charms

He might've escaped. Check the log.

Given how the gods came to be, the nature of the third-to-last area in the game(forgot the name), and how Iovara appears in that area, I've gotten the idea that Iovara is part of, or 'is' Woedica in some sense. Being burned alive and then tossed into the pit wasn't the end of her punishment. As one of the cruelest fates imaginable, the Engwithans sealed her, along with her heretical followers, into the spirit of a goddess, the goddess of justice no less, to see how long she(they) could deny her(their) own divinity. Of course, this had to be the weakest god, so she couldn't try anything like undoing the gods or willing herself out of existence. The rationale for crippling Woedica and the story of Iovara's downfall molded together and twisted over time, as myths do, eventually becoming the canonical version of the Woedica myth seen in the modern lore books. One of the big holes in this theory is that, assuming the other gods are telling the truth about Woedica's goals(notice that, at the end, Skaen spoke for her, and it's never really clarified whether Thaos' plot is his patron's or his own), Iovara and Woedica have completely opposite beliefs. The details of how gods really work is still kind of sketchy, but it's possible that the Iovara part could have found a way to keep the faith while the rest of the goddess eventually gave up and calcified around her assigned role in the pantheon. Also, I don't know whether the flashback sequences take place before the gods were made, or after. The theory only makes sense in the first place. Help support this idea, or strike it down if you prefer.

People still buy these?

Elf Cyborg Elf Cyborg Elf Cyborg Elf Cyborg Elf Cyborg

The best way to handle this would be to have there be only one 'romance option' - a woman reincarnated into a man's body, who wears women's clothing, acts feminine, and is 80 years old. You can either continue down the romance subplot and see Chris Avellone's reluctant take on non-heteronormativity and gerontophilia, or say something like "But you're not a woman" for a massive approval boost from your entire party, except Edêr for some reason. That ought to piss off just about everyone.

I tried to vote for Our Queen, The Garrote of Justice, The Dreaded Oathbinder, Goddess of Gods, Woedica; but I had to choose one of the gods on the first list so I picked the most useless-sounding one.

I imagine it's more like a master/student thing than what Paladins have.

I played around with the Rinkworks fantasy name generator for a half hour and whipped up a Rauatai proper noun generator. Many of them will look strange, but if you press F5 enough you should eventually see "Kana", "Rua", "Rauatai", "Aumaua", and "Mahoa" show up, so it'll come up with names that are consistent to the setting at least some of the time.

This just sounds like Persona 4 with wretched old people.

Avellone's good at what he does, but if that happened, then the Eastern Reach would be a wasteland consisting of forsaken sites of battles that were fought in the past, and it would be populated mainly by elderly crones with a monomaniacal, explicitly non-romantic obsession with the PC.

Good to see that wyrmling pet doing its share of tanking in the dungeon.

Murder hobos don't really seem like romantic types to me.

To figure out why there aren't any romance subplots in this game, you need to go all the way back to Baldur's Gate. Regardless of their alignment, race, class, or hit dice, the companion NPCs in Baldur's Gate 1 felt like real people. They had motivations, backstories, and most importantly, personalities. They weren't just tethered to the PC - they could dynamically interact with other members of the party, forming relationships or breaking them if there was too much conflict. The end result of all this was that it didn't feel like you were the center of the world - your companions had autonomy and could interact with the game world themselves. The developers thought this was too much for the sequel. Instead, they made everything about the player character - you are the most important thing in the universe and everyone else acts like it. Back in the 90's this meant that some of the characters were forced to fall in love with you (they were all elf females because that's what gamers wanted in the 20th century, but I'm sure if BG2 were created in this age of creeping Ideological Fetishism, there would be an gay gnome or a transgender ooze gensai in addition). I think one of them had a cringe-inducing pregnancy system where at the end of it you could put the baby into your quick item slot if you didn't want to sell it to a weapon smith. Not only were the romancable characters ruined by this character focus, but all the other characters were deteriorated from it as well. The characters that came from BG1 didn't retain the agency they once had(there wasn't any good reason for most of them to be in Athkatla anyway) and the new characters all had a unquestioned, Bioware-like devotion to the PC. They didn't have their own lives - instead of going off on their own adventures when you kicked them out of the party, they would all await your return at the Copper Coronet, drinking their now-purposeless lives away as if they were PCs in a typical role-playing enforced MUD. My point is, romance can never be done right, because it's a symptom of bad writing, which itself is the symptom of misplaced focus. In order to have romance subplots, you have to make the player character the focal point of the game world, doing which puts everything in jeopardy. It's better to have realistic characters than romantic ones.

What I don't get is dwarves. If there's going to be a seperate species based on a real-life physical deformity, wouldn't hunchbacks be a better choice?

Like how people were asking BioWare if they could kill all the gay party members in DA2? Generally, gay people don't have any kind of intrinsic link with the embodiment of the concept of death. Nor do they have giant, symmetrical tumors growing on their foreheads.