs. Seligman or (more likely) the future Widow Seligman. I wanted to see the sequence in which Minthara ties up your Dark Urge character.

I was at a point where Astarion was in an established romance with Helia. Minthara was just about to declare that she wanted a relationship. I made sure I had a save. I also made sure that Helia would be told to slay her partner at the next Long Rest. I was all set for some testing.

I confirmed that if I did a Long Rest, Helia would be told to slay Astarion, as I predicted.

I restored from the save, and had Helia confirm with Minthara that the two were now in a relationship. I started the Long Rest…

… and Helia was told to kill Astarion.

I realized that I never formally broke up with Astarion. I restored from the save again, had Helia forge a relationship with Minthara again, and this time had Helia have the “break-up” talk with Astarion. His feelings were hurt, of course.

Then I did a Long Rest, and saw that Helia was told to kill… Lae’zel. Huh?

First, I went through the entire cutscene to see what it was like to have the “tied up” cutscene with Lae’zel. Then I restored the save again.

I checked the dialogs with Astarion and Lae’zel, and realized that the game thought Helia was still dating both of them. So I had Helia have the break-up talk with both Astarion and Lae’zel, and forged the relationship with Minthara yet again. I started the next Long Rest…

… and Helia was told to slay Gale.

The language of this scene was slightly different. Instead of being told to kill a partner, Helia was told to kill her best friend.

I went through the “tied up” scene with Gale, to see what it was like. I’d rate it only slightly less than the one with Karlach, not that any of the scenes were bad.

I restored from the save again and took a look at the detailed approval ratings of all the characters. Minthara’s approval rating of Helia was 48, Astarion’s approval rating was 62, Lae’zel’s was 75, and Gale’s was 100. Everyone else in the party had approval ratings lower than that.

Helia was never in a relationship with Gale. But as I implied on one of my fanfic pieces, it’s very easy to get a high approval rating with Gale, even if you never initiate a romance with him.

What was going on? I can think of a couple of possibilities, both of which may be true.

Real Angela once suggested to me that there was no “tie up” scene with Minthara. She based this on looking at YouTube compilation videos of all the “tie up” scenes. There wasn’t a Minthara one.

The game’s logic for choosing which character the Dark Urge is told to kill may be more complex than I thought. In my repeated attempts, first the game picked Astarion because Helia had engaged in more significant relationship dialogs with him. Then the game picked Lae’zel due to her unresolved relationship status. Finally the game picked Gale because of his maximal approval of Helia compared to anyone else in the camp.

In my mind, the only way to resolve this is to have a Dark Urge playthrough in the future in which Minthara has the highest approval rating of anyone in the camp. Or perhaps in which she’s the only remaining member of the party.

Hmm. Tricky. But doable. Real Angela did something like this in her playthrough 8.

After all that, I restored the game from the save and proceeeded on the path that led to a completed relationship with an Ascended Astarion.

A bit of neck nibbling can be very pleasant.

Wings

The main purpose behind including the Wings Unlocked mod by chuloco was for me to get pictures of characters with wings. It had the secondary effect that all the characters could fly from the start of the game. This is a large part why the combats became trivial.

It turned out that the mod had entertainment value beyond just slapping wings on characters. For one thing, there are different kinds of wings you can give a playable character:

Cambion
Decayed
Deva
Eagle
Fallen

You can have fun deciding which kind of wings is appropriate for a given character.

Cambion wings seemed appropriate for Helia. I originally planned for her to be a Succubus Dark Urge, like my Tav in playthrough 3, before the other mods made build choice irrelevant.

I gave Lae’zel Deva wings. Eagle wings might sound better, but…

…these are the Eagle wings. I think the white ones looked better for Lae’zel.

Astarion gets Fallen wings, because why not?

I tried the Decayed Wings on Astarion. I just don’t like how they look.

The mod’s author, chuloco, did a good job with modifying the character models. The wings themselves don’t just hang motionless on the back of the characters. They flex, shift, react to character movement, unfurl when flying, and otherwise look convincing. You can see an example of this in the video clip I have below in the “Evolved” section.

The mod is a bit tricky to use with a controller, so I’ll include a few tips.

The way to get the item that gives a character wings is to obtain a Ring of Spawning Wings. This can be found in your inventory if you start the game with this mod. Otherwise you’ll find it in your camp chest.

When you put on the ring, in its tooltip you’ll see the icon for the articles of clothing it can create: underwear, cape, or clothing shoes.

The “Hidden” versions mean that the wings aren’t visible during dialogs.

I didn’t choose the Hidden versions. As a result, some of my cutscenes were partially or entirely obscured by Helia’s wings.

However, the clothing icons you see in the above tooltip picture don’t show in the action wheel when you put on the Ring of Spawning Wings.

