Temple of Elemental Evil

Well, despite what I said in my Fallout 3 review, I haven't been able to resist the lure of Temple of Elemental Evil and as such, Hitman: Blood Money continues to sit on my shelf waiting for its chance to shine. The thing is, although I enjoyed playing Fallout 3, I've always preferred party based RPGs where you have different PCs taking on different roles. Add in the fact that I've recently been re-listening to the D&D podcasts created by Penny Arcade, PvP and Wil Wheaton and you can probably understand why I've been itching to get back to a very traditional swords and sorcery style RPG.

However, by far the biggest draw for me is that Temple of Elemental Evil features a party going into combat using turn based initiative mechanics. I honestly cannot remember the last time I played such a game. Even the famed infinity engine, which was the basis of my all time favourite cRPG Baldur's Gate 2, wasn't able to scratch this itch as it wasn't a turn based engine (although it was able to capture the feel of D&D game mechanics extremely well).

As a result, after the payment of a mere USD6 to gog.com, I am now the proud owner of TOEE. Naturally, the first thing I did was to download and install the Circle of Eight modpack which fixes many of the bugs in the original game as well as tweaking the rules to make them even more compliant with 3.5e rules. Oh yeah, it also includes a ton of new content (gotta love mod communities!).

I've spent the last week mucking around with the game to get a feel for how the game plays (I even briefly recreated Acquisitions Incorporated ingame for kicks). Bear in mind that I've never played a 3.5e game before so it was important to get a feel for some of the differences (such as clerics being allowed to use bladed weapons!). I'm now ready to start the game properly and you can find the party I intend to use below.

Sir Galahad
Sir Galahad is my sword and board tank. I intend to start him off as a fighter to grab some extra feats and then multi-class him to Paladin to get the Paladin bonuses. I've been a huge fan of the Paladin class since the BG days so having a Paladin in my group was pretty much a no-brainer.


Granted, I had to reroll 81 times but check out those stats!

As you can see from the stats, Sir Galahad is a king among men. As a general rule, I did take the extra time to reroll stats until I managed to get some good ones but even with this in mind, the stats that I managed to get for Sir Galahad are beyond belief. Its probably a good thing I created him last otherwise I would have spent way too much time trying to get similar stats for my other PCs! Anyway, with stats like these, I naturally named him Sir Galahad (who, if you know your Arthurian legends, was the knight who found the Holy Grail).

Falgur Nalbek
Falgur is my backup melee fighter and main healer. I have armed him with a great spear which has 10" reach so that he can stand safely behind my tank during combat. This will allow him to still attack the same target as Sir Galahad while being close enough to heal Sir Galahad if the need arises.


With a Con score of 20, Falgur could have as much hp as Sir Galahad!

One of the nice things about 3.5e clerics is that they don't actually need to select any healing spells. Good aligned clerics can spontaneously change any existing memorised spell to an equivalent level healing spell at the time of casting. This is pretty awesome as it allows you to memorise and play around with other spells without fear of not having enough healing.

Jaheira
Jaheira will act as a backup divine spellcaster. I didn't initially plan on having a druid but in my initial muck-around, I found that all of my clerics spells were spent on healing. The druid will help alleviate this problem and hopefully allow me to cast some of the other divine spells in this game (I did consider having 2 clerics but felt that would be a bit boring).


I admit it - I just couldn't resist naming her after one of my fav NPCs in BG

One of the cool things in this game is that they have partially recreated the crafting system in 3.5e. Unfortunately, crafting magical items, scrolls and potions generally requires an XP cost. Having Jaheira in the group will allow me to create scrolls and potions based on divine spells without my main cleric taking the XP hit.

Coryn
Coryn is my artillery. His role is to stand back and blast enemies from afar. Sorceror is the preferred class for this as he doesn't need to memorise spells hence he can cast as many of the right type of spells as he needs. I also made him an elf so that I could get the free longbow proficiency for cases where I don't want to waste a spell.


With a face like that, I was soooo tempted to call him Edwin...

Of course, the difficulty for me will be in making sure that I pick the right spells. As sorcerors can only learn limited spells, picking the right spell at level up is critical. This wasn't as big an issue in BG2 as, by the time I played a sorceror in BG2, I was already intimately familiar with the game.

Sonora Lothiriel
A rogue to round out the party and to deal with traps and act as the face man for the party. As with the sorceror, Sonora is an elf in order to benefit from the free longbow proficiency as well as the +2 dexterity bonus.



I also intend to multiclass to a wizard after getting several rogue levels. I understand that traps aren't a huge deal in this game so 2-3 rogue levels will hopefully be enough to see me through. Meanwhile, the additional wizard levels will allow Sonora to act as a backup artillery caster as well as taking the xp hit for crafting items and scrolls.