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James Ohlen was chief designer for both of BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate games, and he now heads Archetype Entertainment, an in-house studio working on scripted video games for Wizards of the Coast. Apparently, he also had time to put together a supplement for Dungeons & Dragons based on Baldur’s Gate, with the help of other former BioWare veterans (Drew Karpyshyn, Brent Knowles and Jesse Sky are in the credits).
Minsc & Boo’s Journal of Villainy contains character descriptions from the two original games slated for D&D 5th Edition. Some are presented as potential patrons of your characters, others as adversaries. It also details four cities from the games (Athkatla, Suldanessellar, Ust Natha and of course Baldur’s Gate) and 12 monsters that had not yet reached 5E (such as Gibberlings, Sword Spiders and Phaerimm).
While recent D&D supplements have avoided spelling out too much detail, leaving parts vague so that players feel free to fill in the blanks themselves, this book is full of detail. There are rules and prices for buying magic items in each of the cities, and the stat blocks for monsters have full spell lists. These items will be useful to many players, as will the stats of high-level big bad guys like Mephistopheles and Bhaal, but a few of the character bios contain some surprises. Imoen seems to have dropped out of magic studies, and is he a vampire now? They are not, however, as far removed from video game versions as those from (terrible) novels. And Minsc’s article is perfect, listing his favorite nemesis as simply “evil.”
If you want more Baldur’s Gate in D&D, Ohlen also wrote Heroes of Baldur’s Gate, an adventure between the two video games, some of the illustrations and monsters in this book are recycled. Heroes of Baldur’s Gate was a third-party release, released without the official Wizards of the Coast seal of approval, but Minsc & Boo’s Journal of Villainy is one of the official WotC books released as a fundraiser for Extra life, which raises funds for children’s hospitals. It is available in pdf or in print on demand via Driving RPG.
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