All you see in the wheel are question-mark icons. My guess (and I’ve been wrong lots of times) is that chuluco didn’t test their mod using the controller interface.

Once you’ve selected one of the icons in the previous photo, which determines the article of clothing you’ll get, the next wheel lets you choose the type of wings. You still see the question-mark icons, but the icons’ text makes the wing type clear.

When you select one of the above icons, the character will auto-equip the item you’ve chosen. There’s a subtlety here: The item of clothing itself is invisible, but to see the wings the item has to be “potentially” visible.

Here’s an example. Astarion is wearing the Shoes of Fallen Wings, which means that to see the wings you have to set his display to show his camp clothing. That’s why he’s barefoot, because he’s wearing invisible shoes. The camp clothing outfit he’s wearing comes with Dark Urge – Slayer Equipments and Spells. (If you’re asking how his STR became 30, I told you that this mod was overpowered!)

Why not just wear the Wings underwear, which is “visible” (potentially) in either camp clothing or regular armor? Well, if you are seduced by the Temptation of Bhaal, you’ll want to wear the underwear that comes with the Dark Slayer Equipment mod instead.

Another subtle issue with wearing the Wings underwear is that it makes your underwear invisible. Normally this isn’t a big deal, but if there’s a sequence in which a character would show up in their underwear, they’re rendered nude instead. This may interfere if you’re someone like me who takes lots of screenshots for his blog that he tries to keep at the PG-13 level.

This is an example of how the Wings clothing choice can affect a cutscene. All four characters are being shown in their camp clothing. However, both Lae’zel and Minthara get their wings from a cape, and capes are only visible in regular armor. That’s why you can’t see their wings in this screenshot. (Lae’zel is wearing the camp clothing she gets by default at the start of the game, while Minthara is wearing another Dark Slayer clothing outfit.)

The Wings mod has a subtle story benefit. Real Angela likes her characters to have Flying, but to get that through the normal course of the game, you have to make a potentially-unpleasant choice that affects your character’s appearance. She typically uses a mod that keeps your appearance unchanged. If you use the Wings mod instead, you get Flying without having to make that choice.

If it seems like I’m being critical of Wings Unlocked, that’s not my intent. The interface issues are easy to work around, and only take a few minutes to figure out. The fun of seeing the wings flap and flex lasts the entire game.

Evolved

As you’ll see from the pictures below, I yielded to temptation and summoned every possible Evolved creature at once, at least for Acts 1 and 2 of the game. Having done that, I hope you’ll listen to this advice: Do as I say, not as I did. Stick to just one or two of these companions in your party.

If you want to play with the Evolved mods, I do suggest that you install all of them if you can. But it’s not to add to your active party. It’s to turn your camp site into a dynamic place. Recruiting an Evolved companion adds them to your camp, whether or not you actually summon them. I made a video of Helia walking through a camp to give you some idea.

One of Exaen’s achievements with these series of mods is coming up with camp behaviors for all the summons; e.g., Tusk will lie down and go to sleep; Us will turn into an actual kitty; Pooldripp will kneel in adoration before people. In the video, note that both Arabella and Thaniel react to the presence of pet-sized animals such as Quothe and Us (in kitty form); Yenna does the same thing in Act 3. At times you may want to just hang around the camp and watch your menagerie move about.

Worried about a dirty camp? Flind will take care of it!

Exaen crafted a set of abilities for each companion. These abilities expand as your character goes up in level; that’s the “Evolved” part of their mod’s name. The amount of direct damage any companion does is low, so don’t expect them to hit as hard as your character can. But their support abilities can be quite handy.

I advise you to think about your party’s composition, then pick a companion whose abilities complement your combat strategy.

Of course, you’re free to ignore me. You’ll probably find what I did: Outside of combat, you might have 16 companions summoned by your character or summoned by your summons, and one unique companion assigned to three more specific characters (Boo = Minsc, Tara = Gale, Varrl = Lae’zel). Just traveling down the street might take a while. Your combats may take such a long time that it would even test Druid Angela’s patience.

For some of the following photos, I fired up Jarvis to take pictures of companions not visible on my PS5.

So you don’t have to do it to see it, this is what it almost looks like to max out on the Evolved companions. For the sake of accuracy, I’ll point out that Helia has summoned Nimbus, and Minsc has summoned Lupus Major; those summons are not part of the Evolved mod suite. Helia is missing one potential Evolved companion, Sazza; I’ll get into that below. Also not shown are the Dire Ravens summoned by Quothe.

In the following, I only briefly describe the abilities of the minions you can summon; see the linked descriptions for details. I believe all of them are compatible with mods that allow you to level your character up to 20.

Bernard

It takes a small quest to unlock Bernard. It’s not hard, and I enjoyed it.

