- Wait what? Giving birth to a Bhaalspawn is lethal to the mother, it comes up several times in To B. By all accounts the player character had a peaceful childhood, what with being raised in Candlekeep, which is one of the nicer parts of The Realms. And the Player Character has more than one Mass-murdering evil half-brother. In fact, he's got five of them that are significantly worse than Sarevok.
- Giving birth to a Bhaalspawn isn't fatal. The quasi-flashback shown to you in Throne of Bhaal revealed that the main character's mother, Aliana, was alive at the same that the main character was a very young child. She planned to slaughter him/her. Gorion saved the main character while killing Aliana.
- Strictly speaking, only two half-brothers we can call "worse". Gromnir is equally bad at worst, Balthazar is secretly a decent guy, and both Sendai and Illisera are half-sisters. Only Abazigal and Yaga-Shura have really outmatched Sarevok, and then, mostly because they didn't have Gorion's Ward breathing down their necks in their starting zones.
- Perhaps Dexter Morgan is a Bhallspawn.
Since score means twenty, this guess is assuming that it was used in the literal sense.
- The ending of Baldur's Gate 1 has statues of apparently every Bhaalspawn ever, and when one of them dies their statue breaks (as seen with Sarevok's). There were a heck of a lot more than twenty Bhaalspawn statues in that huge tower, so it's hard to believe that there were only twenty total.
- Even if it weren't for that, a simple count of the number that appear or are otherwise mentioned over the course of the games would seem to disrprove this theory. This page lists twenty-five known individuals, and there are implied to be potentially many more holed up in Saradush - and those are just the ones Melissan was able to 'save', suggesting there were stil more killed earlier by the Five.
- A theory of mine that knocks around in my head every time I play the first game. Well, first of all, when you run into the dopplegangers masquerading as the people of Candlekeep they are all located in the Candlekeep catacombs and drawing from that, doesn't that mean that they were just about to work their way up and kill the people whose forms they took? Because of course, they will have to take those forms to avoid arousing suspicion when they go through the secret exit I.E the bookcase. And also, most of the people there are located outside of the great library so it would be really hard to get them in the first place and to top it off, the dooplegangers ALSO masqurade as Gorion and Elminster and because of gameplay you know they are not killed by the dopplegangers, so what about the others then?
- That's what I'd always assumed; that the catacombs were where the dopplegangers waited for the couple who had already infiltrated Candlekeep to dispose of the person they'd be imitating and give them a chance to slip in unnoticed. I was surprised when I found out people thought otherwise; just the way they talked made it seem clear to me that they hadn't had a chance to get a good read of the people they were meant to eventually imitate just yet.
- And because they are acting out of character attempting to imitate them yet you run into the people they are trying to imitate i.e Winthrop, Dreppin, Reever etc outside acting just like themselves, I can only assume that by killing the dopplegangers in the catacombs and just outside in the libary itself you inadvertently ended up saving their lives, and thus it acts as a subversion to a player punch.
- That's what I'd always assumed; that the catacombs were where the dopplegangers waited for the couple who had already infiltrated Candlekeep to dispose of the person they'd be imitating and give them a chance to slip in unnoticed. I was surprised when I found out people thought otherwise; just the way they talked made it seem clear to me that they hadn't had a chance to get a good read of the people they were meant to eventually imitate just yet.
By all rights, Minsc should not be able to cast spells with Intelligence and Wisdom scores as low as his; indeed, there's a question of whether 2e would let him stay a ranger. However, given how sensible Boo's advice tends to be, there's a possibility that Minsc used to have some measure of sense...before his head wound. His head wound ended up slightly jarring the communication between the two spheres of his brain, giving him a case of what some psychologists (usually fringe, admittedly) would call a "bicameral mind". The spheres are communicating, all right, but the perceiving side isn't quite realizing where the reasoning side's messages are coming from, so it projects them to the most likely candidate. In this case, a certain hamster. When viewed in split personality terms, Minsc is a personality that's always forward, but manages to stay in some measure of contact with the other personality, to the point that the Boo personality can even use Minsc as a conduit for spells. Minsc still has the spell-casting requirements; they're just squirreled away in the Boo component.
- There's no reason he couldn't. The Wisdom chart in 2nd edition goes all the way down to 1 for spell casting purposes (you only need a minimum amount to be a pick a class..it can be modified after the fact without issue (Minsc's lowered stats are the result of his head-wound) though there'll be penalties, such as inability to cast arcane spells with 8 or lower intelligence). The only issue would be a 35% divine spell failure penalty due to low wisdom (hilariously, Anomen's Wisdom is so low it would also have a 5% failure penalty vanilla and he'd still be incapable of casting 6th or 7th spells even if his upgrade succeeds). Divine spells don't require study like Arcane spells do, the cleric simply acts as a conduit for the God's power, though characters with less willpower to channel the energy for spells correctly result in the spells not functioning properly, and the most powerful spells can't be cast at all.
Instead of her essence/taint being sucked into the black hole that is Bhaal when she dies, facilitating the typical Bhaalspawn disintegration, it stays in “orbit” around the main character until s/he either resurrects her or dies him/herself. This additionally serves as an explanation for why she’ll stay by Charname through thick and thin, even if s/he’s a mass murdering psychopath completely at odds with her own alignment.
- That is one of the more plausible explanations I've seen. Especially if you consider Bhaal's energy to be prone to 'sticking' to itself (which makes sense, if its designed to accumulate and reform him). Since Charname reportedly has a pretty hefty chunk of Bhaal's power - compared to other Bhaalspawn, anyway - and Imoen has a very small one, it would probably be easier for it to get stuck in his/her gravity than go flying off towards the abyss.
- I always thought her Bhaal-essence was different simply because of the kind of person she was. It doesn't show much in the first game, but in the second she seems to have a great deal of empathy for people in pain. She might also seem happy-go-lucky in the first game, seeing as how she goes through quite a bit but it's not until Irenicus tortures her that she starts to be affected by anything bad.
So the reason why Imoen has so much less of Bhaal's 'essence' as compared to Charname and Sarevok is because it's been diluted through several generations. That, combined with her natural optimism and friendliness, means that it never would have even manifested without Irenicus' meddling. Gorion was probably unsure that a Bhaalspawn descendant would even be tied into the whole prophesy gig, and when Imoen didn't show any of the same signs of her heritage that Charname did, just assumed that she was off the hook. Hence his not bringing her along for their ill-fated Fleeing-the-Keep road trip, too.
- Imoen says in Irenicus' dungeon that <charname> and she are the same age. If she's your niece, then your mother had a child in her teens and then had you in her late 30's or early 40's. It is possible that Bhaal could have gotten your mother pregnant more than once; much harder to do would be for him to get your mother pregnant with you while a previous Bhaalspawn son or daughter impregnated/got pregnant by a spouse or lover around the same time. However, I've always believed that Imoen was "different" as a Bhaalspawn mainly because of her childlike innocence, playfulness, and empathy that she has for others. <Charname>'s personality as a child was of a real troublemaking, willful scamp who would skip lessons and run around naked (much to <charname>'s later embarrassment).
- Which makes it hilarious that one of the things in the novels that ended up explicitly made non-canonical is... Minsc and how he was there (the current canonical stance seems to be that the Bhaalspawn was Abdel Adrian, or at least had that name, but that his adventures were more like the games, seeing as Minsc has a properly bald statue in Baldur's Gate and everything)
- On that same note, that's probably why one or some of them sent the Solar. These sorts of gambits are pretty common for the Realms' deities, and the non-interference proclamation would not stop quite a few of them.