The last time I had a moment to play Baldur’s Gate 3, I had just finished off the first of the Goblin Camp’s three bosses, the goblin High Priestess Gut. I then explored, without the rest of the party, some of the back rooms, solved a rotating disk puzzle that required lighting torches to give hints, declined to go down the dark stairway alone, and returned to the party.
With her down, we continued into the camp to rescue Halsin, the druid. That fight wasn’t too bad, since we led off freeing him, and he kept the gobbers busy while we went ham on them from behind. He offered to come with us, but suggested if we were being sneaky, we might not want him, so we left him behind in order to take on the remaining leaders ourselves.
This may not have been the best suggestion.
We explored a little, saved spoony bard Volo and a druid who was being tortured, gaining us some minor loot.
First up was Nightwarden Minthara. I knew a couple of things about her. One, that she would join your party as a paladin if you helped her wipe out Druid’s Grove. Nah, I already told the druids and tieflings there that I would help them out. Besides, I have my Githyanki friend for tanking, and Halsin would (justifiably) leave if I destroyed his home.
The second is that she is said to die easily if you could convince her to cross the rickety wooden bridge, and then destroy it while she’s on it.
So this was my strategy. My failing strategy, as I couldn’t ever get the timing right.
But through the tries and attempts here, I learned about destroying the goblin war drums so that help wouldn’t be summoned. For the final attempt, I destroyed the bridge, destroyed the war drum in the room, and finally had a chat with her re: her death. She and her friend died fairly easily. Unfortunately, the magic eye that was roaming around kept screaming and waking everyone up, but we managed to calm them down by killing the eye from range, along with any goblins who had a problem with that.
Astarion was key, with his ability to always attack from hiding. All the other characters had to alternate hiding turns with attacking from range turns in order to leverage the hiding advantage to counteract the minuses for being pretty far away.
We looted her, got some cool stuff, then jumped our way over to the Goblin King.
I didn’t have to be told that attacking Dror Razglin, the Hobgoblin boss, would be best done from the rafters. But it still took several tries before I managed to both kill him and his minions without wiping out. It took hours of tries.
I think I could have prepared for this better; after the battle, I looked around the area and found a few barrels of high powered explosive that almost certainly would have made things easier. I also had a character positioned next to one of the goblin war drums to take it down once the battle started, but she was immediately targeted with Hold Person and help was summoned nonetheless.
I threw absolutely every throwable I had at Razglin, leaving him at about 1/3 health by the time he managed to shake off our attacks long enough to get up on the rafters with us. A few more ranged attacks had him down, leaving us only with a couple dozen minor gobbers.
The Astarion/Githyanki duo just decimated those, while the two clerics used what attacks they could to keep things manageable. I’d learned in some of the unsuccessful tries to make sure everyone had healing potions, AND that everyone should be near enough each other to help out if they get downed.
Halsin would really have helped out here. I really should have asked him to come along. I feel I was playing all this in hard mode without him.
Killing Razglin allowed us into his treasure room for more loot. Everyone leveled up, and I was thinking about multiclassing Astarion as a bard…
We also got some story snippets during a long rest. A drow in our dreams promised she would halt our transformation into mind flayers and urged us to develop our tadpole powers in order to save the world. So, I guess we should be using those? I thought that would be bad, or something.
Anyway, when next I play, it will be plundering the rest of the camp, investigating those stairs, and then backtracking a little as I think I missed a lot of content. I’d like to return to the druid grove ready to continue on.