As one might expect, most of Bernard’s abilities are related to electricity.

One of Bernard’s abilities is to summon a Guardian Turret in combat. You had to dodge them to get to the Arcane Tower; now it’s your enemies’ turn.

Even in your camp, he’ll recite poetry if you ask.

Boo

If you’ve played BG3 all the way through, then you should know how to recruit Boo. If you don’t then you’ve denied yourself his faultless judgement.

Behold Boo, the miniature giant space hamster. There is no need to tremble in fear, unless you are an evil-doer. If you are, he’ll go for the eyes.

Boo is a Way of the Four Elements Monk, which befits his wise council.

Flind

In many respects, Flind is the most interesting of the Evolved companions. You can only recruit him if your character is the Dark Urge. With Flind by your side you can recruit up to four more “sub-companions”: the Hyena, ‘Barnabas’, ‘Timothy’, and ‘Tomelia’.

Those last three form the “Gnoll Pack.” Once they’re recruited, Flind can summon one of them at a time. They all have their own set of skills. ‘Barnabas’ is unique in that he’s got a summons of his own, namely the Hyena.

It’s a summoning chain. Flind (center) summons ‘Barnabas’ (left) who summons the Hyena (right).

I’m emphasizing the Hyena because Real Angela cares for him. She’s felt this way since I introduced her to the Hyena in her first playthrough, 1/14.

Flind himself has several nice support skills. He has special weapon strikes that don’t do much damage, but can inflict paralysis or madness. As he levels up, he can also restore other characters’ spell slots and project an aura to improve Saving Throws.

Of course, he can Rage. Madness surges through him. His Rages can take a few turns to ramp up. In my playthrough 22, since few combats lasted more than two turns, I didn’t see his Rage’s full effects.

The Flind Evolved mod has at least one significant flaw: On consoles, Flind can lose the ability to summon the Gnoll Pack when entering Act 3. I’m not the only one who’s observed this. Most photos of ‘Barnabas’ and the Hyena that you see in this blog were taken on Jarvis, my Windows machine.

There’s an exception. If one of your regular party members *ahem* is permanently removed from play, then one of the Gnoll Pack will take their spot. Here we see ‘Barnabas’ making sure his newly-acquired area is clean, even though he must know I’m on my PS5.

Owlbear Cub

The Owlbear Cub becomes available as a summons through the existing process of recruiting the cub to your camp site.

The Owlbear Cub is another example of an Evolved summons that doesn’t do much direct damage, but more than earns its keep through other abilities. In Bite’s case, I found that her Crushing Flight was just as likely to knock an enemy Prone as a Druid in Owlbear form.

In preparing this blog post, I noticed that she also has other nice utility abilities. Plus, although you smell good, she will not bite you.

Pooldripp

All you have to do to recruit Pooldripp is to become Mahkloompah. If you don’t know what means, then you’ll have to figure it out on your own. (It’s not obvious.)

Pooldripp has his own spellcasting mechanic, based on Belief Points.

As you saw in the above video, Pooldripp can give you a nice blessing at least once a day.

Out of combat, Pooldripp can summon an Armored Crab. The crab moves on their own; the player has no control over them.

In combat, Pooldripp can summon a Sahuagin. I managed to get a picture:

Quothe

You can recruit Quothe the Raven by fulfilling the same quest that, in a vanilla game, would award the Raven Gloves; you get the ability to summon Quothe instead.

Quothe is more than just the Dire Raven Beast Master Ranger companion. I didn’t explore this much, but he’s got a number of Shadow abilities which roughly match those of a Death Domain Cleric.

If you miss Dire Ravens, Quothe can summon two. However, you don’t have control over them.

Sazza

In my playthough 22, I missed recruiting Sazza.

I don’t know what happened. I saved Sazza’s life twice in Act 1, but she didn’t appear as I expected in Act 2. Maybe it was something I overlooked, or it was just a game glitch. Oh, well. That’s why we do repeated playthroughs.

Scratch

Scratch is easy to find and recruit.

What’s happening? What have you done with Scratch?

I’ve been messing with you. Among other improvements, the Scratch Evolved mod lets you select between several breeds for Scratch.

Here’s Scratch! And he’s got his brand-new saddle bags.

Among Scratch’s abilities is that he’s a Bard. His wet kisses, which he can use to Help people even in the unmodified game, can be used to give people inspiration.

Scratch also has an “Adrenaline Point” mechanism that behaves similarly to the Warrior Rage mechanic in World of Warcraft: he gains points by attacking in combat, and can spend them to do things like summon more hounds. I didn’t have a chance to test this in my playthrough 22, since my combats were so short.

Even an Evolved Scratch loves to be petted.

Shovel

You know her. You love her. She eats your babies. It’s Shovel (or Basket, or Fork).

I renamed her to Basket for my playthrough 22.

A very nice thing about Exaen’s Shovel Evolved mod is that it takes the guesswork out of recruiting her. You don’t have to respec into a Wizard and be careful with your dialog choices to recruit her, as you do in an unmodified game.

One of her many new skills as she levels up is the ability to summon Phantasmal Spiderlings for 10 turns.

I didn’t make much use of this in playthrough 22, but the Evolved Shovel can shapeshift into different forms, similar to a Druid’s Wild Shape ability. She does this on her own while in camp, depending on who she’s closest to, in order to be petted by some party members.

Squire

As I mentioned above, you can only recruit Squire if you “tame” her when you first encounter her, and if Isobel survives until after the big Act 2 battle.

Squire has a number of Necromantic abilities, more than just the ones you see here.

If you spend time talking with her when you first meet her, you’ll learn that her tale involves both loyalty and tragedy.

You absolutely should pet the necrodoggy.

Tara the Tressym

Tara is Gale’s friend, familiar, and conscience.

Tara doesn’t need to be recruited separately. She shows up when the player recruits Gale.

Tara’s skills are those of an Abjuration Wizard. She can cast Mage Armor, so she can charge up her Arcane Ward and wander past enemies in combat, causing them to hurt themselves.

Tara’s skill wheel when she gets to level 12. With spells like these, who needs Gale?

Well, we need Gale to pet Tara, since he’s the only one with that privilege.

Tusk

You can meet and recruit Tusk relatively early in Act 1.

He automatically picks up some armor as you gain levels.

I only just read Tusk’s full description as I prepared this blog post. Tusk gains abilities if you feed him a Soul Coin, and even more if he’s summoned by Halsin. I was going to disparage his combat abilities, but now I know that I didn’t use him to his full advantage.

Us

You recruit Us in the usual way, but afterwards it levels up with you.

… and this is how it looks to everyone else. You can transform Us to this shape if you choose. It will also shift into kitty shape while in camp.

Again, I didn’t know this until I review the mod’s description for this blog post: Evolved Us can use the Astral-Touched Tadpole to gain new abilities.

Varrl

Youth Varrl is the newest of the Evolved mods as of this writing. The mod is not yet available for Macs and consoles. To get the photos of him for this blog post, I had to use Jarvis.

Essentially Varrl is a Four Elements Monk.

Varrl is an interesting guy to have around. Treat him right, and he’ll sing you the Orpheus song.

Outcome

The overall outcome for my playthrough 22: failure. The reason? The game crashed due to mods.

I had two major end-game goals:

For the playthrough in which Helia fully immersed herself into her Daddy issues, I wanted to see how much power Ascended Astarion could exert in the outcome. Would he be helpless, or would he have authority since she was his spawn?

Astarion seemed to think that he would retain veto power.

If Helia decided that she could be a disobedient girl and not listen to her Daddy, then I wanted to see how the camp looked at the very end of the game. In the descriptions of the Evolved mods, Exaen stated that many of the companions would be present.

I saw neither outcome. As I embarked on the journey towards the end-game, the game crashed. I reloaded from a save and tried several variations: party composition, gear, whether or not companions were summoned, whether or not Daddy was involved. I even tried using that same save on my Mac and on Jarvis in addition to my PS5.

The result was always the same. Start the trip, crash, burn, send a bug report to Larian. I had a Windows, Mac, and console bug trifecta!

“The weather started getting rough. The tiny ship was…” PROGRAM ERROR!

To be sure, the game was showing signs of glitches before this. They were annoying but not game-ending: quests that couldn’t be completed because character and event interactions didn’t work as expected.

This final bug was inescapable. It could not be worked around. It was a situation similar to Real Angela’s playthrough 9.

Once a mod is activated for a given playthrough, I couldn’t de-activate it, at least not on a PS5. I couldn’t test which mod(s) were causing the crash.

This has reinforced my negative attitude towards mods.

Perhaps in the fullness of time I’ll start a playthrough in which the Evolved mods will be the only ones I use. In a different playthrough, perhaps one without mods, I’ll repeat the Dark Urge/Ascended Astarion experience.

I haven’t entirely given up on mods in future playthroughs. However, I’ll try to limit the number of mods in a given playthrough so that their potential interactions are less likely to cause problems. Certainly I won’t use the Dark Slayer Equipment mod again, for example, and I have little reason to return to the Wings Unlocked mod.

Fanfic?

There will be no playthrough 22 fanfic, at least not by me. I created it as a “quickie” playthrough to get pictures for other fanfic.

Besides, nothing has occurred to me that would make an interesting story. My disappointment in an unfinished playthrough exacerbates this.